August 16, 2017: It's beautiful and unglamorous and unpredictable. Hello, process. [Day 15]

Welp, I am NOT going to post any of this, because I'm guessing no one needs to hear how totally uninspiring my process is at the moment. 

I mean—what am I even doing? Fending off a weird illness that's vampiring all my energy away, leaving me drained and feeling like a ghost myself...

which would maybe be cool if I were writing about ghosts, but, um, I'm not. (Yet.)

Anyway, what have I been doing? Investigating each of my main characters, listening to music that inspires me and closing my eyes and trying to see into their minds. Trying to feel my way into their bodies, their hopes, their forcefulness, their dreams.

I'm trying to believe, even for just a second, that I'm not me, that I'm each one of them.

What are you thinking, my motley mix of people? My rag-tag crew of characters? 

What do you care about so much that it's shaping you, your every scene? What's driving you? 

What's forcing you to grow, to change, to fight, to run, to do the absolutely unthinkable thing?

And then what happens next?

I'm dreaming, I'm scribbling down the moments of clarity, I'm stirring the soup in my mind, and I'm dreaming again.

What does it look like? Nothing, honestly. It looks like pulling apart everything that didn't work in the last draft of the trilogy. It looks like rebuilding, with unfamiliar tools.

It looks like a writer who feels like she doesn't know what she's doing, even though, maybe, at this point, she kinda should? Can she trust that wily grinning imagination inside her?

It looks like doubts and it looks like pure lightning-bolt truth too, when the plot knits itself together and reveals itself in a flash. Breathtaking and beautiful and lighting me up inside, my pen racing to catch up with the fading vision. 

But it also looks like naps and sweat and bleary squint-eyes and hot toddies. Because germs.