It’s time for me to get back into the swing of writerly things. I am not sure where to begin. Never have I taken so completely a break from life in general, let alone writerly life, and I didn’t even get too, too far from either real life or writerly life.
Of course, it’s hard or impossible to separate my ordinary life from my writerly life anyway.
While we were soaking in the healing hot springs of Pagosa Springs, CO, I had an idea for a scene in my back-burner work in progress. At the moment there was no way for me to record it, but the spontaneous dialogue that made up the crux of the scene stuck with me until I could get back to our room and get out the laptop.
I’d purposely tried to give all things writerly a break. But I wasn’t entirely successful with that. I still checked email (even though I refrained from responding to them for the most part), watched my Twitter feed (and again, refrained from Tweeting as much as possible) and watched the happenings on my blog from afar and tried to leave it alone.
That was not easy and I don’t feel that I was very good at taking a total vacation from it. Maybe with another week I could have weaned myself further.
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So this update is bringing me back up to speed as I try to figure out where I am at the moment.
I don’t think much has changed since the last update. I still have three submissions out, one short story and two photo essays. When I get a better camera I’ll be able to submit to more photography markets and I like the combination of writing and photography so it’s a good diversion from the novel-writing when I need to take that sort of tangent.
Tonight I’ll try to work on editing Symbiosis for the first time since taking my vacation. I hope the break makes it easier to see necessary changes. It’ll be a good opportunity to look at it with fresh eyes to see if I really do like the POV change I’d made.
It’s time to begin working on my career plan, too. Tonight I’ll start reviewing my thoughts on that.
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Have any of you ever taken a complete and total break from writing, including all the peripheral writerly activities? Were you successful at it?
