Missing Muses and the Dandelion Dilemma

Jacked photo from Cleveland.com 

So April came. Spring came in the middle of it, but signs were pointing that way even at the beginning. A couple of days in the 70's, a light snowfall, the cycle continued all through April. As April left, so did the Winter of 2012-2013. Lows are in the mid 50's now, and spring has arrived. Bear with me, I have a point...

For years now, I have suspected that I am a seasonal writer, meaning that my writing content changes with the seasons. I have taken data over the last few years and that seems to indeed be the case. My content changes, with a transitional piece that I keep working on that falls at the change. Fall and Winter bring out the guns and bad people, Spring and Summer bring more kid-content and more shallow yet morally-challenging stuff; Desert dwelling kidnappers, boat stuff, etc.... Keep bearing with me, the moral dilemma is coming....

With each change comes with it the most frustrating part of writing: Being blocked. I usually spend from two weeks to two months blocked. Unless you write, I think that it is hard to understand; This is my "career" for now, and with it, like any job, I have goals and stepping stones to get to those goals.

Imagine if you went to your job and were unable to do it, completely out of the blue and no matter how hard you tried, you just couldn't. Not until just as suddenly you could do it again. Herky-jerky, all over the place work completion. You would want to get as much done as you could because you know that there will be a window coming up where you can no longer do it for an indefinite amount of time. And to make matters worse, you could be in the middle of a project or completing a sale or order, or whatever it is that you do, and that is when you freeze up and lose it all, knowing that once you stop, you will be working on something else that got cut short from before, or worse, starting a new something completely out of the blue that you never though of before. I have a suspicion that a lot of short stories are a product of writers block; that is where every single one of mine have come from. In the more than 20 years that I've been writing, I've completed three full length novels, I am in the middle of two others, but I have more than 20 short stories of varying lengths that all come completely out of the blue and need to be completed before I can move on to the big projects that I actually want to work on. Few people like short stories (plus, mine average less than 10 pages apiece - pretty short short stories) so there is no real hope for them ever paying for themselves, so all in all, writer's block stinks on all fronts.

So needless to say that the entire month of April I was blocked, and the block continues. I have goals to complete a sequel and have it available by September but it is going nowhere fast, I also have grand dreams of two other projects that would go along just fine if I could talk the muses to sticking around for more than a couple of months. Currently they even found content difficult to put on this blog...It's been over a month and this is the best thing I could write? My muses are cruel bastards.

Muses in antiquity

My Muse - I call him Carl.

Secondly, whilst I am hopelessly blocked, I am always looking for content for when the writing flood gates open. If you've read my stuff, you know that I like endings that the reader needs to finish in their heads (it judges what they're like as humans compared to my characters), and I like to put my characters in moral dilemmas that they get themselves out of, or don't (depending on the reader, sometimes). Well I came by one today that it too weak for me to write even a nano-story about:

Spring brought with it over two weeks of serious Spring and sunshine; The dandelions had a heyday. I've controlled them decently in my yard through scheduled fertilizer with weed killer, but some skill exist because they grow here like everything else- uncontrollably wild and big. Well there were a few left, and they have now gone to seed.

My kid is in the yard today - a full-sunshine perfect afternoon before nap time - and she finds some dandelions and picks them. Before I can spit out a barking order "Little Child! Put down the dandelion gently! Slower, slower, now drop it and step away from the weed!" she fills her lungs full of air and blows that sucker all across the yard, then reaches for a second, giggling.

"Look what I can do, Daddy!" and she blows another one - the seeds drift into the largest, most prominent and visual area of the grass parts of the yard- a part that I've been able to keep relatively free of the weeds. You see the moral dilemma coming: Do I let the kid be a kid and enjoy nature's ready-made bubble wand, or do I stop her and try to protect the turf that I have been nurturing back to life since we moved to Camp Speer? We do not have time to travel elsewhere, and there is nowhere else to go. I reflect on the time, cost, and effort that I have put into the yard over the past few years, and how all of that may be at an end after three minutes of play, and then I reflect on my real job - not the job of writing; Writing is my hobby. My real job is to raise the kid until we put her in the school system. This is where I would stop writing if this were a short story (which at this point, this blog post may exceed most of my short stories!) What do I do, reader?

"That's great, sweetie! Good blowing! let's see you do some more!"

Not my kid...not my picture - but it was like that!