No, not the utility kind.
The fiction kind.
I've been working on my new book A Little Patch of Sunshine, for a while now. My writing is a funny thing - sometimes I am on point, churning out thousands of words every time I sit down, with ease. Other times, I just can't seem to find the time or the secret-entrance-behind-the-bookshelf-in-the-study-inside-my-mental-house to get there.
Years ago I recall something a favorite author, Piers Anthony said about writing and the block. You just keep going. You find coping mechanisms, deploy them, and plow on through. [One of his better coping mechanisms is employing these brackets where you have a conversation with yourself about the issue in question. Isn't that a good idea. Yeah, I thought so too. Look how meta you're being right now. I know, it's amazing, right?]
One of my coping mechanisms is to have test readers. They're a trusted few who I let read my work as I go, and they help me fine tune it. Another coping mechanism of mine is to perform my writing, to read it aloud for an audience.
That's just what I did this past Wednesday night. I read from both Concerning Littleton, already published, and from A Little Patch of Sunshine which is still up on the blocks, with the hood open.
People dug it. So much in fact that the audience visibly paled at the places I wanted them to. (Which is a challenge when the audience is a text based IRC chatroom while I read on the podcast stream. You know you've really got people trembling when they emote that they're doing so.)
It worked well. My creative fires are banked and getting hotter. I'll be doing it again. Repeatedly.
