*taps microphone* Testing testing, is this on? Does anyone still follow me here, or care about what I do? I'm flattered if so!

So if you are or ever have been interested in my writing, you'll notice I haven't had much in the range of new material lately. Various life events contributed to this, I won't bore with the details, but the end result is that I've lost my drive to write, to actually put words to paper. I seem to be content to imagine and post fun little ideas to social media, and try to plan out novels entirely in my head, perhaps even do some very basic notes, but never get beyond writing more than a scene or two. So far I have more than a dozen stories that are unfinished. Some are abandoned and I won't touch them again, but some could be finished with varying levels of effort, and yet even when it wouldn't take that much more work to finish them, I can't bring myself to do it. I just keep feeling like "who's this for, who's going to read this, will I even finish it before the world collapses, what's the point?" and other defeatist thoughts.

Compounding this is a problem that I'm sure affects everyone, but especially me: I hate my old work. I've heard it said that all artists hate anything they made more than five years ago, and due to this long period of absence I've had with the craft, most of my work falls outside that five year window. As I look through the list of stories I have on my userpage here on FA, there's precious little I'm proud of. Most of it I don't even want to read again, and would be embarrassed if a friend tried to read one of them today. A truly embarrassing amount of these stories have either myself as one of the main characters or a blatant author-insert with the names changed. Some of that was because they were gifts for friends, or the commissioner requested it, but it was a really bad habit I had there for a while that I'm honestly trying to quash. Even my most recent story, Happy Holiday, has me appear as a side character, which I really regret but was left with little choice but to carry ahead with. I learned a hard lesson there: Never commission the centerpiece artwork for the story before you've written it, because then you're stuck trying to make that scene happen exactly as depicted.

Incidentally, thanks again to everyone who's purchased that story, if you have I'd love to hear from you with what you thought of it! The biggest downside to selling a book rather than just posting it to FA is that I don't get any comments or feedback, so I have no idea if anyone actually enjoyed it!

I'm trying to get myself back into writing, and in typical fashion for me I haven't decided to finish one of my existing almost-finished stories for an easy win, but instead start a new one. It's about a construction worker living in a world where some people can just change their size at will (similar to the shifters in the works of Arilin or Becky Cascane) who after witnessing a fatal accident is forced into therapy for people who have trouble being around shifters in the workplace, and meets a cute ringtail who leads the "interactive demonstration" portion of the therapy session! (I swear this one isn't author-insert for a change) If that sounds interesting to you then please let me know, because I could really use the encouragement right now to get back into the swing of writing! Hopefully I'll have something to show for it soon!