Melting ice

I got a fantastic boost from Sarah Landry's blog ( http://sarah-writerinmaking.blogspot.com/ ). Welcome to all new visitors to this blog. I hope you find it entertaining, and perhaps even useful.
I never realized how bad January is regarded before now. Growing up, January was always January. Alright, Christmas Day was gone, your birthday was a few months off and you had to go back to school. But still, going through a January was better than not going through it. There was that song, "January/Sick and tired, you've been hanging 'round me", but I always assumed that the songwriter just put those words in to rhyme.
Over the last couple of years, though, I've begun hearing people say "I'll be glad when this month's over." News stories have started cropping up about the most depressing day of the year (in January, of course). And it struck me that January 2009 also became a bit fraught on the domestic front.
Sarah's boost came to me at the beginning of February. And as soon as I read it, I felt like jumping for joy. As far as I'm concerned, that was the beginning of spring. And as with spring, there's still a bit of ice about, but it's thawing. There are buds in the ground, even if they haven't opened yet. The sun is peeping through the grey clouds.
And I began daydreaming again about my stage play. As I wandered about, memories of what I'd already written came back. Some of it was good. I began thinking of my lead character, Sue. Her marriage. I began to see her husband. Her motivation started becoming clearer.
I was on the verge of giving up this stage play and going onto another writing project. Somebody once said, in a creative writing manual ( I think it was John Braine, in How To Write A Novel) that if you have two ideas at the same time, you should choose one as if you were deciding between two dinner inviations, i.e.; you go for the one which seems the most exciting. And the advice is good. Writing is a bit like sex : you can't do it well unless you've got passion. And the other project (which I call my Twelfth Night project) was giving me the come-hither eyes, whereas my stage play seemed rather cool.
I haven't done a stroke of work on my stage play for about a week. When I see that Sarah Landry has clocked up 51,000 words (all the while doing a medical course) I feel guilty. But Sarah is an inspiration, too. So, this morning, I will open my notebook again. I can't promise to write one more sentence of the actual play. But I will think about it, and daydream about it, and see which ideas bud through.
2010 might not be so bad after all.