Summer creative reflections

After many years of disliking summer, I think the season and I have finally reached a detente. I take its brightness, its crowded parks and jacked-up travel prices, as a reason to retreat into the shade and work. With zero plans for July and August and the indoor swimming pool closed, I spent these weeks of summer in full Summer Hermit Mode, writing and creating, alternatively sweating in the heat and cooling down to the artificial cold of the air conditioner. But racks of school supplies, the start of football season, and the arrival of autumn-themed foods, however, remind me that the rest of the world is moving onto fall, and soon I have to leave my cave.

Creatively, what kind of a season was this for me? I think it was a season of realization, of trying so hard to bring so much into the world. In the depths of my frustration with my corporate job, writing took on new urgency for me—a way to try to close the gap between the life I have and the life I envision and dream of for myself. I’m not sure I’ve closed the gap yet, or if I have, I haven’t seen evidence of its closing. But I have to trust that I am moving in some kind of direction, even if the movements are too small for me to see immediately.

I wrote and created a lot, more than I ever have in a single season:

• I nearly finished drafting Act I of my novel. It’s a messy, shaggy draft, still not something I would even give to a writing partner to critique, but the building blocks are all there. The novel draft has 35,000 words right now (inflated, since this includes writing I’ve deleted from the draft and saved for later, and all of my notes to myself that I’ve scattered throughout the text—but still, a milestone)
• I drafted and revised an essay, Writing is a Kitchen, and typeset it and got it ready to riso print
• I learned how to riso print: I took classes on bookbinding and risograph
• I drafted, revised, and submitted a flash fiction story
• (which is forthcoming in Milk Candy Review)
• I drafted another flash piece
• I made this entire website
• I added to this website: I wrote pages describing my current projects, and shared poems and writing
• I wrote 6 poems as part of my tarot poetry practice
• (Also, I learned about tarot)
• I started a newsletter to practice sharing my work, and kept up with it over the summer
• I even told people that I know in real life about this newsletter, which was mortifying, but necessary

Now that I’ve released many of these creations into the world, along with others I've had lying in wait, I feel like my creative stocks are empty. This season I need to refill them. I still need to keep writing — like every season; and especially because without it, I will end every day frustrated and fed up — but with less focus on completing and producing, and more focus on tending to a few chosen things; planting some seeds for new ones; and letting certain others lay dormant for a time.

Focus for next season

• Exploring Act 2 of my novel. While Act 1 was familiar ground (covered in the two short stories I wrote before realizing that the project was actually a novel) Act 2 is new, and with writing anything new, I inevitably must confront the gap between the perfect fantasy I have in my head (which does not exist) and the reality of the creative process, which is that most writing is ugly on its first pass. I have to resist the urge to try and put a shape on things too soon, to try and draft out a plan of scenes before I really know what the emotional heart of this act in the story is - the goal is to explore and find my way there, not to try to logic out the riddle.
• Generating material for my poetry chapbook.  I’m getting blocked because I keep thinking of how I’ll need to edit all the poems so that they are a cohesive whole. But I can’t edit into a cohesive whole if I haven’t written the poems. I need to write them, and then see what is there.
• Revisiting the flash piece I started in June. It’s laid fallow while I worked on everything else, but now I have more ideas for it, and I want to braid those into the draft.
• Collecting and reflecting on inspiration — bringing in new inputs and making space to pay attention to them, explore why they are compelling to me, and what I might create in response to them.

Laying dormant

• Zine projects, e.g., I wanted to make a zine about backyard birds and nature, a mix of images and text. That I can let wait for a bit.
• I have some half-drafted thoughts about my design rationale for this website: something about how, in creating this website, I’m trying to exist between the poles of literary-academic-prestige chasing, and social media influencer-follower chasing, which then ties into a whole set of thoughts about how I want to make art moving forward. This is a big idea, but I expect I’ll have more to say about it once I’ve actually tried to do the thing that I’m writing about doing.
• I subscribe to newsletters with lots of creative prompts, exercises, etc. These are lovely! But so much. I may release myself from the idea that I need to do these as they come into my inbox, and instead explore as it feels right.