So yeah, I’m still pretty much wiped out! I had high hopes Wednesday night of starting to put my sleep schedule properly back together, and those hopes turned out to be rather premature.

I’m still working on fixing that, of course, not least because my natural inclination is to do entirely the opposite and just sleep and wake whenever, with no particular respect to day-night cycles. That’s actually not the worst arrangement for creative work; if you want to write a story that’s set in a world other than this one, being a little bit less firmly rooted in this one can put your head in a useful place for that. Unfortunately, one does also need to make a living, and getting into a state where I’m sleeping 10am to 4pm will not make that easier.

That said, the headspace I’m in is also one I recognize. It’s the one where I’ve got a story idea really bubbling away nicely in the back of my head, and I’m spinning up to start writing it. It would be great to be able to say that that guarantees I will write it! Unfortunately, that’s not necessarily so, and I don’t yet really know what makes the difference. I do know that burning myself out before I manage to properly start writing isn’t going to help, though.

(Neither will being angry with myself because it takes me so much more energy to write than to do the work I do for a living. I’ve been doing that latter kind of work for about twenty years now! It should be no surprise, after so much practice, that it takes me so much less effort. I’m not nearly so good yet at writing, and while it’s easy to get frustrated at how much harder that can be, I’m not being especially fair to myself when I do that.)

So, in order to address all this properly, I’ve taken a couple extra days off work, extending the holiday weekend. I’ve also given myself permission not to worry about writing today, when I have work and other occasions, or tomorrow, when I’m helping a friend with some housework that’s liable to leave me pretty worn out. Whether or not I extend that permission into Sunday—well, we’ll see how I’m feeling Saturday afternoon or so.

The point is to make a proper vacation of it, give myself time to get my head back into place, and head into Monday with the energy and wherewithal I need to start discovering the world in which this new story takes place, and the people who are part of it. In the meantime, I don’t expect to have a lot to say, seeing as that is after all part of the point of what I’m doing with this coming weekend. But who knows?

So you won’t be bored in the meantime, here’s a couple of webcomic recommendations! My Dragon Girlfriend is a sweet, cheerful, and uplifting story that’s pretty much exactly the slice-of-life romance its title makes it sound like, and Sleepless Domain is—I suppose I’d say it’s what you get once the post-Madoka Magica turn toward grimness in magical girl stories starts turning back again. Both are primarily character pieces, which is probably a lot to do with why I like them so well, and both, of course, I think are well worth your time.

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