I am hoping that, by writing the above, I can banish the writer's block that's been plaguing me, and I'll be able to get some work done on the many things that have been sitting untouched. The one aspect that seems to have suffered least is my poetry. I haven't been writing nearly as much as I should, but I'm at least not completely blocked in that area. Anything other than poetry, though, has been waiting in the wings for quite a while now.
I think the lack of writing is probably attributable to a couple of things in my life: happiness and stress. While I know those two things don't typically go together, I'm finding they're the two occurrences that make me least likely to put pen to paper (or fingers to keys). When I'm stressed (as I increasingly find myself lately), I often retreat from many things I enjoy, which leads to depression, which makes me even more apathetic and less likely to do anything outside of sleeping and working. Happiness, likewise, influences my writing (or lack thereof) because I am an angsty writer. I write my best when I am upset or feeling particularly morbid. When I stop to consider how wonderful my life is and how happy I truly am, I'm less inclined to write about the nonexistence of love or some other suitably jaded topic. Love, especially, has been difficult to write since I have no experience in writing about love gone right.
I have an excruciatingly vivid imagination, but, when it comes to "true love," my imagination falls horrifically short. I am going to attempt to remedy that, though. I'm still not sure that I can bring myself to write a "happily ever after" story, but I definitely feel the urge to attempt something a bit more realistic. While I'm immensely happy in my own relationship, I'm not stupidly so. I have very realistic expectations of how difficult things are going to be for The Boy and me. They haven't exactly been a walk in the park thus far.
About a year and a half ago, a close friend of mine and I started working on what we imagined would become at least 2 novels, though we were aiming for a trilogy. For the time, it's teen fiction and the heroine is much like we were at eighteen. The problem I have with long works of fiction is that I get lost in the details and lose sight of where the story should go. I'm great with the intricacies of a scene and I would rate my descriptive capabilities pretty highly, but I'm lousy with a general outline. My friend is wonderful with the outline, but she gets bored with the details (there is reason that we claim to each have one half of the same brain). For the first few chapters (all we managed to accomplish before real life intervened), our method worked extremely well. She would draft a chapter to give me a basic idea of what was going on, and I would fill in the details. We actually have a few very good chapters and an intriguing prologue.
My goal for this summer is to get some work done on the book. Each of our bucket lists includes becoming a published authoress, and I intend for my work to be published in more than a non-profit teen magazine (Teen Ink, for those of you who are wondering). There is also the wonderful thought of being able to make some money from my writing that keeps me itching to write more, even when I'm suffering from the world's worst case of writer's block.
Meanwhile, I'll keep rambling until I find something worth putting pen to page.
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