AND JUST LIKE THAT...

...a light came on.

The last couple of weeks – since I wrote the blogs where I felt like I was struggling with a few things – have been decidedly different.

As I said in those, writing stuff down really, really helps me, and this time it looks as if it really did. Thoughts and feelings are sometimes too enormous to take in, and writing them down in a linear form is like taking a step back so I have a panoramic view. Rather than try to understand a mountain by pressing my face up against the side of it, stepping back by writing it out helps me to be able to clearly take in what it is I’m really looking at.

Basically… the short of it is, it seems I’ve got my mojo back. It’s been two weeks, and I’m feeling so, so much better. I mean, it’s a process, I get that. You go back and forth, there are still challenges we’re facing – in terms of my career, and financially particularly - but this is the first time it has felt like the sun has come out – and stayed out – in ages.

I mean, I’ve never really had writer’s block. I’ve always been full of ideas. But, for very obvious reasons, the last six months have been a challenge to simply find the enthusiasm to be creative. Ideas weren’t so much not flowing as just not there at all. When my brain is working, ideas kind of appear unbidden. Connections are made automatically, and that provides the spark I need. But of late… that was like a void; like having a phantom limb. I could feel it there, but when I reached out with it there was nothing.

Creativity, for me, isn’t something I ever want to force, but that’s slightly what I’ve been having to do since everything happened. Forcing it, and hoping the engine gets jump-started, while wanting to enjoy it in the way I always have. Unfortunately, it has been like trying to write with my non-dominant hand. It’s a miracle we put out as many decent Digi eps and podcasts as we did.

And then at some point in the last couple of weeks, I noticed my mood lifting, and as the mood lifted, so the ideas started coming back – and with it that urge to put those ideas into practice. I keep mentioning the paintings I was commissioned for last summer, before everything went tits up – and how hard I’ve found that. Even those now seem to be coming together.

Hence, for the first time in what feels like forever, I’m excited about our upcoming plans. Digi Level 2, the regular Digi eps, Digi Live – I’ve got my sense of creative ambition back. I had a really nice Cheapshow recording session the other week, and that seems to have kicked off wanting to work with lots of different people again; something we didn’t really do much of last year, because I’ve wanted to be a hermit.

And what has been especially great are some of the discussions I’ve had with Sanja; we came up with a brilliant, creative, solutions to a few Digi Level 2 production issues – that have sparked an idea for a whole new segment that has the potential to be the stand-out of the entire series. We’ve had some fantastic ideas for Digi Live (Piccalilli Willy’s factory tour will be something special…). We’re also kicking around ideas for a whole new run of Supernatural World, and we’re filming our first Supernatural World spin-off next week, in which I’m interviewing an ACTUAL alien abductee – no, not me doing a character; a real person who claims to have met aliens 60-odd times…

The biggest thing Sanja and I are looking forward to this year is Found Footage 2 – which I’m basically having to hold myself back from starting on, so I can get everything else done first.

While we’ve still got a way to go in terms of sorting out the wreckage from the past few years, and I continue to struggle to wrap my head around what exactly happened to a previously successful career, the last two weeks have been the most creatively inspired – and therefore happiest - I’ve felt since 2021.

I’ve missed me. I hope I stick around.

Paul

PS. I'm doing Ashens' Twitch stream tonight at... 8.30pm or thereabouts? https://twitch.tv/ashens

PPS. I couldn't have come up with this even a few weeks ago: