Just stepping out for a bit...

I’ve been agonizing about this for couple of months. I hate to do it but I have to take a break, like a long one. I’ve been trying to work on fiction and do SStack and for right now it’s not working. I realize that might sound precious but it’s a real thing for me.

You won’t be paying for this down time, I’m suspending/freezing subscriptions until I’m ready to come back on the regular, which I’m guessing will be in 3-4 months. During that time I may post every now and then, because I don’t want to completely drop this still-new way of writing and being. But if I do post, it will be free until I’m ready to do it 2-3 times a month again.

If that’s all you need to know, read no further! I will see you later!

But in case you want to know more, I will try to explain even though I don’t fully know the explanation.

Fiction seems to draw on a very particular part of my brain and psyche. It requires a particular kind of inner focus at least when I’m trying to get into a groove with a new work. It’s not about social thinking even when the work involves—as it usually does—depiction of society or elements of it. Okay that sounds silly even to me. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that the language I need to think in isn’t social language, rather a kind of intimate dream language that I have to speak in my own mind before I can translate it outward? I sincerely don’t know. I just know that for me fiction writing has usually required a level of social withdrawal—for a time. At a certain point I need to come back and be a normal person; it’s a question of balance. I’ve always had this strong sense of inner and outer (or intimate and public) and sometimes struggle to find the right place between the two. Frankly it can be a real pain in the ass. I wish I could be the kind of person who could go in all directions at once! But we have to work with what we have.

This is maybe why I’ve enjoyed SStack: it’s a combination of social and private, a kind of physical aloneness happening alongside social engagement in near-simultaneity. That makes it energizing but also engaging to the point that I feel caught somewhere between inner and outer—an interesting place to be but hard, too hard to get from there to the more private shore where my fictional world can luxuriate, stretch, examine its new teeth and toenails, and consider what form to take.

I’m hoping that at the end of this hiatus I will be able to come back with a better blend, a state where the new creature can stroll down the street in a top hat and high heels, and/or express itself on SStack! Sometimes that happens, I get past a certain point in the work and can integrate it. Regardless, I will see you later. Meanwhile…

a song of hopeful launch…