Back in the Saddle

To the seven of you who actually read this blog, I must apologize. I haven’t been giving it the sort of love one must to foster a long and healthy relationship. Why? Because my mistress is back in town.

I’m writing again.

It’s funny, for a long time, I didn’t really enjoy writing. It was something I could do, so I did it. There was no inherent pleasure, for me, in the process itself. It was always something I wanted to have finished doing, not actually do. (I felt the same way about my wedding: I wanted to be married, I didn’t want the hassle of getting married. But I did. Huzzah.)

Then I started writing my first solo spec. (For a while, right out of college, I wrote with a partner who didn’t have a day job so he was able to spend long hours doing the heavy first-draft lifting while I could swoop in and do the rewriting. I’ve always been an editor.) And it was fun. I didn’t feel that page-60-barrel-stare that I had in the past. I even stayed up way past my bedtime. To write. Never did that before. Never liked it before.

And then I didn’t write, not for a good long stretch. Lots of reasons: work, newborn, toddler with newly diagnosed autism, the attendant mental exhaustion. In the middle of all of that came the Monster Attack Network comic book opportunity, which was fun, but the aformentioned shifting of gears (from writing in the screenplay format to the comic format) took a lot of work. One of life’s constants is that learning to think differently is hard—occasionally, so hard that most people never do it.

Adam and I wrapped M.A.N. up in November. In the time between then and now, I’d been experiencing something of a malaise and I wasn’t sure why. Career fatigue? Not quite. Depression? Nah. Sloth? A little, but gluttony is my achilles deadly sin. No, I finally realized I was unhappy because I wasn’t writing. Imagine that.

But we are now. A spec and a TV pilot, both to be wrapped up by spring. And it’s still hard, but it feels good. It feels fun. And, man, does fun count for a lot.