I hate writing.

Okay, no, I don't hate writing. But sometimes I dislike it very much. You see, I have this 'process' that I have to go through in order to complete a story. I sit around for days, sometimes weeks, trying to come up with an idea for a story. I go through countless pages of Word documents and loose leaf paper, freewriting, complaining to myself about how stupid the creation of a story is, how pointless and useless and worthless my writing is, so on and so forth. And somewhere in that period of time, an idea comes to me that actually sticks for more than a few minutes. I head to the library and get into an eight- or nine-hour writing frenzy, in which I go through my entire "Epic Writing Mix" (composed of various movie soundtracks like 300 or Pan's Labyrinth, plus some of my favorite classical pieces). I find that this type of music is wonderful to write to - no words to distract me, and the music itself is sufficiently...well... epic to give me momentum and keep me writing for a while. The entire playlist is about seven hours long. Hopefully, once I come out of my soundtrack-and-Stirling's-smoothie-induced haze, I'll have created a rough draft of a story. Then I get to edit... joy... and out of that comes a story that, hopefully, is worth something.

Unfortunately, today is one of those days in the first part of the process - the self-loathing, hatred-of-everything part of the process. So I get to sit and stare out the window, hoping maybe some monumental idea will come crashing through the glass yelling "TA-DAAA!!"