minding my head in the clouds, feet on the ground business

on not being afraid to try again, and manifest small

art by @3dbystander.

almost exactly a year ago i sent a tweet that said 2022 was going to be the year i finished my second book and got an agent.

i’m not any closer to finishing that book than i was last year, mainly because life got in the way. i struggled. i was in the dark. i never went to the doctor with my symptoms, but there was a lot going on between my ears. so the book was put on the back-back backity back burner until a day in the future when i had the strength, energy, and creative space to write it.

dreaming.

the book i wanted to have finished last year is about a young woman who does something really brave but kind of impossible.

the story is scattered in my notes, physical and digital.

inspiration has started to come to me again, and that is a big deal. i can be sitting there, aimlessly scrolling or whatever, and it’ll be like a little zip through my belly.

i can put in a little magical realism in the story, or a whole lot. i can make the characters serious, quiet type comedians or place a lighter in their hands and watch them burn the city down.

i love being at this stage of the story, and maybe that’s one of the reasons i’ve conjured circumstances that prevent me from finishing it for real. it’s broken up and kind of perfect and as big as i want it to be in my imagination. not putting it down leaves it in its big imperfection and i like it the way it is.

and then i can imagine the main characters, like the woman depicted in the image above. i don’t have to worry about writing a story that disappoints my self, or the people i imagine the characters to be.

thinking.

i’m not as afraid to put this book out into the world as i was Girl Tracy. this story is personal in ways that are more removed. it’s me taking things from my childhood that can’t be changed and changing them. all of the elements are there. the story is ready in a way that GT wasn’t, and yet, i’m not writing it.

in Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert (the person who wrote Eat, Pray, Love) talks about creative ideas. story ideas, marketing, ideas for new games or things you want to draw or paint. she says that if you, as a creator, aren’t ready or available for whatever you get, when you get it, that idea you got could “choose to leave you and to search for a different human collaborator.”

here are my questions: what happens if an idea leaves you? is it like a relationship where the other person has gone silent? can the creator still dream, still work at it, still create it? if you’re still engaged with the idea, has it truly left? do they exist in the same way we do? like, what if what feels like years to us are days or minutes to these ideas?