hrj

What is that fine line between responding to the call of inspiration and haring off on a tangent to avoid the immediate project? And what is the deep subconscious meaning of that call of inspiration being directly related to the meaning and nature of inspiration? (And is any of this really coherent, given that I'm still a bit woozy from having slept 36 hours straight through to fight of something fluish?)

I'm still struggling a bit to keep the edits for Mother of Souls on track. Having fought through the first few chapters, they're going a bit faster now, but after having started the year a bit ahead of my planned timeline, I'm now behind again. I'm not going to count "The Mazarinette and the Musketeer" as an actual distraction, given that I wrote it at a time when Mother of Souls needed to rest and rise a little before the next bit of kneading. But I got hit on Friday with a reminder of a story idea that had first shown up as a poem fragment a couple decades ago. Only now there was enough imagery to make a story. (And it felt concentrated enough to be a truly short story of the sort that seem fashionable at the moment. As in, less than 5000 words, rather than "can be rounded down to 7500 words to make a technical limit".) While I was waiting for the cold medicine to take hold Sunday evening, I pounded out a couple thousand words on it. But during this morning's session, I steadfastly returned to entering the edits for MoS.

I don't want to put too much meaning into flashes of inspiration, but it would be easy to see this one as "meaningful" in the same way my transparent anxiety dreams can be. Basic premise: due to excess demand on the system, a harpy is moonlighting as a muse, but she has a bit of an idiosyncratic deal with her "clients": in exchange for inspiration, she gets fed--either on artistic output, or with...something else. And for my protagonist, that "something else" gets tangled up in a downward spiral of literal deadlines and writer's block.

Now, I'm definitely not feeling blocked or anything on the editing. Just under pressure from my self-imposed schedules. But it's an amusing irony to have this image of a very demanding muse who is actually serving as a distraction from my creative output.