Sat at the cafe this morning after finishing moviepicture n.409, Red Desert, and I wrote two movie posts in the notebook but didn’t make a dent yet in the ongoing fiction thing, which is normally what I start the morning with, and I don’t mean to add an undue amount of mystique to it but one of the things I think any person working in an artsy field realizes, if they stick doggedly to their craft for a really long time, is that you’re engaging with your subconscious whenever you sit down to get some work done, letting it manifest things you maybe didn’t even know you’d been dwelling on (and that you won’t recognize until years later), and so when for some reason your routine just seems to naturally rupture, and the creative project in question kinda rears up to face and challenge you, it’s natural to start wondering about what’s going on with you, in your head or heart, like is there maybe a reason that the flow of things has changed. Are you enduring some kinda internal thing that you don’t even notice.

And what I’m guessing is the reason for the change of pace is one or both of two things:

1. Yesterday I finished and submitted to BW/DR a long essay I wrote about Erich von Stroheim (writer/director of Greed and Foolish Wives) for their upcoming April issue about Long Movies — an essay that was having a majorly vampiric effect on my energy and also wedging itself into my schedule, occupying huge amounts of time.
2. Having spent so many days writing virtually nothing for the blog, I was laying in bed last night, having just submitted the Stroheim essay, and I felt this sudden surge of words, which I know sounds weir,d but it happens every now and then and it’s kinda like a piling-up of nicely tumblesome sentence fragments in my head, all having to do with events of the past few days. I almost turned on the light and went to my desk and started writing blog posts (I guess they were backed up in my head like poo) but decided to just go to sleep and wake up a little earlier than usual. Do em in the morning. Which, to my surprise, I did.

So anyway. Things are shifting back into their ways, if bumpily. Slowly.