At the beginning of this year, I came to a sudden realisation that I had achieved the writing goals that I had set out in my head since my earliest memories. I had a shelf of books that had been published with my name on them. Below that, I had a shelf filled with awards and the tertiary qualifications I had taken time to achieve at various institutions leading up to that.

I had a whole little setting on my upstairs landing of what I had achieved in my humble little life thus far. I was proud of it. I was happy.

And I also felt done.

I knew that I had work coming up in anthologies around the place, each of them highlighting important / intrinsic parts of my life and journey.

Non-binary gender – Climbing Lightly Through Forests, edited by R. Lemberg and Lisa Bradley
Asexuality – Best Lesbian Erotica vol. 5, edited by Sinclair Sexsmith
Polyamory – Love All Year, edited by Elizabeth E
BDSM – Mastering the Art of Mastery, edited by Raven Kaldera

I’m proud of all these pieces of writing, and am excited to see them out in the world. But it was a struggle to consider anything of a full length that I might write for publication again.

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By May of this year, I realised I needed to put some thought into what writing meant for me now. A lot of the representation that I had wanted to see in books as a teenager in the 90s has come into being. There is no faster way for me to kill my boner for writing than to think of it in terms of marketability.

So where did any of this leave me?

There is a novel on writing by Elizabeth Gilbert called Big Magic. It’s a novel that effortlessly combines the creative process with a more spiritual one, and it’s one I’ve come back to over and over since its release in 2015. The belief that has lived within me since that first reading is this one:

“I believe that our planet is inhabited not only by animals and planets and bacteria and viruses, but also by ideas. Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us–albeit strangely. Ideas have no material body, but they do have consciousness, and they most certainly have will. Ideas are driven by a single impulse: to be made manifest. And the only way an idea can be made manifest in our world is through collaboration with a human partner. 

“When an idea thinks it has found somebody–say you–who might be able to bring it into the world, the idea will pay you a visit. It will try to get your attention. […] The idea will try to wave you down but when it finally realizes that you’re oblivious to its message, it will move on to someone else. 

“But sometimes […] your defences might slacken and your anxieties might ease, and then magic can slip through. The idea, sensing your openness, will start to do its work on you. It will send the universal physical and emotional signals of inspiration.”

“And then, in a quiet moment, it will ask, ‘Do you want to work with me?'” (Big Magic, pages 34-36)

On Friday 10th July, after 5 months of writing nothing, I believe one of these ideas signalled me down while I was in the passenger seat, taking my Old Man Pupper to the vet for a tooth extraction (it ended up being 11 teeth instead of the expected 5, but that’s another story for another time).

I remember gazing out of the window, not thinking anything much, then suddenly gasping a breath in as the idea struck. What an inconvenient time! I thought to myself. I have things to do. I’m not able to get any writing done at the moment; we are 2 minutes away from the veterinary clinic.

And then a wonderful thing happened: The idea was still there when I woke up the following morning.

I don’t usually write on weekends. Those who know me well will know that I’ve managed to keep my writing habit from taking over my life in my more hyper-focused states by having an incredibly strict regime of writing. Not in the evenings unless I’ve been at work during the day, and not on weekends.

On Saturday morning, I asked my partner if he would mind if I broke my embargo on not weekend us-time writing given that it had been such a long draught between words.

I then proceeded to write 10k words. It was delightful. It was exhilarating. It was like flying from the seam of my pants and having a very hazy destination point in mind but not really worrying about how I was going to get there because I knew I was fully taken care of.

Me and the idea, we were going to take care of each other, that was a given.

Sunday morning, the only thing that changed is that we went out to the supermarket before I sat down and lost an entire other day what was becoming a burgeoning manuscript.

By Monday, I knew what the potential three acts would look like. On Tuesday, I woke up with a title in mind, taken from a Coldplay lyric.

By Wednesday, I finally began to slow down. This was important, it gave me a chance to get back to thinking of other things that needed to get done around the house, to having a video chat with a friend of mine, to read and allow more words into myself after this rather radical outpouring.

This weekend, both Saturday and Sunday, I have returned to my promise to self of not writing on weekends, but the idea is still there, curling up with me when I’m about to go to sleep and presenting ideas for upcoming scenes that I am putting down into notes in preparation for writing on Monday.

And so all of this has me thinking: What is it that’s different about this piece of writing? Why did I say yes to this idea when I’d said no to so many others for months? What is the tremendous pull of this particular collaboration between myself and idea?

I had a couple of initial thoughts:

having time in which to write
writing for fun
writing for myself

In reality, for me, it is none of these things.

The thing that thrills me about this story, the thing that excites me enough that the Word document is the first thing I go to rather than any web page, is one simple thing:

When this manuscript is complete, I will have a memento, a keepsake. This keepsake will be something I am proud to go back and read over whenever I want to.

Frankly, even incomplete it brings a smile to my face, and pleasure to my thoughts.

This, then, is the answer I’ve been looking to find for the last 3 months.