The Big Pending Burp

The muse rules.

My muse doesn’t have a name, which is kind of odd because my research muse certainly does (it’s Spike, which should give you an idea of the pushy nature of said research muse).

But she rules, regardless.

That means I write.  I write regardless of whether or not I have a contract.  I started writing in 7th grade (the first book, modest as it was) and I wrote through junior high, high school, and two different colleges.  Once I was living on that beloved mountainside in Eastern Kentucky, I wrote even more.  I wrote my way through Virginia, through Ohio, back to Western New York–and there, I finally sold the first book.

The point being…I write.  Regardless.

When I don’t write, the world is askew.  The pressure of that need builds inside, rather like the onset of a spastic tick.  Or the pressure of a big pending burp.  Or something more glamorous than that, if I could only think of it.

These past months, I’ve been involved in a lot of projects, and a lot of things that aren’t necessarily first draft, even when they’re part of the writing process.  It hasn’t escaped me that with each passing day, my little frantic undernote of being off-balance grows greater and greater.  Or that these other things, having forced their way in to eat my life, are really, truly eating away at the thing that keeps me whole.

The challenge is getting back to that whole–that pattern of basing the day around the writing.  Once you’ve fallen into that frenetic, off-balance place, finding the balance again isn’t always easy–especially when you have to say “no” to people to do it.  (And especially when real life isn’t cooperating, with weather chaos, wrecked van chaos, injured dog chaos, publishing industry chaos…oh, you just name it.)

So this week, I’m practicing.  Writing FIRST, other things second.  (This is complicated by my natural pattern of writing in the evenings, but I’m working on it…)  Because the muse is staging a rebellion, and in this case it doesn’t mean refusing to write…it means demanding to write.

I mean, it’s not healthy to hold in a burp that big, right?