Office archaeology
I pity the person who tries to make sense of my notes in the future. I have up to five notebooks going at once, and make notes on whatever is on my mind in whichever one is closest to hand, and if one isn’t nearby I’ll write on whatever is. Anyway, it makes for some fun excavation at times.
I just came across a little Moleskine I kept in my purse in 2009. And in it I found this:
Two things are very cool about this to me:
1. I remember that Twitter conversation with Tobias Buckell. It made a huge difference at a time when I was feeling really low and that awesome writerly self-loathing that we’re all so good at had set in. (My friend Adam wrote eloquently about that at Inkpunks today–go look.) I didn’t know Toby at all at the time–since then we’ve met at conventions a couple of times and have a number of mutual friends, but at the time he was a professional author who took the time to give a pep talk to a despondent and unpublished stranger, and I was (and remain) deeply grateful. I’m really glad I have this reminder. I hope I can do the same for someone else some day.
2. This is the first note I ever made on Blight*, and I love that I just found this, because my friend Jeffrey Scott Petersen and I turned Blight into a pretty cool story just last fall, and we sold it a couple of weeks ago to Zombie Sky Press for an upcoming anthology.
Regarding that self-loathing and stuff–Adam’s Inkpunks post really nails it, I think, in that these kinds of blocks are all about fear. I know that I am personally terrified of falling flat on my face with this novel, and it keeps me from working on it. But not this weekend! This weekend I’m off to a retreat with a few other ladies and we are going to WORK IT. So if I’m scarce for a few days, that’s why: I’m in the desert with friends, facing my creative fears. :)
* [ETA: I think it is, but who knows, there may be another notebook floating around somewhere.]