That title, in a nutshell, describes my feelings. I feel like I haven’t done much of anything this week.

I have done things, of course. I’ve read a lot, I’ve done a little shopping (a hat, and ribbons for the drapes in my office), I’ve started painting over a box and some game pieces so that I can reuse them in “alpha” versions of some board games ideas I have (in other news, I don’t think I’ll be doing much of that anymore: much, much simpler and less messy to just cover them in paper or in cardboard), I have participated in discussion to put the final touches in the A Match Made in Austen production.

(btw, I think I forgot to put it here: the campaign was a success! We raised 2 475$! Thank you so much, everyone who participated.)

I think the main problem is that I haven’t written a lot. I don’t have any one solid writing project that I can devote myself to. That’s not true, there is the one thing, but I’m so early in the pre-writing stage, in the planning and the research, that I feel like it doesn’t really counts as writing. So I’m looking at the other planned ideas in my writing folder, and I dabble around with them until I am good and discouraged, and all I want to do is curl up with a bunch of Popsicles and read Danielle Steels novels, or Ivanhoe. (Don’t ask me what they have in common, other them my desire to read them.)

Part of it is that I feel like I should have something ready to publish for the next year; I feel like Renaissance is relying on me and that I’m letting them down by focusing what creative energy I have in a project that they won’t be able to publish or produce. They’re not pressuring me, I’m pressuring myself, which is worse. I’m trying to cut myself some slack: I have provided one project a year so far (two books and a game in three calendar years of productions), and I might have a little something for the 2016 calendar as well. We have two new authors, and we might get more. There are other people who can write the books that we publish, and there is no need for me to try and be as productive as Caroline Frechette, who writes twice as fast as I do, if not faster, on top of everything else she does.

I want to finish my big project. I don’t know what is going to happen to it once I have finished, maybe nothing, but I want to finish it. After that, I’ll probably be in a better state of mind to write potentially publishable stuff. And maybe I’ll stop feeling like I’m in a rut.