I took my first cup of coffee black this morning, listening to Ed Sheeran while sitting at a desk in the Fairmont Princess of Scottsdale. Call it a Groupon staycation. There are all sorts of names for finding a way out of your daily routine. Funny how here I’m falling into my daily routine. My new one, at least. This morning I texted my heart that the foundation of my morning ought to involve coffee, music, and her between my arms. In lieu of that I’ll take the literary comfort of words.
Ten minutes is a solid start to the day. Of course, another evolution is that ten minutes is going to be a minimum. If I’m on a roll, I ought to keep going where possible. Call it ‘At least 10 minutes of writing a day. Every day.’
So how to spend these 10? I’ve spent about a quarter of the time so far, marked by the edges of songs. Still, I don’t have terribly much to say. Yesterday I rebooted the Idea Archive, an old structure designed for me to dump all my ideas into one well with the thought that getting them out of my head and on to paper created space for new ideas and kept my brain growing and stretching. It may not be a coincidence that when I stopped archiving, I stopped developing new ideas and lost momentum furthering old ones. Self-reflection is beautiful. Self-reflection is a bitch.
One choice I’ve been teetering on is the destruction of old work. I have a handful of stories and novel starts that represent very old ideas—some thirty years in development. It is time for those to go away. It doesn’t have to be ceremonial. I’m just going to go home and dump them in the trash…
Okay, maybe I will start a fire. Burn them in the backyard, watch the ashes float away. Call it renewal. My mom burned my first novel, supposedly by accident. This could be an opportunity to revisit that event and make it my own, the way culturally we readapt words and ideas to reflect our growth and ownership over them. I suppose you’ll see what happens tomorrow.