A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-Three-Hundred-And-Three

I would like to get stuck in on a big progect, but I am not there right now, in some way.  I feel like it would be good for me.  It has the ability to focus the creative energy and to provide a sense of progress within the work that can be satisfying.  While that cannot and won't replace the desire for changes in life and the world, it can be a distraction, to some extent, and the process itself is, for me, always a way to grow and evolve, as an artist, of course, but also in other ways.  I think that, for me, any piece of writing is a self-exploration of a sort, though that is rarely my focus.  In a larger work, the piece can be so consuming, can take on such a large role in one's mind and daily life, that it becomes possible to discover a great deal that might otherwise be hidden.  I do not know how to explain it, but it is the fact that I am distracted and attentive at the same time.  I am not always aware of what, from my life, is going into the piece, am not always aware of the ideas that have formed as new discoveries until they are already on the page.  To offer an example, in writing my first, still unpublished, novel, I didn't recognize that I was explaining aspects of my neuro-diverse experience of the world.  I knew that i was attempting to do something that would put the reader into a different kind of relationship to the text, and that I wanted the fiction to seem to bleed out of the book, and my effort focused on those aspects of the work.  It was only when I reviewed it that I understood what I had been doing, and realized how much I had discovered through that process.  I feel that could be a positive thing for me right now.  I think it is possible for me to just throw myself into a piece, if I can just commit to it, but that energy hasn't been present.  Maybe it is a fear of what I might uncover.  Maybe recognizing that will allow me to begin.