Oh Here’s My Brain
On reentering a space of creativity after a lengthy drought.
I am suddenly on a creative tear. I finished a novel last week — one that had been lingering at like 90-plus percent done for over a year — and am deep in massive rewrites on another novel. I wrote a blog post and an essay and then this essay, and there’s a third essay cooking in my brain. I have new novel ideas popping into my head without my even looking for them; I got another one just this morning.
The soil of my creative mind, so long fallow, is suddenly bursting with life.
Which is a good thing, a marvelous thing, and not just because so much of this writing is long overdue. The novel I’m now rewriting was due back in, oh mumble mumble, maybe February? I struggled to draft it last year, and then sent it to some first readers.
One reader had minimal comments; another reader…not so minimal.
So I put the book aside, to “think about it”. Promising myself that I would get to the revisions “soon”. Soon became “later” became “I’m so busy” and then “I don’t wanna” and then I hardly thought about it at all. Until my editor, so gently, so politely, sent me a note: “Any thoughts on when we might be seeing this novel from you?”
