“Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up. I’ve always kept going. I don’t feel that I could afford to give up.”<\/p>\n
– Joyce Carol Oates<\/p>\n
———————<\/p>\n
This has helped tremendously today. I feel like I’ve got a boulder on my back. My knees are about to buckle. I have to spend every ounce of energy I have in an effort to breathe – forget about being able to create<\/em>. <\/p>\n It’s a hypothetical boulder, of course. Life is good and I’ve no real burden to bear. But the phrase ‘squeezing blood out of a stone’ keeps coming to mind every time I sit down to write. It’s been this way for three days. I grow weary. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum…I’ve never given up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing-tips","tag-joyce-carol-oates"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3149,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/3149"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.buffyholt.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}