Try Not to Fill the Creative Space

To the weary and unseeing eye (mine, I'll admit) my house-shaped shed looks almost exactly the same as it did when I was blogging on February 15...

If anything, the sense of chaos is even more pronounced than it was back then...

Add to this the fact that my agent is starting to send my novel The Dragonfly round to publishers - eliciting an eerie silence after the noise made by the Steves - and there is the definite sense that everything which matters is completely on hold.

My default position, both as a writer and as a woman trying to get her life back, is to slide into a decline, but somewhere inside me is the sense that it would be an opportunity missed.  It's in these rare, weightless, transitional moments that magic can sometimes occur:  When you feel precarious and unprotected perhaps you see things obliquely, or allow different and unexpected ideas to slip through your defences. Tectonic plates only need to shift a tiny bit to create an earthquake. It's a question of learning to accept that everything  will remain in suspension for the time being, however uncomfortable that might feel.

Try to think of these spaces in your life as creative ones.  Steel yourself to listen attentively to the cool acoustic, the unsettling silence, and perhaps you'll hear the rumble of the ground starting to move beneath your feet.