"Your muse is in another castle!"
It seems like lately I only ever blog on LJ when I need to complain or vent. /o\ Not that I'm sure it really is of any importance since maybe only two people read this blog anyway? W/e, w/e, right? Anyway.
Actually, this weekend was really good on the home front; the family had a really enjoyable Mother's Day weekend where we hung out together, ate out at restaurants, and had minimal conflict. Best part? Mom was genuinely surprised when we gifted her the retro-looking bike on Sunday. Success! (I need to thank Terri later for helping us hide it in her garage.)
Next Sunday, Mom and I are gonna go hang out at the Wonderland of the Americas Mall to try and meet Dra. Ana Maria Polo from Caso Cerrado. Fingers crossed that it all goes to plan! I'm excited to just spend time with my mom, to be honest. She works all week and then on the weekends I stick to a weird hermit-y schedule by pretty much spending all day in my brother's room (especially since he gave me Fallout 3 for my birthday, because Bethesda makes the kind of video game crack I can't refuse), so it's felt like ages since she and I have really done stuff just the two of us. I'm also really looking forward to her idea that we'll spend the summer learning new recipes and cooking. AT LAST! A chance to break out that Alton Brown cookbook and also learn some more Puerto Rican dishes that I can woo people with!
Now if only I could get past this writer's block...
To be honest, I became aware of it yesterday that I hadn't really written anything in what I think might be days, maybe a week. My brain is just completely quiet. I'll get flickers of ideas here and there, but every time I open a document, it just feels like a whole lot of effort. It almost feels like a chore even just to get through a sentence. :|
And then there's the whole fact that I haven't really heard any of my normal characters "talking" in my head or really "felt" any of them hanging around for a lot longer than this block. I'm wondering if that's a side effect of the medication... It's a little worrisome on several different levels. Just how deep have I been living in my head this last handful of years? What is this going to mean for my way of writing and telling stories? (If only I had a therapist who actually wanted to discuss this kind of stuff instead of just telling me to quit caffeine and write me a new prescription every three months!) The last thing I actually finished was fic. I kind of want to not have that be my regular thing, though it's fun to write.
This is kind of not boding well for my plans to start retooling Under the Van Gogh in order to have the site back up and running by September. I don't have any new stories written yet, but I'm going to have to write some extra stories for the early acts plus rewrite a few of the stories to smooth out the timeline. That's on top of a lot of editing I know I need to do--and I already dislike the editing process when I'm in a highly creative mode. /o\
I'm also sort of...not completely ready to start changing things, even though I have a pretty good idea of how to do so for at least the first two Acts. It still just feels too weird to think about how I'm back to working on it directly by myself, even though that's how it started! I am not ready for this for this kind of sole responsibility thing, you guys! I can barely keep track of my spending habits without using the online banking system!
To be honest, I'm still sort of worried that I'll fuck it up somehow and ruin the awesomeness or charm or...magic, I guess, that made it what it is. I've got...what? Five, six years of writing and concepts and notes on my flash drive? That's a lot of stuff. A lot of details and hours put into world-building that I don't think I would've gotten around to on my own. And like...other people are familiar with it! There are things that they know to be canon, like the mystery of Ean's missing sandwich and Present's complicated memory woes and Past being painfully shy until you fuck with his brother or something.
What if I change the wrong thing?
What if they hate the new stuff?
What if I actually suck at this writing thing by myself?
But I'm doing my best to remind myself of the following things:
Just as soon as this block clears, at least. :| Maybe I should poke around brigits_flame and see what the prompts are this month...
Actually, this weekend was really good on the home front; the family had a really enjoyable Mother's Day weekend where we hung out together, ate out at restaurants, and had minimal conflict. Best part? Mom was genuinely surprised when we gifted her the retro-looking bike on Sunday. Success! (I need to thank Terri later for helping us hide it in her garage.)
Next Sunday, Mom and I are gonna go hang out at the Wonderland of the Americas Mall to try and meet Dra. Ana Maria Polo from Caso Cerrado. Fingers crossed that it all goes to plan! I'm excited to just spend time with my mom, to be honest. She works all week and then on the weekends I stick to a weird hermit-y schedule by pretty much spending all day in my brother's room (especially since he gave me Fallout 3 for my birthday, because Bethesda makes the kind of video game crack I can't refuse), so it's felt like ages since she and I have really done stuff just the two of us. I'm also really looking forward to her idea that we'll spend the summer learning new recipes and cooking. AT LAST! A chance to break out that Alton Brown cookbook and also learn some more Puerto Rican dishes that I can woo people with!
Now if only I could get past this writer's block...
To be honest, I became aware of it yesterday that I hadn't really written anything in what I think might be days, maybe a week. My brain is just completely quiet. I'll get flickers of ideas here and there, but every time I open a document, it just feels like a whole lot of effort. It almost feels like a chore even just to get through a sentence. :|
And then there's the whole fact that I haven't really heard any of my normal characters "talking" in my head or really "felt" any of them hanging around for a lot longer than this block. I'm wondering if that's a side effect of the medication... It's a little worrisome on several different levels. Just how deep have I been living in my head this last handful of years? What is this going to mean for my way of writing and telling stories? (If only I had a therapist who actually wanted to discuss this kind of stuff instead of just telling me to quit caffeine and write me a new prescription every three months!) The last thing I actually finished was fic. I kind of want to not have that be my regular thing, though it's fun to write.
This is kind of not boding well for my plans to start retooling Under the Van Gogh in order to have the site back up and running by September. I don't have any new stories written yet, but I'm going to have to write some extra stories for the early acts plus rewrite a few of the stories to smooth out the timeline. That's on top of a lot of editing I know I need to do--and I already dislike the editing process when I'm in a highly creative mode. /o\
I'm also sort of...not completely ready to start changing things, even though I have a pretty good idea of how to do so for at least the first two Acts. It still just feels too weird to think about how I'm back to working on it directly by myself, even though that's how it started! I am not ready for this for this kind of sole responsibility thing, you guys! I can barely keep track of my spending habits without using the online banking system!
To be honest, I'm still sort of worried that I'll fuck it up somehow and ruin the awesomeness or charm or...magic, I guess, that made it what it is. I've got...what? Five, six years of writing and concepts and notes on my flash drive? That's a lot of stuff. A lot of details and hours put into world-building that I don't think I would've gotten around to on my own. And like...other people are familiar with it! There are things that they know to be canon, like the mystery of Ean's missing sandwich and Present's complicated memory woes and Past being painfully shy until you fuck with his brother or something.
What if I change the wrong thing?
What if they hate the new stuff?
What if I actually suck at this writing thing by myself?
But I'm doing my best to remind myself of the following things:
- I started writing the stories that became UtVG on my own, even if it started out with a completely different plot in mind.
- Considering most of my readers are from the Internet, if I sucked, someone would've been more than happy to say so to my cyber-face by now. So far, I've only heard about how I've made people cry from moving them emotionally on various occasions.
- If any of the new stuff sucks, people will say so.
- If Sally didn't believe I could carry on writing UtVG and UtVG-related things on my own--or so I hope is the case, at least--she wouldn't have entrusted everything and everyone to me in the first place, especially considering the amount of stuff and people that sprang out of her imagination. (For which I am forever grateful, because I know myself and how I probably would've petered out before even getting to the idea of mapping out the city of Dis.)
Just as soon as this block clears, at least. :| Maybe I should poke around brigits_flame and see what the prompts are this month...