Roiling

This week has been catch up on real life. Working extra hours to pay the bills and make up the time spent at the writers workshop. But no matter what I'm doing, the novel is always roiling around in the back of my mind. Wake up thinking about the plot and the characters, the epic nature of the story.

And other things too. Is that young, first time novelist, with the MFA in creative writing I've been reading, going to dampen my ardor for my own work, or can I learn something from her book? Is listening to 28 CDs of George Eliot's Middlemarch the right thing to be doing, just because it feels like the right thing to be doing?

Is it possible to work on solving the housing crisis in the San Juans by day, and work on the novel by night? Are the workers' cottages Dorothea designs in Middlemarch somehow connected to the lack of decent affordable workers' housing in San Juan County? Can I work that into the novel somehow? Or should that wait for the next novel? Oh yes, and then there's that thing about the economy, and boomers losing their life savings and no one talking about it...

And on it goes. Showering, dressing, cooking, eating, driving, working, paying bills, picking up the mail, and all the while, there's this invisible mechanism at work, working on the novel for me. I don't even ask it to. It's better than a lover in that it really does know what I need without me having to tell it.

The problem solving abilities of the subconscious. Time spent on worthy endeavors seemingly unrelated to the novel will, as has been the case so many times before, in time, prove fruitful, but how that happens is completely unpredictable. Which is the thing about it I love most. What is predictable is that it will happen.

More later.