I'm back from a week of vacation.
Last night, I asked my girlfriend: “Hey Babe1, are you nervous about getting back to work tomorrow?”
She said: “Not nervous, I just don't really want to.”
Which was the exact opposite of what I was experiencing. I felt extra giddy, excited, feverish, stoked, ebullient. That's one thing we artists have going for us:
—> We can't wait to get back to work <—
A national holiday is an annoyance. A long weekend pisses us off. And a sick day (or a 1.5 year-long pandemic) just devastates us.
“What about vacation?” you ask. “It must simply be a self-inflicted hell?”
You’d be right… if you were asking my past self. A while back, I used to not like vacation. I’d go: “What, you mean I'll have to stop my élan and put off work for a whole week!? That's going to be disastrous for my stats! And what about my (self-imposed) timeline? How will I ever get my novel ready before September!!?”
Through the years though, I've come to see vacation as a positive thing. A week-long Artist’s Date. A chance to reload, replenish the well. In other words, a way to get a severe case of Blue Brains.
What is that?
Well, I'll let you guess what I'm referring to on this one. But overall, having Blue Brains happens when an artist abstains from creating during a prolonged period of time. During which, their creative force builds, builds and builds. It builds so much, ideas are quite literally pouring out of every hole in their body.2
Take last weekend. I was just chilling at home, back from our trip and the Muse was getting restless ‘cause she handed me down:
two ideas for Substack posts;
a fresh take on the next novel;
the solution on how to fix a character in Land of Stone; and
a general feeling of craving.
I craved to get back in it, to get my hands dirty with metaphorical ink. I simply couldn't wait to finish those five last chapters and do the print read-through and go back to my short stories and start working on the query letter for Land of Stone and start my world-building for the next project and so on and so on.
Exhilarating stuff really.
I needed a buffet of plot to satiate my hunger. I needed a release.
Now, today, I’ve had it. My ‘brains’ have dimmed down to a pale sky blue. It started well this morning, with this post that magically appeared in my Morning Pages. Then I fixed Chapter 31 and got Chapter 32 ready for tomorrow by highlighting every section. At this pace, I could be done with the third draft of my novel this very week.
To end this post, never in my lifetime would I have thought of doing something remotely close to what I’m about to do, but… here’s a quote on abstinence :
Abstinence is a window of clarity through which one can better find one’s work and one’s mate.
— Lance Morrow
I totally do NOT call my gf Babe
Not true actually, that’d be seriously disturbing
That was a good one, but no excuses, you should always call your girlfriend babe.
Great stuff, and very true -- I often can't wait to get back to my projects, and when I'm not officially working, keep jotting down notes and ideas because they just keep coming.