Okay, apparently I wasn't really up to getting hammered on this week. It kept on going since the last post with one of the original beta readers finally responding after seven months with opinions that were... less than positive. Admitedly, it wasn't his prefered genre, style, or native language, but still kind of rough. Someone at the writing group managed to get a few comments in that basically implied that none of my writing was worth note; I know I shouldn't take that one positive but it took me by surprise.

So, I found myself sitting on the chapter for my serial and no words were coming. Not just the general sluggishness of a toddler bouncing on my lap sluggish but an honest writer's block. All I could think of was how I was doing everything wrong, that my writing sucked, that no one will ever want to read it. Opinions over the last week just kept welling up and I kept getting more depressed.

I managed to get the first draft of the chapter out, but it was like swallowing something that had little skulls floating over it, the slimey overpowering taste of failure (apparently it tastes like Cheetos).

And... then did something else. I decided that cleaning up my movie collection is a nice distraction. Write a few Python programs to manage TMDB retrievals and got it to cache information for almost every movie I've ripped in the last few years. I also got it to download poster images using mfgames-tmdb (which I wrote) so I can get new images faster.

I'm adding a Stuff category to my blog. I realize that I have too much "Stuff" which doesn't really further my life but it is just there. My LEGO and DVDs are two good examples of Stuff.

This is hard right now. I'm not going to give up, but I keep thinking maybe I should. Nothing seems right and nothing I write sounds good, reads well, or seems... right. I just don't have it but I don't know what it is.

I have something I can work on, just to keep moving forward, but it is getting to one of those points where one of my mottos is coming up again and again.

Just keep swimming.