“I’m doing research,” I say, and huddle in the corner cloaked in my Uzbek suzani to watch Pretty Little Liars.

Bukhara Suzani, 1983

In September it was Glee. I had just finished a first draft of a young adult novel, and I celebrated with three days of impassioned singing and crying (every time I’d sing along, the kids would cry at me to stop).

Now it’s October and Pretty Little Liars. I’m humming the theme song, “Got a secret, can you keep it…” while I revise the novel.

Pop culture bingeing? Guilty.

This is good guilt. This makes all the “shoulds” run in terror: “I should be working. I should be cleaning. I should finish x-y-z project I lost interest in.” It makes me a goal artist instead of a goal athlete.

Tara Sophia Mohr says, ”Detours will lead to fruitful places. Important things will gestate in so-called fallow periods.”

Detour taken, binge over, and everything shifts back into place. Revising sounds good, projects look interesting again. 
 
What guilt-laden detours have helped you get back on track? 

How imagination and location affects our worldview, and how geography charts the past to understand the future.

thandelike:

Since the Ottoman royal harems were filled with women from the Mediterranean and the Baltic — Italian families even casting their daughters on the Adriatic to be picked up by the sultan’s sailors — my Turkish husband jokes he finally brought me back to Istanbul where I belong.