-- Posted by adv at 6:15 am on Nov. 19, 2008 I just did a presentation for a musical I am working on and everyone was impressed, hugely impressed. I recently completed the latest draft before I had to move on with something else. I have been writing all year and it's been the time of my life. I have been producing work, and others agree, that makes me feel like what Milton must have felt when he was producing "Paradise Lost" or Dante Alighieri with "Dante's Inferno". It's been a brilliant time. However, for the past fortnight, I have been unable to write in any form. I somehow managed to produce an outline for a ghost musical I agreed to be involved with. The outline, I thought, was brilliant and a sign that I was advancing even further than I was before. I go to write the first lyric and nothing comes out. The results are almost always unbelievably bad. I've never had this problem before, except briefly, and I always managed to resolve it. I realize I've been working hard but I've reached the point where I've realized this is my life, my career, and you don't get postmen or bank clerks or accountants who suddenly forget how to do their job. Usually that would happen if they had a stroke or something. I just want it back. I can't keep forcing but I'm very bored, outside of work and social life, and I feel like the true perspective of my life, which is represented in the writing, is gone. This is such an awful thing. It couldn't have happened at a worse time. I'm pretty much forced to decline from the ghost musical as well. -- Posted by liv21 at 6:23 am on Nov. 19, 2008 Maybe you could ask someone else to help you with the musical?  Even if you don't have writer's block, lyrics can be tough. -- Posted by adv at 6:29 am on Nov. 19, 2008 I don't want help with the musical. I've never needed help with anything like this. I think the problem stems from what the composer could deal with on the last show. I wrote a lot of lyrics that he turned down in favor of what he could fit to a tune. That was a difficult process to rehearse and I think it's stayed with me. I'm having this mindset that nothing fits any structure, when I used to be confident that it did, and someone will always just turn them down, write a tune and expect me to condense or start all over again. I wasn't used to just throwing everything aside, and now I appreciate that process. But it means I have to wait for someone else and I need to write at the pace I do or else I'll choke. It's a horrible bleak time, a crossroad of dread.