General musings on my process

I've decided that I am never going to convince myself to write anything important during the day. I have to have been awake for several hours before I can get anything creative going. Writing is for the wee hours of the morning.

On the flip side, it seems to be perfect time for doing the more mindless of the editting. Converting everything from passive voice to active voice, rearranging the order of sentences, things like that.

Then again, I've also decided that I'm just not going to worry about passive voice anymore either. There's a lot of it, but sometimes it's supposed to be like that, dangit!

Mainly, I think, I'm afraid that by the time I edit the crap out of everything, I'll also have taken the soul out of the scene and it will no longer really be mine anymore. It'll just be another dull string of words, lifeless on the page, that anyone could've written.

And finally, I'm wondering whether I've found my art form yet. There's writing, music, visual arts, performance arts ... lots of things. Maybe writing isn't quite it for me. I don't know. I read through everybody else's comments about what it's like to be a writer, and although some of those aspects ring true for me, it doesn't ring true quite as strongly. I *don't* have zillions of ideas in my head, just begging to be written. There are no voices in my head demanding to be heard. I *can't* write anywhere near as many words per day as other people, even if I have absolutely nothing else to do - this particular holiday break is proving it in spades. I have an itch to do something artistic, and get restless if I have no creative outlets - but it doesn't have to be writing in particular. I do enjoy being alone and quiet in the dark, but that time is not spent creating stories - or at least, not *just* coming up with stories. It's spent ruminating on stuff going on in real life, philosophizing, and all sorts of things. And the stories I do come up with are just short fantasies about people in my real life.

Also my novel sucks. :p Writing it at high speed in November was sooo much easier than trying to get it into a presentable form. Why can't publishers just be happy to buy first drafts? *whine*

Actually that leads me into something else: the therapeutic and inspiration-rejuvenating powers of whining. I've noticed that when I complain to my best friend that I "have no clue what the frell I'm doing" and start going into great, lengthy detail about why that is ... suddenly my mind is working out exactly what the frell I need to do. And then I get to work, and it gets done, and life is good again.

Unfortunately, my best friend seems to have gotten tired of hearing me whine. :p (Imagine that.) Or, to be more accurate, I think we may have worn each other out on the whining, as she whines at me as well and I know that I get pretty tired of it sometimes.

All of which means that I may end up using blog space to do a lot of my whining. So, just a warning on what's likely going to be in many of my future blog entries. :) Maybe there ought to be a section specifically for whining so that everyone else can just ignore it...

Okay .. I guess that's enough ruminating for now. Back to ye olde grinde with me ...