Like soap bubbles

Been a while. So long that I can't really remember when I last wrote here, or what about. I have a distant recollection of some ambitious plan perfumed with an abundance of optimism. I'm not going to be a downer. I'll just say that I've learned a lot.

Today I sit in a laundromat while my dirty clothes rotate in soapy water. I always wondered about those people, in the movies and TV shows, sorting garments and slotting coins. I can now add that experience to the list of recent experiences. I don't see the same people regularly like I thought I would. I don't have any conversations with strangers like I hoped I would. Like I feared I would.  But the weekly chore-ritual has settled into its place, predictable and quantifiable.

What I haven't been able to work through as yet is the writing. And I guess that part is a bit debatable. An artist friend professes that thinking about writing, outlining, sketching, even drafting temporary, unrelated things counts. As per usual, if that counts as writing, then I still write just about every day. I just don't know if I fully believe her words. Earlier this year I had four chapters written on a novel that was years overdo in its beginning. Then I realized I had an opportunity to put out the whole series of my first supernatural novels, on my own terms. "It shouldn't be that hard," is what I said then. It's been some six months of lessons since, about working with other artists, finding them and communicating with them and pushing my imagining through the filter of another's mind. And that wasn't even the most difficult part, not really.

The most difficult part, I'd wager, is keeping up the momentum. Like a spinning wheel twisting through water, there is no time off. Every revolution is earned, every turn purchased with the expenditure of a finite resource. I can honestly say there have been weeks when I just took time off. The toiling week was full and contentious and when it came time to work on my passions, on my dreams, I opted to rest. Naturally, as I wasn't moving forward on those things, this writing was the first to be cast aside. This is hard enough to maintain when I have the time and the energy.

But I think I'm turning another corner. I have an idea of what I need to do, and an avenue of planning to reach that destination. I'm Facebook friends with my cover artist. He's younger than me, and in his musings beneath the sketches that he posts, I can also feel a nostalgia for where I once was on my own artistic journey. I would say that I am a novice at management, at knowing how to push others to produce their best work without causing burn out or breaking them entirely. It's an idea that I think about a lot these days at my weekday job. In certain circles, my resume is not insubstantial. There's been talk of "sharing my knowledge" because of the fact that "I've been working in the profession for a while." I don't know when that happened. I still remember what it felt like in the first few years after graduation, just finding something to pay the bills until the publisher world realized who they kept rejecting. 

But I absolutely have opinions, the kind that would coil behind assertions that I could make about why a thing should be done, or a way to improve this method or another, in ways that seem obvious to me and unclear to those in my midst. I don't like the inherent responsibility, but that's a much longer diatribe for a much different time.

This is, in so many ways, preamble. After all, if I have time to write here, then I certainly have time to write elsewhere. I used to debate with myself whether it was more appropriate to "find the time" or to "make the time." I always thought finding it implied that it was just misplaced, that it was available and unfettered, if it could only be located. Whereas making it was a much more direct and muscular action. Things had to be shoved out of the way, stacked with certainty. But now I think the whole process is much more magical. There is no time, not to be found and not to be discovered. It must be produced from nothing, beyond alchemy, equivalent to a miracle. Fragile and floating away.


In short: back to work.

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