With a Little Help From My Friends
I love my friends. In some ways, this week has turned out to be kind of stressful - Baby X had his second round of immunizations, and he had a really bad reaction to them (which he's now recovered from, thank goodness); my physical post-pregnancy issue suddenly got much, much worse, so I've been in quite a bit of pain; etc. etc. etc. - but...
Thanks to wonderful friends on twitter, I got an unexpected copy of Violet Mackerel's Personal Space in the mail, which made both me and MrD really happy. It's number 4 in one of my very, very favorite series of chapterbooks, sweet and funny and meaningful for adults as well as kids. MrD insisted that I read him the entire book in one go, and then we started over again the next day. Then we started re-reading all the earlier books in the series! It's been really fun for both of us, and a perfect cheer-me-up when I'm feeling down.
Then yesterday, just as I was starting to feel really sorry for myself about the pain issues (after doing too much walking for my own good yesterday morning), I got another unexpected package, this time from one of my oldest friends: a lovely collage print that reads:
She ate many chocolate truffles while pondering the BIGGER questions of life. It didn't help her thought process but it did make the whole enterprise more enjoyable.
I laughed. I felt totally warmed. (She knows me so well! And yet she still loves me, 24 years into our friendship!) (And I love her, too!) I put it up on the bookcase next to my nursing chair so that I can see it and be cheered and warmed by it all the time...
...and then I sat down on the living room floor and managed, because I was feeling so happy, to shove the pain out of my mind for the next two hours so that I could play with writing. And I really did play! First I did some brainstorming drawing with crayons on white paper (a deep blue witch's hat; a half-moon; a locket), then I spent some time gazing at my own personal collages (on Pinterest!)...and then I had my very best and happiest writing session since Baby X was born, writing 1350 words of a brand-new short story. I'm about halfway through the story now, and I'm still really loving the whole process of writing it.
(It's funny how inspiration works. The short story I was working on earlier this week felt very mechanical - I wanted to write a short story, in principle, and there was an interesting opening I'd written down three years ago and hadn't used yet, so...I wrote 300 more words of it, because I couldn't think of anything better. It was a good writing exercise, and the truth is, I have, in the past, written stories I ended up really liking using exactly that process, but...well, the only reason I was doing it this time was because I wanted to write a short story, any short story.
BUT! Writing 300 words of that first story, as an exercise, the other day, got my head back into the short-story-creating mode for the first time in nearly a year - which meant that a couple days later, a new idea I loved occurred to me, an idea that made my skin tingle whenever I thought about it! So those 1350 words of the brand-new story rushed out of me yesterday in exactly the kind of inspired blur I live for, as a writer...and writing them made my mind start playing with other ideas for even more stories I may well write after I finish this story.
- Which I will, because unlike the first story, this one matters to me...
...But if I hadn't forced myself through writing some of that first story earlier in the week - if I'd just sat back and waited for inspiration - I'm 100% certain that the second story would never have occurred to me, at least not this week. So. Interesting!)
My friends back me up in so many ways, all the time. But on weeks like this, I am so particularly grateful for them.
Thanks to wonderful friends on twitter, I got an unexpected copy of Violet Mackerel's Personal Space in the mail, which made both me and MrD really happy. It's number 4 in one of my very, very favorite series of chapterbooks, sweet and funny and meaningful for adults as well as kids. MrD insisted that I read him the entire book in one go, and then we started over again the next day. Then we started re-reading all the earlier books in the series! It's been really fun for both of us, and a perfect cheer-me-up when I'm feeling down.
Then yesterday, just as I was starting to feel really sorry for myself about the pain issues (after doing too much walking for my own good yesterday morning), I got another unexpected package, this time from one of my oldest friends: a lovely collage print that reads:
She ate many chocolate truffles while pondering the BIGGER questions of life. It didn't help her thought process but it did make the whole enterprise more enjoyable.
I laughed. I felt totally warmed. (She knows me so well! And yet she still loves me, 24 years into our friendship!) (And I love her, too!) I put it up on the bookcase next to my nursing chair so that I can see it and be cheered and warmed by it all the time...
...and then I sat down on the living room floor and managed, because I was feeling so happy, to shove the pain out of my mind for the next two hours so that I could play with writing. And I really did play! First I did some brainstorming drawing with crayons on white paper (a deep blue witch's hat; a half-moon; a locket), then I spent some time gazing at my own personal collages (on Pinterest!)...and then I had my very best and happiest writing session since Baby X was born, writing 1350 words of a brand-new short story. I'm about halfway through the story now, and I'm still really loving the whole process of writing it.
(It's funny how inspiration works. The short story I was working on earlier this week felt very mechanical - I wanted to write a short story, in principle, and there was an interesting opening I'd written down three years ago and hadn't used yet, so...I wrote 300 more words of it, because I couldn't think of anything better. It was a good writing exercise, and the truth is, I have, in the past, written stories I ended up really liking using exactly that process, but...well, the only reason I was doing it this time was because I wanted to write a short story, any short story.
BUT! Writing 300 words of that first story, as an exercise, the other day, got my head back into the short-story-creating mode for the first time in nearly a year - which meant that a couple days later, a new idea I loved occurred to me, an idea that made my skin tingle whenever I thought about it! So those 1350 words of the brand-new story rushed out of me yesterday in exactly the kind of inspired blur I live for, as a writer...and writing them made my mind start playing with other ideas for even more stories I may well write after I finish this story.
- Which I will, because unlike the first story, this one matters to me...
...But if I hadn't forced myself through writing some of that first story earlier in the week - if I'd just sat back and waited for inspiration - I'm 100% certain that the second story would never have occurred to me, at least not this week. So. Interesting!)
My friends back me up in so many ways, all the time. But on weeks like this, I am so particularly grateful for them.