Life · 4:08pm Jul 26th, 2023
Reporting to you live from aboard the Ocean Machine. If that sentence and the title of this blog don't make the reference click, don't worry about it. (No, it's not about the funny submarine thing, good guess tho)
I'm going to be totally upfront here before I get into the rest of this: things haven't gotten much better for me, and I am struggling. Things haven't gotten much worse, but they have indeed gotten worse. I've seen more than one light at the end of this tunnel that has only turned out to be the headlamp of a fast approaching train. Just when I think I'm ready to dust myself off and move forward, I look up and something knocks me right back on my ass.
My lack of creative output here is reflected pretty much everywhere else I am. It's hard to create things with my hands when there's someone whacking my fingers every time I grab onto the ledge of this depression hole. There's a variety of things that are happening in my periphery/close proximity have made things far more difficult than they should be, and it has led me to this point where every time I have a moment to sit down and create, the flock of words constantly flapping through my mind at any other time disperses.
Because things have been hard for me, I'm allowing myself to do something super pretentious and grab a quote from one of my own stories to talk about it. Specifically, I want to talk about this bit in the fourth chapter from Can You See What I See, Glass: Half-Full:
Something I’ve always heard from other artists and musicians alike is that when your heart is aching, that’s the best time to create. While language is our primary medium of emotional communication, it’s far from the only one – it’s just the easiest one to translate. Even though the voice in our mind speaks a language that sounds like the one we speak with our mouths, it's different to some degree. That’s why we may end up speechless when we feel certain things. It's why, when words fail us, creative expression is said to be the next best thing.
At least, that’s what some people would lead you to believe. But I’ve never understood how people are able to create when they feel angry, or sad, or any other kind of negative emotion. When I feel like I do right now, those feelings are all-encompassing. If anything, it’s only become more of a challenge to translate these feelings into anything creative.
When I wrote CYSWIS, I would always begin by writing an opening monologue like this, and while I did try to keep them all in character, my main goal first and foremost with writing these introductory bits were to talk about myself. Chapter 2, for instance, has that whole introductory bit about being the first one awake at a sleepover, never being able to sleep past a certain time even after staying up super late, and ridiculous metaphors about small appliances that only a normal person would think of. Chapter 5 has the bit about being an awful teacher, how it's difficult to reduce concepts you are intimately familiar with back down to the basic form you meet them at.
This opener was definitely one of the most About The Author™ passages I wrote in the entire story. Usually, I don't create if I'm in the dead center of a bad spot. Despite losing myself in daydreams about things I want to make to cope with how shit things can be, by the time I go to draw from that, the well has already run dry. That said, all those daydreams still happen, and all the ideas I get are still floating around in my head, and they'll find their way out eventually after they've had enough time to marinate.
As depressing as all of this may read, I don't want any of this to be read in a pessimistic way. If anything, this should all be read pretty optimistically and I'll explain why by talking even more about my writing process for CYSWIS and one of the key things that inspired it that I haven't talked about.
Last summer was similarly rough on me for a number of reasons, which sounds weird to say after all that, I know, but just hear me out. Toward the beginning of July 2022, I went through one of the hardest breakups I'd been through in a long time. We met in 2015, and flirted off and on until finally getting together in 2019. Both me and them were in pretty bad mental spots already when everything ended, though. It was explosive, not amicable in the least, we haven't been on speaking terms since it happened, and I don't think we ever will be again. Neither of us did anything particularly damnable to one another; it was just the result of two people with different wants and needs clashing in the worst way.
As you can imagine, it was pretty devastating, and while it was not the only thing that devastated me last summer, it had the largest impact. I receded inward after that. For the next two and a half months, I barely talked to anyone outside of the people I live with. I ended up binge-watching mlp/eqg for the second time, which led me to writing my first long-form fic that I put on ao3 (it's bad don't look it up for real) as a way to get some feelings about all that out. I felt satisfied after hammering that out, but that story was incredibly directionless, and was more to occupy my mind than it was to express myself.
From there, I got more into reading/writing fics. Eventually, I found Krickis's story Something About Sunset, and thedarkprep's sequel piece Leaving Something Behind which, if you haven't read those, I very highly recommend you do as they are the two most influential fics to my own EqG writing, and also both stories hurt so fucking good. I won't spoil the ending, but I will leave it at the fact that I wasn't satisfied by it. Not by the quality, mind you—that should be obvious by how much praise I heap at these two stories—but because the resolution gave me some kind of conviction. Like, I had experienced quite a few unsatisfying, often sour endings that year, and I just needed to write something that was cute and fluffy in a flavor I like. Eventually, that snowballed into a huge collage of emotions I needed to express.
I needed to write about how amazing, wonderful, exciting it is to fall in love. I needed to write about how embarrassing, nerve-wracking, terrifying it is to let your guard down around someone. I needed to write about how maddening, enraging, infuriating it is to see someone hurt not just by the words and actions of others, but by themselves. I needed to write about wearing emotional masks, and how the longer you wear them, the further into your face they eat. I needed to write about taking on too much of an emotional load for others because it's the only way you can think to repent, and how self-destructive that is. And how important it is not just for the ones you love, but for yourself to forgive yourself.
And there's so much more I needed to write about, and I could keep going on, but the point is I aimed to get a lot of emotions out of me, and I did. In the process, I produced the single most cathartic piece of work I have ever made, and that's a mantle it still holds to this day.
What I'm trying to say with all of this is that I believe the storm is almost over. Soon, the skies will be clear again, and once they are, I'll start digging through the mental debris for pieces to build my next work out of. I already have a lot of great ideas in my head—not just for TECHNOMAGICOMMUNION (which is still in progress btw! it's slow but we've still been chipping away at it) but for the rest of Chromatic Aberration, and some other unnamed works as well. oh and the cys remake that may or may not be here next year lol
As always, I won't give any time windows as to when I'll be back to posting regularly. But rest assured: despite the radio silence, work is still happening in the background. For now, that's all I can offer, and hopefully that will suffice. Hope y'all are all holding out okay as well. Until next time.
Thanks for reading 
Best wishes in these painful times, Avery.