This question comes about after chatting with one of my fellow Squids. He's not a brony, but he draws art and is nearing the end of his term of service and doesn't plan on re-enlisting as he's lost a lot of his inspiration to draw.

This stuck with me and I didn't know why until I looked at my stories and noticed a trend of it taking longer for me to push out chapters. I enlisted in 2015 and since then I've seen a drastic increase in the time it takes me to publish chapters. I, too, have lost a lot of my inspiration just as my buddy did.

So my question to all you folks is: have you seen the same loss of inspiration?

Definitely. I used to love writing, but I just can't find the motivation or self love of my work to actually bring myself to finishing a lot of my stuff. That's one of the biggest downsides to being in the active military: you spend so much time doing literally everything for everyone else, and you're still expected to make time for yourself. Often times, you barely even have enough time during the weekdays to get shit done, and by the time you get off work around 1830-1900 after being there since 0500? All you want to do is sit in the shower and fall asleep.

The only real motivation for cleaning a barracks room, in my experience, is so that your leadership doesn't have an excuse to make your life even more of a living hell than it already is. And yet, like Stockholm's, you're still in love with being in the military. Everyone except for officers are super salty after they get out when they spend longer than five years in.

I wrote about half of my current catalogue while not in the military after college, and I had a job that afforded me essentially the entire night with a few breaks in between to brainstorm or write out a chapter. once I got in, the time was somewhat still there when I was in flight school because there was a set schedule and no extra nonsense going on outside of it. Once I got to a regular unit though, the time began to evaporate as field problems and deployments and just day to day stuff began eating away at the motivation to make time to write. On the other hand I feel I'm pretty accurate with the way the Army works if I ever had to write a story about that, so thats cool I guess.

It feels good to seem some people are still active here.

7120411 Can confirm, 12 hour shifts at my last command destroyed my life. Barracks inspections motivated me to make E-5 and get out of the Barracks.

7120420 Same on all accounts. I was still pushing out content at a reasonable pace all through A and C schools, but once I got to the fleet everything just went straight down the drain. But yeah, at the same time I can now write decent military fiction and characters who can represent that mentality and lifestyle.

Pretty much yes, Military has killed my strive to finish my stories. Plus the shows ending put my interests in MLP typ a low.

I still love it and will be a Brony, but 6 years ago I was in it big. Not any more.