Some nights

I sit here staring at the pixels which form the modern equivalent of a blank page. This slab of Asian components has so many ways into and out of it: jacks and ports and drives. Nothing that'll plug into the back of my skull. So I've got to make due with qwertyuiop.

Some nights I'm tempted to dig into old archives and post bits from them, to fool those of you unacquainted with my ex-site into thinking that something new has happened here. I never do. Everything in those archives has been posted already, and once I've re-read them there's never anything that strikes me as worthy of being posted again. Plus, that would be tricksy and false, wouldn't it? A salve to sooth an ego wounded by a quiescent period of inactivity or, more accurately, a period of less activity than I would like.

On some of those nights the pixels remain a pure and unmarked WYSIWYG white. It's not that I'm frightened of the empty page. I just don't have the energy to jump into it. These fallow periods have always been offset by later bursts of manic production, but that never feels like a pattern I can rely on.

So, I end up stuck in that moment, while my characters lounge in static scenes with nothing to do, smoking cigarettes too quickly and looking up at the ceiling, wondering when the hell they can get on with their lives.

Then I come here, and tell you about it.