aha... hit a 'creative block' as well recently ... arghhhh.

have a nice one at Bangkok!

Inspiration, when the juice is flowing life flows like a great river, when it has dried up there ain't no art. I guess I'm lucky, I don't have to make a living off my creative writing. That gives me the luxury to wait and be ready when I feel the juices of inspiration flowing and I can just hop aboard and go along for the ride, writing like a madwoman all the while. I have been a "writer for hire" for essays and reviews, and that was definitely work when the flow wasn't there. But I could still get it done. Inspiration is a strange beast. The harder you look for it, the more elusive it is. But when you're not really looking for it at all, you stumble across it and it whacks you up side of the head and transports you into some other space. Then is a race to see how much you can get on paper while you're in that altered state. I can't create inspiration, but I have discovered over the years where I am likely to find my inspiration. First and foremost, I find it in people. I find people fascinating--their emotions, how they respond to and understand life, how they interact with the world around them. Sometimes I will run across someone that I won't know too much about, but there will be something about who and how they are that grabs me and I start creating a picture of what that sort of person is like. (I know I'm basically creating my own character, what I noticed about the real person is just the starting point and I'm creating the resting, connecting the dots, if you will.) I also get a lot of inspiration from music. This one a bit trickier because music creates emotions and these emotions then crystallize as words. I have never figured out exactly how this process works, but when it works, I get a lot of really good work out of it. It is a very strange process to have an emotional response to a piece of music and then translate that emotion into words that evoke the same emotions, but with a different spin because its in a different medium. I'm not sure if this ramble will be of any help to other creative individuals. Inspiration strikes me as something quite personal. It is like some sort of energy field and we all interact with it in our own unique way. So I certainly have no prescription for inspiration. Maybe the best I can offer is to say perhaps you can look to the types of things that gave inspiration in the past and be open to discovering new inspiration in those realms. You never know when you're going to discover a powerful source of inspiration; sometimes you get really lucky. Three years ago I literally stumbled on the work of a composer/musician living in New York. In the normal course of things, I should never have found his work. But I did, and it generated an entire poetry collection, Porteño Muse, named after this very inspiring individual and his magnificent music, and has led to a very lovely friendship with one of the most talented and creative individuals I will probably ever meet. Lesson of this very long message: be open to the unexpected, be willing to look outside of what is comfortable and known, and be prepared to be inspired any time, anywhere. Good luck to you and every other artist going through the desert of no inspiration. You'll either stumble across an oasis or it will rain. You just never know when.

take me with you! we stopped by Yumla last night, but couldn't stay that long , it was getting late.