Musings from a bus ride
As I sit on a bus carrying twenty fourteen-year-old girls and a handful of parents, heading to a weekend of soccer games in Buffalo and Pittsburgh, I have a rare moment in my hectic life to simply sit and think. I use this opportunity to re-introduce myself to the manuscript I’ve been working on but haven’t opened in several months. I tend to write in spurts. The excitement grows and I get on a roll where the words flow out of my fingers onto the screen. Then, when life happens, work gets extraordinarily busy, things at home get busy, soccer season happens, the time and energy for writing dissipates. Once it goes, it can be difficult to recapture.
A couple of weeks ago I targeted this ten-hour bus ride as my opportunity to jump back into this unfinished novel. After procrastinating (and sleeping) for the first four hours, I finally forced myself to open the computer and do it. Voila, what an amazing feeling. The first few sentences came out slowly, plodding and rusty. I deleted them and started over, re-reading the last few chapters of what I previously wrote again to try to get back in the moment. Then it happened. The words started to come out, the distractions around me (twenty fourteen-year-old girls trapped on a bus) disappeared, and I was in my world again. It’s so satisfying. The characters came alive again and the little corner of Chicago that features in this story re-appeared in my head. I felt the energy. I wrote a single chapter and when finished, I read it along with the previous chapter, written several months ago. They fit seamlessly together.
Motivated and energized, the next several chapters flowed out over the course of the three day trip. I once again feel the excitement and feel the yearning to keep the story rolling. I feel this will be the spark to get me across the finish line and complete this story about a young man named Hunter Cahill. Hunter is a blogger and finds himself thrust into the middle of an adventure in Chicago. He’s written some great blogs. Maybe I’ll share one or two here on this blog in the coming weeks.