Yeah, I’m not dead, just resting. Ineffectually.
I’ve had “Update the blog” on my to-do list pretty much every week since the last post in (checks notes, faints in embarrassment) August last year. And every week I’ve not gotten around to it, and then felt bad, and put it back on the to-do list for the next week. And so on.
It’s a self-defeating cycle of shame and despair, tending inexorably to entropy and collapse. But hey, that’s pretty true of everything in these days of the slow-but-accelerating apocalypse. The constant exhausting state of the world – with pandemics, wars and gross political negligence – has flattened stronger-willed people than me. In my social circles, barely anyone seems to operating at the same energy levels they were a couple of years ago.
I should probably stop beating myself up about it.
You might imagine that with all this time off from writing blog posts that I would have plenty of time to get some writing done. And you’d be right, but that doesn’t mean I’ve actually done any writing.
Reader, I have not. Oh, the ideas still flow regularly enough, and once in a while I am seized with the impulse to scratch out the odd paragraph here and there. So far, that creative spark hasn’t expanded into the compulsion to finish an actual story.
It’s not that the well is dry so much as I just can’t find the enthusiasm to crank the bucket up to take a drink.
But if I can’t quite there with the fiction writing yet, I think I can still summon the energy for blog writing. Reportage takes a different energy to fiction, at least for me. So for the near future, I’ll be reviving my blogging habit. Not daily, but hopefully not once every six to eight months either.
There’s a fair bit going on, after all. I’m reading again, for one thing, and there’s always good stuff to recommend. And I’m involved with the Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild again, and the organising committee for the Aurealis Awards, and I’m gearing up to support the next CSFG anthology. Plates are spinning, is what I’m saying here.
I’ll try not to let them fall where anyone will step on the pieces.