New Year, New Words

I’ve been out of the writing scene for some time now. It’s been more than 6 months since I’ve written anything worthwhile.

I’d love to tell you that the absence was due to some extenuating circumstances but, if the truth must be told, I don’t really have a solid reason. The last half of 2010 was certainly busy and stressful (in ways I won’t bore you with here) but no more so than previous years. In all honesty, I just don’t know why I stopped writing.

But I woke this morning blustering with resolve to get back to the keyboard. Certainly it has something to do with that crisp, fresh potential that January 1st always seems to bring, but there’s a little more to it than that. For the last six months I’ve felt a curious hole in my life. Something intangible but definitely there, and growing day-by-day.

I didn’t know what it was until my wife pointed out that I’m “not happy when I’m not writing”. It was one of those simple statements that just sank into me like an arrow. Too simple to be profound, but too profound to be self-evident. I realized that if there was just one resolution I aimed for this year, it should be to make myself happier… so it follows that I should be writing.

And here I am. Oorah as the Marines might say…

But my Neo screen is blank. My fingers have hovered, unproductive, over the keyboard for the past hour; my eyes closed, the only sound in the room my own tinnitus (I played one too many loud gigs back in my band years). Scenes and characters flitted across my minds eye, too fast to catch and too wily to capture, tantalizingly close but in the end no more than shadows and silhouettes. The old specter of perfectionism reared up too and no matter how many times I told myself to quit it and just start typing, it wouldn’t go away.

My screen is still blank.

I’ve just experienced my first writers block of 2011.

Oorah.

So I find myself here, firing up the old blog again. ‘Even if I can’t tell a story today, I’ll damn well write something’, I told myself. Perhaps later tonight or tomorrow the muse will visit me and the fingers will fly once more, but for now this post will have to do…

I hope I’m back. And I’m sorry I was gone for so long.

~CGW