Bloggin' With Bitchass

Has It Really Been Since Thanksgiving?

Geesh... I guess it has, so maybe I'd better post something. I don't have any idea what to write about, so maybe I'll start by writing about writing. How appropriate!

First let me explain a few things to any of you who might be interested. If you're not interested, then look away until I tell you to look again. See, Bitchass has been away. Not away like going somewhere on a vacation, but more like all my energy to write went away and I came down with the worst case of writers block you can imagine. For the last couple of years, it had come fairly easy. Then a couple of things happened that took the wind out of my sails, and my writing went into a funk. It became harder and harder to even sit down and expend the energy.

This is how the process used to work for me. I'd have a vague idea for a story in my head, and I'd sit down at the keyboard and try to become whatever character I was writing about. My recurring characters were easiest, because each time I wrote about them it fleshed out the character more and more and made it a lot easier to become them. New characters are the hardest, but eventually they come around and develop their personalities. The hardest part for me was keeping the characters personalities separate. If I'm not careful they tend to start blending together.

If I was really inspired and into the character, the story would flow out right from the start. But most times it was more difficult for me. I would struggle for a while to get into the flow, going back countless times to rewrite certain parts, but eventually it would come, and the rest of the story would seem to write itself. If you've read much of my stuff, you've probably noticed that I have a much harder time stopping a story once it gets going.

One of the things that made writing easier was corroborating with a small group of others in this blogspace whose writing I really admire. I think my writing improved by leaps and bounds once I began to feel pushed to get better by reading stuff by quality storytellers like Billybear, Miss Tara, Lucky, and Ace, to name just a few. I don't mean to leave anyone out, but these were the people who were most involved on a day to day basis. To this day, I am totally awed by how Billybear can make a complicated storyline come together so effortlessly. I wish it came that easy for me, but I could never do what he does. And there were times that I laughed so hard at what he wrote that I about peed my panties.

I can't put my finger on exactly when I became completely blocked, but it was sometime after Lucky detonated the 10 pounds of C4 under his blog. I don't blame him because I knew his reasons for doing it, and by that time I had lost most of my inspiration for writing anyway. I tried to keep going by forcing stories out, but that usually shows in the finished product and the Emporer soon has no clothes.

I had a good opportunity to write some true life posts when Hurricane Ike and a few other storms visited the area. I thought the Ike stories turned out pretty well, but after the storms went away, so it seems did my writing.

So anyway, I'm hoping that shining the light of day on my writers block will turn things around and get me writing again. Maybe it will, and maybe it won't. I can't say for sure. I feel especially bad for disappointing my regular readers, and Miss Tara certainly deserves to read something new instead of having to depend on the old archives for a chuckle or two. Although, I confess that I too read the archives from time to time when I need a laugh. It's a damn shame that the Real World has interfered, but since Miss Tara, Billybear and Ace have been posting the occasional post, maybe there's hope that they will get going again too. Maybe even Lucky might find a way to resurrect his blog from the ashes. We can always hope.

Well that's about it for tonight. Anybody who looked away because they weren't interested can look back now.

Hopfully it won't be so long between posts this time!

little bitchass