Awaking Elsewhere

Keeping to a schedule, I’ve always found, helps me to remain steady in my writing. A creature of the early morning, I awake when the majority in my time zone slumber, and try to capture my thoughts with this net call literacy. I try to do it daily, but the desire to sleep is great, and weekends invariably find me cheating.

Then there’s travel. Even fictional people need vacation. Indeed, travel is one of the greatest sources of literary inspiration. Seeing something out of the ordinary, talking to people you seldom see, throwing your concept of morning and night off by several hours. These things can be an alternate form of consciousness.

I try to blog on schedule. This, as most of my literary endeavors, is subject to a kind of profound failure at times. Life gets in the way—wonderfully in the way—of writing. It is always my hope, though, that at the end of it all, I’ll be able to scribble it all down.

My current trip was beset by bad weather, excessive early rising, cancelled flights, and a day-long drive across an unfamiliar state. All this to end up at a place where I suck in inspiration like oxygen and in which I have based several of my stories. It’s far from home. I’m not in control here. My schedule is not my own and the thoughts I have are ricocheted off those of others. I’m traveling.

Like my devices, I too experience battery drain. Often I wish I could take a week or two off work just to write. When I get that week off, however, I travel. And travel and writing can have trouble cohabiting, it seems. As much as they love one another, they don’t always get along.

So it is that I’m trying to stay on schedule with this little blog. I may not get the words down as they occur, but this foreign, familiar place I find myself has always proven an inspiration before. Good thing it’s not a crime to think and drive.

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K. Marvin Bruce

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