I have been working like a maniac lately, cranking out words. I expect a crash soon, but for right now, I’m trying not to lose momentum. When I’m working like this, I feel like my brain is on fire, and I remember why so many writers are alcoholics: when you’re thinking so intensely all day, sometimes booze is the only thing that will calm you down.

Something else I’ve noticed in this frenzied state: my creative energies aren’t really sapped if I switch over to other projects. My son will ask me to draw a new page in the book we’re writing together, or I’ll need to write a blog post for the day, and it just doesn’t faze me. I finished a first draft of something this morning, and I was up and looking around for something else to do, Hulk-ed out, like, “WHAT NOW? COME AT ME!!”

I’m also internalizing, finally, what Annie Dillard wrote in The Writing Life:

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

Creative energy is a renewable energy. Right now, I’m all charged up. I know that soon I’ll need to recharge again, but for now, baby, I’m burning, burning, burning.