#oops turns out I did write a big ol' post mortem

[dumb-hat]

All The Nothing You Want

At one point, I had an ambition to write a big ol’ post-mortem on my FFXIV Write 2020 experience. It was my first time partaking in something like that and, fresh off it, I had a lot of thoughts about it. Now we’re a week and a day out from it, and I’m at work, and I’m tired, and man, I just can’t remember things like I used to. 

Also, like... It seems kinda silly to write a post-mortem on a challenge that I didn’t engage all that thoroughly with. I’m certainly proud of the output I did have, don’t get me wrong, but you can definitely tell the point where I lost steam. So, I guess, let’s start there. What happened?

The first week and a half of the challenge were great for me. I struggled with a few of the prompts, but it was a good struggle; the sort that makes you stretch your legs a little and test your boundaries. About 12 days in, some sorta real life stuff cropped up (and largely, not even my stuff) and it seemed like it was time to take a break. Just a day or two, plus I could make it up on Sunday, right?

As much as I had enjoyed having a steady reason to write again—something I hadn’t done in years, since college, really—the allure of taking a break was really, really seductive. I write Evander as having some pretty gnarly executive dysfunction, so it’s probably not a surprise to anyone that I struggle with ADHD. It’s definitely a case of “write what you know,” for me, even if very little of his life beyond that makes sense to me. I don’t think this is uniquely or wholly an ADHD experience, but I bet it’s familiar to a lot of people with ADHD brains: Sometimes, nothing feels better than taking a break. Even when it’s something you’ve been happily plugging away at, something you’ve been looking forward to every day, it just feels so good to let yourself ignore it for a day. And then after that, it’s just two days. And then... I stopped writing around the 12th prompt. I picked it back up on the 17, and stuck it out until the 20th. Then I fell off until the final, 30th prompt, which... I actually really liked that one. I felt like it was a pretty strong finish for me, and it worked out just wonderfully that it tied back perfectly to another piece I had already written. I wish I’d been more diligent, but I can’t say I regret the writing I didn’t do. Even without a great daily habit, I think the challenge helped me stretch my legs, encouraged me to RP more, to collaborate with people and read just an absolute wealth of great material from people I both knew well and not at all. Most importantly, it helped me find some joy in writing regularly again. Maybe if I’m lucky, or can manage to make it a priority, I can even hang onto that until the next writing challenge. We’ll see. In a way, that’s me in a nutshell: I started strong, took a break and then just settled down comfortably in the alluring embrace of comfortable inertia, and in the end, things were fine. Coulda done better, but I don’t mind.

So then the challenge ended, but oddly enough, the break from the challenge didn’t. I wasn’t kidding when I referred to it as “alluring” and “seductive.” My favorite Calvin & Hobbes strip famously reads “There’s never enough time to do all the nothing you want.” It’s made it hard to get back into tumblring, into being a tumblrer, one who tumbls, but I’m going to work on that. I’m going to quit taking that break (or maybe just take a break from it, who can say) and tackle the drafts and asks and tags and mentions and inboxes and whatnot that I put aside a little over a month ago.  Then... I dunno. I’ll write some more. That was fun and cathartic, turns out. I guess I forgot that at some point. Maybe I’ll go back and finish the prompts I didn’t for this challenge. Maybe I’ll hunt down prompt lists for the previous years and see if anything looks fun. Maybe I’ll collaborate on some fun stuff with some of my wonderful friends. Maybe I’ll make some new ones. Hey, maybe we should RP.

#ooc #with apologies to watterson and dylan #oops turns out I did write a big ol' post mortem