Dissatified on the creative side

I feel like I haven’t written in forever. I mean, I blog occasionally, but not at length. I write for the paper, but nothing really challenging aside from infrequent humor pieces. I haven’t written fiction… sigh since early summer.

NaNoWriMo’s coming up, and I’m dry on ideas. That’s straight from a lack of practice. Every idea I come up with is suspiciously like a story or character I’ve read of recently, and I’m not up for 50,000 words of fanfic. Even my diary writing has been sporadic and staccato in style. “I went to yoga. Yay! I binged again. Boo. Oh, well, better luck tomorrow.”

I’m realizing lately how important my creative endeavors are to my general happiness. My self-exploration, my self-expression, hell, the simple ability to string a few well-chosen words together usefully: all of these stem from my writing practice, and I haven’t been doing it. Over and over again recently, I’ve felt like my words are “lost”–I can’t write funny or witty little phrases in my newspaper pieces, I have trouble thinking of the elegant word I want to use for something, etc. It’s frustrating and I feel like I’m getting dumber and less skilled. It definitely shows here on the blog.

My goal for the next week is to write at least three micros, shorts, or segments of my larger works. I might wrap up a few pieces for my sorely-neglected Ila des Mains series or post a few unrelated pieces out here. (Then again, nothing may make it out here.) I don’t excel at shorts (since I don’t like to read them much), but it’ll get the juices flowing again.