In which a bunch of authors & editors are invited to answer the question: How do you deal with creative exhaustion?
Author Cat Sparks demonstrates how to access those pieces of yourself that aren’t burned out – because they’re still glowing.
When all else fails, I grab an A4 legal pad and a smooth-flowing pen and, depending on the weather, find myself either a sunny spot and banana lounge or a snuggly armchair by the fire and let loose lists of stream of consciousness-style dot points relating to the subject at hand. No full sentences because that’s too hard. Burnout chokes the flow but there is almost always a scattering of glowing embers lodged in the lizard regions of my brain. Little kernels that can be typed up and extrapolated upon at a later date.
– Cat Sparks is fiction editor of Cosmos magazine. Her story ‘All the Love in the World’ appears in Hartwell & Kramer’s Year’s Best SF 16.