The general consensus on February from many of the journallers I read can best be summed up as, "Thank god that's over!" February was weird. It was a month of many good things: I landed an internship; I've writen the first draft of my first real professional technical writing assignment, and it's pretty darn good, if I may say so myself; I've got a few prospects going in my hunt for a full time job; I had many good times with good friends; and I attended Potlatch.

February was also a month of not-so-good things: I had a cold that knocked me out of action for the better part of a week; I spent too much time feeling tired and cranky; Columbia blew up, our President continued to behave like himself, and Mr. Rogers died -- it's getting to the point where the only part of the New York Times I look forward to reading is the book review; I didn't land a full time job; and I'm feeling a bit frustrated on the fiction writing front.

The frustration about the writing is really nothing to worry about. I'm working on a couple of projects right now, and they're not really gelling. I'm putting words on the page, but not as fast or as many as I'd like, and the words are not really up to snuff in terms of capturing the story that's in my head. So, I'm frustrated.

Except in some higher order way, I'm sort of encouraged, because I recognize this feeling: it's the sense of total stagnation that tends to hit me right before I make a major writing breakthrough. I can't predict when these periods of despondency will hit, but they have a fairly predictable pattern: I'll flail for awhile, start half a dozen different stories and abandon them after two pages, decide that the highest achievement I can hope for as a writer is doing my part to keep the manufacturers of fountain pen cartridges in business, and grit my teeth while I grind out my daily minimum wordcount. And then the writing part of my subconscious mind will finish doing its spring cleaning, or whatever the hell it's doing, and whatever it is I'm working on will catch fire. And I'll usually end up with a finished story that is, as I've said, some kind of breakthrough.

One of these slumps produced the story that became my first sale just last month. Another resulted in the story that got me into Clarion West. I may have gone through a mini-slump at Clarion itself: I recall telling Ysa on Tuesday afternoon of week 4 that I felt like I never wanted to write again. And then I wrote what was probably my second-best Clarion story over the course of Thursday afternoon. [What was probably my best Clarion story resulted from an entirely different psychological state involving sleep deprivation, Pat Cadigan, a deck of Tarot cards, and deciding to see what happened if I just faked being a better writer than I thought I actually was.]

Actually, faking being a better writer than I thought I was worked remarkably well. I wonder if I can learn to do that while fully awake.

So, anyway, I'm in a fiction-writing slump. And it sucks. But I'll get over it. And then things will get better. And maybe some of the other bad things about February will get better, too.

In the meantime, pass the New York Times Book Review, will you?