The Muse Has ADD

During this week's writers' group we asked each other how many projects we were working on right now.

Not one of us said less than three.

I'm working on a novel, an unrelated novella, some poetry, and flash or nanofiction. The other members of the group are working on multiple short stories and novels.

Each of us felt guilty about having so many projects. I know I feel a little scattered and distracted at times, each project possessing a different sense of urgency or a different allure.

In retrospect I think we suffer from the delusion that we are married to one of these darlings and must remain faithful to The One, until publication do us part.

But in my personal experience, The One — the biggest project requiring the most intellectual input — is enabled by the other projects. My toying with words in smaller or lesser projects has been instrumental to putting better words together for The One.

What about you? If you are a writer, are you serially monogamous to a project, or are you engaged in polyamory with your works in progress.
Ditto for readers: do you read sequentially, or multiple books at a time?

[photo: del grosso via Flickr]

The Writers' Club: Motivation of Another Kind

I joined a local writers' club in January, in order to give myself a kick in the rear. If I had to meet folks on a regular basis, look them square in the eye and say, "I only wrote 500 words in two weeks," I thought I'd write more and frequently. The subtle push of peer pressure would be an improvement over letting the moody, irregular muse dictate when I wrote.

It worked; I've written a lot more and with greater frequency. Inside the last two weeks I've written in excess of 20,000 words.

Unfortunately, most of it was not related to my targeted novel—the one I want to complete within weeks for editing.

The muse had other plans for the motivation generated by club membership.

~ sigh ~

The club has been extremely helpful, though. There is a preponderance of men, and they bring a different perspective as beta readers. If I can't answer their questions as I write, I know I could be losing part of my potential audience.

And the club also throws around a lot of other material which has been extremely helpful in terms of jogging creativity and encouraging research. What was once a single book now has the potential to be four inter-related books due to the amount of research new avenues of thought have opened for me to consider. It's highly motivational to think I've got all that work out in front of me now—the book I've nearly finished, and another three books after that.

What about you? Do you belong to a writers' club or group? Does this work for you or no? Tell me in comments.

[photo: penmanila via Flickr]

Essay: Going Home

[original photo by slambo_42 via Flickr]

The following essay was published at The Rumpus, in response to their call for submissions. The prompt was "Going Home." Thanks to The Rumpus' Susan Clements for her prompt wrangling.

- - - - - - - -

His father said, “He’s not like his sister, or even other boys. He’s a lot more emotional.”

Yes. I know this well. My son has cleaved to me for the last fifteen years. He surprised me first, pissing in my face during his inaugural diaper change. He hurt me first and second, my nipples pained with the shock of his first teeth erupted at age four months.

He’s really an empath, this boy. He gathers and carries the emotions of others, the little dustman sweeping childhood’s streets into a bin each day.

And I’m the one who empties the dustman’s bin, just as I’ve emptied his diaper, his pencil box, his backpack.

Years ago it had been habit with his much-older stepbrother that I asked about his day in the car on the way home from daycare. Ritually posing open-ended questions kept the boy awake and on his regular evening schedule. But my stepson was not chatty; he resisted both drowsiness and my inquiries.

So unlike my son, who dumps; buckets some days, tankers on others, but he dumps. In second grade he spilled about the little girl tormented by bullies; in fifth grade he disgorged group dynamics of classmates bucking for best reader. Every day was fraught with emotional turmoil; my son captured and delivered it all in a stream of consciousness, within the safety of mother’s automobile, between the school’s driveway and that of home.

It took all my strength not to pull over and weep with the overflow the day he told me his middle school classmate’s teen brother committed suicide. I was almost prepared for the emotional burden; a friend had called, warning me my teen daughter might be impacted as the deceased had been a classmate.

But no--it was my son who talked with and comforted the surviving sibling, a friend of his with whom he’d worked on class projects.

On rare occasion my kids had been allowed to use the car as their Maxwell Smart-ish “cone of silence,” within it permitted a single trenchant word when something particularly wretched earned rapid decompression afforded by an otherwise forbidden expression.

This dark day deserved such treatment. He asked if he could swear, once he’d offloaded his emotional freight.

Of course.

We both said it. He roared first, I seconded, the final harsh consonant fading as I pulled the car into the driveway.

Submission: Going Home

Made my first submission to http://TheRumpus.net 's Rumpus Readers' Report--this edition's theme, "Going Home."

Past editions have been like the proverbial box of chocolates, an assortment ranging from the odd candy-coated withered fruit to the rich excess of truffles. Let's see if this next edition is every bit as wide in its reach.

What are you reading these days? Fiction or nonfiction? Something short or long? Tell me in comments.