It may seem that I have died and gone to whatever hell could hope to contain me, but believe it or not I am quite alive and well. For the most part. Today I had a murderous headache that would not be quelled by migraine-strength Excedrine until I piled four ibuprofen and a day of unconsciousness (did not wake til an hour ago) on top of that, but now I’m doing well enough to call it good-ish.
So, I woke up and checked my messages and found that one of my loyal readers (also known as my oldest friend, brother in crime, and sometimes collaborator in creative plotting) had left me a message stating: “The people are hungry for a BLOG POST. Hahaha. They need CKWS”
Don’t ask me what fucking people. I don’t know. But oddly I had a whopping 9 views today when I had maybe 2 all week. I never claimed this blog was reaching anyone. I don’t promote it at all; largely so I can get away with not writing for a week and not have to worry about losing precious readers.
Somehow, I actually gained a few by not writing anything. I’m sure there’s a metaphor for the futility of the writer’s expectations in there somewhere, but I’ll leave it up to you to solve for your damn selves. Can’t be spoon-feeding everything; you’ll never learn that way!
So, what the fuck? Why haven’t I been updating the blog?
A few reasons, really, but the most pertinent might be that I simply had nothing to blog about. I sat down a couple of times to start a post, found nothing really jumped out at me to write, and decided I’d just do it later.
Beyond that, though, I’ve actually been filling a lot of my free time (read: every waking hour I’m not looking for work) with other creative endeavours that simply leave me too drained to do anything else.
First, building. I wrote a post about this last week, so I won’t go into the details again, but I’ve been on a pretty hardcore building kick for the MUD that made me “famous”, Prophecies of the Pattern. I finished one 100-room area last weekend and jumped straight into a second that I might finish tonight or tomorrow. Building is a sort of creative jumping point for me. I can sit and pound out descriptions for rooms, cities, towns, forests, creatures, people, and whatever the hell else goes into any given area for hours to keep the creative mojo rolling, and when that hits a high point I can ride the tide right over to another project and do that for a bit.
While one of those projects has been working out the details of establishing a new central plot character for the MUD to help revitalize the world a bit, I’ve also been using that time to work on my other stuff. Namely: revising the novel at last, and picking away at a pair of short stories that are currently competing for completion. I had intended to finish one of them and send it off to TOR’s web imprint, but that one’s been going slower as a result of expecting more out of it, and the other has picked up a bit of steam, so instead of hinging on one I’m letting two stories duke it out in my brain to see which winds up submitted somewhere first.
Then there’s the German. I’m up to a twenty-one day streak on Duolingo and level 7 in German. I could probably be higher level by now as I spend a lot of time working on it, but I tend to only run a new set of lessons every two or three days and fill in the rest of my days with practices to rehash everything I’ve learned so far. It must be working, because I find myself thinking in German here and there when I recognize something I’ve learned and can express in a complete sentence. It’s been an enjoyable exercise so far, though at least one friend has declared it pointless because I should be learning Spanish because I live in America, not Germany. To which I say simply; I am a citizen of the world!
That’s really all I’ve been up to lately, though. I stay up until ungodly hours when my brain’s finally had enough of trying to generate creative things, and then I crash all day. I expect that’ll change once I finally get a solid schedule in place around an actual job, but for now I’m just riding out the wave as it goes. If that means I stay up til 6am (or 11am on weekends…) doing anything creative I can get my mind to focus on, then at least I’m not just sitting around brooding about doing nothing at all.
That wouldn’t be good for ANYONE. Except maybe you poor bastards. You’d get to see what madness really looks like in black and white.