Springtime

By Mark S Jobling (Own work)
[GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or
CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

So, to pick up several months later from the previous post (and add another bird picture here), I have two times a year when I get this creative bug.  It causes me to go nuts, feeling like I am not creating anything in the world, and I am merely a bystander and consumer.

The primary time that I get this "creative flu" if you will is around October and November.  This one makes total sense to me.  For starters, I think there's some subconscious tie-back to when I was in school, and summer was the time for slacking off and having fun, and then my brain was programmed to start working in September.  Now that I live in Texas, it's still hot and summery in September, and so my mental trigger just kicks in a little later with some seasonal association.

More directly, I think that the creative juices get flowing after doing NaNoWriMo for so many years.  Since that runs November 1-November 30, I would usually kick in the planning phases for the novel around late September or early October, which just trained my brain that that is the time to be creative and write.

Add to that the November Poem-A-Day challenge over at Writer's Digest with Robert Brewer?  And you've just reinforced November as my "must be creative" month.

A few years ago, though, I noticed that around March, when the temperatures started to come up, and I was rebounding from my post-NaNo slacktime, I started to get "the bug" again.  My "springtime second wind" would usually result in musical endeavors rather than writing, but would kick me in the creative pants anyway, and get me doing stuff.  Then Writer's Digest added the April PAD challenge, and voila - I had another reinforcement of my Springtime-Falltime-creativity-boost.

This year, I skipped it.

OK, that's not entirely true.  Lots of stuff happened over the March/April/May timeframe that caused me to be relatively busy.  So what I skipped was completing the April PAD challenge.  I started some work on a book in February/March using the "magic spreadsheet" as touted by Mur Lafferty (which I will talk about in a subsequent post and will probably try to start using again at some point), but that dropped off with some real estate transactions that I took part in (and am still taking part in).

What I didn't skip was the crazy "you need to be creating, you are merely consuming, add to the world don't just take from it" nagging at the back of my mind.  It's still bugging me.  That's why I'm writing something here.  To tell it to be quiet.

So, before I post again here, I've got some poems to write.  I'm going to try to pop out at least the poems as inspired by the April PAD prompts, even if I didn't do them in April.  And then I'm going to work on some flash fiction (I think) since I've downloaded the free flash fiction course from Holly Lisle, who defines the flash fiction as about 500 words each.  And then I might get back to that novel.  We'll see, and I may or may not keep you posted.

Oh, and I'm considering having one blog, instead of three or four.  Will post more on that if I decide to merge...

Cheers.