I believe these WriteBlogs were meant to be weekly, but obviously that hasn’t happened. Upsetting, because it means I hit that old blog cliche – a post opening with an apology for not blogging recently.
Shame I picked this time to drop off the WriteBlog schedule, as I was chuffed with the last one about comic scripting – nice balance between self-indulgent me-talk and links to worthwhile resources. Anyway, let’s move on. What’s been going down? Well, there was the Hobson & Choi birthday…
Double Trouble
As I’m sure you all know, due to being avid H&C fans, I did two chapters of the serial last week to mark our first birthday on the 17th of February. This was a very apt idea, but the execution of it utterly killed me. I really thought it wouldn’t be too hard – writing a chapter usually only takes a day or so, I had the necessary extra day spare – but then two things hit me:
ONE – real-life interruptions happened – occasions to be planned, other work to be done, pints of beer that wouldn’t drink themselves, that sort of thing. Frustrating, but survivable if not for…
TWO – I got stuck on the first of these chapters. H&C #54 just killed me, the bastard. I have an entire draft worth of material that I threw away. And even worse, it isn’t even material I can use later – all scrap. I’d “budgeted” two days to write both chapters, and ended up taking most of three days on just the first one.
Mustn’t get too doomy, I made it – thanks to the paranoid amount of padding I add into my schedule, I was able to have those problems but still get the chapters up. And then I tried to move onto another project and ran into a dead stop of uninspiration. Basically, my entire writing productivity for most of February is the previously-mentioned short comic script and meeting my self-imposed H&C deadlines. This, by my usual standards for a non-Christmas month, isn’t amazing. So, could this mean…
WRITER’S BLOCK – THE SCOURGE OF THE MIND
Hmm.
I’ve never got as far as saying Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist, but I’ve never accepted that it’s a condition all on its own. Yes, there are times in life when I’ve struggled to write due to external circumstances or the story just not working – or, as per ONE and TWO above, both of them at once when really damn lucky. Might as well call that writer’s block, it certainly blocks your writing.
So, not much to do beyond try to work around it – throwing my hands up and acting as if I’m cursed would just annoy me. Case in point – today, I fucked off the project I was stuck on (after emailing a couple of friends for help) and went to do something else. Not really a long-term solution, gotta go back to it eventually, but I got a decent amount done at a good speed today for once, and feel much better as a result. One reason why I’m back here doing this, I suspect.
Admittedly, I was going to write more tonight, but got distracted screwing around on Twitter. A major street in south-west London was flooded with sewage, you see, and there’s no way you can’t want to make puerile jokes about that burst of turd. It’s funny because it’s poo, after all. (Kudos to whoever on Twitter coined the term poonami.)
So I churned out a few quips, one of them got a few retweets and again, I feel better. And when I’m feeling beaten down and anxious about the state of things, I’ll take any good cheer I can get. Even if it is slightly embarrassing that my most “viral” Twitter effort in a few months is a joke about shite and undigested sweetcorn…
The worst part is, long after the #poonami has receded, local residents are going to be finding stray bits of sweetcorn EVERYWHERE.— Nick Bryan (@NickMB) February 27, 2014