I've been on vacation for the past week. Well, "vacation" as in not being at work. Haven't been more than twenty minutes away from the house this week and that was for an appointment on Tuesday and then for breakfast with family on Thursday.
Aside from those things, I didn't really do anything. Okay, I did some chores -- swept up the house, washed and changed bedding, sharpened knives -- but I mostly watched TV shows and movies. (Got all the Thin Man movies on Blu-ray. So great.) (Also, yeah, I still buy physical media when I can. I can watch it when the inderbluts goes out and I can loan it to people, who still have players.)
What I wanted to do was write. Fiction. Uh, fanfiction. I couldn't, though. My brain wasn't decompressed enough to even seriously consider writing fiction until Saturday night. I even broke out notes I have for a story at around 10PM and didn't write a word. I skimmed the notes. I opened my preferred word processing program. I titled and saved the document. I looked at the notes again. I closed the document. And I went to bed.
Part of it is that writing fiction stretches brain muscles that I haven't used in a while. I forced it over a year ago, and it exhausted me. In bad and good ways. But I don't want to feel that way again. It wearied my brain for a long, long time.
Part of it is also that the notes I brought out -- the fic I most want to write -- are for a story from the point of view from a character I find detestable. Sandy Griffin. Oh, how I want to finish those last two parts, though. And Quinn has to be the final one. Begin with the one I like the best and end with the one who showed growth before the post canon's came around.
My brain is much better than it was a year ago or even six month ago. The fact that I have a want to write fiction is proof of that. Further proof is that I'm reading before I go to sleep again. Not a lot. One or two issues of a comic book or a dozen or so pages of a novel. I used to read a larger volume, but the fact that I pretty much didn't read anything for seven or eight years makes me... content that I'm able to read something again. Maybe I'll even be able to get back to my annual reading of To Kill a Mockingbird next spring. That would be nice.
And there are so many fics that I want to write. I have the notes I listed above. I have notes for more post canon Gravity Falls stories that are connected to the others I've written; one is an almost New Year's date between Dipper and Zia, a character of my own creation. I have notes and ideas for so many Daria fics, including the continuation of the crossover with The Tick, a Mack and Jane story based inspired by an Iron Chef from forever ago at PPMB (which is where I did my first non-lurk on that forum) that's been in my brain for more than 15 years, a Daria/Defending Your Life crossover only I asked for,and a series of stories inspired by the songs from the Semisonic album Feeling Strangely Fine. And then there's that The Good Place fic I want to write to challenge a couple of things presented in the show, but really I want it to be a comedic/depressing self-insert story.
As for today? Today was about preparing for next week. Five lunches are packed. Dishes are scrubbed. Laundry is folded and put away. My brain is preparing for all the people I'll have to deal with again. No, writing fiction was not in the cards for today.
Maybe I'll be able to decompress from work faster when my next vacation comes around in December.
Until then...
Be well.