Living Life · 2:39pm Jul 31st, 2012
>More than two months since last blog entry.
>ohmy
Hey there, watchers. I've been very scarce for a number of weeks now, and I think I owe you some explanation as to why.
First, the technical, physical reasons why: I've been busy with all kinds of stuff in real life, and my internet connection has been less than reliable (read: I've pretty much gone without one for a large part of this little hiatus). Thankfully, my internet's back and reliable now, and I've managed to figure out a schedule that fits all the fanfic/pony stuff I want to do in with everything else going on in my life.
Second, the more wishy-washy, less concrete and sympathetic reasons why: there came a point over the last half a year where I felt creatively stagnant and fell into more and more prolonged periods of writers block. My skeletons for the remaining Long Distance chapters were not at all well-paced, and I was having trouble coming up with much more than base ideas for new installments of I Dream of Daisies. I'm a creative person and I really don't feel good when I've got no inspiration, so I decided to do something about it.
For the first time in about a year, I took a full-on break from ponies. No /fic/, no FIMfic, no EQD, nothing pony at all (well, aside from a single chapter of Background Pony). It's a great show and I love the fan content (just look at my (bloated) estimated words read) but I needed to expand my horizons more than I'd been doing. So I watched some movies, read some books, and did some other creative things. I also fixed a guy's computer (quite an adventure of motherboard beep codes and hardware replacements that was) and learnt to type properly, so hooray for self-improvement.
Before my busy period, I think I made the mistake of giving myself too much time to write, seeing as I barely wrote at all during that time, really. I did not have a lot going on during the first half of this year, and I think that made me kind of lazy and a little listless. When you've not got much to do, procrastination hardly seems like a big deal.
What's more, the more time I gave myself to write, the less I ended up actually writing, because I just had too much free time and not enough to do, and without things to do, how could I write? Writing springs from inspiration and inspiration from life. I think we need to write to live, and not live to write (I half-remember a story about Stephen King buying himself a writing desk and having a similar problem).
But now that I've lived, I'm finally feeling recharged. I wrote about a thousand words of Long Distance Chapter 16 last night, and it was great. It just flowed. I've reworked the skeleton, and I'm going to hold myself to an at-least-1k-words-per-day writing rule from now on. I'm feeling psyched to write some more pony, and I hope to share that with you soon. Sorry for dropping off the face of the Earth like that.
PS: Oh, and I should mention that I'm busy converting http://derpy.me/EznGuide to HTML, for faster load speeds and other nice features. The excellent RogerDodger's provided the framework, and now it's really just up to me to reformat the doc and give it another content sweep. I'll probably add a few things as well, so watch out for that, I guess.
Huh, I was wondering where you'd gone. Nice to have to you back!
Also it's nice to see someone burn out on pony then actually come back =3
Awesome, it's good to hear from you. Taking breaks from ponies is good; I've been doing it a lot more as of late.
Great to hear from you, Ezn! And no worries about the hiatus. (Just getting through some of the same myself, eh.)