Linda's taking a church friend's kid to church camp, so I have the house to myself today. Playing Springsteen's Western Stars at full blast, contemplating my creative life.

My heart attack made me less ambitious, the opposite of what I would have expected. Vanity, Vanity, all is vanity.

But I still have the urge to create. Lately, I've been writing poems. One and done. Easy and fun, and it feels creative. So I got the bright idea of trying to write a full story as a prose poem. I'd come up with an idea for a horror novel--or at least the beginning of one--the other day. So I sat down with some scrap paper (I have a stack of paper two feet high from chapters I've taken to writer's group) and a pen and just let go.

It's definitely a different experience--the writing feels less finished. But I don't think that's a bad thing. I think sometimes the urge is to have it polished, when what I'm really after is the creative flow. I want to shut out the critic part of the brain.

The story has it's own power, which tends to pull away from the poetic part, so I constantly have to refresh my intentions.  I left the ending of the first chapter for today, so I'll have something to start with.

After my experience with Ruby Red and the Robots--which just petered out after 15K words, I should be leery of starting off a story without some idea of where it is going. But I've also written a number of novels on a whim, so you never know. Thing is, if what I'm trying to do is spark my creative side, then it doesn't really matter.

It mattered a lot at first that I finish my novels, because in my previous career I'd stalled out too many times and it had started to become a bad habit. But I've proven that I have no trouble finishing novels so I can let myself to explore now without fear of failure.

It's the flow that counts, not the results.