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A man who can’t bear to share his habits is a man who needs to quit them.

Stephen King, The Dark Tower

Settling back into writing makes me fully understand what the Tin Man was going through. The cumulative seconds, minutes, hours of staring at the blinking cursor and fighting internal battles over character motivations and means of advancing plot feel little less than having my joints locked up over years of rain and neglect. That is, after all, what I’ve been doing this year. Neglecting the creative angle, allowing this site to pass for “real” writing and making excuses for not putting in the work on stories. Allowing that rain to fall and rust everything I spent so long getting ready to move.

What I needed was a little oil. Only a smidge, an ounce to get some motion back somewhere. I’d brought this up before in a few articles, namely Learning from the Greats, that I was actively seeking to immerse myself in great stories again. To ingest them, to talk about them, and, ultimately, to get back to talking about my own work. Nothing gets ready to write so much as talking about what I’m writing. Thankfully, I didn’t just… talk about talking about writing (Truly, author-worthy prose in stream-of-consciousness land), I did it. I worked on my outlines and talked to myself about them. About the issues with the timeline and some of the relationships. I talked with friends about them and possible solutions. We bounced ideas back and forth. Pros and cons, possible speedbumps, hiccups, how these things affect the overall direction of the story.

Oil.

Last night I managed to dedicate a full hour to editing. That sounds like nothing, and a few years ago I would have agreed, but for the current me that was practically groundbreaking. Sixty-six whole, uninterrupted minutes (Thanks, Beeminder logging) of plotting arcs, restructuring and reinventing events, posing and working through questions, and actual line editing. Writing, like basically all skills, is effectively a muscle that needs exercising to build. I’d let it atrophy, so being able to flex it again felt nothing short of incredible. I’ve missed this. Truly. I wish I could capture the feeling of creation in a bottle and siphon little bits back to myself to spark more drive when I need it – my own little perpetual energy machine.

I suppose I’ll have to settle for continuing to bother those few close friends that I bounce ideas off of. What energy I get back from them is always more than enough to get the engine of creativity running. Or, wait, maybe that’s not the right word. It’s not about the creativity, in the end. That’s aways there, more or less. It’s the drive. The urge, the need, to sit down and get these ideas out of my head and onto the page before they rattle off out into the wilds and take on lives of their own, lost to me forever.

As for the work itself, I’d planned to be done with high-level outlining of the whole 2nd draft of Residuum and a rewrite of the first part by the end of the month. That’s still very much on target, and now I’m thinking I’ll have time to push a little beyond that. More detailed chapter outlines likely makes the most sense. And… I might just start thinking about a little side project I’ve had on the back burner for a while. I don’t exactly have the readership to make it as interesting as I’d like it to be, but it might be worth a shot anyway. Hone the craft, sharpen the blade, etc. Build it and they will come sort of deal. We’ll see.

Either way, I’d like to thank all you Dwellers for bearing with the nothing for a while. It’s been a hell of a year, I have to say. Time to get to work. There are worlds to build.