On Starting Out...again.

I've been staring at my blog, willing some kind of pertinent, intelligent post idea to pop fully formed from my mind and straight into the blogger editor. I've deleted two partial entries, mostly for being the kind of self-absorbed rage-filled crack that drives me nuts on other people's blogs. I'm reading to see other people's ideas, not their wildly out spun reasonings for overblown grudges because their husband forgot to do the dishes. Write that shit up and then delete it, yeah?

And then while I'm reading through other journals, I fall across Celeste's. I'm spun in, jealous and breathless, in two minutes flat. I used to have that - passion, excitement, wonder, inspiration. What the hell happened? I haven't written with adrenaline and spark in years.

Celeste isn't the only one here making me look at myself deep and carefully. The world seems to be conspiring to remind me of who I was, as a teenager, which was only a few years ago. I'm a few months short of 25. I've run across letters, written to my older self. Poems, from late high school, early college. Dreams and thoughts and hopes and fears. There isn't much from the last few years.

I'm married now. I've been in a stable relationship for 4 years. As my common sense and relationship pattern-recognition has grown, the tumultous crazy friends of yore have filtered away, either dumped by me or me dumped by them. I don't have room in my life for pointless drama. I still have friends - wonderful, supportive, interesting people. Who aren't out to sabotage anyone. (Which is a little strange, given past history.)

Damn it. Damn it damn it damn it. I never wanted to be that kind of writer. The person who only has something to say when everything is going to hell. I used to teeter on the brink of supposed chaos and consequence (the kind that would go away if you would just STOP AND THINK RATIONALLY for a goddamn minute), and the words flowed like frat-house beer. Not very good, frequently messy and unsophisticated, but plentiful. I stopped and thought rationally - and the words went away.

I let them.

I haven't written a fanfic, poem, short story, journal entry, or anything more complicated than a dungeon in...since I graduated. Three years. The dungeons are kinda fun, and I spend a lot of time on interesting plot, but I'm not exactly emotionally attached. I am going to sign up for Nanowrimo this year - for the first time, I have the time. But meanwhile, let's get back to the point.

I've been staring at my blog. And not writing. I think part of the problem is all the podcasts I listen to; or rather, that I think writing about their topics is cribbing, so to speak. I always have an opinion, but I'm not exactly going to write out long involved emails and send them all off - for one thing, I'm so backlogged the podkin would be receiving responses to crap they talked about 6 months ago. For another...I'm not sure. So, screw it. I'll do a whole series of Podcast Response. It's not cheating if you cite the source, right? :) Eventually it'll kickstart me into some of my own topics. And if it doesn't, I'll just rename this thing Pennanti's Podcast Paragraphs.

No, I didn't put Pagan in there. There's quite enough of that already out there, and they do it better than me.