Stress and writing

I've got a lot on my mind at the moment. Family stuff, moving house (furniture today, me next week), courses starting, appointments, kid trouble, leaving my husband for months - it's all piling up a bit. It's killed my writing habit stone dead. I now only manage a few hundred words of vapid cliches and then run out of plot. I have no incentive, no motivation. I thought at first it was the lack of deadlines - give me a TMA date and I'm usually fine but it's more than that. It seems as if stress cuts out the creativity as well as the motivation. So, I'm going back to the blue book, from A363, to try and wrangle a bit of imagination.

Moving has been intensely emotional, too. In theory, I could be writing loads of useful stuff in my notebook about moving, lots of free writes or other raw material like poetry to use later. The pages remain pristine. Note to self, get off your arse, stop moaning and get on with writing anything. In the past, that's the only thing that has worked for writers' block. My workload this year, plus my kids and living in two places is going to generate a lot of stress and I can't let that slow me down. I estimate I have to write 100-120 thousand good words in the next 12 months - I've managed about a thousand in the last week. Back to the laptop.