Creatively, I'm drained.

It's really hard for me to talk about myself without feeling like I'm climbing up onto a soap-box and proclaiming that I hold some deep knowledge that everyone is going to be wowed by. I don't feel that way, and I don't mean to project that self-assured, cocky, know-it-all vibe. It always happens, though, and it bugs me.

That's not really what this blog post is about, though. I just wanted to preface what I was going to say with that, or rather, letting my mind wander, that was the first thing that I thought to write. I'm trying to just let my fingers and my brain do the talking. The rest of me is kinda numb.

Usually when I sit down to write, I have some little idea I want to write about, or some scene that's just begging to get onto paper, or some odd and abstract setting that I want to scribble about. I don't tend to take my writing very seriously, and I do it often without even thinking about it.

Except when I'm stressed out. When I'm stressed out, the time I spend writing is, at the same time, time I'm trying to spend mentally relaxing. I carry a lot of stress in my head, and the more crazy I get with work and my home life, the more difficult it seems to let the creativity flow. I want to be writing every day, but right now all I really feel like doing is laying down. I fight it because I know I'll never write if I let myself get away with that, but at the same time, what I write in this frame of mind is usually not that useful.

The last four times I've gone off to write, I've started something new that I didn't feel like working on later. Each of the things were interesting in their own way, but none of them linked very well to anything else. They were just thoughts without ending and sometimes without beginnings. Some of them were fictional, and some of them were decidedly autobiographical. None of them are suitable for consumption by the masses, which has made me a little depressed. It's been a month since I wrote anything worthwhile outside of my comics.

Even now, as I'm writing this blog post, some part of me is trying to make me find out what I need to do get Jaimee's contacts reordered. It's not a process I'm at all familiar with, and it's exasperated by the fact that when we last got her eyes checked, we didn't leave with a prescription. For some reason, Firefox doesn't seem to believe that didn't is a valid word (except now it does), and now it's assuming that "doesn't" isn't a valid word (except that the second time it accepted it). My computer is going all kinds of weird lately. Ah well.

I just want to be writing now, but some part of me feels like I have nothing worth saying. Part of this stems from the fact that I cannot write sci-fi. Or, rather, that I'm scared to. I am not a physicist, and though I keep myself pretty well read, I am very much a layman when it comes to what the future is going to be like. I hate the feeling that people will read my work and scoff because it's not "hard" enough, and that I neglected some all-important development that's almost guaranteed to happen.

And part of me knows I'm just being silly (it's in the same vein as worrying about the hard-core fantasy buffs who want something to be exactly like Tolkein but exactly different from it as well, or even me who wants the system and process of magic to make sense). My goal should be to write, and not worry about what people might say. But when I'm stressed, it seems to be all I think about -- the audience. Who will want to read what I write? Who cares what I have to say? What can I say that's in any way unique?

These fears are stupid. I know they are, and I should just stop.

... I kinda wish it was that easy.
--Joe

(I'm gonna see about getting those contacts now).