The Achoo! Effect

I know writers are supposed to say we are romantic souls, inspired by the finest in music, poetry, art, nature, and humanity. And I am—sometimes. Okay, occasionally. Most of the time I am inspired by reality; cruel, embarrassing, frustrating, kick-me-when-I’m-down reality. Never was that more true than this winter when some sort of super germ, resistant to my usual echinacea-zinc-vitamin C illness prevention voodoo tonic, got the best of me. It started out at as a wicked sore throat (that lasted a week) then morphed into an even uglier chills/flu thing (another three days), followed by two weeks of such horrific coughing that even the cats were giving me their “shouldn’t you be at the vet?” look.

As awful as my plague was, it did come with one rather interesting side effect. It got me to put the brakes on my usual warp speed pace. Forced me, is more like it. I, typically, juggle a schedule of writing both fiction and nonfiction. I am writing one book, while researching another, while writing captions for a third, while editing a fourth, while thinking up a proposal for a fifth, while … well, you get the idea. But when you are sick, the demands of your body outweigh the demands of your life. You simply have to rest.

And so, my voice and strength all but gone, I surrendered. I shut down my computer and camped out on the couch with my 18-pound ragdoll cat, Kira, to wait for the old immune system to do its work. What I didn’t anticipate is that while one part of me had to rest, another part of me was equally desperate to awake. No longer bogged down by my daily ‘to-do’s,’ my imagination saw its chance to escape and took it. In those quiet hours, in that foggy world between consciousness and sleep, my mind came up with new stories, solved problems with old ones, and explored unknown territory. I met fresh characters with original voices, and devised wild adventures for them in faraway lands. Unlike my typical writing day sitting in front of the computer, I put no pressure on myself to come up with something clever. I made no demands. I simply closed my eyes and let my imagination go wherever it wanted to. That’s when I realized I had done this before; a long, long time ago. When I was a child I used to make up strange and wonderful and nonsensical stories. Just for fun. Just for me.

I’m feeling much better now and I am back to my regular fast-paced routine. I don’t know if anything my imagination created during my illness will ever find its way into one of my printed stories. Maybe. But that's not important. I have made a promise to my imagination. I have vowed to shut out the clutter of the world and let it be free a little more often. Okay, a lot more often. Something tells me we’ll both be the better for it.