Progress Report: July 2022

Yup, I’m back. I know, I know, it’s been a while. I’m sorry.

So, I know that when the year started, I was trying to be more consistent with writing and posting, and I was trying to be better at sharing thoughts about what was going on with writing and life. There are countless alternate dimensions where this did happen.

But, you see, what had happened was…

Life. Life happened.

Let’s backtrack. At the beginning of the year, I had this wonderful goal of editing a project that sat on my shelf for the last three years or so. I put it away in the wake of a pandemic, a wedding, buying a home, and a move. I got back to that project and found that it was a different version of me—angrier, more cynical—that pored over for years. In the time since I finished the most recent draft, my life changed, and certain attitudes changed with it. When I went back to re-edit, I didn’t find the profound thoughts surrounding the heat-death of a marriage that I thought I had written down. I found a collection of bitter and jaded characters that I couldn’t connect with anymore. I mean, yay for personal growth and healing, but that’s bad for working on your own writing. I couldn’t edit it. I didn’t recognize the writer or the headspace. A from-scratch rewrite was off the table, it took seven plus years to get to where I was at. Paralyzed by the lack of a clear direction, I found myself unable to write anything. So far this year, I’ve written zero words of new fiction.

And boy, has that messed with me.

Writing, my go-to emotional outlet since I was a teenager (as well as a central part of my eventual retirement plan) became so difficult that all I could do was stare at a blank screen. Soon enough, I couldn’t even be motivated to do that. And this blog? I couldn’t think of anything worth saying.

I mean, seriously. My last entries in this blog were a travelogue about a trip my wife and I took last Thanksgiving. And it seemed so…

I think the best word is “shallow.”

My wife encouraged me to take a step back. If it wasn’t fun, stop doing it. She was right and I did as she suggested. I refocused the energy to my paying job, among other things, to let the writing battery recharge.

Did it work? Well, yes and no.

I decided to put that project back on the shelf for now, until such a time where I can relax some of the pressure I put on myself to say something meaningful with that story. I do have a couple of other irons in the fire, and I’m going to pivot and focus on those. I’m going to do my best to rediscover the joy I have for writing, especially as I feel the creative battery surge.

And I’m going to try not to be too shallow.

This has been a strange progress report, I’ll be the first to admit it. Thanks for listening, and hopefully there will be better ones in the near future.