The Rogue's Scribe: Creativity flows and halts at the same time

Sunday, March 10, 2013

Creativity flows and halts at the same time

Well, I'm once again full of fail.... I didn't attend the "temp post" to be a permanent one, but for the third week in as many months I seem to have failed at going back and posting the delayed update.

FAIL!

To be fair, the reason I missed last week's post wasn't because I was busy or lazy. It was because the week before consisted of little to no writing. I am completely stuck behind a Writer's Block.

Since I had talked about writing an inspirational postthree weeks ago I thought last week would have been the perfect time to go ahead and write it. One, I promised that if I didn't have much of an update - which I didn't - I'd work on that post. Two, it seemed fitting since my lack of update meant I'm in the same boat as some of you.

And then the post just took over and became this massive beast! Instead of at least attempting to go to sleep while Hubby was at work last week, I spent the seven hours he was at work writing last week's post. SEVEN. STRAIGHT. HOURS. Seven hours of collecting all of the "I can't do it" issues that my writers have come to me with. Seven hours of me gathering up my "yes you can" responses. Seven hours of finding articles online that could help motivate and inspire. Seven hours of me organizing and categorizing. Seven hours, and I still wasn't done when I had to leave to pick up Hubby.

When we got back home I tried to get back to work, but I was dead tired and napped before work. Throughout the rest of the week I kept going back and slowly worked on the post, but this thing is a beast! It's LOOOOOONG. Plus, I want to have the time to also update my Handy Links page to make sure all of the links I have in the post are also there. It's a bit of a task!

So I might break that post down in to two or three smaller posts, work on them off and on throughout the rest of March, and then drop them as a series during April while I'm on my Script Frenzy Hiatus. So keep an eye out for that.

Now, as for my writing. As I said, I still haven't written a word for the latest chapter of What Is Truly Meant To Be. So there goes two of my resolutions: Post a new chapter of WITMTB each month, and finish the full story by the end of 2013. That doesn't mean I won't still try throughout the rest of the year.

Anyway, I think I MIIIIIIGHT have the issue that's been holding me up figured out. I did end up sending inquiries out to DarkAngel1326, ChibiSunnie, and AngelBlood666. All three of them have been helpful with their advice. In fact, every time I log on to Facebook I seem to have a new message from DA with yet another article she found somewhere in hopes of helping me out. Now for me to return the favor and finish beta reading something she sent to me late yesterday. Poor thing is just as stuck as I am, so let's see if I can help her as much as she helped me.

In the meantime, I must struggle against a weird lack of desire to write. I'd much rather play video games.
I dunno. I guess I just feel tired and uninspired lately. I'm hoping to break myself out of the funk soon - even if by force.

One way I'm trying to "force" myself back in to writing - aside from keeping up with this blog - is to participate in a new writing challenge the Hey Arnold group is holding. Once every two weeks we'll be given a writing prompt; we have until the next prompt to complete the story. The prompt that started this challenge was given out on March 1st, and we have until the 15th to write our story. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with "Struggling with a moral dilemma".

Another creative outlet has once again become the X-Men Forum RPG that Hubby started up in June. We recently had a few new players sign up, which also resparked interest for the game for some old players. So now Hubby and I have been trying to figure out how to restart the story after the 2yr time skip he created when everyone slowed down posting.

He decided to use the same tactic as when we started officially role playing last year - jump-start everything with a real-time "mixer". He set a time on the first for everyone to try to be on the forum and we all enjoyed a little party role playing. It was fun and mildly eventful. It was a great way to meet the new players and have them interact with our old characters.

Unfortunately, there's been little activity on the forums since the mixer ended. It seems that no one really knows what to do with their characters when they're the only ones on the boards, and since we have so few players - only about nine people - it's rare to have two people on at the same time unless an (like the mixer Hubby hosted)online get-together is pre-arranged. Sadly, I'm one of those people. I still don't really know what I want to do with Lia and Willow now that there has been a 2yr time skip. I'm still figuring out how they changed over those years I guess.

However, the one character Devon is active again. The combination of reading his posts and obsessively listening to "My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark (Light Em Up)" by Fall Out Boy resulted in mini-inspiration. I have Willow, a wild-child prankster who can create illusions, and I have Lia, a magma-controller who can also be sort of considered a pyrokinetic. However, the angry passion of the Fall Out Boy song just calls to my inner pyromaniac. I wanted a character that was a pyrokinetic, but not as reserved as Lia. Essentially, I wanted a character who was crazy-impulsive like Willow, but with Lia's powers. Thus, a new character was born.

Whereas I had a mildly healthy chunk of backstory for Lia, and Willow's backstory is as bare-minimum as it gets, this new character's backstory is massive. I started writing and just didn't stop. It's almost a page long on its own. She is the first character that really took over and spoke to me in a while, so "YAY" for that. She feels like she'd be a lot of fun to play.

However, I'm also a bit fearful that I'll never get the chance to play her, for multiple reasons.

There are already easily 100 pyrokinetics in the normal Marvel universe. Add in Devon - who has his father's powers - and Lia, and my newest character may be one pyrokinetic too many.
I created the new character as someone to interact with Devon while he's considered a betrayer by the X-Men, but Devon's player already has three of his own original characters that he was going to throw in while Devon was on the run. Does he really need my character if he has so many of his own to interact with? Would my new character just complicate things too much?
With my character's personality and power combo, she may be too unstable and uncontrollable. Yes, I'm very good at not going overboard with my characters; being able to hold them back. Both Willow and Lia could probably be a lot more powerful than I'm allowing them to be. However, my newest character may be too volatile regardless.
I have two characters already that I'm not entirely sure I know what to do with. Do I really want a third character to run? Especially since it will be a little while before Devon would be ready to meet her? Also, considering that I'd pretty much exclusively use her to interact with Devon and his player has very limited internet access, so I could go days or weeks before I could do anything else with the character.

I'm still proud that I managed to write SOMETHING this week, even if she never joins the fray of the forum. Maybe if I don't end up using her for the X-men game I could find some way to rework her for one of my high fantasy stories. She'll most likely fight her way to the surface somehow. I won't be able to keep her confined in my head for too long, I'm sure.

Another bout of creativity hit me this week by way of avatar-making once more. Back when the X-Men forum game was first started up I was having difficulties visualizing what Lia and Willow looked like - as well as the other characters. I am a majorly visual person and have to have some sort of reference for nearly everything. So I started building a floor plan of the Xavier Institute so I knew where my characters were and where they needed to go to get to different rooms and such. I also found this pixel-doll making site.

Taking elements from multiple doll-makers and combining them in Photoshop, I started creating avatars of the different characters. Over the summer when I started this project I only managed to create Willow and Lia - along with an extensive "closet" so I could switch out their outfits whenever I needed to describe them in something other than their "every day" clothes. I have fun playing "dress-up" with them.

The process was long and tedious the way I was doing it originally, and so I stopped with my characters even though I wanted to do the full "cast" that we had at the time.

Well, something about the new characters got me obsessed with avatar making again. I even found a way to make them that was MUCH easier than how I was originally doing it. I'm breezing through the guys easily. The girls will be a bit trickier since there is easily seven-times more outfits I would have to sift through. Again, it will be fun to play dress-up.

Even with the easier set up, however, it is a bit time consuming. I've easily spent about 14hrs this week just messing with this stuff.