Kerry has shamed me into updating my blog. It wasn’t anything he said; no, that would be too easy. Instead he has been updating it every damned day with fresh tidbits. Damn those tidbits! Admittedly, that is by far the most offensive machination. My inclination is to wait until I have a million things to say and only then will I sit down for hours to spill out pages of rambling verbiage - I think that’s one of the reasons I abandoned my blog - but those tiny tidbits of random asides intermingled with news of goings on in his life have chagrined me into returning to this particular stage. I am committed to adding to it as much as I can, even if it is littered with nothing but miscellaneous tidbits.

There are a couple of reasons I abandoned my blog, halffull.org, and, worst of all, the LoO page. (Oh, LoO website! How I miss you!) Unfortunately for you, I typed up those reasons and then my internet exploded so I’m not going to retype them out for you. Allow me to sum up:

Nothing I was writing really intrigued me and I was developing a serious creative block, and I knew it was because there was something that I really needed to express. It’s similar to “writer’s block.” According to the Oxford Dictionary, “writer’s block” is: the condition of being unable to think of what to write or how to proceed with writing. For many writers, there are a myriad of reasons as to why one ends up with that kind of blockage, and the condition is discussed on many websites. When this happens to me, it isn’t for any reason other than this: There’s a topic or issue that needs to be expressed, and until I can eradicate it from my soul, I have a hard time writing about anything else. The problem with this is that it usually takes me a while to figure out what it is that is bothering me, and by the time I figure it out, it spills out in some tumultuous spewing of emotion. Ask Tom. He just loves it when I do that.

The difficult part was that I had no idea what that something was that needed to be expressed. I needed a new project that I could really sink myself into, but nothing I could contribute to halffull really excited me. I thought it would make me feel better if I had a blog and could write whatever I wanted. Perhaps, I thought, it would come out on this page. I really wanted it to, but it never did.

During this time, some other things were happening. Another friend had this idea of building his own NWN world and I had been dreaming and scheming up a storyline for this. When that project fizzled, Kerry had started an online roleplaying thingy. I had never done such a thing before, and it was really fun. Every Saturday we looked forward to playing it, even though it was kind of on an inconvenient evening - Saturdays were hard to make. One day, Kerry asked me to help him build the world he was creating this story in. At first I was a bit reluctant because the last project I had started thinking about had fizzled, but of course I couldn’t resist the temptation. A lot of things were dreamed up in my head, and of course, that project eventually fizzled out as well.

I tried returning to halffull a few times; the page stayed up on my screen at work for entire days while I tried to think of something to say, but I never did. It depressed me because I really wanted to write. I’m still not sure what happened to be perfectly honest, but one day it just hit me: I needed to take some of the things I had envisioned from those two past creative projects and use them, build on them, and bring them to fruition:

So, I’m writing a novel.

For some reason that sounds really stupid to me, but I’m doing it. My days and nights have been filled with nothing but writing and reading about writing and planning and plotting and scribbling - one of the books I have read recently (can’t remember the title offhand) cautioned writers that your spouses will hate you for secluding yourself in a small, dark corner every night and day. I don’t want to do that, but I simply can’t help myself. Right now I have no plans or wild ideas about what I will even do with this once it is finished; there are no secret fantasies about getting this thing published and becoming the next great novelist. This is something I need to do in a way that I can’t explain. When I am done, it may not even be very good, but I am doing it anyway. It’s the brave thing to do, and I needed a project. This is it.

So that’s what I am working on at the moment. I’m still in school, still working, still everything - while I’m writing. And last night I think I hit my stride. I’ll be back with more of my life and damned tidbits.