Seasonal Plume

Yes, I am alive, but sadly my (fiction) writing is not. It’s gone into hibernation yet again, buried by work, emotional stress, the Various Little Things That Take Up Your Attention. Plus the super typhoon. (We still don’t have electricity in Laguna.)

October makes me remember NaNoWriMo, though. Sadly, every single year I’ve joined (I’ve been joining for a while), I’ve always lost. The steam disappears after around a week or so, and then the Various Little Things start covering up anything left over.

It still doesn’t stop me from toying with the idea of signing up (and eventually losing) again. Yes, I fear I am a masochist. Seriously, though, I always have my ideas all bottled up in my head, and if my journal entries are any indication, I can easily write reams of words enough to meet (and exceed) the 50k word minimum.

Only I don’t feel satisfied with the way the words convey sentiments, or my thoughts are all jumbled up. My emotions are always connected to what I write. But I always have difficulty understanding my emotions, which is why I am always, always, always writing about it, analyzing it to death, trying to piece it all together and be able to label it accordingly. I feel this, I feel that. No, I don’t know what I feel about this yet, I need to find out what I feel about it. And so on and so forth.

My subconscious finds a lot of excuses. Oh, but you have to do your exercises. Oh, it’s already late, you should sleep. Oh, you should take advantage of your website layout creativity right now and revamp everything, you know it can go away again in a while. …and so on and so forth until it’s the last day of NaNo and I’ll just think, oh! It’s the last day, oh well, I failed again.

You know what would be a luxury? To take November off and just write. (Fat chance of that, though.)

I haven’t been able to write much this week; I’m not entirely sure why. I felt quite inspired early this week too, so it’s a bit saddening that I just haven’t been able to get myself to write non-journal things. I suppose it’s partly because of:

1. I get home tired — I spend around four hours a day travelling to and from work;
2. I don’t know what to write, exactly, and I just sit in front of the computer with my head completely blank; and
3. I’ve been feeling down and rather depressed and can’t for the life of me make more than very maudlin depressing poetry (which shall never see the light of day).

The coming week doesn’t seem too conducive to writing, either. For one thing, my dad will be flying to different (local) places throughout the week, so that means I will be commuting to and from work, as opposed to hitching a ride with my dad. That adds an extra hour of travel time between home and office, and that means I will be spending six hours on the road. I leave home at six, get to work at nine; I leave work at five, and get home at nine (that was four hours, but yeah). It’s very draining, in addition to work, and to other sundry stuff I have to deal with during the week. :( I can’t stay up late since I can’t let myself sleep heavily on the way to work (and wake up where?). Help! :((

Plus, a lot of things are vying for my attention! I want to release the next version of my Enthusiast script soon, so I have to work out the last few bugs for that. But before I release that, I have to WordPress-ify Indiscripts first. And before I do that, I have to make sure my custom downloads organizer can handle being included in a WordPress-powered site! I think I’m ending up making a completely new version of the downloads organizer. @-)

We did peek in Powerbooks tonight, and I saw this book: The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art by Carol Joyce Oates. It looks quite interesting and promising–I read a few bits and pieces and it reminds me rather like Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, which I have raved about before (haha!).

Well, we shall see what happens this week. Sigh, the paragraph I quoted in this entry really does ring true. :p It’s hard to get back into things once you’ve slacked off. :(