Lacking Inspiration

Every so often I sit down to make a post here and realise that, for whatever reason, my mind is a blank. Whatever I had planned to write has either gone out of my head completely, or else suddenly seems unimportant. There are a lot of reasons for this: sometimes it is because I'm feeling unwell, sometimes I'm too preoccupied with other stuff and sometimes, like today, I've had a shitty day. Today was the day that I finally had it confirmed that the world truly has gone mad and that this country really is a banana republic. However, as all of this is work-related and I'm not prepared to discuss anything directly connected to my day job here anymore, (too many people can connect Doc Sleaze to the real me these days), I can't elaborate. Suffice to say that I now find myself in a quandary, contemplating what to do with information I now have. Doing nothing isn't an option. But the question remains as to what exactly to do, and when best to do it. That said, even before I can begin to answer those questions, I need to be clear in my own mind as to my motivation - I need to be sure that this isn't about evening a personal score or massaging my ego.

Anyway, getting back to my original point - lack of inspiration when it comes to posting here. I actually find these impasses quite useful. It's a surprisingly good intellectual exercise to force myself to write something, even when the ideas and creativity aren't flowing. The fact is that you can always find something to fill a few column inches. And once you start writing, it becomes inspirational - all those other writing projects which I couldn't make any progress on suddenly start to return to life. Over the past few days, for instance, I've been struggling to get started on a proper Halloween story for The Sleaze. I had an idea for a story, for sure, I even knew some of the scenes I wanted in it, but it was stubbornly refusing to take any kind of shape. The structure was eluding me and, without structure, I find it difficult to create. After several abortive attempts over the past few days, last night I finally managed an opening sentence I liked, but nothing else. But during the course of writing this, the structure has become clearer - I now have a pretty good idea of the story's shape and how it should progress from that opening line. Now, there's a chance that by tomorrow, when I'll finally have time to resume writing the story, I could have lost creative momentum again, but usually I find that once jump-started like this, the creativity keeps flowing. Well, there you are - I've written a post after all!