Thursday, January 31, 2008

Restarting

It's a sad day when I'd rather clean the bathroom and mop than sit on my ass and write.

Then I remembered that it's Thursday and I don't have to write. Not today. It's a research/study day! And you know what qualifies as "research"? Watching movies! Reading books! Surfing the internet! Reading smut on the internet!! Reading the newspaper! Hanging out in the mall!! Going shopping!! Even watching talk shows, soaps, and daytime judge shows!! And what qualifies as "study"? Reading and responding to things on message boards!! Reading books!! Even role-playing online!!

Seriously.

See, I did a fairly good job of cutting myself off from the world a while back. The world annoys me. It grates violently on my nerves and so much of it disgusts me. More times than not, I prefer to be alone. Isolated. Completely and totally. No television. No music. No phones. No outside influences. Just me. I'd do well in one of those monasteries hidden in Tibet or some other such place.

The problem? I all but stop writing when I'm isolated. There's no spark. There's no drive. There's a whole lot of staring and meditating and listening to the blood flowing through my veins and to the noises inside my head. But there's no writing. No creativity of any sort, actually.

I've known for a long time that I need the world and that I need contact with people. In all but a few isolated cases I tolerated the need for the world grudgingly. I never truly accepted the need.

Until now.

And you know what? Since letting go of that almost desperate desire for complete isolation and accepting that I need the world, I've been writing. Ok, so technically it's been REwriting, but it's still progress. And I'm starting to have ideas again. The creativity is coming as a trickle, but it's coming.

And I'm itching to write. Really... write. I've got smut in progress. I've got Ophelia things in progress. I've got a class project -- a story about a bookish pacifist who, in a fit of grief, becomes a demon-hunter and, not knowing he's been lied to, goes after the demon that reportedly killed his cloistered sister -- in progress. And Holly was poking my brain last night.

Maybe I will write a little later today. But if I don't, I'm not going to sweat it because, technically, today is a research and study day.

I'm feeling a little smutty so I'm going to go do a little research now...