I’ve taken…holy cow…almost the entire year so far off from writing fiction. Most of the time off has been spent working on other projects such as the card game and setting up some the initial business stuff required for that.
And, yeah, designing and playtesting 52 Dragons has been so much fun. I can’t wait until it’s released, and I’ve got plans for not only expansions to it, but also for a handful of other games. I’m feeling pretty good about the game design thing as a whole.
But during this whole process, one phrase continued to play over and over in my head:
You should be writing.
Yeah, we all go through that don’t we? If you follow other writers on Twitter or Instagram, you’ll see like millions of memes with that same phrase in it.
But it’s true. I should be writing. No matter how successful I may or may not be in other areas, it always comes back to that one thing.
Writing
Everything non-writing thing (ebay, the game design company, the day job) it’s all with the goal of eventually getting to the financial place where I can write full time.
So I’m starting to feel like doing all of this non-writing stuff with hopes that it will lead to more time to write is in some ways misguided. Getting out of the habit of writing regularly is also making it more difficult to get back in.
That all changes this month.
I have to start writing again. No more excuses or “wait until”s… or anything like that. It’s a new month and writing and blogging will once again be a new priority. Writing because I need to, and blogging because it reminds me of that and also keeps me inspired. (And yikes, I only posted 1 time in August. That’s a career low :0 )
I know you don’t really need to hear my whole life story, nor my excuses for not writing, but I like to share stuff like that sometimes, because I know that all of us writers go through this every now and then. Other stuff gets in the way of writing and we have to force ourselves to get back in.
What I’m planning to do is to set some new goals. I’m not quite sure which long term project I want to work on next, so I might just stick to short stories for a little while. In fact, I have my first new short story in forever being published next month at Constant Readers, which is really cool since it’s a Stephen King tribute site, and you probably know, he’s been my writing inspiration from the beginning.
Apart from that, I’m just going to take it slow and get whatever done that I can. I’m in the final redesign of the card game, but I still need to rewrite the manual and create some promo videos before I can launch the pre-release.
I’ll keep working on that, become a little more active here, and no matter what, start writing even just a tiny bit every day. So keep me in your thoughts 🙂 And happy writing!
Have you taken an extended vacation from writing? What led to it and how did you get back in the habit? Leave a comment and let us know!
Image by engin akyurt from Pixabay
