Sunday Morning Tea: Nov 27, 2022

Good Sunday morning afternoon and welcome to my front porch for Sunday Morning Tea!

For the uninitiated, Sunday Morning Tea is my virtual writing salon, where we talk about our writing goals and projects while sipping on a hot cuppa tea!

I overslept this morning. It’s a cool and dreary day, with barely any sunlight coming through the window blinds. In fact, when I woke up this…afternoon, I thought it was still early…until I looked at the clock…

So today I’m drinking a steaming hot mug of black tea, which I’ve been told has more caffeine than coffee. We’ll see if my energy level spikes in about 20 minutes.

We’re entering the home stretch of the No Holds Barred Poetry Writing Challenge! Just four more poems to go, and I’ll be honest, I’m ready for this thing to be over! I’m starting to fizzle out. Inspiration has been pretty dry lately. How I’ve been able to write the last week of poems has truly been a miracle, especially as most of them were written in the final minutes before the clock struck midnight.

Yesterday’s poem was the hardest. Fighting sleep, I pulled myself off the couch, stumbled to my laptop, fluttered my fingers across the keyboard praying they’d produce a coherent thought, then collapsed into my bed. I was out cold within seconds.

I’ve got to dig deep to find that same energy I had at the beginning of this challenge in order to finish it strong. Especially with 31 Days of Holiday Hooligans right around the corner! What is 31 Days of Holiday Hooligans, you ask? Well, it’s a time when my blog becomes Christmas central! Every December (err, most Decembers, when I’m not blocked), I give you 31 straight days of holiday-themed stories and poems, some fun and light-hearted, other serious and thought-provoking, all with the same holiday shenanigans we love in our favorite Hallmark and Lifetime Christmas movies, to celebrate the holidays, my favorite time of year (when I’m not depressed or stressed out).

I feel myself approaching a funk, not quite writer’s block, as I’m still managing to write something every day, albeit not much, and I’m still debating whether or not what I’ve written is “good,” because like any other writer/creator, I’m my own biggest critic, but I’m hoping I can break free before my holiday marathon, especially because I plan to bring back the Twilight Zone marathon this New Year’s, and that’s going to take A LOT of creative energy.

It could start with me getting a proper amount of sleep at night, because I feel exhausted most days, and that could be because I’ve pretty much abandoned my daily schedule I established back in September. My eating habits could also be contributing to my lack of energy. My first meal of the day usually doesn’t come until after 1pm, and no, that is not because I’m intermittent fasting, it’s because I’ve been staying up past midnight, and so I’m exhausted in the mornings, and I don’t have enough time to prepare a decent breakfast before it’s time to start work.

Gosh, is anyone else struggling this hard? Can I still blame the pandemic? I’m going to anyway. Hopefully this caffeine-high tea can help me wake up, and then I can brainstorm what to do next.

Until next Sunday morning!

(If I’m successful…)

—Nortina