After the better part of 6 months without a single breath of life from my (fickle) muse, all of a sudden 'she' starts to talk to me again (yes, my muse is female...my writer's block is male, but that is a post for another day). Not only is she talking to me, but she is incredibly verbose and whispers to me at an almost frantic pace. In the past two weeks she has:
- Given me ideas for finishing my current work in progress (tentatively titled 'Uncaged' but I'm not overly happy with that title).
- Told me how to rework my finished novel to tighten some of the background 'mythos' holes.
- Helped me brainstorm plots/titles for 33 STEM-oriented, geeky romance novels (with a bit of help of my husband and best friend).
Then Monday during my morning commute I was thrilled when she finally whispered the name of the female protagonist in the novel I'm working on, and started showing me flashes of where she lives, how she met the male protagonist, etc.... two things I had been struggling to resolve for a two weeks.
After further examination, it seems that my muse is toying with my heart.
The new character, scenery and plot points aren't for the novel I've been working on, but for something entirely new!
Not that I'm complaining. I'm somewhat obsessed with the scenery at the moment and desperate to work on it, but there is one little problem -- I have to work for a living.
The more I want to focus on my writing, the more I find being a 'PayrollCaptive' to be a painful and infinitely frustrating experience. I have an hour-long commute each morning, during which I think about my plot holes, story outlines, characterization questions, and all manner of writing 'brainstorming'. By the time I get to work I am dying to dive in and write, especially since the morning is my best time for writing -- but I can't. As I pull into the parking lot each morning and make my way into the glass encased building, I realize that I am doomed to spend the next eight hours hunched in front of three computer monitors (not including my work laptop), rushing through the work of two people while my bosses demand I do the work of three people.
Then when my spirit is wrecked from the stress and my mind is turning to mush from crunching numbers and pounding out reports all day, I begin my drive home, once more dodging semi-trucks and crazies as I zoom down the interstate in my Beetle, hoping I am small enough to avoid any major collisions. The whole way home my thoughts are on what I want to write when I get there, frantically working to remember the scenery, dialogue and emotion of the scenes in my head.
Yet, when I arrive home there are other things that must be done before I can carve out 'writing time'...
- Dinner needs to be sorted out.
- Whoever doesn't handle dinner has to help the spawn with her homework.
- Then there is the nightly coin-toss to see who has to supervise the geekling through her nightly ablutions (where she tries to alternately sing every song from Moana or wet down every square inch of her bathroom).
By the time our darling child is tucked up in bed with her nightly story, all I want to do is collapse into my own bed in order to store up some energy to do it all over again the next day.
But...I can't. Now that the spawn is asleep, I need to spend some time with my husband and try to connect with him.
So at the end of the day, when I am finally ensconsed on the couch with my feet tucked against hubby's side (because he will idly rub them if I keep them within his reach, and I'm no fool!), I have *maybe* an hour to myself to write -- unfortunately by that time of the day my brain is the consistency of pudding and I'm struggling just to keep my eyes open until 9pm.
Not a particularly good time to do anything that requires much in the way of brain-power or concentation, muchless creativity.
Something is going to have to give, but I'm not sure what. I know there are other working professionals/parents who manage to get their novels written, but I am struggling to see how. I cannot squeeze anymore hours into the day, and have yet to discover a 'time-turner'.
Who am I kidding, it isn't a time-turner that I need, I need an 'energizer' that would allow me to function at full capacity on only two hours of sleep. THEN...maybe, I could do what I long to do and actually finish the stories that are trying to claw their way out of my imagination.
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