Here’s the thing about coming out of an extended creative burnout: It’s so easy to get overwhelmed by the possibilities. Let me explain. Over the next little while I’d like to re-vamp this blog which will involve researching similar blogs, engaging in the community, re-organizing my layout, and overall planning an actual direction for this blog. On top of that, I have 3 active WIPs, one of which I’ve started posting, one serial book series I’m working on with an editor, one solo book I’m working on, a multi-book series I started with a friend in desperate need of polishing (and finishing), and just single page outlines of stories I would love to write in the future.
(NaNoWriMo, is that you I see looming in the near future?)
“Wow that’s a lot,” you might say. And it is. A lot. And I haven’t been able to work on any of it for the last 5-7 years. Yes, YEARS. Most of my projects were completely abandoned near the end of 2016, and I have not picked most of them up again until this year. And for all those years I desperately wanted to write. I would yearn to sit at my computer and take the stories in my head, and put them on a page. But I couldn’t. I even opened things, and read them over, and I’d get to the end of what I’d written, and there was nothing there. My brain was empty. An all-consuming void.
It’s really a weird feeling to want to do something so desperately, and have your body be unable to execute that desire. Part of this, I have learned, is the executive function issues that come along with ADHD and Autism. But the other part of it was feeling so emotionally and mentally drained that not even an ounce of energy was left for anything else. And now that I’m finally coming out of that, I’m struggling to find a routine. And there exists an oxymoron between the ADHD, perpetually impulsive on the fly side of me, and the autistic, thriving on structure, routine, and hyper organization side of me.
Because I want to commit to a single story. I want to edit it, and perfect it until it’s polished… But I also want to start that new story… and that other new one… and that story that I just dreamed about last night….. Oh, but now I wanna go back to that original story, because those other ones aren’t grabbing my interest as much anymore… And how do you really engage readers with your content, when your ADHD brain really only wants to work on whatever’s most interesting at that time.
And so this is where I find myself, trying to manage creative overwhelm. The absolute, complete opposite of what I had been struggling with. Because there was nothing, and now it’s all here, bombarding me, all at once.
Send help.
Tempest in a Teacup 