No Motivation (again?)

I have written nothing substantial for almost three weeks. I am panicking.

Writing is my flow activity, yet I don’t feel like writing. I have no ideas possessing me; the item I was writing seems to have bogged down. I have briefly thought of putting the writing down, doubting my ability to write. Standing at a crossroads, I ponder the path I will take (and cringe at this sentence.)

I need to get motivated. I need something to write, something that captures my imagination, which seems to have gone on strike. Not necessarily to get another novel written; I have too many novels already. But just to write something.

I’ve gone through this before, haven’t I?

Cute Fluffy Wide-Eyed Things That Love You

What are they?

Cute Fluffy Wide-Eyed Things That Love You (henceforth to be known as Cute Fluffies) are multidimensional creatures about the size of a bocce ball but consisting of iridescent, gossamer, silky fluff. They are almost all fluff. They have googly eyes and spindly arms and legs. They weigh nearly nothing (not surprising) and they burble and coo and like to hang around with people, who they find endlessly captivating. Being from an alternative dimension, we do not see them, but sometimes we feel them in a breeze.

Their effect on humans is usually to make people act giddy with how cute they are. Those in the know can elicit this effect in other people by scooping up the invisible critters and throwing them at someone. A person hit by these little puffy creatures is usually a giggle.

Where they come from

They are, alas, a figment of my imagination. I think.

Let me explain. I have never truly grown up. Yes, I’m 57 and hold down a pretty demanding job, but I have a strong sense of play. And when I dated another person with a strong sense of play, we chanced across the Cute Fluffies, and how much fun it was to throw them at people.

The secret to throwing the Fluffies is to scoop them up, pet them, and burble at them before throwing them at people so they know that they have, in fact, been hit by a cute fluffy. It helps to pick imaginative people who will appreciate them. Many people actually giggle and feel temporarily buoyant when hit by Cute Fluffies.

Why don’t I have a picture?

Nobody has been able to photograph a Cute Fluffy.

Day 10 Lenten Meditation: Imagination

Imagination is perhaps my greatest gift.

Imagination saved my life in a bleak childhood, when I spaced out in school imagining the dialogue of two princes plotting to kill each other, created story lines where I alternatively saved and was saved by classmates, and envisioned elaborate backgrounds to the music I listened to on my AM radio.

The times when I have had nothing else — times of illness in a behavioral health ward, lonely times in my depressive episodes, times of failure — I have had the ability to create images in my head, create words in my heart. To see what was not immediately there.

Imagination is perhaps the world’s greatest gift. We live in a world of strife, so we imagine peace. We live in a world of climate change, so we imagine solutions. Then we change the world.

A Place I’ve Never Written About

I’ve been reading a lot about “incels” — men who call themselves involuntary celibates, but who have such a repulsive worldview of women that it’s understandable why they’re not finding partners. They look at unattainable women as bitches and women who enjoy sex as sluts and women who are involuntarily celibate as cows. In other words, they’ve dehumanized every possible woman they could have bedded. Naturally, they’ve taken to valorizing men who kill as many as these women as possible.

When I was younger and single, I had a lot of what would be called dry spells. I was appealing only to a select group of people, many of which were interested because “fat girls are easy”. (Note: we’re not.) I once even called myself celibate, until a sassy friend said, “There’s a difference between being celibate and not getting any.” So, as you see, I was in the same boat our incels were in.

I didn’t become a man-hater, although I’ve always been too much of a feminist to give in to “fat girls are easy” and too proud to gush over any guy who looked at me. So I took matters into my own hands.

I fantasized about a place of solace.

I named it the Brigadoon Sparrowhouse, “Sparrowhouse” for a place where free spirits, which I had nicknamed “sparrows”, lived, and “Brigadoon” for the play about a mysterious village that appeared only every seven years. In my mind, the Brigadoon Sparrowhouse popped up somewhere in the west central part of Urbana, the funky area where college professors and the occasional house full of poor, progressive students lived. I didn’t know where it would be, but it would appear when the light filtered just so through the trees as they shook droplets from their limbs. In my mind, in the moments I was most in need of human contact.

The door to Brigadoon Sparrowhouse was always open to me. I would walk in, and find myself standing in the middle of the living room, a slightly chaotic place with couches and chairs, all with their newness worn down by use. The living room wore dark paneling, an artifact of the era in which the room had first been remodeled. Pillows and an afghan brightened the room, and a woven wall hanging completed the look.

I would sit on the couch and cry, soaked from the rain and feeling like I would never get warm again. I would grab the afghan and curl up in it. I was alone; it was always a chance I took going there.

Soon, someone would show up, someone who was free and not currently connected with someone. Usually, it was Mark, who looked gloriously unlike the people I knew. He was tall and thin, with waves of auburn hair pulled back in a short ponytail. His face was narrow and pale and Irish; his eyes nearly the same color as his hair.

“You’re freezing,” he would say and wrap his arm around me, hugging me close.

“I got caught in the rain while I went walking,” I would stammer. “I didn’t know where I was going.” Often, I would think, I didn’t know where I was going.

“Something’s up, then,” Mark would say. “Tell me what’s up.”

I would tell him what was up — I felt like I was wrapped in a bubble and unable to talk to other people; I looked at the shining beauty of a friend and couldn’t reach them; I believed that nobody would ever love me.

“We love you,” Mark would say with his arm around me. We. The Sparrowhouse.

Sometimes Mark the sparrow and I would make love, up in his bedroom, a chaotic room with white walls, a mattress on the floor and a chest of drawers with sacred objects on its top — a stone with a hole, a cowrie shell, a bowl made of stone and a feather. Our union would grow out of a discussion, and tears, and solace. I felt the poignancy, because the sex was borne of agape, not eros or ludus — it was a gift, a reassurance that isolation would not be forever. It was not charity, but humanity answering humanity.

I did not fall in love with Mark, knowing that he was a figment of my imagination, just like the Sparrowhouse, which would disappear when I stepped out of it.

Playing with the Dark Side

The dark side of our imaginations exist to remind us that many of our fantasies should not be fulfilled.

I left a tantalizing remark about the dark side of my imagination at the end of last night’s post, the type that begs for a response: “What about the dark side of your imagination?”

To be honest, the dark side of my imagination doesn’t like talking about the dark side of my imagination, because it envisions someone taking these notes and applying them to the dark side of seduction, something obsessive and manipulative and successful in a way that, in real life, I would call the police on.

In writing, the dark side of my imagination gets released. It imagines a dying world of lethal competition for scarce commodities like clean water (Voyageurs); a cold, vicious being crushing an unsuccessful henchman so badly that DNA analysis is the only way to identify him (Gaia’s Hands); a near-immortal being bidding his protege and lover to hold his heart in its pericardial sac (Mythos); a crazed militia leader aiming at a courageous old lady with dispassionate media crews filming without interceding (Apocalypse).

The darkness in these moments comes from the conflict of emotions and actions — we aren’t supposed to rejoice in having a hole punched in our chest or kill others with cold satisfaction or watch a murder with our only reaction professional pride at having captured the story. Writers feel their own conflicts — in real life we would reject the possessive girlfriend, abhor the poisoner and his method, get grossed out at the righteous punishment of the rapist by crushing his testicles (or as an old friend once put it, castration by “a brick, an anvil, and some duct tape.” My friend had a very dark side.)

We don’t want to witness any of these things in real life. But we writers put them in books to exorcize the demons from our minds, to get justice in the end for the executors of these deeds, and to allow us to go back to our happier fantasies of sitting in the perfect bookshop.

Nurturing Spaces

Somewhere, there exists a perfect coffeehouse. The light is soothing, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It is paneled in warm wood, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. It has local art on the walls, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. The espresso is rich with thick crema and a twist of lemon, and a piece of dark chocolate on the side, NOTHING like this coffeehouse I currently sit in. In the perfect coffeehouse, I can crawl in bleary-eyed after a day of writing and feel like I’m home, nothing like this coffeehouse I currently sit in.

I think I’ve made myself clear about the coffeehouse I currently sit in.

One of the great things about being a writer is that I can create nurturing spaces that I can’t find in real life, spaces that literally make me weepy-eyed. A kitten pile on a warm wood floor, a cottage in a place called Heaven, a coffeehouse where I can be completely unselfconscious, a toy shop where a young Kris Kringle builds wooden toys. A rainy alley where two people kiss for the first time, an attic where the sun shines in through a window, an auditorium with perfect acoustics.

If I encountered my imagination in real life, I would wonder if I was in heaven, which means I’d wonder if I was dead, and whether the afterlife would be a place where I literally walked through my imagination. That wouldn’t be bad as long as I didn’t indulge the darker parts of my imagination.