Upward And Inward

[lilithsaintcrow]

Some days the words are a trickle. Other days, a torrent. Just over 3k on the fourth Dru book yesterday, and today is shaping up to be the same. The recent changes in my living situation have been incredibly uncomfortable emotionally, but it appears my creative equilibrium has returned. I am extraordinarily glad about that.

There’s a caution in that, of course. I’ve been asked to be very careful that I don’t use the creative flow as a means of escape. I’m of two minds about that. On the one hand, I’ve been doing a metric f!ck-ton (bigger than a regular f!ck-ton!) of work on myself, and if I want to let some of the things I’m feeling out on the page where they don’t do anyone any harm, well, I can’t see that as a bad thing. On the other hand, I don’t want to just Band-Aid a gunshot wound, so to speak. I want to get that thing cleaned out and bandaged up, and I want to start the process of turning it into a healed scar I can look at and say, I survived that, it’s over now. If “escaping” into the words is a method of putting off dealing with things, I’ll take lower-end creative flow.

I don’t think it’s solely a method of escape, at least not currently. For one thing, this is my job, and the productivity I’m experiencing isn’t incredibly outside my average. I’ve just got my life rearranged after the disruption of the holidays, and 2-4K is a normal day’s work for me. When I start consistently producing above 8K every day for more than four days in a row without a deadline looming, then I’ll worry that I’m being escapist.

And I’ve got to admit it feels damn good to just be concerned with plot arcs, grammar, and pacing rather than with deep, tearing emotional pain. I’ll take it as a step up.

Anyway. I’m sure this is interesting to nobody but me. I watch my mental and emotional bandwidth carefully these days, because I have to have enough to consistently produce words, and that takes not-just-physical energy. It’s a good sound business decision to make sure I have the resources to do what I do. Plenty of books on writing gloss over this fact–the energy to write is just supposed to come out of thin air. It doesn’t. One does have to prioritize and think about where that energy comes from. It’s not enough to just want. You have to want, and do.

Over and out.

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