So this year, I’ve decided that I’m going to try to not take a hiatus from writing during the legislative session. I’ve mentioned time and again how after a prolonged break from writing it feels like my writing muscle has atrophied and I need to build it up again. It’s getting harder and harder to tone it back up these days. Compounding the stress of session with the stress of writing might be the height of folly, and I’m sure there will be episodes of frustration and failure, but I think it’s something I should attempt.
I’ve noticed that those elusive, transcendent periods of writing flow, where the words and the story stream from mind to page in a euphoric epiphany of rightness are becoming not so much elusive as extinct. I’ve waved the “Writing is Hard Work” banner at nearly every panel I’ve spoken on. I know better than to expect cake. But there have been vast stretches of time—months and months and months—where it seems all my hours of writing, day after day, have been spent groping for words that never come. I’d almost forgotten what flow felt like until one day last month when I was working on an additional scene for Demon Queller, and I hit it. Then it was totally, “Oh, yeah. I remember this. This is what writing-love feels like. Where have you been, baby?” And I realized that the last time I remembered hitting flow was…one year, no two, maybe could it have been even longer ago? And that made me go buggy. Continue reading
Writing Stuff
