shakespearemom

AAAAAaaaaaaaahhhhh! I feel like walking out the door and screaming at the top of my lungs. I have a list a mile long, and none of it–none of it except this blog–is something I truly want to do. Errands to run (need eggs, art posters, and a zipper, all to be had in different places), things to do (exercise at the YMCA, write cover letter for job, take in hubby’s jacket), and I don’t have a chance to get everything done… which means no writing (except for this, which I sneak in just before the kids I watch come over in the morning).

So I’m not writing. I haven’t been writing in about two weeks. And I would, by this time, be committed to a madhouse, straightjacket-bound, if I weren’t thinking. 

I’ve been thinking about everything I’ve read over the last few weeks–four books, over a dozen manga, a sister’s novel, two plays–picking out things I like about each thing, stuff that works, narrative voices that I feel attuned to, places and adventures and characters that strike me in unique ways. Stuff that doesn’t work, people I don’t know well enough to care about, situations that feel contrived, or take too long to come to fruition (or do so too quickly).

I’ve also been thinking about the revision of several of my own plays… for I now know how to fix them, how to make them truly worth staging (and when I don’t think they are worth it, no one else will). Now it’s a question of which play do I work on first? I think I need to work on a one-act, since it will be used for a short play festival this coming summer (yes, actors, techies, costumes, everything).

And I’ve been thinking about several novels. Three new ones (the ideas are slowly forming in my mind), a research book on ghosts (in my area), and my first novel–only with this version, I’m going to plan out the whole series, pulling events and character developments out of the original and spreading them out through the whole series. Only working on this series means planning out the entire thing before I begin to write again. It also means a LOT of research on Native American tribes here in the NW and in western Canada. Native American rituals, songs, and mythological traditions are going to play a huge role in the development of the books, and I can’t write about what I only sort of know.

So, even if my fingers aren’t typing on the next great novel–and they wouldn’t be even if I were writing (I’m not such a complete braggart that I actually believe I’ll write the best novel ever), my faculties are slowly recharging. My brain is whirling with new ideas, new paths, and new ways to keep the straightjacket at bay.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS