Holy shit am I bored.
I don’t typically obsess over things. Sure, a TV show or book series will grab me by the throat and drag me along with it (Downton Abbey and Sanditon are my latest drugs) but when I’m done with them, the soreness of not having the characters around lasts about a week before something else comes along and distracts me. I go to a boxing gym to essentially assist people with their obsession (punching and being punched attracts some interesting humans). Video games were kind of my thing growing up and early in college, but I don’t have the stamina for playing them for hours at a time. Reading isn’t hitting the spot like it used to. Neither are horror movies and podcasts.
After graduating college in 2012, my focus was on finding a decent job and getting my life settled. I limited myself to a single hobby: writing. Writing has always been my go-to hobby. I love creating characters, world-building, messing around with language and sentence structure. It’s all awesome, and I love it. Just not lately.
One of my mild writing obsessions over the past decade has been a trilogy where I strip away the veneer over the hero’s journey structure/trope/formula to create something of a modern myth. I love myths and epics and the way they display how our collective ancestors processed their perception of the world, themselves, and their places in it. It’s interesting to see and experience how we’ve intellectually evolved into 21st century content-consumers who think we’re smarter than everyone in the past. I like them so much that I’ve procrastinated, drafted, brainstormed, daydreamed—did everything but write—this convoluted mess of a story for the past ten years. But for the past four years alone, I’ve done everything I can to avoid writing this trilogy, including writing seven completely unrelated books. I always came back to my story-obsession, though. I couldn't get rid of it. I didn’t want to.
Last year was my “buckle down and get this shit written” year. No more tossing out drafts. No more constant brainstorming in Word. No overly complicated plot and subplot outlines smashed into whichever spreadsheeting program I was going to use. No moving on to some other story. Just sit down and write it.
I did. I wrote over half a million words last year. The books are drafted and currently going through various phases of beta and sensitivity reading before the editor gets her goblin claws into it.
A normal person would feel accomplished. And I do. That trilogy is finally out of my brain immortalized on paper. I like how the story unfolded. I love the main characters, Jo and Lucy, so much. My shoulders literally feel lighter for not having this weighted shadow of an untold story hanging off me.
But now I’m bored.
It’s like I have nothing pushing me forward. Each book I’ve written in the past five years was pushed through by telling myself, “If I get this one done, I can go back to working on Jo and Lucy.” Then I would get it done, work on Jo and Lucy for a bit, then go back to writing something else. Now that Jo and Lucy are finished, I have absolutely no motivation. I don’t want to read. I have no interest in writing anything new. Movies don’t really excite me. Between being sick, lazy, and this snowstorm, I haven’t been to the gym in two weeks. The only thing I look forward to at all are the beta readers’ comments and my weekly D&D meet up.
It’s winter, so I don’t really have any yard work to do. I’ve watched every YouTube video about slow traveling in retirement that is available. I cruised through all Sanditon and the first three seasons of Downton Abbey in almost three weeks. I’m reading a friend’s book and like it, but I don’t feel pulled toward it. Turning on the computer to play games feels like work. My brain feels like the tendril of a cucumber plant, whipping around and searching for the next highest rung on the trellis but finding nothing. I’m in the weirdest mindset in my life and have no clue what to do.
This is not how I expected 2025 to begin. At a personal level, anyway. All the “interesting history” we’re collectively living through hasn’t been a surprise. My credo has always been to control what I can control and keep my head down. Lots of folks want to make a splash and be remembered, but I’m only running after enough of a sense of security that I can feel content day to day until I finally retire and die.
Anyway, that’s it. That’s the blog post. I honestly don’t have much to say about anything, so this is probably more of an online journal than a blog. Everything is just very “meh” after a year of charging through this fun adventure with a pair of fictional characters that I’m hopelessly in love with. It kinda sucks, too.
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