Christine, Wondering

Random Musings of a Human Becoming

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Aaargh, why now?!

For more than a year – since before I left Sydney – my pet writing project has been stalled. It’s a fantasy novel that I’ve been working on, in various forms, for the last ten years. It’s currently on Version Three, and there have been a plethora of rethinks and plot changes in between versions. The original, adolescent Version One got a fair bit written before I abandoned the concept and moved on. Version Two ran for 20,000 words before I encountered a fatal plot flaw and had to start all over again. I lost a lot of my new planning when my computer died in September 2005, and since then I just haven’t been able to get it together to get the plot working, much less put down a single line of text.

Right now, I’m incredibly busy. I have to move house, I have three assignments due just after Easter, I’m working, and I’m still trying to have something of a life. The one thing I can’t afford to spend time on right now is my writing.

Yesterday, I had to pass a few hours in the city in between commitments, so I went to the city library to get out something to read. While I was sitting there, I had a flash of inspiration and, in one spurt, wrote the first ~500 words of the first chapter of the novel, the entire first scene. Then, at 1:30am last night when I finished the book I was reading and switched off the light, I had another flash, saw the second scene in my head and had to get up and spend an hour writing that too.

Now I have 1335 words of text typed safely into the computer, and I can feel more words frothing and bubbling in my mind. I just know that if I sat down somewhere comfy with a notebook, I could write another thousand today. BUT I DON’T HAVE TIME!

Why now? Where was all this inspiration last year, when I had every Friday free and ostensibly dedicated to writing?! Aack!!

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