Relaxing

I have spent a good chunk of time in the last few days doing something highly out of character: nothing!  Partly I’ve been catching up on sleep from last week, partly I’ve been cleaning up, but mostly I’ve just been kicking back and relaxing.  Which is pretty unusual for me; normally I have at least three or four projects in mind at any given time.  But chocolate was so all-consuming last month that, now that it’s gone, nothing has really floated to the top of my creative mind.  I feel like a creative tabula rasa.

Back in my teens and early twenties, this worried me no end.  (Yes, I was that neurotic.)  I’d fret that I was finally losing my edge, that my Muse was going, that I was going to waste the rest of my life doing nothing.  Since then, of course, it has dawned on me that my Muse is a force of nature and nobody and no one is going to stop Her from periodically taking over my life in the form of chocolate, cycling, weaving, or some other kind of adventure.  But sometimes even goddesses need a rest, and mine is apparently out for a nap after the chocolate whirlwind.  (Perhaps she’s sleeping off the sugar high.)

So I’ve been kicking back, relaxing, and catching up on my reading.  (Yesterday: Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers.  Tomorrow, Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential and Gary Taub’s Good Calories, Bad Calories.)  In a way, it’s nice being between projects: I haven’t done any reading for a long, long time, being too focused on my projects.  So this is letting me catch up a bit on my stack of unread books.  (Which is good, because I just added five John Varley novels to my stack.  I had no idea he’d started writing SF again!  He’s one of my favorite authors, especially his early work, particularly the novella The Persistence of Vision.)

I’ve also been working a little more on Weavolution, thinking about the best way to speed up development, and starting some rather desultory work on a biographical essay about living with bipolar disorder.  (The latter in response to a social worker who asked me to write something he could share with clients grappling with mental illness.  I’m not huge on writing about my experiences with bipolar disorder, but if it helps some other poor sod trying to cope with it, I’m all for it.  Sometimes a tiny bit of hope makes all the difference, and sometimes you can be that hope.)

But mostly, I’ve been relaxing, and quite enjoying it.  I hope my Muse is enjoying her vacation as well.