12 days and counting....I want to be writing...!

12 days and counting....what's that about eh? It is 12 days until I have to defend the document in the picture at my final viva and I am trying to stay focused when all I want to do is write. I want to escape into made up worlds creating new lives but I can't, not yet. Instead I am trying to keep tight control of my nemesis Foucault and all the other arguments I have in my critical piece. As well as trying to remember why I made the decisions I did when writing the novel part - Ham and Jam. I am being given lots of advice but actually it will all be irrelevant if I can't keep my brain working. When I'm nervous my brain freezes and my mouth fills up with cotton wool as it open and closes like a goldfish. Considering this is a creative writing PhD I can be incredibly inept with words as I try to find the right ones to answer any questions asked - and don't get me wrong, this can be as simple as 'what is your name?'

That's bad enough but am also surrounded by piles of marking which I am slowly plodding through. This work is by my students from the University of Winchester and they deserve my full attention as they have often put their heart and soul into their piece of work so I need to focus on that too.

So between those two pressures I am close to screaming pitch and wanting to throw things out of the window - a real dolly out of the pram moment. It will be over soon enough and I can then do what I am desperate to do, in fact so desperate it almost hurts, I want to be writing again. Does anyone else get that sort of pain? It is like an irritating mozzie bite that needs scratching. I have ideas buzzing around in my head that need dealing with but I keep having to squash them to make sure there is plenty of space for all the stuff I need in the viva. But then...who knows what I will be writing.

Below is a song by Mary Chapin Carpenter entitled I have a need for solitude and that title could have been written for me. It is a song from one of her cds which was part of a collection of cds given to me recently by a good friend who knows what I can be like. They have been my saviour.