The um, project that I’ve been working on? I give in and admit it’s a novel and probably for the time being it’s the only thing I’m focusing on. I decided this the other day when I sat down and outlined about 90% of it. I never do this. I usually write out a bunch of the novel in a sort of “writing to discover” process and then figure out what needs to be there and doesn’t and from that figure out the hows of the plot and outline the details and start cleaning it up and revising it in a quasi-new-draft of it. But this outline is color-coded and I didn’t even write it on the computer. (Note to self: transfer to computer and save a billion backup copies of it everywhere.)

But this thing, this novel. It’s alive. It’s a creature taking hold of my brain. A giant squid novel, yep, that’s what I’m writing. (Having nothing to do with squids, really, except for the fact that this novel seems to have tentacles that have reached out of the monitor, grabbed me, and started smacking my head against the keyboard until I finally relented and agreed to work on it full time.)

I can’t complain, though–strike that, I shouldn’t be complaining, yet I am. I went from being in a holiday creative slump to being in a post-holiday creative slump. There was much staring at my iGoogle page, wondering what to do. I hadn’t even felt more than “Bleh” about reading–READING–that’s how slumpy I was. This… this fire… this is work of the kind I haven’t felt since February of 2006 when I started a draft based on an image of a conversation one of my historical characters was having with her brother. The image–what she was wearing, how she was sitting, her facial expressions, all of a sudden revealed this character that drew me in and made me so much more interested in her than just this figure who crops up in legend on one of the other novels. She was a real person with a whole story and a whole arc that needed to be told. That draft/novel was the cause of me getting very little sleep that semester. Instead I spent every weekend of that winter glued to the computer, feverishly working on that instead of working on what I was supposed to be working on. (Homework. Papers. Stories. The like.) The irony of this is every big draft I’ve ever started and enjoyed enough to write through I’ve started in the winter, usually in January or February. The autumn slump and the holiday break leads to an impatience and feverishness in January or February, I’m guessing. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

But I feel guilty! I should be working on something else. In fact I love that story and really want to be working on it! (Alas, I need to write to discover with that one, though, which seems a bit onerous.) Maybe I should sit down with my colored pens and outline it anyway and just be as daring and brazen with its plot as I was with this novel and see where it leads. It’s working with this one! The word count of this document is probably going to surpass the count of that one in another week with my current pace (which is nicely graphed in Excel) and really… gah. At least my protagonist has multiple reasons to feel guilty so I get to use that guilt and angst in a productive way.

To think, this all started the day I interviewed a prospective student applying to Carnegie Mellon. I went to Starbucks a bit early, sat down with the laptop and opened a blank document. “To hell with it,” I thought. I’d intentionally arrived way too early to force myself to focus on writing. Something. Anything. And hell. It worked. Carnegie Mellon, you’re still helping me write. (In an admittedly weird and roundabout way.) Bless you.