The Wait Demands Its Tithe

October 17, 2012 by Cassidy Frazee | 4 Comments

There is always a moment, after events are handled and preparations are completed, where one feels an emptiness come over them.  What to do, what should be done?  There is nothing, however, and trying to fill the time with something usually leaves you feeling like you even more empty.

Right now I’m feeling that emptiness.  The majority of my prep work for NaNo 2012 is finished, in the bag as one might say.  A few thing to puzzle over, and some street names to add to notes, but that’s it.  So it means that I have no . . . real . . . writing at the moment.

I was in this position last year.  I burned through most of the prep work for Her Demonic Majesty, and with a couple of weeks to go I had little to keep me occupied.  So what did I do?  I wrote a story.  Actually, I finished a story, because I’d started writing it near the end of September, and I finished it up before getting deep into NaNo.

What became of that story?  It was Captivate and Control, and I sold that sucker to Naughty Nights Press.

Is that what I should do now?  Get into another story, knock it out in the next two weeks, then give it a quick edit when I have nothing better to do, and send it out?  Not this time.  I spent the end of October getting Captivate and Control edited, and submitted it because I figured I had a chance to make a sale.  I was right, I did, and the rest is, as they say, history.

The thing is, I am writing other stuff at the moment.  I’ve finished up my story Replacements on another blog, and I have another that is just about to wrap up.  Those two stories–once the second is complete–amount to about twenty thousand words.  Looking at it that way, I’m not exactly sitting on my butt doing nothing.  Well, I’m sitting on my butt, but you know what I mean.

This is where writing plays with your mind.  You get tired of working on a story after a while, and you want it to finish.  You get into an edit, and it feels like it’s taking forever to get things correct.  But have nothing to do for a few days, and you get this itch to create.  You want to find something to discuss, to describe.  You want to show people another world.

It’s almost as if you’re being punished for sitting around.  If you aren’t thinking about writing, you’re writing.  And if you’re not doing that, you’re being tortured by something unseen.  Most likely it’s your conscience telling you to get your ass in gear.

(I know, I could say it’s my Muse, but she is a lovely Muse, save when I’m not doing as I should.  Then she digs the spike heels into my back.  I know, trust me.)

Tonight, I felt like I should be doing more.  I felt as if I should have busted my butt on my novel, when the reality is, I’m pretty much ready to crank out the wordage.  I’ve got a couple of weeks of downtime, and I should use it to relax, because come one minute after midnight, 1 November, I’ll put out at least five hundred words, just as I did last year, so I can get my feet wet.

I know the water will be chilly, but that feeling vanishes after you’ve put ten thousand words to your back.

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