I surfaced from an odd, bag of weary bones sleep this morning, my eyes fluttered open to darkness and silence. I lay there and wondered why I had woken so early, my wondering only broken by the occasional fitful turn. I think it was probably due to a pesky sinus-clogging cold which has left my teeth feeling loose and achy.
So I lay there for a time, one part of me adamantly wanting to go back to sleep, and the other part grumbling "not gonna happen", ache, groan, piss, moan. Then my mind became less webby and I started thinking about the day ahead.
Then some words appeared, drifting up from a dark dreamlike place. Strangely, this was the thing that got me up. Not the list of things I had to do before hustling the kids off to school, no those words which formed a rhythmic beat in my mind, the deepening pulse of a creative vein.
I wrote them down and saw that they were peculiar. They'd lost some of their rhythm once they solidified on the page. And I don't know exactly what they mean. Like a dream, the act of writing tends to boil things up from the subconscious. These words need to be worked over like some precious metal, the dross burned away and their meaning refined before they can be shared.
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This little 5am epiphany got me to thinking about how much of my writing actually happens inside my head and interestingly how much of it still stays in there even after writing the first draft. It is a bit jumble up there in the old grey-matter. I have multiple worlds populated by multiple characters, many with very distinct voices, mannerisms, backstories. Isn't it any wonder that it takes so much time to sift through and refine the page-story to reflect the mind-story. Sometimes it feels like I'm chasing a ghost of a thing that doesn't really exist yet. And it sorta doesn't, but it does at the same time. Does that make sense? I'm not sure that it does, but then again not everything about the creative process makes sense. *Mumbles* "it's all rather mysterious really."
Particularly those 5am wake-ups leading to the odd existential ramblings of a fictional but sentient universe.
So that was my morning.
How was yours?
