IWSG: (clever title goes here)

 

EDIT: evidently if you put < > brackets around part of your post title it just gets ignored by the system. 😓  I've replaced the < and > with ( and ) so hopefully now the whole post title will show...

    As my health problems are starting to stabilize (or at least I've realized that they're coming every two weeks, which suggests that maybe my high school friend was right when she suggested it might be connected to menopause), I'm going to try answering the monthly question for a change.

June 7 question - If you ever did stop writing, what would you replace it with?

    I've spent so much of my life writing, it's hard to imagine what I'd do if I stopped!  (Other than totally lose my mind.)  I suppose I'd have to depend on one of the other creative endeavors that I have occasionally flirted with:  maybe making things with resin, maybe working more on making box rooms (though I'd need a bigger house first if I wanted to have a place to store/display them!), or just devote myself to game dev.  (Though game dev is also writing for me, since I'm a writer and you have to write the game before you can make it, but...)  I could maybe actually dive into one of the two Humble Bundles I've bought with content to teach a person how to use Blender (one a set of video courses and the other a set of books) and maybe finally learn how to do 3D art and hope that I'd be less garbage at it than 2D art.  Maybe I could keep mucking around in that mapmaking program until I got to be slightly less awful at it.

    I suppose I could also just lose myself in my non-creative hobbies, but I feel like that would get old pretty quick.  These days, I can't even make it all the way through a turn-based JRPG without finding myself wanting to do something else while the battle animations play.  (And until my heart issues are resolved, I don't know if I can play anything that isn't turn-based.  Though hopefully I could at least handle the low-level action combat in, say, Stardew Valley, or its myriad imitators.  Hopefully.  (I'm in trouble if I can't, 'cause I've backed a lot of them on Kickstarter and some of them may actually release this year (if I'm lucky)!)  But maybe I'd finally get back to trying to learn another language (probably German, 'cause it's easiest, plus many years ago I bought an untranslated copy of The Neverending Story and I am determined to someday actually read it!) and actually follow through for once.

    But yeah...mostly I think I would go insane if I stopped writing.  Unlike a lot of other writers, I don't have any intention of trying to publish my work, aside from releasing a few things free on itch.io or AO3, so I sort of approach it differently than many others.  I write because I have stories jostling around in my head and wanting to get out; I write to get them out of my head so maybe it'll be less cluttered in there.  (Of course by the time I finish writing one story, five or six more have taken its place, so it's a never-ending struggle...)