Why Moving is Like Writing....Part Two

I'm sitting in my living room as I write this, where I always sit and write.  The difference is the living room currently looks like a bad day in Beirut.  I mean, literally, there is crap EVERYWHERE!  I'm moving, remember?  Except you wouldn't know about that just by looking around.  What you would think is that perhaps we were robbed?  By organized and tidy thieves? Or this is what the aftermath of an earthquake or a 9 year old's birthday party likely resembles?

As I gaze around, at the tumble of boxes and jumbled piles of God-only-knows-what, my mind goes back to where it always does.....my current project.  And I start to consider that my writing is just like this room in disarray.  Things that make me happy, but scattered all over the place, with no rhyme nor reason for being.  And as the Head Packer and Decider of All Things Moving, I alone have the ability to organize it all into something cohesive.  The same goes for my writing.  There, I am the Head Decider of All Things Scary.  Currently anyway, as I am into horror right now.

I pack boxes with canned goods, pantry items and linens and I am really only half there mentally.  This largely mindless task allows my head to wander all over the place.  As usual, my writing comes first. It's funny, because I read tons of blog posts and articles about how to make time for your writing and I laugh until my sides hurt.  Because they are doing it wrong if they find they have to make time.  I find I have to make time for the rest of my life, because my writing, my projects, are always foremost in my brain.  Even knee-deep in packing material, my projects occupy the most valuable real estate upstairs.

I survey my scattered surroundings, and I imagine that each box is one of the short horror stories I have recently written.  I am assembling them in order to be delivered to their new home, the same as I am assembling the stories in one combined grouping, which will be the collection I envision.  Just as I can see a week into the future when this hell of moving is over and everything is in its rightful place in the new house, so too, can I see the stories in proper order in the new collection, just as organized and tidy as the new house.

So confident am I, that I am ready to reveal the new title: Way Past Midnight.  I have the hopes that the title evokes the uneasy feeling any time beyond the top of the hour can bring, when the dark envelops you and the quiet is not your friend.  And my artist is rocking the new cover hard.  Big reveal for that soon.

I'm nowhere near done packing.  Likewise, I feel as though the collection is incomplete as well.  I have five terror-tastic tales and just as I decided five was the magic number, Musina popped up.  Nope, she said.  Five doesn't work for me....what say we go for six?  And this seriously scary and bitchin' idea formulated as a whole piece.  I have the beginning, the middle, I even know the ending line.  The move may have taken me away from my computer physically, but mentally I am all about the stories. And isn't THAT what makes us all writers?  The actual, physical inability to let the words go?  Yeah.  I knew you'd agree.

It's like that Jackson Browne song I have always loved: The Load-Out song.  The musician implores the roadies "Just make sure you've got it all packed to go, before you come for my piano."  I promise you, this laptop will be the last thing that leaves this empty house.