The Empty Bucket

So a moment ago I was in the middle of the maelstrom, the eye of the storm.

I had a novel I was working on, which needs skates put on it now (because Developments…) but at some point some random factoid on the internet connected with an old, old idea which had been filed away in a dusty folder for years waiting for a story to recognize it. I could feel the links snap into place but as usual (yours truly is a certified pantser…) I had no real idea what final shape the story would actually take, just that it needed to get told, and it needed to get told NOW. So I pushed the novel to the back burner for bit and engaged with the stealth-attack story, to see where it would go.

It took its sweet damn TIME.

It also swerved in directions I wasn’t expecting, necessitating rapid backtracking, rethinking, reshaping. It wasn’t an easy story. It didn’t spring from the forehead of Athena fully formed and happy and singing. It was sullen and despite its insistence that it needed to take full precedence and be told NOW NOW NOW ahead of everything else… it wasn’t giving up its treasures lightly.

So I spent a couple of weeks at this thing. Forging it like a dagger. Hammering it into shape when it was red hot and then when it cooled thrusting it into the flames again to bring it back to that white heat that it needed to be at before it could be worked on. (be a writer, they said. It would be easy, they said. Or at least enjoyable. Nobody ever tells you about the stories that need the forge…)

I finally finished a firstdraftish version of it, and then made the conscious decision to set it aside for 24 hours to cool properly so I could see its final shape and make a judgment call about whether it needed further work. In the meantime I would go back to the novel…

… but it isn’t that easy.

The story was a full bucket, itself. It was full of words falling over each other, trying to fight their way out. It was a full time job wrangling these things into some semblance of coherence. When I was done, the contents of the bucket would be clear and cohesive and able to be poured out like water (yes yes yes I know I am mixing metaphors like crazy here. Just stick with me.) But once I was done with it and I had poured the first pressing of the story out, the bucket… was empty. It was not yet full of the words that belonged to that other story, the longer story, the novel, which I had had to remove from it in order for there to be room for the stealth story to marinate. I still had to go back and dip the bucket into that other well and haul forth new words to work with. But until I did that… the bucket was empty, and it stood there and looked at me like a reproach. The Word. Bucket. Was. Empty. And I was a reprehensible slouch for permitting it to become that way.

I finished the story kind of late in the afternoon, way too late to start something new straight away, and anyway I needed to at least sleep on the finished story before taking another look at it in the morning… but I was antsy as all get go all night with the feeling that there was something I should be doing and wasn’t. I was without words, and being without words makes me twitchy.

That moment in between projects, that moment of the empty bucket, that’s a hard moment. I am neither here nor there, neither in one world or another, and all i have is the reality in which my physical body exists… and that is never enough for me.

I need to run, not walk, to the story well to draw up another word slosh to work on.