When I was in junior high school, I liked to draw my own cars. I remember well when the latest model Plymouth came out and it resembled one of mine. I didn’t grasp what that meant until years later.
Then I developed an interest in writing my own melodies. I hadn’t thought about one melody in particular that I wrote many, many years ago until about two o’clock this morning. I even puzzled over whether or not I could recall the melody. What I remembered most of all was that a few years after I wrote the melody, a song came out with the exact same first two measures. And after those measures our songs were totally different. There was a message there, but I didn’t get it then either.
I have a lot of friends who are authors. Yesterday I was reading the manuscript of a soon-to-be-published book. I mentioned to the author that one of the concepts in it was also used in a very popular movie. The response was that she had had this idea for over twenty years and just now wrote the book.
By now, I was finally getting it. Oh, the first time someone mentioned that once an idea has been verbalized it goes out and belongs to the universe. That put me on my guard and shaped a new philosophy of creativity.
I have had a few block-buster book ideas. One in particular is so good that I have feared since the day I had the idea that someone would beat me to getting in to print.
Immediately I jumped into the first draft and had it done within a few months. Then I got busy on the second draft. A month later I had completed about 75% of this first revision. That was a year and a half ago. I work a little on it once in awhile, now–in between huge blocks of time devoted to music.
I have a book that is virtually finished and another that needs just a little revising. No one will ever come up with the ideas behind these two, so I rationalize that there is no rush to get them into print.
But it really isn’t okay, is it? I know I have wasted enough time in the last two years to polish off all three of these books, get the covers designed, and into print. So, as of this morning I am going to waste less time and finish all three of these books–by the end of 2016!
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