sometimes, feeling the urge to write can be a royal pain in the ass. sometimes, you just can't string your thoughts and words together in anything approaching an effective manner and when you try, it generally makes you feel worse about your output.
after a bit of a creative spurt around the holidays, i've found the last couple of months to be as cry as a fundamentalist church during prohibition, which is just no fun, because it means that i spend a long time sitting in front of the computer thinking that i SHOULD be writing, but unable to do anything worth keeping.
in the last week, i've put my foot down, though, and i've managed to work out some writing exercises for myself. it may not be writing something that i could even dream of calling finished, but at least it's making me think creatively, which is more than i can say for a lot of my daily activities.
aside from standbys like just writing about what i see around me, or trying to describe one particular thing i see, i've found some success in combining things that i love, namely writing and music. my latest trick is to turn on the ipod (which has the added advantage of blocking out other, unrelated sounds) and writing a piece for every track that comes on. they may just be short little bursts, but it's interesting to see what comes out when you try this for an hour or so. (i personally wouldn't recommend doing it for a lot longer, as even things you enjoy can become a little tiresome.)
so now, i have pieces based on the following soundtrack:
azure skies- bring nothing back
heavy electronics v- advokat ihrer hoheit
quaternary- strafe f.r.
muslimgauze- palestine is our izlamic land, part i
deadwood- wither sith
stratum terror- collapse
skalpell- mindscrape
not bad for a night's work. i don't know if any of them will develop into more, and i'm at varying levels of happiness with them, but hey, it's better than sitting here wondering why i can't think of any ideas...