Getting High

Lately I haven't had too much experience with having a writer's high. When everything else conspires to constipate your day with bureaucratic blockage of life, it's easy to forget why we enjoy writing so much. As a new writer, I thought publication meant I had leisure time to work on manuscripts. I envisioned a lot of humming and smiling while I typed to my heart's content. I imagined the old fashioned mail carrier type, hand delivering my mail to the apartment (despite the fact that there are slim metal boxes marching along the wall in the lobby to avoid the face to face confrontation of mail delivery) with check after check of royalty beauty.

Not such a reality, in fact. I had no concept of the business aspects to writing. I had understanding that jumping into publication meant I had better get a thorough understanding of contract language, assertive contract debate, promotion, record keeping, sales to the reader and sales to the publisher for upcoming work, nor did I realize how much commitment there was for chats, interviews, short articles (blogs). It's all become enjoyable but for a first timer it can be overwhelming. This is all much, much different than I expected and it is easy to lose your "high" about writing when these things step on your creativity and then bounce on it until bureaucratic flecks of dirt cover the last dregs of creative surface area.

I've been wallowing in the dirt.

There is a high, however. It happens when those other things fall away and you are left with the river. Thought, ideas, images, characters flow like a river from you and appear on the page almost without effort. It's the perfect storm of creativity, excitement, purpose, and pleasure when your work takes wing of its own accord and flies into the skies almost without any effort from you. It takes on its own breath, its own strength and from a fledgling half-featured creature it leaves the nest and soars above the landscape you thought you created but was in fact created by the stretching of a plot which birthed its own landscape.

When that happens, all the stars are in alignment and the gods smile down on you with favor. That's when the magic happens and that, my friends, is when the writer's high is its highest form of perfection...

To this humble *ahem* writer.