Thanks for your enthusiasm regarding Hibernate! I'm pretty excited to get started with you all, and as always, it's a pleasure to see everyone buddy up in the comments. You do this so smoothly and independently; it's impressive! There are still a few more days to sign up with a friend and share the cost, but in general, registration will remain open until we begin on January 16. There's plenty of time to join. See you there. xo
Writing something – anything – was the plan for this morning. I pulled up the notes app on my phone which houses a running list of words and short sentences that provide fodder for bigger work. I’ve done this for years and it works pretty well, cataloging snippets of stories, questions, thoughts, and everyday moments that have a pesky habit of presenting themselves at the most inopportune times. So I write them down. Or, type them, as is the case. To an onlooker, there isn’t much to decipher from my list of fragmented ideas, but for me, it represents a larger narrative waiting to be worked out at another time. Occasionally an idea will come, the keyboard happens to be close by, and you have time on your hands: this is the ever-elusive holy trifecta that allows for ideas to be born instantly without the need for recordkeeping. Those are pretty sweet moments. Rare, but sweet. For the most part, it’s a you snooze you lose sort of deal, and those crystalline thoughts that form just as you’re about to drift off to sleep, will definitely vanish by morning if not captured right then and there. At some point along the way I took to using my phone as a tool for this capture, and now as I sit here this morning, I realize how naive I was for placing my confidence in such a peculiar device.
When I pulled up my notes app this morning, the precious extension-of-my-brain was nowhere to be found. Poof! Not in the trash bin, not moved to another list… gone. Dozens of prompts that will probably never materialize. Sure, there’s always those strong-willed ideas that don’t need placement on some common list, they’ll happily nag at your conscience until you give in and write your way through them. But for the most part, I imagine much of the list is history. Who knows, maybe pieces will find their way to another person who also feels compelled to spend time with a keyboard, which would be nice, because even though most of those stories and ideas weren’t very good, some were not half bad.
The irony (there’s always irony) is that just yesterday I read that unless your digital material exists in three places, it doesn’t exist at all. It’s fair to say, by that logic, that my single-locale list of prompts was hardly even a conception, let alone a reality. The whole thing an illusion. Live and learn… every single day. Furthermore (continuing with the irony), my creative brain has felt trapped in a vice for nearly two months, despite having this long list of potential material to work with. Maybe I should look at its disappearance as complete liberation. Starting from scratch. Yeah, I like that. How's that for a hot tip: When you lose every single one of your writing ideas, frame it as "liberation." Mastering the delicate art of self-preservation since 1972.
As for what to do now, I guess I’ll go and gather up a supply of pencil and paper. I hear they still make those.