It’s a tough choice right now. Obviously, I haven’t been keeping the blog up. Obviously, I have left vacant my seat at the bar. Far too often have I left it vacant.
I wish I could say the words had stopped because there were no more words… Well, at least I wish I could say it was because there was no more need for the words. But that would be a lie. There still is a need. There still are thoughts and emotions and dreams crying out to be written.
There still are my ghosts, haunting the back of my mind, crying out to be heard…
Crying out to be written.
But I’m a creature of habit. I’m a creature of habits far more bad than good, by the way — one need only look at my current waistline to know that. Writing is, for me, a thing of habits, too. It is a thing of momentum, and of focus. When everything is clicking — when I am writing with that full momentum behind me — it is an unstoppable urge. I could no more stop my fingers on the keyboard than I could stop my lungs.
When I stop, however…
When the inertia takes over, when Newton’s 1st Law is proven all too true about objects at rest…
Yeah, to start up again after you have surrendered all movement? Yeah, that’s the hard part. Something has to act on that object to get it moving. Something has to act on me…
To put it in plot terms, there needs to be — yet again! — some inciting incident. In our stories, out protagonists start out at equilibrium. Whether that stasis is a thing of happiness or misery doesn’t matter, they are at rest until something or someone* acts on them to change that equilibrium into the motion required for both plot and character development.
*Us writers, we’re the stone-throwing, stasis-breaking bastards that ruin everything. When you get right down to it, we are entropy incarnate.
I’m right back at Chapter-freaking-One. I’m right back at “It was a dark and stormy night…” and I don’t like it one bit.
Of course, there had to be an inciting incident to even get me going this far — how many thoughts and urges have I let pass without so much as scratching out a single word in the past months? Too many to count. So what was, that thing that drove me to write? That drove me to reconsider my silence? That made me acknowledge my own inertia?
The bill.
No, honestly, it was the invoice for my upcoming renewal for this seat at the bar. Now look, a blog is cheap to own and run. I know this. Hell, you probably know this, too. A custom web address with a .bar domain? Yeah, that ain’t so cheap.
So I looked at my notes and drafts to check if it was worth it to keep things up. That’s when I noticed just how long it had been since I had posted a piece here.
Then, of course, I had to go and look at the dates on my fiction stuff…
*sigh*
Those ghosts…they’re screaming at me right now.
Even with all the screaming; even with all the voices; even with all the need…
I still can’t make up my mind.
{Musical Note — because, dammit, there has to be music!}
Finding My Way Out 