Scary

Okay, it's official--I've started writing again. Although calling it that makes it sound like way more than it is. The other day, I wrote a few lines of free verse. That's definitely not writing. Just now, I opened up an old file and it was a story I'd started back in the 90s. I have no idea where it was going to go, what it was the story was to be about. It's possible that I didn't know then and that's why there were only about two paragraphs to it. I still don't know what it's about or what's going to happen next, but there's about four paragraphs now.

This is scary.

What I haven't been able to do yet is return to my novel. I'm just not ready for that yet. It's become even more difficult now, because it's about an advertising man in the 1980s and Mad Men is such an amazing, complex, show about advertising men in the 1960s...I'd be afraid of comparisons. I suppose if I just write what I know, what I meant to write back when I started it (again, in the 90s) and/or what I'd like to write now (as if I know what that is), it'll turn into something that feels right to me. Or at least something I'd be willing to show other people.

What's even scarier at the moment is that I really don't have any new ideas. And back when I was trying to write (yes, the 90s), I had no shortage of plots and characters and things I wanted to say. Most of which I recognized even then as prosaic and unimaginative and dumb, but they seem even more so now. I feel like such a naive, untalented person, why should I even bother? But that seems a pretty unproductive attitude, plus there's a part of me that feels that now that I've started again, I don't want to stop. Almost that I can't stop. Very nearly that I can't stop.