Inspiration and a Guileless Confectioner

The weekend has brought with it fresh writing inspiration, which involves changing the era and setting of my current project completely.  Excited about the changes and where they may lead, yet peeved about having to actually go back and change everything, I move ahead at last after a too-long term of creative stagnation.  The story is changing somewhat as well, and things are a bit scrambled, as things will be after a sudden and extreme transfer over several centuries, but the characters are the same.  It's always rather fun to take the same basic personality and throw it into a completely different era, just to see how it will fare.


Aaron is performing in his first musical this month, The Drowsy Chaperone, as a gangster posing as a pastry chef.  I like to think his character is a nod to Great Expectations and the "guileless confectioner" briefly mentioned on Pip's arrival at Mr. Jaggers' office in London:

"The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery, which was painted over."

Inspiration From Strange Places

I feel I've been most remiss in my posting lately, but it has been a week of insanity in many ways, good and bad, and time is the one thing that always seems to be running short.  However, a burst of writing inspiration, stemming from an unexpected source, has much improved the last few days, though it has also left me somewhat sleep-deprived.  At least I feel I have certainly earned this weekend, and I may even sleep in until (gasp) 7 AM tomorrow!  Seriously, that's two and half hours more sleep than I usually get.


So, writing!  The inspiration is finally returning, after a long dry spell when I began to seriously doubt whether I had anything even remotely resembling talent.  The flow is steadily improving now, however, mostly owing to an angry paragraph written several days ago.  It was meant to be therapeutic writing, because I was seriously pissed off, but it has been gradually turning into something longer and much more interesting.  So far it's still in the vague developmental stage, but it's coming along nicely in my imagination as well as on the page, and someday soonish I may even feel comfortable enough to divulge some plot details, or at least basic themes.  For now I'm more comfortable leaving it vague.