I almost forgot to write this today. It isn’t that I didn’t know what to write, or that I didn’t have time, but that I procrastinated until the last possible second and (unusually for me) let that slot of time be consumed by another thing.

So, anyways, I’ve been thinking a bit lately. I’ve hit that wall of “writing sucks” again. The same one I find myself facing every few months. Often I’ll write for a big project, get bored 10,000 words later, and then start writing something I’m more interested in because the old project simply isn’t new anymore. That’s where I’m at now. I’m still interested in the Spear Gate universe, but I need to do un-fun work in order to jump back into it.

I still like Lisa, too, but I don’t love it. What’s worse, I’ve sort of promised myself I’d write a quarter of Lisa 4 every week this month so I don’t fall behind like I did March. Trouble is, I’m still not even done with Lisa 3. So here we are.

Part of me wants to take another break. Something like a month long just to relax for a while. But on this journey of learning who I am as a writer, I feel like I’ve found myself in a weird position where I don’t think I really know myself at all. I used to know, or at least I thought I did, but now I don’t.

Maybe I’m just one of those people that has to transition between periods of lots of writing, followed by periods of no writing. Maybe I’m just not cut out to be a novelist. Or maybe I’ve just been tactfully avoiding the hard part of being a writer, which is writing when it’s not fun and then editing when it gets even worse. I feel like I do write when it’s not fun, but I can’t maintain that for very long.

One weird thing that I learned from Writing Excuses, but haven’t been able to personally verify, is one simple concept: “The more you write, the easier the writing gets.” What this basically translates to is that if you’re not writing, writing is very difficult, but if you write consistently, maintaining that isn’t hard. Newton’s second law or whatever. If that is true, taking a break is a bad idea. Plus, as a human I feel a constant need to be productive all the time. So if I didn’t write, it might eat at me.

Being on the cusp of change is tough. I know it’s easy to imagine I’ll have everything figured out in five years, but that’s just statistically unlikely. Not having even the knowledge of the direction’s of one’s next step is frustrating. I can only imagine how difficult it is for people who don’t even know what they’re passionate about.

That’s one funny thing. Senior year of high school, I had aspired to be published (and established) by 24, and I thought that deadline was very generous at the time. Now, I find that goal very threatening. I made a list of the 30 authors I was most familiar with, when they were born and how old they were when they were first published. Of those 30 authors, the average age they first published at was 33, and on that list the oldest is 46, so there isn’t any outliers racking up the age. (If anything, Christopher Paolini is an outlier the opposite direction. He brings the average down by half a year by being published at 18).

So, things are a little mentally complicated for me right now. I’m tired, mostly. and I haven’t had a spark of “Oh, that’s an awesome idea!” in quite a while. At least, not one that I’ve actually used in my writing. So, whatever.

Alright, rant over. Hey, at least I got my 500 words in for the day!