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poppyseedheartWorld cold, words hard.
I had typed a whole intro to this entry but it was so unnecessarily long! Mostly I just want to wave at the title a bunch and have it somehow sprout into a fully formed post on its own.
2023 hasn't been my most prolific writing year to date, but it certainly hasn't been as fallow or drudging as my brain keeps trying to convince me of. It doesn't help that I haven't posted anything in over two months now — that's uncharacteristic for me, and definitely challenging me to locate new and exciting levels of chill considering how few WIPs I have close to finished right now.
There's a parallel here between my internal unease and the post I keep threatening to write about the many many impacts of late stage capitalism and advertisement-centric state of the modern internet on fandom culture. I think I sound very old when I say that it didn't use to feel like this, but I don't really mean that fandom was "better" when I first joined. Mostly I just mean that I was 13. When I was 13 I was just really excited to be making stuff. I'm glad I'm a better writer than I was then, and I have a lot more feelings about craft and growth and my trajectory, but I sometimes miss how easy it felt to sit down with a blank document and only feel a rush of pure excitement.
These days writing is a bane and a lifeline. I am, for once in my life, trying to ease up on committing to deadlines. I'm not participating in Yuletide! I'm not looking for new things to join! I'm writing my big bang and that's more or less it for things I'm actively on the hook for. It makes me antsy but I'm trying to get better with stillness. & I think it's a good choice and a good change but it really has felt like 2023 is just lesson after lesson and I am getting tired of learning.
So maybe I'll make some old mistakes, just for fun. Maybe I'll set myself some deadlines, or start another event, or stay up late late late into the night recapturing the magic that always brings me back to this endeavor in the first place.
I keep threatening to walk into a bog and never emerge when I struggle to get into a good flow. I overthink and underplan and write myself into weird corners. I let my brain get weird about what it says about me if I'm not accomplishing as much as I'd like to. Even opening an old doc and being really pleased with what's in it can be demoralizing if I feel far enough away from it, like someone else did that work and now I'm burnt out and confused trying to figure out why I can't reach that magic again. It's not easy to remind myself that it always comes back.
Writing is hard! But not writing is harder. So we keep trucking on.
I had typed a whole intro to this entry but it was so unnecessarily long! Mostly I just want to wave at the title a bunch and have it somehow sprout into a fully formed post on its own.
2023 hasn't been my most prolific writing year to date, but it certainly hasn't been as fallow or drudging as my brain keeps trying to convince me of. It doesn't help that I haven't posted anything in over two months now — that's uncharacteristic for me, and definitely challenging me to locate new and exciting levels of chill considering how few WIPs I have close to finished right now.
There's a parallel here between my internal unease and the post I keep threatening to write about the many many impacts of late stage capitalism and advertisement-centric state of the modern internet on fandom culture. I think I sound very old when I say that it didn't use to feel like this, but I don't really mean that fandom was "better" when I first joined. Mostly I just mean that I was 13. When I was 13 I was just really excited to be making stuff. I'm glad I'm a better writer than I was then, and I have a lot more feelings about craft and growth and my trajectory, but I sometimes miss how easy it felt to sit down with a blank document and only feel a rush of pure excitement.
These days writing is a bane and a lifeline. I am, for once in my life, trying to ease up on committing to deadlines. I'm not participating in Yuletide! I'm not looking for new things to join! I'm writing my big bang and that's more or less it for things I'm actively on the hook for. It makes me antsy but I'm trying to get better with stillness. & I think it's a good choice and a good change but it really has felt like 2023 is just lesson after lesson and I am getting tired of learning.
So maybe I'll make some old mistakes, just for fun. Maybe I'll set myself some deadlines, or start another event, or stay up late late late into the night recapturing the magic that always brings me back to this endeavor in the first place.
I keep threatening to walk into a bog and never emerge when I struggle to get into a good flow. I overthink and underplan and write myself into weird corners. I let my brain get weird about what it says about me if I'm not accomplishing as much as I'd like to. Even opening an old doc and being really pleased with what's in it can be demoralizing if I feel far enough away from it, like someone else did that work and now I'm burnt out and confused trying to figure out why I can't reach that magic again. It's not easy to remind myself that it always comes back.
Writing is hard! But not writing is harder. So we keep trucking on.