It's been a long, cold, snowy winter, and I can't say it's been quite as productive creatively as I wish it had been. For some reason, I haven't been finishing the stories I've started, which is a bit of a relapse back to an earlier mindset of almost a decade ago, when most of my stories sat around half-finished. I was on a short story tear for about five years, getting most of them done and published. Then I began a novel, now I'm 2/3 of the way through the novel and suddenly I've produced the first five pages of three short stories.
This may be all back to fear of finishing the novel, or it may be that spring is coming and ideas are bubbling up, and I'll get back to the stories and/or the novel during the (rapidly approaching) warmer months. Or, hey, it could be the collapse of the Dow (but wait, isn't that rising again?) or the impending mayoral elections (although, who am I kidding? I'm voting for Bloomberg).
Or more likely it's all the energy I've been putting into my nonfiction lately. Although I would vigorously scold any of my coaching clients who said so of their own work, I probably don't think of my nonfiction as requiring the same creativity as my fiction. There must be some unacknowledged scale in the back of my mind, with fiction, drama, and the odd libretto or song lyric on one end and nonfiction of all kinds on the other. This probably requires some rigorous examination and revisiting - but I'm much too tired after this weary winter to take it up right now. As soon as I see a daffodil somewhere, maybe I can start thinking about it.
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