The inertia boils down to this: I love two opposing forces.
What a great novel it would be to marry these two: a demon and a saint; a wolverine and a fairy; a creator and a destroyer.
I love my day job, but I also love writing; sadly, the two are all-consuming. My inner muse, the writer in me, cannot be knit with her other half. Any teacher knows how consuming it is: waking up at a God-forsaken hour to prepare for the children; answering a myriad of questions during the day; managing the chaos of conflicting and often impulsive pupils; following the whims of hierarchy that is our crumbling school system. It takes it out of you. It really does.
What’s left is a crying soul, an inner fire burnt to embers, with no fuel left to furnish the escape that creative writing lends me. As Shakespeare once wrote: “too much sadness has congealed my blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.”