Ben Douwsma

I apologize for not having the second installment of “Five Songs” ready on-schedule.  I returned to full-time employment in late October: it’s a standard Monday to Friday job with daytime hours.  I have to wake up around 6:15 every morning to get myself ready before I catch my bus for work (which usually takes a half-hour between where I live and downtown).  The adjustment from my whole nocturnal routine I’ve cultivated over the last little while hasn’t been as hard as I thought it would be, although I usually am up after midnight.  You know what they say about old habits.

Now that I’m settling back into everyday life, I have to start thinking about how much time a week I need to carve out for my writing and photography.  I’ve forced myself to take the camera out a few times in the last couple of weeks and experiment a little bit.  One thing I need to be countering is my urge to rush to a finished picture: I never really let myself futz around with the different settings on a camera, which somewhat defeats the purpose of having an SLR.  I recall getting a bit of advice from a friend while at a wedding last June about not being content to just snap the picture but more actively creating something to shoot: the specifics of what he told me are sadly a blur right now.

I had started NaNoWriMo but quickly trailed off after a few days; I found myself trying to sketch out where the novel was going and fell into a block. Normally you’re supposed to just write through these things, though.  I think part of it was guilt over not having “Five Songs” part 2 finished, but that just may be an easy rationalization.  What I need to do is actually set a fixed period of time every night where I shut out the world and write.  When I’m at work I’m allowed to listen to my iPod, which I find helps me focus a bit better; unfortunately when I tried to do this at home, I had found myself playing around with my iTunes too much, looking for appropriate background music for my endeavors.

I may actually try to use the germ of an idea I had for NaNoWriMo and develop it further with a bit more research and preparation, but first, I have to find something I want to build on.  I’m also trying to read a lot more than I have and cut down on my backlog of books; after all, one of the most common A friend has just finished writing a novel: his preferred method is to do the research and map the whole thing out before getting the actual writing part.  I tend to let myself vomit all over the page and see if there are any worthwhile nuggets in there.  When I started NaNoWriMo, I came up with a few names, a place, but felt that it was so mundane and boring, with no potential springboards for a story.  Where was the vomit?  Where was the abandon?  It felt like the writing equivalent of the dry heaves.

Again, I think it’s just my urge to rush towards a fully formed, finished product without getting into the messiness that is writing.  I have to get over this: creation is rarely tidy.