Now I know what it’s like to not be a writer (even a perpetual amateur like me).
It’s quite liberating. No agonising over not writing, no overthinking on words and scenes and meanings. Freedom to choose what I spend my time doing. Is this what it’s like all the time for people who don’t write?
I got two new shinies in the last three weeks, a Nintendo 3DS and a shiny new Android phone. I knew I’d loose a few days of #wordcount to the new toys. Heck it was my birthday, right?
But that niggling feeling that you should be writing… it’s gone right now. The “niggling feeling” can be the worst source of procrastination with writing (sometimes called Writers-block). You know you should write, but you don’t have the energy/will/whatever to start something right then1. Which only feeds that niggling feeling, which in turn increases the tension between starting something and your energy and can be a vicious circle. I thought I broke it with my wordcount2 which I was successfully hitting nearly everyday.
It’s even snaked it’s way into my social media habits, making me more of a consumer than contributor. I’m just more than a little disinclined to engage or post on the various (okay two) services I frequent and even less likely to comment. I even let one or two days go by without checking it and don’t make any attempt to catch up.
I find this mildly curious, why my desire to write is tided into my desire to share online?
And my ennui does not appear to be abating. In fact I see it getting worse. I just got Street Fighter 4 for my new 3DS and a mixture of solid casual gameplay and a strong dose of nostalgia, has absorbed me. But Gaelcon ascends on the horizon (despite the flooding) this weekend and after that is the potential of NanoWriMo next month (which I seem to have avoided making any decision on). So maybe it’ll pan out.
Maybe I should consider this a holiday away from writing.
1 It’s not just in writing, in my secret identity as a programmer, we jokingly call this tension in our work flow “context-switching”, after the computer operation (done by the CPU) of switching between tasks and loading in and out the associated context of states and threads and so on. When you’re working an embedded device, you want to reduce these sort of operations as it can be an expensive task in terms of load. It seems it can also be an “expensive task” for us humans too and if you’re already tired, it can suck all motivation out of your next task.
2 This blog post only counts for ~500 or so words of my #wordcount for the day. But it’s something. It’s all words. 