I quit. Sort of.

I said to my friend this week, "I'm quitting writing."
She said, "What, again?"

She's right, of course. I'm always quitting. It never sticks. I have no illusion it will stick this time, either. But there's always the possibility it will. Sometimes that panics me. I feel no particular panic right now.

I took the week off because I desperately needed to be doing something besides writing right now. After four days I already thought of a way I wanted to rewrite the ending to Shivery Bones to make it more consistent (and to allow me to steal part of it for the current WIP without having to do a total rethink on that). I'm not exactly yearning towards other ideas, but they're tickling. Late in the transmission of a novel, other ideas always start up with their own bandwagon. It's different this time, only I'm not sure how yet.

The only thing I'm not yearning towards is the current WIP—and I'm so close there, so damned close. It's stalled, and I don't know if it's just because I need a break, if this is another version of late-in-the-manuscript panic, or that I've gone off on a tangent that's leading me astray. Sometimes I stall when the gee-whiz-this-would-be-neato center of my brain takes over and pushes the story off in a new direction. Sometimes this is the correct direction, sometimes it isn't, and sometimes I have to pause until I figure out which. I don't mean figure it out in a brain sense, not think it through logically and plot it out, but figure it out in a gut sense. Let the gut catch up with where I've headed off to, let the gut digest whether this is where I really want to go. Sometimes no left brain analysis is involved whatsoever. All the processes takes place off screen, if you will. One of the perils of organic writing, at least the way I do it, is that there's a lot of gut action involved—and as we all know, sometimes the by-product of guts isn't, um, pleasant.

Or maybe it's a right brain action posing as gut action. This thing that guides my stories feels centered in the gut, but I suspect it's really north of there and hiding down dark alleyways where lurk unsavory characters: cutthroats, thieves, hoors, and other unscrupulous but fascinating types. They are the ones that know how this world works beneath the skin, beneath all the shining bright promises that turn out to be false. Typically, they love doing by subterfuge, pretending to be a gut when they are really denizens of the shadow synapses; the lonely, dark byways where writing hits the road.

It will all work itself out. Or won't. I have passed through this landscape before. I imagine I'll pass through it again. I'm just following the bread crumbs.

93,000 / 100,000 (93.0%)

93,000 / 120,000 (77.5%)

I quit, the addendum

This subject is in the air today. It occurred to me in discussions with others (and in the shower) that the one time I had a really long pause in writing, about four or five years, it was because I'd put myself in an all-business footing. I was a Serious Writing Artiste and I needed to think Serious Writing Thoughts and do Serious Work and be Serious About the Business of Writing. I couldn't read a piece of fiction without over-analyzing it, and I stopped reading fiction. I concentrated so hard on my seriousness and what other people expected from me and my writing, that I choked my muse. It got so bad that for the first time in my life since I've had consciousness I stopped telling myself stories as I fell asleep at night.

I felt damned lost, I tell you.

I took up other art forms—sculpture, textile arts, jewelry making, drawing—and although I love all these things, that just didn't fill that cavern inside me. But they did teach me to have fun again. That cold motherf**ker, Seriousness, unwound inside me. I rediscovered my sense of play in the creative process. It took all those four or five years, but I started telling myself stories again as I fell asleep. Then I started reading fiction again. Then I started writing again. Fanfic at first, but very soon after that, I was telling my own stories again.

This should be fun, people. Yes, we need to take the business aspect seriously and be professional, but it needs to be fun, too. Or we really do run the risk of choking that lovely trickster, our muse. And maybe this time, the little s**t won't come back to play again. He's a darling little s**t, but he does run to Temperament.

This is what I keep telling myself, anyway.