After a short illness-induced sojourn, I’m back to my early morning waking, running, and writing habits. In honor of November, I have decided to try NaNoWriMo for the first time. There’s something good (comforting/inspiring/affirming?) about knowing that I’m but one of 300,000+ people trying to write a book at the exact same moment.
I’ve picked a book I’ve been meaning to write for a while and am chipping away, one delirious session at a time.
There’s something in the right and left, back and forth repetition of my legs slogging over the bridge before my brain is even awake that makes magic happen. Or, if not magic, it makes something happen. When I get back and sit down at my desk, words come out, like water from a fountain. And, often, they are words that I can’t recognize. Most of the time, they seem to have been written by someone else. And later, looking back on the manuscript, I often cannot remember having written them at all.
But I really like this story that’s emerging, and I like squeezing an extra hour or so into the first part of the day. The black skies are beautiful, but not not as beautiful as the tiny, inadvertent night sounds of my otherwise slumbering household. The creaks of the floorboards are amplified when the light is gone. The hum of the fridge becomes a din. Iggy’s breathing is noisy as a waterfall.
There’s something in that negative space between dusk and dawn that’s deep and affirming. It’s my time to borrow someone else’s brain a while and tap into another mind that’s greater than my own.
I think it’s the dark that holds the power, the mystery, the ticket to that other place where books get written while we’re half asleep.
