Burning Out, Burning In and The Twelve Dancing Princesses

So, after my last post, I bet you’re wondering what I’ve been up to.

It’s my own prescription for burnout – I’m cheating with another (shhhh) genre. It’s fiction.

I’m starting small, with short stories. I’ll write a thousand words, then another thousand. For me, that’s a lot of words, because poems usually end before the page is full. The stories are sort of in the vein of the kind of poetry I’ve written – fairy tale influences, and science, and medical weirdness. It’s got mutants and transforming magical women. It was really a slow start – I’d been making bobs and weaves at short fiction for a while, but ending up with mostly prose poems. I’ve tried a little bit of memoir, and abandoned it. But now I feel okay about letting myself write 1500 word stories, 2500 words…I haven’t got one up to 5000 words, yet. But I’m getting there.

I mostly write these stories late at night, after I’ve gone to bed. That’s when the idea for a story “hook” or a certain line will come to me, and I have to grab my laptop and write. It’s what I’ve been doing that’s screwed up my sleeping patterns, making me grumpy during daytime appointments at dentists, physical therapy, physicians. I barely hear what they’re telling me, because I’m waiting for the magic to whisper to me again, when I put my head on my pillow. I think it might be a kind of enchantment that I’m caught in, like The Twelve Dancing Princesses – everyone sees them go to sleep, but when they wake up in the morning, they’re exhausted and pale, with worn-out dancing shoes by their beds.