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So, Garafthel, where've you been for the past two years? I don't even fucking know. All I know is I sure as shit haven't been writing. I lost my something - - call it magic, call it inspiration, call it my writing brain - - somewhere along the way.

No real reason. I mean, no huge trauma or drama or whatever that I could point to and say "There! That's what stole my writing magic!" Just the steady erosion of creativity by the demands of everyday life, the loss of a certain innocent Generation X-style belief in Art for Art's Sake, and the slow grinding crash of small personal crises into life-long emotional health issues. Blah.

It's like swimming through mud. Probably won't kill you, unless you stop moving for too long, but it's endless and gross and takes all your energy just to limp your way to a shore that's just as muddy and hard to climb as the one you came from in the first place. 

Anyhow. So approach number X is that I'm just going to write whatever the hell comes into my head, no editing, no picking away at myself until all that's left is an empty page and blah, blah, shut up already Garafthel and just fucking start writing. 

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A long time ago - - I'm not going to check exactly how long ago it was and you can't make me - - I wrote a tiny snippet of a story where Steph and Jason were on the run and sleeping in the forest in the middle of the werewolf apocalypse. (Why was it a werewolf apocalypse? Probably because I hate zombies. What's going to be different about a werewolf apocalypse than a standard zombie apocalypse? Probably a lot more furries. Ba dum ching! No, that was terrible, and it's replacing like half a paragraph of bullshit about the meaning of zombies which I'm sure smarter people than I have already written theses on.)

Anyway I find certain images either incredibly soothing or totally terrifying, depending on my state of mind. I keep going back to the two figures huddled together in the forest, one of them keeping watch while the other tries to sleep, with the howls of wolves in the distance. (There's also the image of a partly submerged tower with water lapping up to the edge of a balcony, endless pitch black water under the moonlight. But that's a different story, I think.)

Images and characters and nothing holding them together.

Tofa is one of my favorite characters. Just a random character that I came up with because I needed a guard who would help Fili escape. That's all she was at first - - some generic guard who I made a woman because fuck standard media assumptions that any background character is going to be male as a default. And then she grew into this incredible woman, a mercenary far from home who was once a famous hero in a war that no one in this part of the world has ever even heard of (and she's glad no one has ever heard of it because the weight of being the hero of the Battle of the Amber Gate was more than she could bear when all that she could remember was what she had lost). A woman who traveled to lands where no one spoke as she did and worked shitty jobs as a caravan guard because it's better than mercenary work and fell in love with a sad, angry young Widow who turned out to be a princess. There's a happy ending for them yet, as soon as I can write a coherent paragraph again and get over the creeping fear that anything I write now will just be complete shit.

But perhaps that's enough burbling for today. Join me next time for more self-indulgent writer nonsense.