Currently Listening Celtic Christmas By Various Artists see related

Creativity is a drug I cannot live without.
Cecil B. DeMille
US movie producer (1881 - 1959)


I believe this to be true. Due to stress and possibly a small amount of depression(gee, what would I have to be depressed about?), I have a tendency not to be able to write for long periods of time. Then boom baby!! I just take off in a creative binge.

I used to try to pace myself but that didn't seem to work. So I ended up making the all mighty sacrfices. Activities, friends, television...you know the important stuff. I attempted to talk to one friend to convince myself I wasn't getting into 'that mode' once again. But his server was apparently down because everything had that horrid postmaster failed notice. Don't worry Nick, I forgive you for not being there when I needed a male figure to converse with(large sigh with limp hand across eyes-a very southern belle thing to do!)

So I fell into one of my manic writing sessions. I wrote agressively from 9p.m until 3 this morning. I have several projects that I'm pummeling through from a nonfiction book to a few fantasies to an already re-edited romance and doing research on a humor/picture book. When I come out of my writer's block I do it in prodigality.

It would be nice if they all sold at once so I could proclaim myself a full time writer and quit the mundane business of the 9 to 5 life. But then I have gotten some of my best characterizations from these people. So it's a difficult choice. It's really not but it sounds good doesn't it?

But my writing is a habitual thing very much like that drug. I will definitely go through withdrawals when I have to go to my mother's for the holiday. Four days of mind numbing conversations about relatives and senior friends(of my mother) that I have never met. Death is all around my mother's house. She has had 5 different types of cancer in the past 5 years and recently was released from chemo treatments. She knows that her days or months or years are numbered. So the talk becomes not of her impending departure to Summerland but of those who have died or are dying. I am sure that my brother who takes care of her is absolutely numb with all of it. He is only 5 years older but looks as if he has aged 20.

Yes stress and seasonal depression takes many forms.

I plan to take several writing pads and hopefully being back on the home turf will aid in my writing(my mother refuses to let us give her a computer). My mother and brother live in the family house that was once my grandparents and great grandparents. This is where I learned all I know about nature , about my people and the old ways. This is the place my great grandmother sat me on a stump for lessons of the old languages(Celtic and Gaelic). This is the house where my grandmother gave me lessons after school on our faith.  My great grandmother always refered to it as 'our people's ways'. My family came from Scotland after all and the language could be slanted and strange to those not accustomed to the words.  There were more than a few  of the neighbors in this small West Texas town that would start their confabulations with ,'Eh' or 'What did she say?'

I think that is also where I learned the lessons of writing. Not so much commas and colons but of love of words and a love of storytelling. You can't help but love words when you came from a family of sometimes-drunk, sometimes caustic but always entertaining Scottish storytellers. The stories at bedtime were not so much living happily ever after but about faeries and lost souls and children stolen away by goblins and the rules of what to do when alone in a dark forest. They were the horror stories and action adventure stories of another time. We children cared nothing for romance and the prince getting the princess in those days. We liked being scared. We liked watching the shadows grow tall against the wall as the fire flickered its last few embers. As we walked drowsily off to our beds, we liked hearing the women scold the men for 'filling our heads' with such stories.

I was asked by my boss how I came up with the fantasy stories that I write. It's definitely not a far point from today to yesterday. I just smile and raise my shoulders in a silent response. 'I don't know...somewhere out there..."