Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Tue, Jan 15 2013
Locked in with a blank screen
I haven't had to deal with winter cold for many years. We get an occasional cold night here, but nothing like what we've had lately. People are warming their cars and scraping frost off the windshield every morning. These are Midwest rituals, not typical California coastal rituals. Cold air triggers an asthmatic reaction for me, so my outside walks have been curtailed to the extent that I recall the years in Minnesota when I felt like a prisoner during winter months.
One would think that outside cold and indoor lingering would feed the writing muse. There are writers who long for a day inside with a warm beverage and free hours to write. For me, thoughts have become a bit frozen along with the weather. Worse than thought freezing are the bursts of story ideas and sentence fragments that come, only to be sidetracked fifteen minutes later by the wish to prepare vegetables for a pot of hot soup. Comfort seems to produce malaise in my writing mind. Maybe it's time to turn down the heat and eat cold salad, drink ice water, turn off the electric blanket. Maybe then I can envision sweeping vistas of glacial cliffs and a dying sun, where a group of scientific explorers suddenly travel back in time to some Death Valley location where they find a secret tent full of cold-producing bacteria that came from extraterrestrials, who only meant to help us combat global warming, until something went terribly, horribly wrong.
I'll be back. I've just gone to turn down the thermostat and get a bowl of ice cream.
posted at: 08:01 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
I haven't had to deal with winter cold for many years. We get an occasional cold night here, but nothing like what we've had lately. People are warming their cars and scraping frost off the windshield every morning. These are Midwest rituals, not typical California coastal rituals. Cold air triggers an asthmatic reaction for me, so my outside walks have been curtailed to the extent that I recall the years in Minnesota when I felt like a prisoner during winter months.
One would think that outside cold and indoor lingering would feed the writing muse. There are writers who long for a day inside with a warm beverage and free hours to write. For me, thoughts have become a bit frozen along with the weather. Worse than thought freezing are the bursts of story ideas and sentence fragments that come, only to be sidetracked fifteen minutes later by the wish to prepare vegetables for a pot of hot soup. Comfort seems to produce malaise in my writing mind. Maybe it's time to turn down the heat and eat cold salad, drink ice water, turn off the electric blanket. Maybe then I can envision sweeping vistas of glacial cliffs and a dying sun, where a group of scientific explorers suddenly travel back in time to some Death Valley location where they find a secret tent full of cold-producing bacteria that came from extraterrestrials, who only meant to help us combat global warming, until something went terribly, horribly wrong.
I'll be back. I've just gone to turn down the thermostat and get a bowl of ice cream.
posted at: 08:01 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
