Radio silence

We're eight days into the month, and I haven't blogged for any of them. It's not like my life's gotten any busier; I had an active holiday weekend but that was really about it. No, I've found, to my great pleasure, that I've started writing again. I don't know why I'm suddenly able to do it right during what's usually one of my blank months, but I think the existence of this blog helps a good deal. It keeps the muscles in shape, so to speak. Whenever I sat back down in front of the keyboard every fall when my muse woke up, I always felt like I was shaking off a few layers of rust as I started banging out sentences. Not so this time around.

Everyone's got their creative process. Some people exhaustively outline every detail before they write word one. It's like they will a skeleton into being, and then it's just a simple matter of packing meat on top of it. I fall into the opposite camp, where everything is on the fly. No outlines. Random bits of dialogue and description scribbled into the margins of my notebooks. Concepts getting filed away for months, years at a time, only to spontaneously show up in stories I never even thought to put them into.

I like the spontaneity. I like being able to surprise myself. If I know everything in advance, there's no discovery in it for me. And if there's discovery, there's no point.

I'll blog more regularly now. And I promise there will be footnotes next time.

-PK