The roundabout way to my true North

After a long time away from my middle grade novel, I feel disconnected from it. So yesterday I spent several precious hours of solitude trying to brainstorm some new ideas, convinced that the book was beyond resurrection.

I had to laugh this morning when I sat down and looked at the mind map I had created for what I wanted to write next—it was the same book I had already started. So I guess the Muse is trying to tell me those characters ain't dead yet after all!

Or as Stephen Pressfield says in The War of Art, "Resistance will unfailingly point to true North—meaning that calling or action it most wants to stop us from doing."

Wind rose from a chart of Jorge de Aguiar, 1492

Leave it to me to wander around South, East, and West, when I could have just looked at the compass and gone North in the first place.