Plot Thickener
Okay, I’m ready.
Or nearly so.
I look back at this month’s measly two posts and realize I’m not interested in killing time anymore.
March saw a surge of creative energy directed at this blog to get the thing rolling and somewhat relevant. But my enthusiasm for ice-breaking small talk has subsided.
I’ve been poking at two new, unpublished posts: one about the hypnagogic state and its role in my creative process; another about how attempting to finish a first novel mirrored the adoption of serious long-distance running into my lifestyle.
Both are worthy topics, and there’s decent sentences in ‘em.
But I’ve no drive to keep nattering about writing.
I want to get on with the real thing.
Also.
To counteract the necessary labor of completing my tax return, I sought to MAKE something this weekend, to work on a creative project whose completion would fulfill me where finances couldn’t. So I dug out some sound files from the Upcoming Mixes folder on my hard drive (I do that, too, for fun - make music and mix other people’s), and some DJ-centric ideas popped out of nowhere for me to explore yesterday evening.
Alas.
They. Did. Not. Hit. The. Spot.
No, there’s a bigger unfinished project yodeling its presence from on high, goading me from behind, its incipient forms now three months distant, its Platonic ideal teasing ahead, and friends, readers, it’s now time to distance-run toward that destination clearly visible from my comfy spot here atop Procrastination Peak.
I’ve been scared. I’ve been excited. Now I’m just impatient.
I thought maybe there’d be a quiet moment, a whimper not a bang, that presaged my return to the naive, sputtering first draft, there to whip it into an honest, upstanding novel.
Turns out it was neither.
It’s a burn. An itch. A barely-articulate buzz at the back of my subconscious that keeps intoning, as best it can:
Yes, fool, yes - the need is ripe.
Behold that dubious fruit you’ve harvested, then make of it a satisfying meal.
I’m hungry.
And so.
I’ll not wait another month. I’ll get back into a tussle with Inlanders some 30 days earlier than planned. I’ll finish the damn taxes, rip through what’s left of the fiction I wanted to consume while on vacation from my own make-believe, then blunder headlong into draft two at the top of May.
If nothing else, it’ll give me something to yap about here. 
You’ve been warned.
- Stephen Reese
