This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service
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Notes -
I could've written this paragraph myself. I used to write fiction and compose music quite a lot, but when I undertake NaNoWriMo this year, it will be the first significant chunk of original prose I'll have written since mid-Covid. Before that I wrote four novels or novellas (three as a teenager). The reason I haven't written anything since mid-Covid isn't because I've had writer's block (in the sense that I've been trying to write but the words aren't coming to me) - I just haven't had any ideas since. And it happened in two artistic media - it used to be I could write an entire song in my head without touching a guitar, the ideas would just come to me of their own accord. That almost never happens to me anymore, except sometimes with rhythmic patterns - with rare exceptions, writing a melody is something I have to consciously work at, playing a riff over and over until it congeals into something more substantial. It's hardly surprising to me that the best musicians tend to produce their best work in their twenties and peter out thereafter.
All of the foregoing is why it was such a surprise to me when the idea for this story popped into my head - I'd legitimately forgotten how pleasant that sensation is of being in a creative flow state and the ideas are just "coming" to you. I'm not going to say it's better than sex, because it isn't, but it's an intensely pleasurable intellectual sensation.
Why do ideas rarely come to me anymore? Half of the answer is just growing up and having a more keenly honed sense of what works and what doesn't. It's not merely that the four novels or novellas I wrote earlier in my life had a strong premise but were let down by the execution - I think even the basic premises of all of these novels were unworkable to start with, and I was too young/inexperienced/immature to recognise that at the time, so close to my creation and so caught up in the act of creating that I failed to appreciate how dumb my creation was. I remember a handful of the ideas for stories and novels I had when I was younger, ideas which I fully intended on bringing to fruition when I could find the time, and absolutely all of them were utterly terrible. (And that's not even getting into the ideas I've forgotten - I very much doubt there were any gems in there.) Like Scott talking about the Chamber of Guf, I think it's very possible that ideas for stories appear in my subconscious at about the same rate as they always did, but my quality control filter prevents them from rising to the level where I'm consciously aware of them. I'm very excited about the idea for this story, in large part because I feel like it has a very strong "elevator pitch" - even if I can't pull it off, I feel like someone could do something interesting with the same basic premise. This is in stark contrast to my third and fourth novels in particular, which were navel-gazing narcissism from start to finish.
But the "quality control filter" explanation doesn't explain why melodies don't come to me as often as they used to.
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