Posted in: Life, Writing

On Writing Again

As I mentioned a while back I’ve started writing again, and not just inane blog posts. I have a story in progress right now. It’s so short it could be considered flash fiction, and it is the first creative thing I’ve finished since 1992. That’s kind of appalling. Thousands of people across dozens of worlds have been bouncing around in my head for 23 years and I haven’t told you about any of them. I thought about why those ideas were trapped for so long, and it boils down to two things: fear and time jealousy.

Really, I had to pick one? Derp.
Really? Just one? Derp.

Fear
Fear has more tentacles than Cthulhu, and a lot of them can be stupid: fear of failure, fear of success, fear of stagnation, etc. When I finally focused on it a few weeks ago thanks to Chuck Wendig’s blog and writery book, I realized I was afraid of being pigeon-holed. For some reason I thought I had to pick a genre and stay there, never writing about anything else. I couldn’t pick one! My brain doesn’t work that way! I muddled along for years afraid to make the wrong decision and therefore unable to get anything started, let alone done.

And even if I had been able to pick one genre, I had to deal with…

Time Jealousy
I hoard time like dragons hoard treasure, and heaven help the thief who tries to rob me of it. In modern society our days come pre-allocated. Between work, social commitments, and family, we have little free time to do what we want, and some of us are prickly about it. For years, I only wanted to play video games and enjoy mindless TV, with good books thrown in, because I was unhappy with my jobs. The last thing I wanted to do when I got home was more work, so I curled around my tiny time hoard and hissed at the world. My free time was spent escaping from work and reality. I had forgotten that creating other worlds was my original escape.

"Sorry, you'll have to come back later, we're trying to escape!" (dstv.com)
“Sorry, you’ll have to come back later, we’re trying to escape!” (dstv.com)

Clearly that tactic was less than ideal, so here we are now…

Moving On
Now that I’ve sorted through these issues with the help of Brian and other writers, I’m able to get things started. The Idea Farm is running, growing new seedlings of weirdness every day. Is the fear still there? Of course. I’m going to post my new story here soon, and that thought scares the crap out of me. My posting plan has already produced anxiety nightmares featuring alien invasions and hideous diseases, but I’m going to do it anyway. I’m beyond rusty and need the practice, both writing and dealing with feedback in all its hoary forms.

I’ll be posting soon, so if you’re interested…

Stay tuned!

Comments (8) on "On Writing Again"

  1. “anxiety nightmares featuring alien invasions and hideous diseases”: Here’s a nightmare for you: your word-processing spell-check is infested with a virus that changes all correct spellings to gibberish which even Enigma wouldn’t be able to decipher. Pleasant snoozing to you!

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