The other day I had an interesting idea for Patreon content.
I spent a couple of hours generating the background information, I got some input from the Discord, and I built up the basic structure.
I rolled some d20s.
I started typing.
And I was immediately bored.
It's hard to explain the type of boredom I feel when I know an idea isn't right. It's more than just like "wow this is drudgery" or "this is tedious" because there's always portions of a creative work that are tedious. I have enough mental discipline to push through moments that aren't terribly exciting.
This sense of boredom is almost a physical revulsion. I feel it in my gut, a deep sense of "blech, why am I doing this?" And I pretty much always just shut down after that point. There's no recovering from it. I may pick up the idea later, but that's usually only after I've figured out some different angle for it.
(I used to keep a file on my computer called "Bin" which was just where I threw stuff that didn't work. Now I just keep it all in a long list of files on the filetree in Obsidian. I go through it once in a while to see if there's anything worth resurrecting.)
I think I've become bored of adventures.
And as someone who primarily writes/creates in genre fiction, this is a bad sign.
I mean, I was never a straight genre-consumer. I need my stuff to have either something weird, or a lot of heart for the characters. Otherwise I get bored.
I don't know if it's an age thing or what, but I'm getting tired of the action sequences. I'm getting tired of the battles. I've talked before about how my tolerance for violence, even fictional, stylized violence, is constantly dropping.
So it's harder and harder for me to create.
I don't even know what genre I want to do anymore. Romance? Non-violent sci-fi? Surrealism? Mystery?
I feel like I'm in a transitional phase AGAIN, which sucks, because I feel like I just got through one and I didn't even produce any major works in between.
And as much as I love doing these guest episodes with all the listeners, it's just not the same. It is so much more work than just running the show in its normal format.
This morning I wrote an AU random fic passage of some characters I made a long time ago for an online RP. I sent it to my friend who played the other character. It was the first time in a bit that I've felt...normal about what I was doing.
It's gonna be a lot of "pointless" output for now, I guess.
At least the Persona 5 fanfic is still moving along.