Dusting off ancient bits of writing vs. Gloving up again.

I must say that my Halloween project kind of wore me out. I’m spent. I don’t feel like writing, the sudden.* This happened last year, too. Something about October fires me up, and then I burn out come November.

I feel bereft of ideas. I have old ideas, but they’re old because they’re not good. Or because I don’t know what to do with them. I have some others, but nothing fully baked. Point is, the last thing I want to do right now is click on blank document and see a bunch of white space that needs filling up. I’ll come around. I always do. But I feel like a brittle, empty husk right now.

When I feel that way, I sometimes retreat to my archives. My archives are housed on old, gunked up computers that I’ve replaced but haven’t had the heart to dispose of. Or on floppy disks requiring old, gunked up computers to be pulled out of closets and hooked up. I like to dig around and see what good I can find in there. It makes me happy to go back and read things I wrote a long time ago that don’t completely suck. Most of them have never been read by anyone else. Sometimes I find things I haven’t read in years, sometimes decades. Last night I came across something not too shabby that I wrote in the 90s. Yes, you read that right. I said “not too shabby,” then mentioned the 90s. Some of you weren’t even alive then. Which is funny because I’m not sure I’m alive right now.

Anyhoo, sometimes I get the hankering to post some of that stuff. And sometimes I do. And sometimes I think better of it. Last night, I came awfully close to posting an excerpt from an unfinished novel, but I stopped myself. Why? Good question. It didn’t seem half bad, and I didn’t have anything else to post. But that’s why. It’s never a good idea to post something because you don’t have anything else to post, now, is it? Or is that what I’m doing right now? It is. Maybe. I think. But this other thing would have been over 2000 words, and very few people read posts that long. And it would have begun in medias res, in the middle of things, and not because of the brilliant decision made by whoever wrote it (whoever I was back then) but because it was an excerpt lifted out of a larger story that the burnt out writer posted because he was burnt out and had nothing new to post. And it would have had no middle and no end.

It would have been a bad decision to post it. I do make bad decisions from time to time, but I would prefer not to. And it could be argued that by posting this, I’m doing just what I should not be doing.

But this is only 500 some-odd words, not over 2000. And it could also be argued that I’m choosing to face that blank screen I didn’t want to face.

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*Stole that one from PV.J. Hope you don’t mind, Old Sport.

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