(I started writing this before the thing I posted this morning, but maybe there’s some value in it.).
I’m sure I have talked about exhaustion before. It’s not always characterised by not being able to get up and do things, at least not for me. The thing that characterises it is sitting down at my desk and slipping into a state of repetition of small useless actions that lead nowhere. This, I suppose, explains my recent gravitating towards playing games that have a degree of chicken-press-button then chicken-get-reward flow.
It’s not that there has been a total lack of ideas, just that the flow has been slowed to a point where it is barely perceptible. For me, it is strange and distressing and the frequency that trammels the rut on either side starts to make me feel like my communications are going nowhere and that I should dam them up. You have to fight against this. I know there are people who think the whole global situation currently in play is
But I have been having ideas, and they have kind of been trickling out, and I like to think that they are not small ideas. You see things like Dune, The Matrix, and Foundation and your admiration for the scale of the project and the vision contained within it make you want to expand your own vision and encompass everything you can.
I wrote a poem about routine as an escape from exhaustion — forcing myself past the point where I have no energy and using that slow-building momentum to create some level of energy.
The other thing to do is to work out a way to kill distractions — this is one of the hardest things. There are so many distractions for you to disappear into, and the amount of time that you can lose to this is amazing. Having read the journals of more than a few writers I am seeing that I am definitely not the only one who has trouble maintaining focus. For a moment some of the distractions allowed me to skirt around the blocks I was getting on forward progress with my stories, but then they started to eat away at the time that I used to use for the build-up period before writing; the composting mode where all the stuff I have dropped in the hopper rots into something that a story can grow in.