Slumpin'

It's been over a month since graduation, two months since I turned in the final copy of my thesis, but it's been almost nine months since I've found myself in a workshop situation that required me to have pages done and give comments and critiques back to other writers. My own writing is suffering, my free reading is suffering, and I've got a backlog of fellow writers' works to get through so that I can give them an appropriate response in an effort to help them become better or see things that they would overlook from being too close to the writing.

It's a weird thing, this slump, and perhaps I should've expected it; I pushed myself pretty damn hard during the last two and a half years trying to get as much writing done as possible. The holidays don't make it easy either since I never get any work done when I spend time with either side of my family or friends back home. It seems silly to travel all that way to see them all (once, maybe twice a year) and then spend time sitting in front of a laptop trying to be productive. I think this was probably the first time I came home for any length of time and didn't bring my laptop. I knew nothing was going to happen in that regard.

And now it's 2012. I have a piece of paper that says I have been taught a few things that may or may not make me a writer worth reading. I have more free time to go out and see the city, but I also have student loans that are needing to be repaid; as much as I'd love to get out and see/do more, I'm now just as confined as I was before, but without the break in routine that class and post-class boozing afforded during the middle of the week. My brain is atrophying and in need of stimulation that will only help the writing in the long run. I've said it before in this blog: you can't be a shut-in forever. Sometimes you have to get out and do something out of your routine in order to unblock whatever it is that's keeping you from being productive. I just haven't found that perfect break yet.

A trusted friend and authorial compatriot recently asked me why I was working on a project that I was simply "toying with." I said I wanted to see if I could do it, a bit of a skills test, to push myself. He said I should work on what I'm passionate instead. He's not completely wrong. If there's no passion in what you're doing, people will know. They'll feel it when they experience the finished product. He's not completely right either, however. His comment threw me off my game for a week or so; I wrote nothing because I wanted to make sure I had the passion for what I was doing.

Then I remembered that I have some old flash fiction pieces that are perfectly bizarre and in need of updating. I went through all my files and found about 15 of them, all just to the left of strange and, in some cases, recurring themes that could make them a fun little short story collection. I wrote most of them back when my writing was less focused and my prose more poetic and flowery than grounded in any true substance. But the ideas are there and that's the interesting thing. These little two- and three-page fiction pieces have so much more bubbling under their surfaces that they may be what I need right now. More focus on smaller sections of work require less intensity than working on a full-on novel and I'll still be writing.

I'm still passionate about most pieces that I work on; some more than others, but the passion is there. Some stories just end up having different ways of concluding than we previously thought.

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