I'm mourning the security I felt when I thought I knew what I wanted to write next. At the same time, I'm still celebrating my bravery for taking that novel course and having my piece workshopped. I got an education and many answers, useful even if they've left me more lost than when I started.
I love that you corrected the masculine pronoun too, and the villanelle. The latter captures so well how our minds leap and pile on when one stumble reawakens the memory of a thousand stumbles past.
I hate it when a project you thought was IT turns out to be NOT it. Such a funhouse lurching moment. I've had this happen a couple of times. My first novel lost its heartbeat and there wasn't another heartbeat calling me away. Trump killed the other project. I was revising a dystopian novel when Trump was elected and I decided I could either work on a dystopian fiction or live in a dystopian reality, but I couldn't do both at the same time. I might have gone back to it, but the pandemic hit and once again, my fictional world and the real world were just too close.
The best advice I received for those funhouse time is to follow your curiosity. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about being in a creative drought and thinking there was nothing she was interested in writing, but there was one thing she was super curious about--the plants in her garden. She dive headfirst into a research rabbit hole and came back out the other side with The Signature of All Things. So be curious, I guess is what I'm saying here.
Thanks for your reassuring words Cathy. They helped more than you know. As a research hound, I love following my curiosity. I am ready to follow any rabbit hole it leads me to. I'm also open to letting go of the idea of writing fiction and writing non-fiction if that's where my curiosity leads me. I've also just requested Big Magic from the library. :)
I'm mourning the security I felt when I thought I knew what I wanted to write next. At the same time, I'm still celebrating my bravery for taking that novel course and having my piece workshopped. I got an education and many answers, useful even if they've left me more lost than when I started.
I love that you corrected the masculine pronoun too, and the villanelle. The latter captures so well how our minds leap and pile on when one stumble reawakens the memory of a thousand stumbles past.
I hate it when a project you thought was IT turns out to be NOT it. Such a funhouse lurching moment. I've had this happen a couple of times. My first novel lost its heartbeat and there wasn't another heartbeat calling me away. Trump killed the other project. I was revising a dystopian novel when Trump was elected and I decided I could either work on a dystopian fiction or live in a dystopian reality, but I couldn't do both at the same time. I might have gone back to it, but the pandemic hit and once again, my fictional world and the real world were just too close.
The best advice I received for those funhouse time is to follow your curiosity. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes about being in a creative drought and thinking there was nothing she was interested in writing, but there was one thing she was super curious about--the plants in her garden. She dive headfirst into a research rabbit hole and came back out the other side with The Signature of All Things. So be curious, I guess is what I'm saying here.
Thanks for your reassuring words Cathy. They helped more than you know. As a research hound, I love following my curiosity. I am ready to follow any rabbit hole it leads me to. I'm also open to letting go of the idea of writing fiction and writing non-fiction if that's where my curiosity leads me. I've also just requested Big Magic from the library. :)
Beautiful piece, Cathy. And I love the villanelle at the end. Also, thank you for correcting the masculine pronoun :)