Of late I have encountered many roadblocks on the road to creativity. Illness gets in the way. It is hard to think when I have too much arthritis pain. I have a hard time composing anything on days like yesterday when my blood sugar is out of whack. I haven’t been chased by car-driving crocodiles in red fright-wigs and green race cars. At least, not while I was awake. I am trying to follow a writing schedule that has me editing a novel for a contest in April, writing two other novels simultaneously, a set of short stories, and this daily blog that I am trying to average 500 words per day in every day (and succeeding now for roughly 41 straight days) (some days I write less words, but some days I go way over the stated limit). I end up squeezing the toothpaste tube of new ideas from both ends until the big wad in the middle finally bursts and gets white gobbets of creative-idea paste on everything in the room. I will admit that I mangle a metaphor or two, and give meaning to random blobs of description merely for the sake of adding more words. And what is this bit about, then? Clearly I am thinking about how I think and it is not a pretty sight. Sometimes my children bounce out of the rumble seat towards the river of man-eating fish, and I have to depend on the odd three-eyed alien tootling along in a space-doughnut to catch him or her in the nick of time. But sometimes, too, I am the rabbit, calmly watching from the sidelines hoping not to get run over but too fascinated to look away from the slap-dash slap-stick chase scene that is my actual life. This particular bit of tooth-paste squeezing is known as free writing, where I just keep stringing words and phrases together for as long as I can keep my aching fingers from falling off. I make corrections as I go, but there is no outline here, no discernible pattern, and very little logical coherence. Like the picture Paffooney, once it gets started, it just goes. And goes and goes. I have bounced over broken bridges and landed squarely on the pavement on the other side more than once of late. I paid the tax on the house and managed to remain a homeowner for another year. I fought off numerous bill-collecting crocodiles set on me by credit-card banks who are after me to pay off mountains of accumulated debt and interest after my multiple career-ending illnesses. I have lawyers helping me with debt reduction, the step before bankruptcy, which is also probably the step before stepping off the ledge at the top of the Chrysler Building. I continue to draw stuff that makes little or no visual sense, and post them here to further delight, dazzle and delude you. And, of course, I have the audacity to label this word free-for-all as humor… but I have reached five hundred and five words.
Catch a Falling Star 