Or rather, picking up where I left off…

Somewhere along the way I stopped writing. Before blogging was a thing, I wrote on a regular basis and took great pains to post those musings online… Going further back, I’ve conjured and crafted fantastically storied planets for an online text adventure game, won many awards and had a jolly time at it. Before then… well, it gets murky when we start considering my poetry, early plays and many aborted attempts at writing a full length novel.

The point is, I stopped. For a period of time…

Quickly bringing you up to speed, over the last decade, I have written down ideas for stories. I’ve filled entire Evernote folios with background and detailed storylines for several video games — including first drafts of the manuscripts that would precede those games, along with outlined strategies on how to further develop the IPs. Scraps of ideas, some more detailed than others, made their way into my computer. I was even goaded (#BuildTheShip) into fleshing out one of those fragments, building the ship in my garage while I wrote the screenplay during my lunch breaks, to eventually produce a sci-fi dark comedy that took me several years to appreciate the work accomplished.

Then in 2012, I stopped. Again.

In all honesty, I put a halt to many a creative output at the time. Regrets aplenty.

Last fall, however, after being released from employment in early August, my therapist helped me break through a creative barrier of my own construction. I ignored revising my resume, and I wrote a story my daughter and I have been musing over for the last year, about a little mountain rabbit with a very peculiar disposition — that being made of paper.

It felt glorious to finish.

I then chastised myself for “wasting” an entire month instead of looking for work. Buckets of guilty-flavored tears. Really.

I’m working on that with my therapist, too.

Then during NaMoWriMo, being more sensible about my responsibilities, I began work on a second children’s book about a boy who became legend due to his flatulence. I made an incredible start, then put it away for a bit, only to pick it up recently to polish the first eight chapters, before finally deciding to put it down — it’s currently simmering on my back-burner for I must needs publish the first story that waits, all too impatiently.

As my therapist and Henry Miller would scold, “Work on one thing at a time until finished.”

Yet, I continued to serve up more self-criticism and self-doubt, covered in a thick gravy of fear of not earning enough to stay afloat, with a side of every minute of every day should be valued monetarily, to the point of choking for there was no room for writing!

Which stopped me from writing. Again.

It has become a bad habit I’m determined to shake.

So, here you are… Reading something I’ve written. Which means I’m writing, again. In bits and pieces.

This is a good thing.

I must find balance or I shall go mad, and not in a good way.

Welcome to the now.