Norman Green

RIP VAN WHATISNAME

I just finished the first draft of my current writing project, which I am calling ‘BENBOW STREET HUSTLE.’ At times like this I feel as though I have been reawakened after a long sleep. All of a sudden my days feel much longer than they used to and I have a lot more energy than I did. Hurricane Irene blew through and I actually had time to deal with the mess, both at work and in my basement, and now when I get home from my day job the afternoons seem unfathomably long. I am reading again, Lee Child and Jim Butcher and some others who are new to me.

Life is good.

I’m not sure I can handle it.

I am so used to having a writing project that I have forgotten how much time and energy it takes. They say gooney birds stay aloft so long that they forget exactly how to land, and although I hate to compare myself to a gooney bird, maybe that explains some of what I’m feeling. It strikes me now that much of my writing time is spent in a sort of trance, a kind of focused daydreaming where I let my imagination show me what my story looks like before I sit down to actually ‘write’ it. Scene by scene, if I don’t first construct my story visually, I won’t have anything ready when I confront the blank screen. What that means is that the process of writing, if you include the process of visualization, uses up a lot more of my resources that just the time I spend at the keyboard.

Not that I’m complaining.

As a matter of fact I’m bored already. I know I should hold off for a while before I jump into the next thing but I don’t know if I can do it. Maybe I’ll just take batting practice for a while and see what develops.

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