inspiration strikes

As you can tell from the time of this blog I have been hit by restlessness and inspiration has struck. Pearl a novel I have been working on since 2000 and the last draft is dated 2003 is up to about draft 3 and still hasn't quite worked. I've hit on a way to rewrite it from scratch to include my reflections on asylum seekers and how Australia's asylum seeker policy and attitude towards international students etc with the punitive stance of DIMIA is a repeat of history from the late 1800s (as far as the Chinese-Australian diaspora goes). It's taken me a long time to come up with this reframing and rewrite (2 years to be precise) and that's without working on it. The catalyst has been me reading up on fairy tales and myths and trying to tell stories that way using the heroine's journey amongst other things. This bolt of lightning gives me faith in the creative process I needed the gestation time and now I need the patience to redraft it all- which I've never done before. (Vixen was a series of short stories and I only needed to revise the stories and add a narrative backbone to it to morph into a novel).
Having read Tom Cho's blog on the creative process I have now realised that I have been gestating what I teach in writing process as well. I've been reading Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin and a biography of Phillip K Dick and its been helping me formulate how to teach writing in a way which emphasises telling story and is more organic than just the tools teaching I've been doing at CAE.
I've been wanting to return to fantasy writing for a long while and have been unable to because of my health. I have been writing but stuff that relates more to my experiences rather than the flights of fantasy I used to have. But it's all grist for the mill as they say and maybe I needed the hiatus as part of my development as a writer.