It's the first of November. I find myself, on this chilly morning, watching all my friends make plans to write extra hard this month, and I have to make myself write some things down.
But those things are the reasons I cannot, absolutely cannot, write fiction this month. I want to. I want to so much I was frustrated to tears this morning. The other day the First Reader and I dreamed up two beautiful tales out of a single story seed and I had characters in my head talking, breathing, living... and I had to coldly put them down. I don't know if they'll come back. Zombie characters lack something, the spark that animates the first time they come to life for me. But this month... I have a term paper I'm working on, you've all seen part of that (yesterday's post). I have another term paper due. I have a short writing assignment which promises to be rather difficult as I must pack a lot of information into what is essentially an encyclopedia entry, no more than 200-400 words. Oh, and that one is a group assignment, but my partner in it might as well be dead for all the help I'm getting on this project. Eh. College teaches you what teamwork is really about. So there's a lab report to be written this week, and...
Life just doesn't stop. We're gearing up to move. Halloween was a big deal for the kids, and as Mom I'm stage manager and chauffeur and... And my husband is dealing with the new rhythm of life and is stressed so he needs me.
None of this is bad. It's simply that my days are so full, I have to fight for the time to do my daily art, and art is less challenging (for me) than writing is. Especially writing long form, and with that I have a small epiphany that the reason I thought I could only write short form was that my life was darn near this full, back more than a decade ago when I started writing. Oh... and way, way back to my teens when I wrote poetry. Yeah. That stuff is never seeing the light of day (most of it has been lost, anyway. Thank goodness).
I feel like I've gone astray, and I'm trying to retrace my steps to find the path back to my writing. I realized recently that I haven't been listening to music. I know that it's one of the things that facilitate my writing brain, so I'm doing that now while I'm working on other things. Maybe it will prime the dry well. Because right now, there's nothing down there. I haven't been reading fiction, either. I went nearly two months with no reading (of fiction. Plenty of the other sort, especially science papers) before breaking that fast last week.
I have two more months of school. No... seven weeks. Seven more weeks and then I'll have the piece of paper and the freedom. If I can just last that long, then I can write. Right?
But if you can, you should do NaNoWriMo. Go read Amanda Green's blog - she's inspiring this morning.