Whither the hours?
Where does all the time go? Busy, but rarely productive is how I’d describe things recently. I used to be able to get in an hour or two of writing before work but these days I manage to get an hour or two of work in before work. Writing? That’s something from another era.
Apart from articles, papers, and the odd paragraph that goes nowhere, I’ve essentially written nothing this year. It’s not for lack of desire, and it’s certainly not from a dearth of ideas. If anything there are too many things I want to do and not enough seconds in each day to fit them in. My plan for the year was to finish my SF novel in the spring break (I figured about 25000 words would do it. In the end I think I managed about 2500), then spend the semester researching and planning to begin a novella/novel this summer. Now, on June 7th, I think I can see a way to begin doing the research. My character is dying to start speaking (literally) but I can’t make him say anything worthwhile because I don’t know who he is or how he speaks. It will be set in 1920s Paris and Japan and I don’t know nearly enough about either yet to bring them to life. Will I be able to even get a chapter done this summer? Who knows? I have two finished books that I’m shopping around, so that helps keep the anxiety at bay. But still, a writer who doesn’t write isn’t a writer. I need to scratch this itch.
I have been creative though. The band is planning to record an album over the summer and we need a couple of extra songs to round it out. I’ve come up with something that I’m really quite excited by, though I’m having something of a “Yesterday” moment with it: I’m not entirely sure I haven’t ripped off the main riff. It came to me almost fully formed, and so perfectly me that I can’t help thinking I’ve heard it somewhere before. I’ve played it to people, and listened to the bands I think it most closely resembles (Pavement and Dinosaur Jr, since you ask) and found nothing, so maybe it is just that ideal of creativity, when all the influences go in, get jumbled around, and come out in a new form. There’s a feeling I get when something I’ve created is just right, and I get that with this song. It’s a feeling that I think is analogous to when mathematicians talk about an equation being beautiful, that it is simply exactly as it should be and to change anything would be to diminish it. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but that it has found its natural form, whatever that may be. When I hold the form of it in my mind there are no jaggy bits, as the great editor Alison Rae once described the feeling to me. I really hope I haven’t accidentally nicked it.
Oh, look at that. I’ve written something. Time for work.