On the Literary Front #4

The Muse has been slumbering for some time, but with all this talk of NaNoWriMo I've been hearing, I've been thinking of giving the Muse a hard kick in the rear. I've been busy with work, reading, and gaming, and the wanting to write has faded somewhat. After a decade of near-constant writing, I guess it was time to take a break. It isn't that I have nothing to say, but that what I want to say has changed somehow. Apologies if that doesn't make sense. Maybe it's just that I've needed to get settled in my new digs and exult in my freedom before I bow to the Muse. This is something I need to examine further, which I will do in my personal diary. In the meantime, I have two projects I could be working on, but one of these two has become less interesting to me, while the other one has too many things indistinct to me. The main character is not at all visible to me, and I need to make him visible in my mind's eye before I can go and flesh out his world.
I've been reading Cornelia Funke, and her work is magnificient! So much detail and so well-fleshed out are her works. Makes anything I've written seem so stripped down and barren. Fleshing everything out and then cutting back the far is the better way to do things. One problem I have with that is how long to make the chapters. I guess once a scene has climaxed, move on to the next scene. Does that make any sense? And then there's the matter of where to start the story and where to end it. That is one of the hardest parts of writing a story, and I applaud Funke deeply. I also applaud her translator, for I don't understand German. Anyway, I need lessons in creating and fleshing out a world for my protagonist and his fellows.
I need lessons in many other things... especially where getting my Muse stirred up to the point where my fingers are on fire with the desire to write (or type, in this case). Blogging and writing in my journal has taken off some of the edge, maybe, which suggests I may need to drop blogging for a while. Hard to say. Well, that's about all for me. BYE.