Earlier, I listened to Gustav Holst, The Planets, Full Suite. I paid particular attention to Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. The music gets giddy, then runs forward, bringing hope, light, love. The movement is BIG, it’s curious, full hearted and makes my heart want to burst—I feel so full of possibilities.
If I only I could stay there all of the time.
Instead I’ve been digging in the weeds of ‘egomaniac with an inferiority complex’.
AC told me recently that ‘I’m no longer an employee who writes part time. Now I’m a full time writer who works part time.’
I am being big, working on feeling worthy, capable, able, on a large scale. To do this I must act as if and practice being this person I always was and was forever afraid of being, a writer.
I am so out of my comfort zone I am sometimes paralyzed internally even as my body keeps moving forward, even as my mouth says words, even as my eyes seek truth.
Right now I’m listening to Hildegard von Bingen – Music and Visions, amongst other things she was a 12th century Benedictine abbess who composed sacred music. She did some really BIG things in her life.
I write mainly in the evenings. When I stop my day job I don’t know if this schedule will change. I am used to writing when the night is outside my window, reflecting me, and my SAD lamp. I am used to the silence outside, the occasional car whizzing by, listen or not listening to music, I am in my own little bubble.
Sometimes I write until 2 or 3 AM and I have to get up for a 9 AM call. I get to bed, and I am so wired, my brain is alive and my body is saying, you got 6 hours to rest and be functional. My little lizard brain says, but wasn’t it great? No it was terrible. You gotta rewrite the whole chapter. What do mosquitoes eat? How much netting would it take to cover a truck garden? Does apple wood work as firewood? Really? How much sex do I want to put into the book? Does it really matter that where that mountain range is located in real life? I’m seeing it through my characters’ eyes.
It takes a long time to shut down. Sometimes I feel like I want to bake bread or do the laundry, something that’s tangible. That when I’m done, I’m done. I can walk away from clean clothes or cooling loaves of bread. I can’t walk away from my head where my characters knock introducing themselves, with their back stories, wondering why I won’t put all that into the books. I wake up and know I need to re-work a scene or add one. Make one more tweak.
This stuff I love to do. I can do. I’m capable of doing. It’s the being BIG around people, admitting I write, that I’m working on a series.That Book Five is coming out in a week or so.
Being BIG is eating my lunch.
Love, yk