Sunday I sent out the first of five acts from my latest Work in Progress to my Beta readers. This leaves me, at the moment, without an active writing project on my desktop. Oh, there’s a secret project that I work on intermittently as practice and an experiment into adaptation, though steering clear of anything that’s still under copyright, but for original material that I’d be sending straight to a market, nothing is currently in progress.

I don’t know if it is a good sign or a bad sign but for the novel that has just started its beta read process I have really good feeling about it. I am quite happy with how it turned out and it’s overall tone and effect seemed on target. That said I have had a few projects die at the beta read step. It’s hard when you’ve worked on a novel, banged out 80-90 thousand words and the result is a flawed piece that needs to be rewritten from the ground up. Though it is hard to hear that news it is also important to accept it, to look upon the wart and faults with honest eyes and learn from the failure. Failure teaches far more than success provided you listen to its lessons.

So with no active projects that means I have more time for relaxation and recharging the creative juices. Luckily I recently obtained a number of cool Blu-rays with tons of bonus material and the 15-episode documentary The Story of Film. This is perfect for soaking in knowledge and growing as an artist while I lazily sit on the loveseat not writing.

One of the movies I picked up was the most recent Blu-ray edition of The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eight Dimension.The documentary is longer than the film it documents and has been wonderful to watch. Its interesting to speculate on what sort of film it would have been had Tom Hanks been the lead, as apparently nearly happened, or if Jordan Cronenweth, the cinematographer who shot Blade Runner, had remained as the Director of Photography.

This pause in creative output will not last very long. My mind is already banging out the rough structure of my first horror novel and I can feel the anticipation and drive building, soon the muse will once again be in command.