Writing Blog

20220817 Ideas... and then?

August 17, 2022, 7:45pm

After finishing the book a few days ago, it's been weird. I'm not sure if it's because the work was non-fiction and was started back in 2017 or if finishing it felt like closing a chapter on a part of my past, but what normally follows has not, well, followed.

See, after I complete a novel or novella, a short story normally pops out the same day, or the next day at the latest. Fully formed and can be up to 5k words in length. It's like the mind has built up so many ideas that it just needs to belch out the last of them. I will also say that after a long short story (say 8k words or more), a drabble pr poem often finds its way into the world.

This week... not good.

There's a drabble challenge here at WdC  , and I can normally write something within an hour of the prompt going up. Two days this time, and even then it was a struggle. Yesterday, I did a negative review, which was something. And then today, I had an idea. I wrote about a page and a half before the idea sort of petered out. Another idea, less than half a page. A 3rd idea, a page. A 4th idea, a page. A 5th idea, a quarter of a page. And now I've been watching YouTube videos as my brain churns and nothing comes.

This is weird for me. Ideas are there, but they're not coming out. So I wrote another negative review and now I'm writing this.

It's something, I guess.