The Productivity of My Hiatus

...no pressure, no fucks given

I’m not gonna lie, I have enjoyed this break. I needed it. And even though it is mostly driven by me needing to devote time to solving some problems in my personal life, it’s helped clear my head. Sure, there is the stress of the looming doom and gloom if I don’t quickly figure out my living situation, as my current place was only temporary, but taking a writing break has let some air out of the balloon that only seemed destined to pop.

One thing that I have been able to do with the extra time is to finally read the books of some of my friends, colleagues, and contemporaries. It has also let me catch up on some manga that I wanted to finish or revisit.

Additionally, and as I stated in my previous update about this hiatus, I cannot turn my creative brain off. So, the pondering and mulling over of my future stories has been evolving things quite rapidly. Ideas are rushing in sometimes faster than I can write them down. With that, the story and all its little twists, turns, and coolness are developing very, very well. In fact, I’d say that the ideas that are coming to me now are surprising and reinvigorating. I’m really excited to get into these next books even if I am still not sure on the sequence of the releases, due to some of the new plot factors that have come to me.

While I have to sort all that out, each day I’ve gotten a few steps further ahead. This next Fenrik Side Quest is going to be batshit crazy. The only way I can really describe it is something akin to Ridley Scott’s Black Rain mixed with Silent Hill and then turning into the second half of Hellbound: Hellraiser II. It’s a weird, dark story with Yakuza, ninjas, monsters, demons, and an immensely powerful eldritch horror. It also fills in the blanks and builds off of the reveals in the two previous books’ epilogues. Furthermore, it sets up the final stretch of the Barbarians of the Storm saga.

I honestly feel that once I solve this living situation (which could happen in the next few days) and get through this very hectic month at the real job, this book is going to flow out of me like piss from an alcoholic gorilla.

Anyway, it has been nice to give less fucks, overall. It’s been really great somehow finding a way to take pressure off of myself, which has been pretty impossible for me to do in the past. It’s also been really fun having the time to read great stories from my friends. And what I have learned is that regardless of my real life stressors over the last year, I need to regularly give myself more time between projects to recover. My superhuman work ethic is great at producing results but it is also great at making me want to bash my head against the sidewalk.

Strangely, as I have discovered, recovery time and no pressure allows for the creativity to push its way forward more rapidly. I guess that should be common sense, but I have never claimed to have any.