I don’t mean I can’t talk.  As any around me would attest, I’ve been oddly more talkative than usual the last few weeks for reasons that I can’t entirely explain.  And I don’t mean that I’ve completely lost my writing voice.  However, what I have apparently lost is the voice for Conqueror Worm, and I’m trying to determine how to get it back.  Maybe the vacation will return it.  Maybe I need to warm up into it somehow.  But whatever the fix, right now the symptom is very clear: whenever I sit down to work on CW I find myself not able to flow into the narrative style I’d set up, and everything that I add feels disjointed.  It doesn’t belong, somehow.  And let me tell you, that’s frustrating as hell.

I might be trying to hard.  CVS 2.0 has got me excited, but perhaps it’s gotten me a little too excited, and has me pushing myself beyond comfort limits.  That’s why I’m hoping the vacation will help, just get completely out of my head.  The laptop will go along, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get anything written.  At the same time, I don’t want to leave it behind just to have inspiration hit one evening after dinner while just lounging in a hotel room.

I’ve been listening to the Drabblecast lately, enjoying its slight (or sometimes extreme) quirkiness, and it’s got me itching to try some drabbles, which might be good for me.  Get me writing and working on something with such a short distance between starting and payoff.  I’ve always been dismissive of drabbles in the past, perhaps because my only previous association with them was at various fan fiction sites a decade ago when I would actually visit fan fiction sites, usually trolling for the worst of the worst.  I suppose if I shouldn’t judge short stories by fan fic, I shouldn’t judge drabbles by fan fic drabbles.  I’ve actually been rather impressed at how people can set a tone, mood, characters, and get a resolution, all in fewer words than are likely to end up in this paragraph.  Several of my thing-a-week concepts I never really liked cause they ended up all broody and naval-gazing probably because I was trying to take a 100-word concept and turn it into a 3000-word story.

I’m also strongly considering sending Sleep to them.  I don’t know if it’ll work in audio format, but I do feel it’s a stylistic fit, and it’s not my job to reject stories for them.

If I like them, I’ll post some here.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.