April Newsletter: Stripping the Gears

So there I was, locked in the attic, stripping my gears.

I bounced in my chair, heart racing, breath baited, teeth clench, shoulders scrunched together, tingling fingers typing furiously away at nothing.

And I mean nothing! I was moving words around on a spreadsheet, for God’s sake. I copied those words, deleted the copies, made changes to spelling and undid them. I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t working, just churning, churning, churning those words until all sense had been ground into a slurry.

My plan that Wednesday morning  was to get up around 8 like I had most mornings of the quarantine, have my breakfast and coffee while I talked to Pavlina, then lock myself in the attic guest room from 9:30 to 11 for focused writing time.

What a luxury! From September to January, we’d had to make up at 6 every morning to get our girls to school and daycare. Then we’d rush from one meeting to another until it was time to pick the girls up and rush home with them. Now, I do miss restaurants and seeing my friends and working in my quiet office. I do not, though, miss spending two hours a day in transportation from one place to another. Now I spend that two hours sleeping. I have significantly more energy.

The problem, of course, is that energy has to go somewhere. In March, it went into completing the latest draft of Interchange (and existential angst). In April, though, I wanted to let Interchange rest and work on Wealthgiver instead. And I did. I  made a new outline. I did research on Thracian history and language. I ran the premise of the story past the people on Codex and my writing mentor and the people in my writing group. I made the outline symmetrical around its midpoint. I turned the newly-symmetrical outline into sentences rather than bullet points. I made a prioritized list of scenes to write…

You get the idea. So did I. I wasn’t wasting my time exactly, but I wasn’t writing. I was doing things that were easier than writing, things that took less energy.

So I told myself, “today you’re going to write that first scene.” I had a whole plan for the scene. I had my coffee. I had a song to put me in the mood. I sat in my chair and meditated for ten minutes. I opened my laptop and saw that I’d left my Thracian dictionary spreadsheet open. I thought, “I’d better clarify the etymological history of the name of the goddess Bendis, the name of the Bithynian people, and the word zibythídes, which Hesychius of Alexandria reports as meaning “the noble, most holy one.” Are those three words related?

The answer is “no, no, and maybe,” but I was so full of energy that I couldn’t stop myself from leaping on every tiny detail in my research material. Was the name of the Illyrian god Pindus related to one of those words? What about the Bulgarian folklore figure/fashion accessory Penda? Albanian bind (“to convince”) and pend (“a henchman”), Ancient Greek pentherá (“a mother in law”), Lithuanian žibéti (“to glow”)?

And now it was 10am. That’s all right. I still had an hour to write. 10:30, and now I didn’t have time to write anything, but I couldn’t leave this work half-done. 11am. They need me downstairs, but I only had a little farther to go. Noon, and I was an hour late to go downstairs and take care of the kids. Three entries in my dictionary had mushroomed into a tangled mess of dozens, and I couldn’t even see it because there were spots in front of my eyes. My fingers were so cramped I could barely force them to slide the cursor to the upper right corner of the screen and quit without saving.

Then I rushed downstairs, rushed my kids into their jackets, rushed to our garden, and ran back and forth there until my body started breathing again. I had achieved zero progress that morning, but at least my progress wasn’t negative.

Later that day, I found some unexpected time and wrote the first scene of my new draft of Wealthgiver. But that’s not the point. The point is that creativity isn’t just about cultivating greater and greater mental energy. You also have to give that energy something to do. Thinking about it, that’s not a bad problem to have.

So yes, I am working on Wealthgiver. In April I wrote about half of the new scenes, and I’m on track to write the other half by the end of May. It’s a good counter-point to Interchange, which will rest until…

I get it back from the editor. Haha! That manuscript is out of my hands now. I even got paid for it (thank you, Flametree Press and Donald Maass Literary Agency!) Now I’m letting Interchange rest and processing beta-reader feedback into notes for the next revision. Thank you, beta-readers! I’ll write more about this next month, but working with you is both toweringly scary and deeply satisfying. It’s like looking up at the mountain you’re about to climb, except in this case, you all made that mountain for me. Thank you