FORCED INDOLENCE EQUALS DELICIOUS DAYDREAMING

Hello world!

Sorry I’ve been quiet lately. I’ve been taking it a bit easy as I recover and heal after some major surgery. (FYI – all good: prognosis and progress excellent.)

I’d known about the impending surgery for some months prior – but it had to wait until after BOOK MONTH. Of course. How could I miss out on my favourite month of the year? And it had to wait until I had finished a gloriously long list of freelance projects. What this all means is that since about mid-June, I have been scrambling to “get things done” and have made very little progress on my WIP. Just about zilch, truth be told. And seeing as I left my day job to free up time for my writing, this is NOT GOOD. So not good that in my medicated post-op brain fog, I had an epiphany: I had fallen into the trap of relegating creativity and writing to the bottom of the list. Yeah, that old chestnut. Idiot!

But there’s an upshot to my forced indolence. (There’s always a silver lining, isn’t there?) Lying about recuperating has forced me to reflect. It has strengthened my resolve to fit writing into my weekly schedule – to shove it back up the to-do list to the prominent position it deserves. This is SO important.

My forced STOP has also had another unexpected side effect. (And I’m not talking pain, nausea, vomiting, brain fog or blurred vision here.)

It has given me the TIME to DREAM. To be bored so witless that my mind wanders. Wanders off to faraway dreamy places.

Without even meaning to, I have slipped into delicious daydreams about my character and her friends and family, about her life before and after my story idea, about her needs and wants and inner turmoil. My daily papers have once again started to fill with thoughts and ideas about her story. I have had the time to PLAY with ideas, to PONDER possible plot lines and structures. To DELVE deeply into my characters’ pasts and THINK about how this affects their nows.

And it has reminded me how important it is to STOP.

To DREAM.

To simply IMAGINE.

And the momentum that is building in my imagined world is palpable. (Now I just have to write the damn thing!)

Ciao.

PS: My forced indolence has also allowed me to binge watch two complete series of BROADCHURCH. Two silver linings!