In case you’ve missed the very few bits and pieces of my personal life that I’ve shared on…well, I guess just on Twitter…the past four and a half months have been one long struggle for me. Shoot, I’m struggling to write this at all, not because it’s anything difficult to say, but because it’s simply not very interesting.

The thing is, while some things about my life are going very well and therefore keeping me busy (work, Saga Event Planning, The Geekiary), creatively I am in one heck of a rut. I don’t even know if I could call it writer’s block; perhaps it’s more like writer’s exhaustion? In the course of about two and a half months toward the end of 2016, I finished writing my second novel, edited the first draft, and then edited nearly 50,000 words of another book I was working on. That, combined with my writing spurts for The Geekiary (which do unfortunately tend to drain me), have led me to this point where I can barely bring myself to put out an article, let alone pull quality fiction writing out of my completely exhausted brain.

And then there’s my physical health. I’m not getting any younger, but it wasn’t until this past fall that I really started feeling my age. I have a herniated disc in my cervical spine, and the debilitating pain that caused left me – quite literally – flat on my back for most of November and December. I’m still trying to figure out how to live with a herniated disc, because although I haven’t been in that extreme can’t-eat-can’t-sleep-can-barely-function zone for about three months, I also can’t just go back to being physically active in the ways I’m used to. Which is, I’ll be honest, really damn depressing.

So while I’d like to just blame writer’s block, my biggest worry is that I’m just tapped out. That maybe I’m not meant to write fiction but to merely give my opinions of or organize events around others’ creations. I don’t believe that is the case, not really, and I’m hoping that if I shake things up a bit this wall in my silly brain will tumble down. It’s certainly worked before, so hey, keep your fingers crossed for me?

In the meantime, I suppose I’ll keep opening up my latest novel and/or a blank blog post and staring at my computer screen in hopes that this dang wall will start crumbling on its own.