I meant to write a letter to my aunt (the one who I’ve decided to stay in contact with because she’s been pretty good about everything). I even have most of it written! It’s five pages long, so far. Single-spaced. Which means it’ll get quite a bit longer whenever I edit it. Whenever that happens. I didn’t really choose to stop writing so much as… well, struggle to write it at all. It’s exhausting to talk about family stuff at the best of times and these are not the best of times. So I sporadically worked at it for a while, went on vacation, got sick, and now it has been a month and a half, at least, and I’m finally turning my mind back to it (assuming, of course, that my brain fog continues to diminish). I wish I’d been able to focus on it more. I wish I’d been able to spend more time on it. I wish a lot of things, to be honest, and none of them are going to happen. All I can do is carry on from where I’m at and hope that I can get it written by the time you’re reading this [which I’ve managed] so I’ve got time to edit and then print it before I leave my workplace for two and a half weeks. That’s the only place I’ve got access to a printer, you see, and there’s no way I’m writing all of this by hand. I lack the strength-of-writing-hand for that in any kind of quick or even legible manner. So I’m on a bit more of a deadline unless I want to let this time grow into two and a half months. I didn’t even want it to grow into three weeks back when I was still working on it, and yet it did. You would think that, given how much writing I do, something like this would be easier, right?
Continue readingWriting
I’ve Had A Lot Of Time To Think Lately
I don’t normally have a bunch of time where I’m not actively engaged in doing something. That’s an active choice I’m making, generally speaking. I’ve spent my whole life managing my anxiety and depression by keeping myself constantly busy with one thing or another so there’s no room in my mind for them to occupy. Music or podcasts while I drive, cook, and do chores. Books or TV while I eat. Video games when I’m free. Endlessly scrolling social media when I need a minute to myself at work. I’m always doing something. It’s not like I’m afraid to spend time thinking. That’s kind of what this blog post is, and my daily journaling haiku habit, but even that isn’t letting my mind be at rest. It’s an active form of thinking, a directed mode of thought. I rarely leave myself the space for my mind to wander wherever it wants since even the usual “wandering” is directed by whatever activity I’m doing. While driving, though, there’s not much else to do. Watching the road, being aware of drivers, and so on takes some of my attention, but when you’re driving a thousand miles in sixteen hours, almost all of it on one long interstate route, you have a lot of time where there’s no cars or trucks near you where you can’t afford to let your eyes wander but your mind is free to stroll about as it pleases. I rarely come out of a long drive with much in the way of clarity so much as ideas to pick at some other time, but this time I woke up the morning after my drive with a thought nestled in my head that had bubbled to the surface as a result of the time I’d spent and coversations I’d had with my friends over the days preceeding the drive.
Continue readingSemantic Circumlocution
There is a particular feeling that is incredibly important to me. It is like pain, but it doesn’t hurt. It sticks in me like a burr, almost tactile in that I can endlessly pick at it but intangible in that nothing I ever do can affect it. It settles in my chest, at the very center of my physical being–where we often depict things such as the soul being located when we must depict them as something within a body rather than something beside it–occupying the place I would have told you was my heart before I learned how human anatomy is laid out. It isn’t something I can conjure myself, I can’t do anything to keep it around, and it will arrive slowly and then suddenly, completely unnoticeable until it is fully there and undeniably present. I don’t have a name for this feeling, but I suspect that this is what a lot of people are talking about when they describe themselves as feeling inspired by something. I also suspect that this feeling is what people are talking about when they say that they have been moved. If I had to put into it into as few words as possible, I would say that this feeling is the sensation of being moved, but that feels reductive to the point of discomfort on my part since it is not only the sensation of being moved but also the thing that being moved pushes against and the place from which the force of this movement originates. A contradiction of sensations and feelings that I can’t make more sense of than this, despite having felt this cluster of feelings for as long as I can remember.
Continue readingA Self-Sustaining Writing Process Might Also Be A Runaway Writing Process
One of the most common but also most useless creativity tips I’ve even been given, given to someone else, or seen literally anywhere is “you just gotta do it!” I’m incredibly guilty of giving that one out, even if I do try to couch it in terms of building discipline and creating a routine you can rely on. It all boils down to “just do the thing!” in the end. It’s not a very good explanation and building it piecemeal via the whole “make time to write every day, and slowly challenge yourself to write more in that time or expand that time so you can create more” is a bit more helpful, but it ultimately doesn’t really do much beyond make you capable of the mechanics of the work you’re doing. Generally, you need some kind of goal or target to inform why you’re creating in the first place since just wanting to create (or to have created) isn’t always enough to push you through the difficulty of forming good creative habits. You need something that speaks to you or that creates drive within you to help you over that hump. Once you’re in the habit, though, it gets a lot easier. Discipline will carry you as long as you maintain it and maintaining it is so much easier than building it. Unfortuantely, you might wind up in a situation like me where you’re maintaining your discipline just to keep your discipline working rather than because you’re trying to make progress towards a specific goal and you wind up writing just because you are in the habit. The habit fuels itself and its own maintenance, even if the larger purpose it once served is no longer there.
Continue readingBurnout And The Joy(lessness) of Creation
I haven’t actually enjoyed writing these blog posts in a long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that in any of my posts reflecting on my current burnout or creative process or whatever. I don’t really enjoy doing these. I don’t dislike writing them and I do still get a sense of satisfaction out of writing them, but I haven’t really felt the joy of writing in a while now. I’ve done it because I’ve felt the need, to help figure out what’s going on in my head, and to provide myself with a sense of satisfaction after a day largely devoid of anything resembling that. But I haven’t felt any of the joy or passion I once I did. I’ll be the first to say that it’s better to rely on discipline than passion or inspiration since discipline will never abandon you like passion and inspiration might, but I think it’s worth considering that enough discipline will also enable you to actively harm yourself if you force yourself to keep performing past the point where your body is telling you to stop. I don’t think I’m there yet, but I can’t deny that my burnout hasn’t gotten any better in months or years and that I just don’t really enjoy any of my creative pursuits anymore these days.
Continue readingThe Economy And Society At Large Are Failing Artists
Recently, an… associate? Community member? Friend of a friend? Recently, someone I know vaguely in that way you know people who are in your community but with whom you’ve never had much of a direct interaction published a graphic novel (or second of three collections of a comic they’re publishing on the internet, depending on how you want to define things) and got not only zero support from her publisher but a string of such unhelpful responses that it would be easy to suggest that she was actively hindered. I’m not going to name the person, the publisher, or even the comic because I don’t want to drag any mud into her business, but it was absolutely infuriating to hear about what a shitty time she’d had in the publication of this latest book given that the one freaking thing a publisher actually does, aside from making the editing and printing aparatuses available to creators, is help to sell the book! All they’ve done so far is make sure copies show up at businesses and that’s the bare minimum for a business! You’d think that a company that was going through the actually significant hassle of receiving, editing, proofing, and printing an entire graphic novel would also spend some time and money marketing it so they can, you know, make some money of the damn thing! But no. This released with no fanfare, the creator was absolutely stonewalled when she tried to get the ball rolling, and she’s been left to do any amount of marketing by herself via social media. It’s absolutely infuriating.
Continue reading1500 Is A Lot Of Blog Posts To Have Written
This is my 1500th blog post. I wrote it yesterday because I’ve been struggling to keep up my buffer and, in my haste to at least get a post taking up Draft space on my blog so I’d have something to work on between coming up with the idea a week ago and it getting published (which has resulted in me not doing any work on it until the day before), I forgot to put together something for the big one five double-zero! Aside from being a large number of things to have written, there isn’t much significance to the number aside from this being a specific personal goal I set. You see, 1500 blog posts guarantees that I’ve written at least a thousand blog posts since I started this whole thing back up a few years ago. That’s a pretty significant number, considering that I haven’t missed a day (aside from planned breaks) in that whole time. I’ve posted some of these later than I’d have liked (mostly because I forgot to fix the scheduled post time but once because I just didn’t have anything written until partway through the day), but I haven’t missed a day that wasn’t planned ahead of time. I’ve had to reduce my scope by no longer sharing things on Saturdays, I’ve circled the drain of topics and journaled my misery for a while, but I’ve never missed a day.
Continue readingIt Was Bound To Happen Eventually
It finally happened. Between burnout and the depression I’ve been dealing with (which may or may not be related to the burnout), my buffer ran out and I could not drive myself to write anything even knowing I had nothing scheduled to post the next morning. I couldn’t even make myself get out of bed quickly enough in the morning to write anything before posting time. I’ve been scraping the bottom of the barrel for months now and have only been actually caught up on my preferred “5 posts ready to go” amount of pre-written material once or twice since sometime latter last year, so it really isn’t that surprising that it happened. Between everything going on in the world, my lifelong growing burnout, the pressure and stress of work (ten days until the project I’ve been working on is announced and I can finally talk to people about it), my always not-quite-good mental health, and my growing feelings of isolation, I just am not operating at the level I’d like to be. I mean, I’m not longer taking that medication that made me miserable, but I’m taking others that require some pretty specific timing to manage and have enough mild side-effects that I’m once again no longer comfortable most days (though these side-effects should fade in time). It’s a mess, I feel like my life is a mess, and I feel like I am a mess. It’s rough being me these days and it really shouldn’t be, so I feel kinda bad about it.
Continue readingA Late Night Mission Statement: Why I Write
I’ll be honest. I’m writing this at midnight the night before it’s supposed to get posted. I had a poem planned for today, but I haven’t had the time or energy to do a proper recording of myself reading it, so I don’t want to post it yet. I want to give it, and myself, time to breathe so I’m not cramming out subpar work just so I can have something ready to go. Getting anything done right now (this blog post included) is a struggle because I worked twelve hours today and the only reason I didn’t work a longer day was because I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. I also worked fourteen hours on Wednesday (which isn’t yesterday anymore, since I started writing this after midnight), so I didn’t even start my day feeling any kind of fresh. I’m worn out and worn down by the stress and effort of the last few days, which is probably why I’ve written and deleted several partial and complete opening paragraphs. None of them felt right. Sure, there’s a lot of stuff on my mind as the world continues to devolve, as horrible things happen to people, and only the rich shitheads seem to be getting anything positive out of this state of affairs, but it’s difficult to put any of that into words that feel worth writing here and now, at my desk as I’m fighting the urge to sleep.
Continue readingFrom A Dry Well
I like to think that most of my serious metaphors are pretty apt, but I don’t think I’ve tripped and fallen into one so completely apt as this one. It is rare when life’s metaphors line up so perfectly with life, but I’ve never been the sort to let a moment like that go by unremarked. I wrote this after almost six months without writing any poetry, which is a long time for me to go without writing at least SOMETHING, regardless of whether or not it might see the light of day, so I think you can see why it might have struck a chord with me as one of the first things I wanted share when I finally moved my blog to a home where the host isn’t going to sell my data to some “AI” company…
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