dracoqueen22 | Of Writer's Block and Inspiration

Oh the dichotomy of my subject! *laughs*

Except that it's rather true. As of late I've been struck by horrendous writer's block, born out of a terrible case of self-doubt. It happens to the best and the worst of us. The days when we wake up and can't write a damn thing and are quite convinced that all our effort has been for naught because we suck anyway. Yeah, we all have those days. Whether we are writers or artists or accountants or garbage men or whatever, everyone has those days.

Well, I've been having one of those days for almost two weeks now. It's quite distracting on the writing front. Words are like pulling teeth, sentences like peeling paint, and chapters like an agonizing grind of bone on bone. And when I did get word into document, I wanted to scrap everything because it wasn't up to my usual standards. But the lazy sot I am (who abhors rewriting stuff) I held onto it on the off chance that I was probably being paranoid about my own work.

Needless to say, not much writing has gotten done in the past two weeks or so. In an attempt to revitalize my fading creativity, I took a week off from writing. I read porn. I read manga. I watched the last two seasons of AtLA. I watched the first three seasons of Lost and started on the fourth (OMG it's so good and the pretties! They are everywhere). I worked. A LOT. I had nothing better to do than go to work and earn money. I ate good food. Slept a lot. Lazed in my bed with my brand new MP3 Player (curse the confusing IPOD! And thank you mother for spoiling me!). Drank a lot of coffee and tea, and generally just cruised the internet.

Then I started reading fanfiction. Old fics I already knew I liked, and some new stuff that I thought I would give a try. I found a bunch of good stuff (that I'll be recc'ing soon enough) that helped inspire me with the urge to match and do better (if possible). Also, the one week hiatus resulted in a bunch of CRAZY dreams at night, which if anyone knows, is how this whole writing business got started. I have the most incredible vivid, ridiculous, wild dreams and half of my original ideas were born from them.

I absolutely itched that whole week to be sitting in front of my laptop writing something. But I refrained. The most I did was try and type up my chapters of Synesthesia, which isn't really writing since all I'm doing it copying what I wrote by hand into an electronic document. Doesn't take much thought.

My week of abstinence (snicker) ended Saturday, so Sunday starts my week of getting back to what I really love: writing. I don't know how I forgot that. Somehow, I got involved in the whole drive to succeed. In the effort to get published, and stay relevant that I stressed myself too much with mechanics and forgot why I started this in the first place. Not to make money. Not to be popular. Not for acclaim (though, to be fair, I wouldnt mind having all three of them.) I started writing to entertain. Because it makes me happy. Because I like my stories, and if I can entertain someone else in the meantime, well, that's all I really need. For money, I have my dayjob. For happiness, I have my writing.

I don't know how I forgot that. But I did. And now I'm starting to remember it.

So if it takes me almost two years to get another novel published, that's okay. Just knowing someone was willing to publish me the first time, is more than I ever thought I would accomplish. Just because I'm not churning out literature by the bucketful, that's all right. I get enjoyment from the free stuff, from the stories I write for me. For the stories I write for everyone else, too.

You might not get updates to certain stories just yet. I might wander away and start (and finish) a few new projects. I might dive a little into fanfiction of my own original series just a bit. I got this wonderful idea regarding Minutes to Midnight just last night (thanks mandalee1013), so now I'm thinking I'm going to revisit it, too.

I'm pushing back my mid-year NaNo to June because I'm not ready to work on The Nameless. I just want to dork around in May and see what I can accomplish. I anticipate a lot of oneshots, some random pairings and smut, and possibly, random updates to stories I've not worked on in a long while.

There's a feeling I'm desperate to recapture, and I'll be damned if I let it slip through my fingers. It's still there, I just gotta find it again, from where I set it aside in a foolish belief that I didn't need it anymore. So a hunting I go and new fic on the horizon! Keep your eyes peeled!