I've been doing a lot of thinkiness in and around battling to keep my baby website afloat (long story; we'll talk about it later) and reading poetry and scribbling in the gaps of work and life and blizzards and emergencies and taxes (let's just not talk about that), and I've been thinking a lot about creating stories.
The story from inferno stalled out on me a while back, almost entirely due to fear that froze up my insides and outsides and made me second guess everything I was doing. But I like Rachelle's story better than Ashen's because even if it's harder, it's cleaner. Rachelle is not pragmatic about killing. It's something she knows how to do, but it's not something she doesn't care about, doesn't feel. Ashen is on a completely different level and her stories feel grayer to me. I'm not sure what to do about that yet, but I'm beginning to understand at a different level why Justus and Red were friends in their before life and now do. not. get. along. At all.
Anyways, I got my okayness on again about the story and figured I could write it now, right? Apparently not. Total stall. I'm only now starting to figure out that where I left off is too clean cut, no trailing lead in to what comes next and that I don't know enough about one aspect of my world. Hmph.
And then there's writing drabbles. They're not in my blood right now like they used to be and I keep looking for shorter ficlets to cram in the holes around my schedule and most of the prompts I got belong to stories that are hitting the sprawl state. Let's just say :headdesk: and leave it at that.
Then there's the mess of fanfiction. I reread my profile and realized afresh how easy it would be for me to dig back in. I have worlds upon worlds that are good and I never finished them. But. My heart is in Vardin and the teams and so. Not a lot of fanfic going on.
Finally, I'm discovering that I'm still an immersion writer. Doesn't seem to matter what I do, I do it in spurts. I find myself writing only two storyworlds at a time for a swath of fic and poetry, then shifting which two, but no more than that. The ideas proliferate crazily while I'm doing it and I have to make notes for stories I'm not really ready to get into. In short, I get full up on a world and it crowds out most of the others. Right now, I seem to be in Vardin and Seven Days or Kingdoms and Thorn. Breath and Faeology beckon, but I keep telling them to wait their turn.
Do storyworlds or types get in your blood and out again? Any thoughts on scribbling ficlets when the muse keeps churning out story ideas you don't have time to work on?
Ah, these days I'm having trouble finding mental space for my stories! First there was an inlaw visit and Easter, then a sinus infection took me out for a week, and now we're suffering a heat wave! Writing belongs to my normal life, once I can find where that's hiding again....
:hugs: I have been there. Once I realized my headspace had vanished on the new job, I didn't even try until I saw some actual nooks and crannies reappear. Now, they're back, but not too many of the chunks that let me percolate and really work on a medium-sized work. Here's hoping normal life finds you soon!