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| Empty: a metaphor |
It’s a one-word-in-front-of-the-other night. I don’t see the light at the end, but I know if I just keep typing, words will keep dropping down in front of me. This always works, yet I have not been applying this highly reliable rule in my life. Sit down, turn on computer, double click WIP and let the words drop. Nope, I’ve not been doing it.
The real fly in this ointment is that last year I had so much to write and so little time, yet I managed to write my longest book to date (100K), get it to my beta readers, edit it about 50 times in a variety of ways and publish it. I even updated some book covers, rewrote my blurbs and maintained my blog. Now with time streaming out my ears, my blog is a wee bit anemic, I’ve written very little on the book that has been dogging me for about two years and which I had to hold off until book 4 of the Students of Jump series was done and published, and I have just 13,000 words written so far of Joanie and Friends. Appalling. And I have no excuse. It’s February, for gosh sakes!
I haven’t been on Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest in what seems like ages.
My life has been no more engulfing than anybody else’s, a loss here and there, a gain or two, a lot of smooth sailing and generally the normal actions of a busy life. And I am not alone in my sluggishness. My husband is just as unfocused. He says its having our daughter away at college. Could that be it? The mother part of me is missing?
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Okay, had to stop and digest that.
Writers nurture ideas.
We foster growth and change in our characters.
We step back and watch them make mistakes, hope they gather their wits about them and come out of the stituation okay and when all else fails, we step in and give them a prod or two rolling again in the right direction.
Writers consider possible consequences of actions, follow out scenarios and shift the possibilities.
Writers tuck their books into bed and hope they go out into the world and make good, reliable friends. We tell people about our story’s beginnings, shout out our grandest schemes coming to fruition, trouble our friends with our plot glitches and compare the poor scribbled things to successful writers’ works.
Writers are parents, and perhaps my parenting mode is still recovering from sending off a much more prized creation than any book I’ve ever written.
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Alright, let’s not get carried away. I’ve just been lazy, luxuriating in my extra breathing space this year. I’m a writer and writers write, so soon I will be tapping away my usual word count, characters bobbing about between my ears, chatting away, rustling through my days for the next opportunity to get back to writing. Yup, enough playing around.
This has nothing to do with my daughter being off to college with no one she’s known for years watching her back. Nothing to do with going to bed not knowing if she’s yet in bed. Nothing to do with avoiding eye contact with my partner because if I do hold his gaze too long, he’s liable to start talking about how much he misses her, and then I’ll think I hear a crack in his voice, see the early mist of a tear in his eye, a sigh on the rise in his chest. Then I’ll start to cry. Silly me. I just need to sit down and write something.
#writing
#daughter