literary confessions

On my ride into work this morning I was thinking about my vampire story. Wondering why the hell I can’t seem to write anything more for it. It’s been over a year since I gave a friend a complete draft, and when I say it was a draft, well, it was not finished, it still had lots and lots of wholes in it, along with more than a few inconsistencies, but it had a beginning and it had an end, and for the first time ever I put the scenes into chronological order, which at the time appeared to be the most logical order in which to place them all. Thus, I had a draft that could be shared and once the pages were printed and the 3-ring binder left my hands my mind began to take a vacation from it all, but the sad truth is that since I gave it to her last October I haven’t been writing much for it. A scene would appear in workshop, or a two sentence stint there for the tiniest of connections, but nothing like what I had had happening before the draft was printed.
For a while I kept telling myself that I needed a break, that the characters were becoming too much a part of my life, that everything and anything in my life was channeled back into the story, there were even pieces of real life in there! An accident I had seen, words and phrases said by co-workers or friends, snippets of songs I heard on the radio, all would inspire me to grab the closest pen and paper and jot down something for the story. But there was nothing after the draft was printed.
Sometime during this lapse I came to the realization that my main character was similar to myself, the way she held nothing back was how I would act if no barriers existed, and as soon as my mind made that conscious leap I found that I wanted to back-peddle as fast as my conscious mind would allow. I wanted to steer my mind and my body as clear away from that possibility as fast as I possibly could!
The problem with this is that I made a vow to finish the draft in 2012.
How the hell am I going to do that if I can’t even bring myself to write anything for it? It’s not like it’s going to miraculously piece itself together, mending broken images with the slick tape of proper tense and accurate syntax of words that allow the vision inside my head to be placed perfectly on the page for all who read it to know exactly what I was thinking.
So, one of my desires for this month was to get back to it, push myself passed the hesitation and get back to writing! But how do you go back to something that you have tried to ignore for so long? How do you go back to something that you purposely made yourself forget its existence? How do I go back without losing myself again?