WISHES IN BLOOM

"Dreams do come true, if we only wish hard enough."

--Sir J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan--

Words seem to skitter away when I sit here to blog lately. I am dreaming my big dreams, wishing my countless wishes, and taking it one step further--putting my work where my ideas are. This is what is usually missing for me...the work part. I have always thought of my creativity as arriving in wisps and winds and I would craft elaborate rituals around what my muse needed. Then, if unsatisfied--she wouldn't show and I'd pack my notebooks away to daydream out the window, saying, "Well...perhaps tomorrow. These things cannot be forced after all." Only, guess what? They can.

I forced forsythia into bloom once--slicing the stems with a horizontal slash and dropping them unceremoniously into a clear glass vase full of tap water. "Grow where your planted," I thought...not coddling the branches or offering them plant food or any kind of distilled filtered perfection. There they sat in a sunny windowsill one unusually bitter March, half-noticed, until the day when yellow flowers accumulated on the limbs faster than the drifts of snow outside. Day by day, incrementally--they were making unseen progress and readying themselves for an unlikely explosion of blossoms. It wasn't magical...it was timing and proper conditions. This is how my pages have been stacking up lately. I wish I could tell you that I traveled to some smoky occult shop where a crone handed me a silk caftan and said I should wear this while slicing apples horizontally with my right hand to expose their seed constellations, and then urged me to write in mystical crimson ink to reveal the words with my left. Instead, I start off each week writing a to-do list of scenes that need editing and any places where new writing has to be done to bridge to the later sections of manuscript. When I am bored from revising tiny snippets of words, I move into the new writing and my wild pinwheeling thoughts. No smoke, no mirrors...a list? How tedious! Daily writing whether the creative gods show up or not? Boring! But, to me it is gentle...it is sane...it has been cutting away the drama of the writing process, and I am beginning to see the tender flowering.

I've recently had sick-child days and computer breakdowns...house repairs and gardens to resurrect...taxes to get done and a crazy neighbor to avoid. I heard a disappointing fellowship "no" even though I'd been invited to apply for it. Then, an editor at a (rather large) publishing house expressed interest in my work after reading all of the seventy-five pages I gave him in one "delighted" session (his words)...but of course, he cannot do anything until it's agented--which currently it is not. So it is one step forward and two steps back again and again...my daily routine and my little list keep me afloat when I worry that I'm adrift.

So I may be wishing hard, but I am writing even harder.