Blog 41 In Between Projects

 

Currently, I’m in-between projects following the release of my first published story collection, Uplift: Sunrise Stories. I’ve heard the expression “between projects” often. Taken out of context, it might sound a bit stuffy. Might it suggest, however, a fallow period, a time of rest or something else, some time away from writing, perhaps? But what does the term mean to me?

The closest I can come to something definitive is that I’m weighing a decision regarding ideas for a new direction and not suspended between project ideas. The former hang from my brain like ever-dripping stalactites. A mind in motion, always. Gift or curse? Depends upon the day.

As I have in the past when I’m “between projects,” I pursue two parallel tracks on an almost daily basis. The first, I view as an opportunity. I review, re-edit and update unpublished work. One might compare it to an athlete, which I once was, practicing between competitions to retain a conditioned ability. Viewed this way, it could suggest that writing, at least some aspect of writing, is an everyday activity and not just one that arrives in inspirational bursts. Whatever one might think, this is the way it is for me.

The second track is less definable, more nebulous, but, for me, just as important. I try to remain ever alert to possibility when it serendipitously offers itself. The catalysis of an idea lies all around, always, the world speaking to us in myriad ways. It might blast forward in a roar (war crimes in Ukraine) or it might shudder forth in a whisper (the wine-tinged revelation of a slightly inebriated person at a Christmas party). But it’s there, in the news, in my city or neighborhood, in something someone says, an expression (original or trite), in a single word somehow housed in an otherwise forgettable context, in a gesture (essential or familiar, or both simultaneously), in a sensory experience triggered by art whether a painting, a song or a satisfying book. When it comes, and it will, I seek to get it, to get something, on paper ASAP.

How do you manage the in-between?