Blocked With My Writing and Why

I've always heard that if you're blocked with any writing project that you should write out why you're blocked, and eventually (hopefully) a way past the block will show itself.

Let's hope this works.

For the past 5 months, I've been working on Draft 2 of my horror novel, Prisoners of The Mind. A lot of what I've written has been "trashed" (filed away in a file, probably never to be used again). I struggled with how I wanted the plot to go, etc etc. Only for the past 2 months have I felt like I've really figured out where I wanted to go with this story.

Unfortunately around the beginning of April, my dad fell ill. He does have congestive heart failure and asthma, so it's not unusual for him to lie around for a few days and be a bit unwell. This time things ended up differently. He wasn't getting better. He'd spend a lot of the night coughing and gagging. There was also some pain in his chest and lung areas, causing him to think that he may have a blood clot.

All of April he was like this, in constant pain and having never ending coughing fits. Eventually he went to the doctor and was told he had a blockage in his throat (a surgery on his neck a couple of years ago ended up scorching his throat and the growth is layers of skin attempting to heal it). Then he told us that he'd gotten pneumonia too.

Now under normal circumstances, he 'd enter the hospital for a week then come out fine. This time he refused to go, saying he wanted to stay home with his family. But as far as I know, he has received little or no antibiotics. And he's not getting better.

This has placed stress on all of us. I've been babysitting my siblings for a few years while my mom works. Now that Dad is so ill, it's become mostly me in charge. I like to call myself the "surrogate mommy". And honestly, I don't mind doing what I can to make my parents' lives easier. I just find out emotionally taxing at times. My sisters are 4 and 12, then my brother is 9. Obviously there is a bit of rebellion every now and then from the three of them, but my brother is the worse. I'm not saying that to be mean. He is just very argumentative and tests my patience.

Throughout all my emotional struggles with doing what I am doing and experiencing all this stress with my dad's illness, I try to keep writing. It's therapeutic for me. When I can't write because I'm experiencing a block, it's insanely stressful, and unfortunately I sometimes let this show via my emotional state (irrationally angry, etc). Or I just feel lost and spend lots of time whining on Twitter about it.

With writing this, I can already feel a weight being lifted off of me. I hope that with confessing all that I have, I can hopefully get back to writing more tonight or tomorrow.