According to a guy I was talking to on an online dating website, Joni Mitchell used to think of creativity as being like crop rotation. If you worked in more than one artistic discipline there would be periods where you would spend a lot of time on one form and the others would lie fallow, as it were. You would ride the crests and troughs of each type of art so that they would each have time to mature and regenerate between periods of high productivity.

I’ve been feeling bad about the amount of time I’ve spent on the novel I started for NaNoWriMo this year since November finished. I made it through the challenge, and I won, but since it’s been December I’ve written very little. The reason I guess I’m feeling a bit guilty about it, is that the story isn’t finished.

I don’t like the fact that the story isn’t finished. It niggles at my brain but I’ve been really really not feeling like writing. I know this isn’t surprising, NaNoWriMo is not a sustainable way of writing, and the last two times I’ve done it, I’ve finished the work within the month. I’ve never had this feeling of unfinishedness hanging over me.

There are other contributing factors too. I’m not studying currently because it’s not semester time, and since I’m a full-time student these days I don’t have a ‘proper job’ so I’m sort of not really doing anything which means I’m floating around and floating around feels directionless and feeling directionless is a bit of a vicious cycle in which you feel like you don’t achieve anything so you then don’t feel motivated to achieve anything and therefore don’t achieve anything. I think you can all see what I’m getting at.

I have been spending a significant amount of time on my bass guitar playing, so that’s good. And I’m sure it being right before Christmas isn’t helping with the generally weird feeling of forced frivolity either. I don’t really know what this post is trying to say but y’know, maybe I’ll take myself on a photowalk tomorrow or write a couple of thousand words and then I’ll feel a bit more like I’ve done something.