Creative Break = Good Thing!

I know I haven't been blogging much for some time now. As I said months ago my time has become rather limited. What I have available I prefer to put to the best possible use, and blogging is lower on my list of priorities than, say, PLANNING or WRITING or EDITING.

Now that I'm officially on a Creative Break, I can say what a wonderful thing it is to take a break. I pour my heart and soul into my work when I'm writing. It's draining. An occasional break, guilt-free, helps me re-fill the creative well-spring and recharge my batteries. For me, this "away time" is refreshing and an essential part of the overall process. If I kept writing year-round, non-stop, I'd burn out. We take vacations from our day jobs; we should not begrudge ourselves a little R&R where our writing is concerned. I prefer to take a "Creative Break", which is not just any break. A Creative Break is one where I specifically seek to refill the creative well-spring. I learn new things and seek inspiration and to be reminded of the joy and power of story-telling.

So, what am I doing these days? Apart from not blogging? (*grin*) Well, I'm reading. A lot. Which makes sense, since I have a lot of reading to catch up on. I'm reading fantasy fiction and also non-fiction stuff that will feed into my fantasy writing. I'm reading about the Middle Ages, to give my imagination something concrete to work with. My current emphasis is on daily life, clothing, weapons and combat/warfare. The fiction I'm enjoying right now is the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy by Weis & Hickman -- I ordered the trilogy from Amazon and am quite happy to see what so many reviewers and others have enjoyed so much. I know it's not new but it's good and highly-rated.

I'm also learning more computer-related stuff. I like to do something logical from time to time to stimulate my sense of "order out of chaos". It seems to help me later with my writing process. I'm learning CSS (finally!) and will redo my website soon using the new way of styling web pages. I'm also beginning to learn PHP and MySQL, just for kicks. So far so good, but I'm still in the beginning of it. I think I'll do better with this than I did trying to teach myself Java -- I learned a lot from that but I still can't write a complex program. I just have to be patient and try again with better materials to learn from.

My apologies to those whose blogs I follow for not visiting their sites often enough. I will endeavor to get back into the swing of things as my time situation improves in the coming months.

Well, that's it for now. I appreciate all of the visitors to my site, even if the majority of them never leave a comment. (If any of you would care to share links to your own blogs or websites, or other blogs of interest to fantasy fiction writers, please do so by leaving a comment. Thanks!)

Best wishes for your own Creative Breaks, if and when you take them,

Adrian