Hello. I'm in limbo.

Is it writer's block? Is it NOT writer's block? Is it a third thing, special and secret and forbidden?

Hello. It’s a Sunday night as I write this, and my eyeballs are too warm. The temperature would probably seem fine if I stuck a thermometer in there, but it feels like they have a fever. Just them. Rest of the body is just mildly tired. But the eyeballs are so warm that they are melting the brain. Which is a big problem, because I need my brain to write.

It’s 10:48 PM and I am sleepy. I’m in college and we have class on Saturday too, so Sunday is the only day I can sleep in without also missing out on attendance (100% required on paper, 75% in practice). Also I’m an insomniac. I don’t think that’s surprising if you’ve read my stuff, I’ve probably mentioned something about sleep being horrific and the night being the love of my life but alas my affections are unrequited etc etc etc etc etc

But anyway. Writing. I write a lot of flash fiction. I have some projects of greater length lying around too, but they’re in the brainstorming and outlining stages. My 11 PM melatonin alarm just rang. And I have some programming stuff to do tomorrow. And I have no focus, as you can clearly see right now. And THAT explains why I currently have 6 incomplete bits of flash fiction (with potential to be short fiction¹) just… lying around.

And that’s the NEWEST ones. I take a look at some of the slightly older ones — ones which I happened to remember because I thought, “oh hey that one was compelling!” and so I opened it and now they all STARE at me from the Google Docs page — and yeah, yeah, yeah… lots of stuff… and there’s more lying deeper in the storage as well… gathering up dust…

The one titled “I Can’t Keep My Eyes Open”, I started writing that just a few minutes before this post. It’s in the format of the script of a play, there’s a rat, the stage is a character, there’s voices whose bodies are sound. The other stuff I started writing… most of it is from within the past 30 days, but the face one and the pelvic bone one are much older.

So, I’m not on the peculiar 4-month² magic period of having rats on cocaine in my head controlling my every move, just like the rat in Ratatouille, except there were multiple and they were on drugs and they were INSIDE my head making out with my nerve cells and getting their rat saliva on my gray matter and, instead of cooking, they would help me with WRITING and MUSIC and ART and ANIMATION and GAME DEVELOPMENT³. Except, unlike the rat in Ratatouille, THEY were not good at all that stuff, because they’re a literary device. It was all me. THEY simply increased the speed of processing information (pain! joy! minutiae & mundanity!) & using every single detail as new bits of fuel, and THEN they increased the speed of USING the fuel. And they managed it because of the cocaine. Which the rat in Ratatouille lacked.

I’m NOT having THAT right now, but clearly I can still write. And I can’t focus and I’m tired and my eyeballs will melt away my brain like wax, and then they themselves will turn to liquid and it’ll look like I’m crying but I’m not. Because I can’t. Because the eyeballs burned the tear ducts away. It’s just the entire structure of the eye leaking out of the sockets. And that makes it pretty hard to write!

But see, see, see, that is writing! That paragraph just now! This entire post! It is writing! Do I have writer’s block! That’s a rhetorical question so it doesn’t deserve a question mark! I don’t have writer’s block! I’m just tired! And am functioning in a way which is reasonable to expect from a busy college student! However! I am unable to complete the flash fiction projects! And THAT gives me the illusion that I may have writer’s block! Even though I don’t and I keep rambling & rambling & rambling to ANYONE who’ll listen, in ANY text box on ANY platform!

The problem is focus. That makes sense, right? I’m tired. I have 24/7 physical pain in the piece of badly wired flesh I call my right leg. Of course the writing fuel goes a bit funky and the focus is— words! Words! What is sentence structure! What is structure at all? See, that deserves a question mark.

Readers, answer me. What is structure and what is order? Where do you go to escape chaos? How do you calm down without drowning in the void?

“What is structure?” is a good question because I’m not sure what the structure of this post is, either. I was about to talk about the Not-Writer’s-Block I have. I guess I did talk about it? Who knows. What do you think? I think that, after experiencing the glory of the cocaine rats, any normal level of creative output just feels… slow. But also, the cocaine rats cause idiocy. Run so fast you lose sight of everyone else. Then trip and fall. Then the cocaine rats leave. They leave me on the ground. Fuck you, cocaine rats. Their departure creates an extra-slowness, way below normal baseline, and they leave many many MANY voids in the places where their cockpits used to be; they’re airplane pilots, you see. Soaring high in the turbulent skies. Shitty pilots though, since they ALWAYS crash land. NEVER a smooth landing, NEVER.

What is the point of this post?

Well, writing is hard for many people. Not for me, though. Usually. So it’s extra frustrating when I can’t really write the way I want to. So in that frustration, I write. I can’t write the strange surreal flash fiction so I go write strange surreal non-fiction. So I guess it all works out fine!

Goodnight, everyone.

1. This is said considering anything below 1000 words as flash fiction and anything above that as short fiction. At some point it becomes a novella, but I haven’t written one of those yet so I don’t really care about the definition. I am too tired.

2. Started May. Ended mid-September. With May, it may have been the middle of May? Possibly? Or early May. Time is a strange thing.

3. That last one is underdeveloped, compared to the others. Right now I’ve got a couple game concepts written down, and one small project which I’m going to use so I can learn the craft. Time management can be a tricky thing, especially with college and especially with learning a new skill. For the gamedev stuff, I need to learn Unreal Engine 5.

And you know what? I have full confidence that, in the coming months, I’ll find a spot of two or three free days (in the middle of such a hectic schedule oh god 3rd semester), and I’ll finally be able to kickstart the UE5 learning. And I know from experience that the momentum really starts after that kickstart.

There’s no real rush, minus the self-imposed one. I’m 19, just a newly minted adult, so I theoretically have enough time. Theoretically. The theory could be wrong. Anything can happen.