#mrtimh

This is exactly how I feel. This is how it feels to break up with someone. This is it. Thank you Tim for putting into words the seemingly unexplainable.

To those of you that read my blog every now and then, you'll know that a writer's block isn't uncommon for me. They seem to come around an awful lot and can have crippling effects on my work.

Recently I've been redoing a lot of the exposition in my novel, but it's gotten to the point where I just can't bring myself to write what I've essentially already written over again, and even when I do it rarely sounds right. I've promised myself that I'll have it finished by the end of the summer, but as that date slowly looms closer, I'm starting to think that I'm not going to make that deadline.

While other creative types may understand where I'm coming from, the people I spend my time with in everyday life don't really see it as an issue, and the only creatives I know live too far away to help me deal with it on a personal level or are too focused on their own work. Maybe I'm spending too much time with the wrong people these days or maybe being a creative isn't as popular or as easy as it used to be, but either way, I haven't really received much support in this area recently.

But this morning, I found a video on Youtube that summed up exactly how I was feeling, and it alone managed to spur me into writing something. This was Tim Hautekiet's Creative Crisis, a seven minute love letter to the creative types suffering from a block. 

Now I've been a fan of Tim's ever since he joined Eddsworld and especially enjoyed Project: Library, but it was the personal videos like this that really grabbed my attention. Sure it was four months old but the message still stood, and Tim's final soliloquy actually encouraged me to close Youtube and open up that Word document again. Three hours later I was two thousand words of exposition down and for what felt like the first time in months I was genuinely enjoying writing this book again.

Because aside from the excellent directing and well-written humour one thing stood out for me: I realised that there was nothing stopping me from getting it done. I'm on the longest summer holiday I'm likely to ever have and at pushing seventeen I'm not going to have an opportunity like this again.

So thanks, Tim. I owe you one.

 - James -