Getting Out of the Way

I don't have any writing to report today. It was a long day at work-- in at 9 and home at 9. Never the less, I can feel the book gnawing at the edges of my brain all the time. It's like that song from the 1980s "Always something there to remind me." It's like the story is demanding to be written. I imagine that I were to keep ignoring this impulse, it would disappear.

Before, when I was feeling a lot of despair about not having time to write, I needed clean blocks of time to sit around and muse about where I wanted the novel to go. I was really mad at myself because I didn't get much done on the precious days I carved out for this. But I think that my brain was working on it and those ideas have matured.

I was teaching my class today and I just wanted to stop lecturing and take down some notes on ideas I have about the manuscript. As I was leading a discussion of Tony Grooms' beautiful novel, Bombingham, I could only think of how one of my characters would have been impacted by the Civil Rights movement. I actually jotted a note in the margin of my book.

The book is alive in me right now. It wants to be written. I am going to get out of the way and let it happen.