You may have noticed I’ve fallen progressively further behind on posting updates here. I mentioned some time back that this was because some of the essays were getting too big and detailed – that is still true, I have a several pieces that have gotten out of hand this way that I still intend to revisit, but it turns out there’s a bit more going on. The core challenge of each piece I write is to figure out something to say that feels new and meaningful and worth writing about: How difficult this is can vary wildly based on a number of factors, the most pertinent of which are a) how many interesting discussions or experiences I’ve had recently, b) my ability to spin off a chain of thoughts from those experiences which I can transcribe and expand upon to build an essay and c) how confident I feel about the writing and structures I create this way.
If any single one of these breaks down for a while, I can usually keep going okay until it’s back on-line: If not much of interest has been going on I can dig deeper into old topics or ongoing situations, if I can’t expand easily on ideas I can just note down random meandering thoughts until something catches on and seems promising, if I’m not feeling confident I can write quietly for myself for a while with no greater expectations until I have something that seems solid and interesting to me and then force myself to post it. If two or three of these stop working for me simultaneously, though, things get tough. Right now, not much interesting has been happening, I don’t have much energy or inspiration to expand upon, and I don’t have much confidence in my ability to do so interestingly. At such times I frequently fall back on venting about the specific challenges I’m facing in getting creative work done – after all, the intent of these posts is to be a rumination on creative process and life, and much of that process and life consists of being stalled out and frustrated. This is, you may have observed, what I am doing right now. I try to avoid doing so too often, though; I don’t think it’s interesting or helpful to write exclusively about not writing, even if it’s an experience many people have shared.
Because I’m behind already and show no signs of catching up, because I don’t know how long it will take to regain any momentum I once had, and because it’s increasingly difficult to maintain the relationship of time between my writing work and my ongoing game project, I’m going to put the Patreon on hold for a month while I get caught up. It’s important to me to feel like I’m meeting my commitments, and getting posts out a week late at best just doesn’t feel good. Having these commitments hanging over my head is also making it more difficult to get caught up on them, as well as potentially reducing the quality of my work, since the more stress and anxiety I stir up into my writing the harder it becomes to push past the dread and into the creative zone.
The irony of this is that with this post, alongside the game DevBlog for this past month which will shortly follow it, I’m effectively caught back up – assuming, that is, that I’m then capable of immediately following these up with a third post. What I need, though, is a little breathing room; I want to be able to spend a bit relaxing and thinking about different possibilities before having to dive back in, to be able to feel good about waiting a time to post a new piece while I ponder its ramifications. I’ll be trying to maintain more or less the same writing habits (sans crushing anxiety, hopefully) and will post pieces as I finish them. By next month I can hopefully be back ahead of schedule, with a decent backlog of posts so I don’t need to worry so much about being punctual with each new offering.
I hope that by then the prospect will seem, once more, joyous and exploratory, rather than intimidating, confusing, and stressful.