priming the well
I was thinking this morning of how I spend so much time amongst words now. I guess I always did, my own poems and others. I guess, since a large part of my world was out there, in the outer world doing other things, I noticed it less. And in fact, the words felt like what I was always trying to get back to. The things you went off to do to make money and a living to be able to play with words the rest of the time. A good portion of my day is writing content and SEO now, and the rest, editing and designing, mostly things with or about words or language in some way.
I worried at the prospect of freelance work for years. Could I possibly spend so much tome--too much time--in the muck and have anything left for my own words? The answer is apparently less dire than I expected. Actually, I have time to write things I never may have been able to before. Or maybe less time, but mental energies. this may entirely be an introvert or isolation thing. I do not hit the end of my day or the end of my week quite as exhausted and frazzled as I used to, so writing at night, in the midnight hour--currently some attempts at genre fiction--is actually going surprisingly well. Weirdly well. I am not sure if any of it is any good, but we shall see. And there are other things in the mix--essays and articles I will be working on in the coming months.
And maybe its just some sort of honeymoon period, but really, I have always found that wading more words leads to more, which was true both as I did things like start lit mags and presses, but also just writing poems everyday. Initially, this was the first thing I did everyday, now it usually happens in the afternoon, usually when I break for lunch from press & shop related tasks. I had taken a short break since finishing unreal city in February, but have now started in to a new project courtesy of NAPOWRIMO so we shall see how that goes. The key might also be that they are decidedly different sorts of writing--mornings the more academic/research oriented work, afternoons for poetry, fiction for night. (and fiction still feels new and strange and sort of like dreaming through my fingers.)
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