blergh week

Went out to the aquarium with Steph and uilos in the rain on Sunday, which was great fun: light-up jellyfish! adorable otters! the octopus!. Also probably an error in judgement, since I've spent the rest of the week in a sinus-infected fog. I've been self-medicating with lots of tea and honey, which tastes faintly terrible but does stop my throat from hurting. It all tipped over from "muzzy" to "miserable" sometime last night. Hoping it's on the upswing now.

Lots of stuff going on this week. Got our official Landing paperwork, which will make us permanent residents. It will likely not be acted on until late May, since they recommend you not travel out of the country between the time you land and the time you actually get your permanent resident card, and Feb thru May is when we do most of our travel. Still, that's ... somewhere between "a relief" and "exciting."

Also received an invite to an invite-only gaming convention in Niagara in mid-April, and started looking seriously at the amount of time I'm taking off work in the next few months. It's ... excessive. Twenty days in three and a half months. I think it'll be good for me, though. First up: the week-long Sun Trip at the end of February to ... somewhere as yet undetermined. I suppose I should get on with determining that.

on not writing

Some links about not writing, which have been open in Firefox for the past month or more because my response keeps being "this is helpful" crossed with "i do not have the emotional bandwidth for this to be as helpful as it could be."

Flight or Flight as Applied to Writing: "It was a trigger-state choice: I wanted to run. Therefore, I chose to fight, and I felt better fighting than running." This is deathly familiar to me.

Writing In Life: "A riverbed doesn't stop being a riverbed in periods of drought. A writer doesn't stop being a writer while raising children, loving families, caring for friends, or enduring and processing emotional upheavals." (Have I mentioned that Blair is smart? Because Blair is smart, and also kind and perceptive.) (Related, Creative Fatigue.)

I'm not willing to say that writers' block doesn't exist: a lack of ideas to write about has never, ever, been my problem but that's not to say it isn't someone else's. My blocks are of my own making, primarily of exhaustion and fear.

2013: A Learning Year: Managing Expectations: "If I'm calling it a Learning Year, what exactly did I learn?" Answer: "I am saner and happier and more me when I write." Yeah.

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I am personally offended by the 'graphomania or gtfo' crowd, and I don't know that I've ever really laid out why. You know the types: the ones who spout 'if you don't have a burning NEED to write then you have no business being a writer' nonsense, who hand out the poisonous 'if you can possibly do anything else then do that' advice to aspiring writers. I'm perfectly capable of not writing. I burned years of my life shutting down that part of myself, because the messages I heard were that I wasn't dedicated or passionate enough to be a Real Writer. Sure, I was miserable, but that was all my own fault for not being a Real Writer.

"But that proves it," you say. "You're miserable without writing! See, you Have To Write!" To which I say cheerfully, fuck you. It is a goddamn miracle that I am alive and breathing right now, because making myself miserable to be what other people wanted me to be was a survival strategy for longer than I care to recall.

I'm starting to get over that now. I still get angry every time I see or hear someone pushing that crap, because I'm only starting to get over it. It still sounds like "you, tucker, have no business writing," and it still sounds almost true enough to take hold. And if I don't get angry at it, it will take hold, and it will eventually strangle me, all because you thought it'd be cool to hold up your creativity as some weird combination of Special Flower and Vicious Taskmaster.

So, contrariwise, anything that tells me 'it's okay to not write all the time' is a lifesaver. A small kindness, and something to be treasured.

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My tag for noodling about writing is 'not writing,' from something Gene Wolfe once said: "To be a writer, you must write. And no amount of prep-work is writing. Research is not writing. Taking notes about the world is not writing. Thinking about writing is not writing. Only writing is writing."

It's nonjudgemental, it's not prescriptivist, and it leaves it as something you, the writer, or aspirational writer, have control over.