The Bottleneck

When you have so many ideas that they all get stuck.

Not gonna try to pretend that I haven’t fallen madly in love with Shutterstock’s AI image generator. Excited for spring. Excited for robots.

My mind has become soup and I think perhaps I owe my readers an explanation. I have quite recently become a voracious* reader. And it has had a curious chilling effect on my writing. Ironic because I started reading for the express purpose of improving my writing.

But, like a bilingual toddler bombarded with words from different tongues, my small, playful, inner voice has become shut up in wonder at the multitude of sounds I can make and, to better hear them all, I’ve been slower to speak.

I’ve never had writer’s block. What I experience is a catatonic freeze as a hail of words, feelings and images tumble from the hollow cathedral of my cranium. One of my first memories is of the word “feeling,” which I pictured as a fish stick (as in, the yummy breaded food found in the frozen food aisle) — I pictured one single fish stick, suspended horizontally inside my empty, pitch black head. That was “a feeling.”