Well, it's been almost a week since my last little fit of brainstorming. And since then there's not been a whole lot. I finished up the backstory on my vampire hunter and submitted him, and I've written down some notes for the two novels that I'm working on. The vampire character is still languishing back there somewhere... guess he's not ready to put in a serious appearance yet. Then again, I haven't really been trying all that hard.
I don't really get writer's block so much as a total loss of all motivation to do anything productive with my time. I can come up with enough ideas to keep me occupied, most of the time. I have plenty of things I need to be doing right now, in fact. But instead I sit around all day long playing solitaire. Yesterday I even ventured into Diablo 2 for a few hours. At first I was just there to update my characters on battlenet (they expire if you don't play them for more than 90 days; by the time I checked I had 17 days left on the clock). Then I decided that mindlessly killing things sounded like a very good idea. So I sat there for a couple more hours whacking stuff in Act 4 normal with a 26 necro. Then I chickened out when I got to the Chaos Sanctuary (where the superboss of the level is), and stopped. Necros don't do so good against Diablo by themselves, and I didn't really feel like repeated dying and losing all my gold.
That pretty much fulfilled my Diablo 2 playing urges for another month or so. When I'm the only one playing, it's a really boring, tedious game that sucks out all of my brainpower and I can't see why anyone would want to sit around playing it for hours. (And yet I keep doing it. Hmm.) At the moment everyone else I know is busily playing World of Warcraft, and I doubt they're going to come back anytime soon - if ever. So it's just me now. At least I inherited all the socket mules. I've got an um rune that I'm going to stick into something just because there's no one around to tell me I can't :p. The only reason the mules still exist is because I updated them.
The other major thing I've done lately is: another cruise. :) I guess my boss has finally noticed that I'm good for doing other things besides being holed up in my office crunching numbers. So that's where I was on Thursday and Friday. It was relaxing, and went more smoothly than the last one overall. (Which in turn went a lot more smoothly than the one that I was on last summer.) I even got a bit of brainstorming and note-jotting down for the two novels, though I stalled out when it came time to figure out my vampire.
A few days before the cruise, I had a dream about being on one where the seas were rather rough. I remember thinking that I'd forgotten to take my seasickness pills. And then noted that I wasn't, in fact, actually sick at all. I'm hoping that this dream is trying to tell me something about seasickness, because I wasn't sick at all on this last cruise. I'd taken a bonine beforehand, but didn't feel a darn thing the whole time. Even though I skipped the pill on the second day. And now that I'm back on land, I'm not even landsick. Maybe I've finally developed some sea legs after all these years. :)
Anyhow. The change of pace was really nice. Hopefully I'll get invited on more of these trips from now on.
On the downside ... I'm beginning to think that part of my fits and starts problem has to do with the fact that my work is very left-brained, while writing/roleplaying is right-brained, and I don't shift between the two modes very easily. There will be a couple days where I'm sailing along great with whatever I'm doing at work, and writing is basically shot. Then there's a day where I can't get myself to do do much of anything. Then I'll have a day or two of really great writing, while work seriously drags. If I can just figure out a way to work around it so I can be maximally productive in spurts for both categories ... hmm.
Oh well. On my writing plate at the moment: create the vampire character for the game, at least one fairly complex post for another game, continue to hack out the outline for the Labor Day novel, write the first scene to Taint.
I figured out where to start with Taint. It's going to be a scene where my two MCs first meet, as told from the point of view of a third character who is basically a plot device. As mentioned in a couple past blogs, the idea here is to write one scene per week or so, as if it were a roleplay post. And when I'm done, I'll post it up in my non-game game where a small group of other people can read along if they really want... they probably will want, which is kind of a scary thought all by itself. :p Kind of like baring my soul in public, especially with what I'm planning to write. Even though it's only about 5 people... but it's 5 people whose opinions I care about. However, it feels kind of like the next step up from what I was doing before with the roleplay. A very reachable next step at this point, and one I am ready to take. So... one small step forward for Nerwen ... one giant leap for Kayara? ;)
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