“When you are consumed with thoughts, write. When you are uninspired, read.”

-Stephen King

I came across this quote scrolling online Monday, and I have to say, the second half fits me. While many authors say to put your butt in the seat and write every day, that has only worked for me twice. Once when I wrote An Unsubstantiated Chamber (I wrote it every day for 30 days until complete), and when I wrote ‘A Scar On The Manifest,‘ which took me seven days. Aside from that, it takes me several months to a year and more to complete a novel. Gaiman once said you couldn’t be a novelist is you can’t write everyday. Well, maybe he didn’t consider the self-published author when he said it. We run on our own unique schedules.

So what has me uninspired? The usual cycle, as I call it. I have for a decade now operated on a few months on, few months off cycle of intensive writing, followed by a curious sense of existential listlessness wherein I think a lot, but am not particularly enthused by doing anything with it other than an urge to get distracted. Since I have depression, it’s often hard to tell which is affecting me. I had no other terminology for it until I came across the quote.

Uninspired. Yeah. Fits.

Because in that mood I am hungry to absorb knowledge, stimuli, in lots of forms. Visual. Audio. Music. Film. Shows. Comics. Books. And so on. But writing, if it comes at all then, is less than 1,000 words during those 3-6 months.

That’s fine. I learned two years ago my ‘system’ works better if I let it run its course than fighting it as I once did. That just made the now termed Uninspired doldrums last longer.

Last week, I wrote 700 words, the first since mid-Autumn. What broke it? I got inspired.

What made me so hype as to get up off the bed, to stop staring at the ceiling, and return to my dark fantasy short story? Horror. Actually, it was two tidbits of upcoming horror that made me salivate and got my clogged brain gears turning.

Nosferatu. have you seen the trailer? Great Caesar’s Ghost! Such a lovely piece of Gothic dread in those two+minutes. I haven’t cared for a vampire anything since Bram Stoker’s Dracula came out in the early 90s. Robert Eggers looks like he can really direct a gloomy, beautiful film and I hope it’s half as stunning in the telling as it is in the vibes. I watched it over two dozen times the first two days it was out. I thought this would be the best thing in horror I would see for the next few years, and that nothing else would charge more dopamine in me.

However…

28 Years Later came from out of nowhere with an announcement, and then a teaser trailer that made me forget Nosferatu ever existed. I used to fear zombie flicks. But I love the 28 _____ Later series of films. Perhaps it’s because they aren’t truly zombies, but living humans infected with insane rage? It’s a well constructed story that is intensely frightening, and the latest chapter looks to make the strange even stranger. And that Rudyard Kipling poem (being read aloud in a 1915 recording) perfectly ups in tone with the trailer and makes it all so very, very eerie.

Needless to say, I got pumped up and after watching the latest horror trailer for the seventeenth time, put my butt in the seat and wrote. My dark fantasy short has quite a bit of the horrific in it, and after dropping wordage I plotted out some more Horror In The Hundreds shorts. Longer ones I hope to submit to magazines, then back to the shorter ones for this fair website in the near future. I began 2023 with a goal of submitting more stories to mags, and did do one that was published. 2024 I wanted to extend this, and didn’t meet the goal, but I sure did start them.

Horror trailers have given me the emotional and spiritual push to jump back into the Darkness and turn digital ink into stories. I was floundering along the road to horror for months, but this fork in the road woke me up. Some think liking horror is bad. I find the struggle against the wicked dark to be inspiring, for getting through life, and for keeping my pen sharp.

Choose your path. It’s easy. It’s the one you chose years ago. Sometimes you just need to stop and light a new torch along the way.

What inspired you to write recently?