The state of mind

As I wait to hear more feedback from the Beta Readers, I'm a bit at a loss. I always have three projects on the go: one nearly completion, one stuck in the middle, and one just getting started. I finished my 'nearly completed' one a while ago, but the other two have not moved up. 

The trouble is, I'm either too stressed or not stressed enough to write at the moment. There exists a middle perfect-level of anxiety and stress that drives words onto pages. Below that level, I have no spinning thoughts to tether. Above that level, I end up like many others; catatonic. When I am too tired, there is no energy remaining for creativity, and the pages remain blank. 

The stress can be mental stress, where I'm working through life or work or emotional affairs and building up anxiousness. My strategy to release that tension has always been to give my over-active, worrying mind a purpose. When my chest gets tight, or when I catch my brain going back over all the negative things that may happen, I point that rambling idiocy at a story. For sleep, a calm, familiar scene or character that soothes it. For anxiety, I give it a problem to solve. How will Breagh and Alastair find the fairy queen? Lania's trapped in a cell. How will she escape? Cairon just stormed out. Will Danoron be able to win him back?

But sometimes the stress is temporal. Sometimes, I'm happy but have trouble finding time to sit down at the keyboard.

I am never more creative than when I have no time to write. Then, the ideas build up, begging to be given life. When there is plenty of hours on the clock, it may fall off as I lose momentum. Being pressed for time helps keep the ideas going. 

It's a good thing I don't use a typewriter though. When in doubt, put the words on a page and go back and edit later. You can't edit when there's nothing there. 

That philosophy got Breagh and Alastair down into the forest, so that's a start. Now I need to discover what lurks in the place where the wind stands still...