Frequent visitors to this site (or my portfolio) may have noticed a new button in the menu — “sunflowers”. Go ahead and click it if you like. It will take you to a short explanation of my book (not yet published) and a listing of the blog posts I wrote about it. I might write some more, but the short story is that I was writing a ton in late 2008, early 2009 (both on the book and on the blog about the book), but petered out in the summer of 2009 as school was heating up and life had more structure than it had the previous year.

I kept in touch with my friends who were characters in my book, sending them my chapter drafts, soliciting feedback, and just generally trying to keep the flow of inspiration on full for as long as possible.

It didn’t last.

Turns out inspiration is fickle, even when you’re writing about arguably the most exciting experience of your life, as I was (and still am, ostensibly). So here I am, wondering where I’m going to get it next.

My girlfriend faces these issues daily, in the writing phase of her PhD. We seem to be in a weird cycle where when she is inspired, I am in the doldrums, and when I’m on a roll programming and creating, she is down in the dumps about her work. Lots of problems, but it’s clear that our discussions about the creative process aren’t exactly cures for our inspirational woes.

Here’s the funny part. This whole post is an attempt at finding inspiration to keep writing my book. It’s my first blog post about the book since April 2009, and I’ve written probably about 60 moleskine pages since that time, so we’ll just have to wait and see if any kind of burst of productivity results from this meta-writing.

To end with a question, what do you do about this crap? Other than reading 43folders, of course.