It has been a long and cold winter. For those who haven’t spent a significant amount of time in the Midwest, Ohio and the rest of the region spent a better part of the last three months being battered by Jack Frost. Inches of snow that seemed to just appear overnight, temperatures penguins would welcome, and wind that could only have been unleashed by the god Aeolus himself.

The worst part of winter, for me at least, was a sudden loss of a drive to write. I didn’t quit writing completely, but I only seemed to have a mind to write sporadically–a paragraph or two here … a page or so there. But there wasn’t that push in me to write page after page, the need to weave a story and build a world.

My creativity was hibernating.

Somewhere, deep in the recesses of my mind, the black bear that controls the ideas of my stories and structures of them, slept through the winter. When I sat at my laptop, trying my best to summon a proper paragraph, I could feel him sleeping; I could hear his grumbling snore in the back of my head.

But finally, after the thaw has begun, spring is back … kind of. Warm weather is starting to pop up, just as little blades of grass are trying to push their way through the soil to get at the sun. And I can feel him rousing, his padded feet shuffling around in a daze.

The bear has awoken, and I feel a surge of creativity coming on. I can feel it, as a tingle, in my fingertips … as a buzz in my head. Soon, the blank screen before me, will be a field of bizarre and beautiful words, dancing to the song in my head.