I’ll give you the ending first.
You’ll have a new Elders Keep story soon.
The goal, of course, was to try to give you a new story every month.
Things happened.
I spent a lot of February fine-tuning and editing a screenplay I co-wrote with Jim Branscome and James DeHaven. Actually, they had already written it. I sort of came in towards the end and had some ideas. Regardless, there was a lot of fine-toothed combing that needed to be done. It took a couple of weeks. It was surprisingly exhausting. By the time we were finished, I did not want to have anything to do with words. No reading, no writing, no speech above a guttural level.
Mild burnout is still burnout, and it was hard to get my shit back together. I couldn’t work on my own script. I couldn’t work on the next Elders Keep story, even though I had it planned and ready to go. I was tired.
It wasn’t even like writer’s block. I was still typing words. I just didn’t like any of them.
The thing that snapped me back was a late-night Twitter conversation with Leslie Moore, the editor of Popshifter dot com. It was late and we started talking Eighties music. I’d name a couple of bands, she would throw a couple back at me and, all of a sudden, we were traversing the decade, moving in and out of musical directions and it was fun. A lot of fun.
The next thing I knew, I was writing a weekly column about Eighties music for Leslie’s website. It got me excited about writing again. There’s a freedom to it, a weird kind of stream of consciousness feel, that makes it fun to write and, I’m told, a blast to read.
So here I come, back again, ready to put words together in a strange fashion. Ready to head back into the Keep and do bad things to fictional people. Ready to write about obscure music from the 1980’s, a decade I actually remember.
Things are moving, things are moving. Keep up.
-X-
Jeffery X Martin 