Writing and other nasty habits

[aadler]

Looking back on the year just past, I had to face something which had been gradually becoming apparent for some time. I don’t have the fire for writing that I used to.

Part of the “Well, duh-h-hh!” on that one came from plain output. In 2017 I only did two stories. That’s pretty lame. More telling is when I look back and see that I did only six total in 2016 and 2017 together. As a measuring stick, I did eight stories in 2003 alone, six each in 2005 and 2006, and seven each in 2012 and 2014. My recent output doesn’t match those peak years …

… but it does kind of match what I was doing when I first started out. My first four years writing Buffyfic, I averaged three stories a year. Granted, I was doing other things at the time (working two jobs, finishing graduate school, getting in a relationship with a woman who was way too young for me but too hot to pass up, then working another job that I hated so much that I joined the Army to get away from it), but that wasn’t the problem. My time on various deployments showed me that my biggest obstacle to writing wasn’t busy-ness — the Army does tend to keep you busy when you’re in a combat zone — but overabundance of distractions; as in, writing came a lot easier to me when I had no other recreation whatsoever. So, yeah, after I learned what kind of output I could manage, I kept up something similar even when I wasn’t on active duty, but the habit eventually seeped away when my regular civilian life turned into the only life I had.

That’s not the real worry, though. What I hadn’t recognized as a continuing issue (as distinct from an acknowledged but minor-and-occasional problem) is that I’m no longer reliable.

The last three times I’ve entered summer_of_giles, I’ve either finished my contribution in subsequent chapters after the event ended, or (in 2017) dashed off something that was substantially less than I had originally intended, just to not fail yet another time. The tendency is even more pronounced in remixes … and terribly so, since — with RemixRedux on hiatus the last few years — all my remixes have been at circle_of_friends, an event I originated and moderate. I’ve missed my own deadlines in three out of the last four years of circle_of_friends. One of those was in Phase 3 of the year when CoF had three phases, the latter two of which were voluntary; that, and the fact that it was the first time I had been so tardy, helped me pass it off as a fluke. It’s no longer a fluke, however, it’s pretty much the norm.

That can’t continue. If I’m no longer as interested in writing, I’ll just gradually move on to other things. If I am writing, though, I damn well need to meet such obligations as I freely assume.

Last year was a bad year for fic production, enough to catch my attention. This year has to be better. The recent pattern is no longer acceptable.