Am Writing (Again)

I have opened the computer file a couple times since November, but mostly the attention to my manuscript has been negligence.  I could easily give you a half dozen excuses.  Work.  A stressful living situation.  Family.  Work.  Theater.  Housework. Not all of them are bad.  Work is in there twice because I like my job for the most part.  It is just exhausting.  And yet… I was willing to find the energy to go to rehearsals for three months.

Anyway, excuses aside, it has been over six months since I spent time with this storyline.  And you know what?  Over those six months, the world changed a bit.

One of the major elements of my novel’s plot is a political sex scandal.  I don’t have cable and read more local news than the petty national click bait headlines, but it is rather difficult to be oblivious to the fact that the shock factor of a sex scandal has a different scale than it did six months ago. 

Also in that interim, the #metoo movement has exploded.  The world is reevaluating the idea of consent and power and appropriate behavior.

I don’t know if it is a bad thing that I succumbed to Resistance for over six months.  Or maybe the world needed to shift so I could see how to shift my narrative a bit more (I was in the process of gutting and restructuring my first draft when I fell off the writing wagon).  I could say that is an appropriate excuse – but when you stop exercising, your muscles atrophy.   Excuses are always easy, especially when it means blaming someone or something else.  But there is a value in embracing the fallout of a not necessarily good decision.

I haven’t decided completely what this means for my novel(s).  That is something I intend to start working though before day’s end.  Brain dumping with a pen and paper is a good way to start.  And that includes a brain dump of the current events, my reactions to them, as well as processing the maturity of my own histories.  That’s what art is.

Perhaps this is a throughline I was waiting for.  Something I could have found through writing these last six months.   But I didn’t.  It could be something to connect all of these novels beyond a love story or my love of local and Irish history.  Maybe there is something to women’s history and our place in the world.  What does consent mean?  What does taking or respecting it mean for the power we have in the world and over our lives and over history?

There are so many possibilities to use those questions as I go through the American Revolution, Abolition, the Troubles, WWI, the Civil Rights Movement, the Great Famine, and the present day.  It is a paranormal fantasy, but maybe I just found the humanity of what I want to write.

The point, though, is that I am writing.  And while this blog is vague – my head is still in that cloud of where do I go from here – it is a restart.  A step forward back on the path of creating a story, blended from the stories I lived and the stories that are unfolding around me right now.