It's a time of shedding for me. In multiple meanings of the word.
I'm "shedding" in the musician slang term. It's short for "wood shed", as in go take your instrument out to the wood shed and practice endlessly.
Every one of my public facing flows of information has been dead silent, but I have been working on a lot of stuff: game design things, solo rpgs, podcast ideas, novel ideas. One of the novel ideas actually stuck and I'm working on it in earnest.
I'm playing around by myself. And it's a nice place to be at. And despite Adam's wariness, it's not all just introspection and self-analysis. It's just making things. It's fun.
And it's a place that I've only been able to get to because of "shedding" expectations off of myself.
I know in the official semi-closure episode of Sil Zero I said I was gonna do a bunch of stuff. I haven't. The only thing I've worked on is the final episode of Droidhead, which is coming along but I am also trying to write a song for it and that takes a lot more time so whatever, it'll be done when it's done.
As for the rest? I dunno. At the moment I don't really want to.
I was feeling obligated when I made that episode. Like I was letting people down and felt they were owed some creative consolation prize for not...I don't know, getting the ending they should have? For ending a podcast in the middle of a season which I always promised myself I would never do?
But ending the season in the middle wasn't my choice so whatever, not my failure.
Also, obligation is a terrible source of creativity. So I might do that stuff, or I might not. You may feel however you like about that.
Lots of other things are sorta "shedding" off me like dead skin. Things I'm not consciously trying to get rid of, but they're just kinda happening and I'm at peace with it. Things always change.
Lastly, I've been "shedding" weight. My achilles tendons were starting to act up (probably a side effect of my ACL surgery) and it was now important to reduce the load on my legs. But what's been more annoying is that now that I pay attention to proper nutrition (not just counting caloreis) I feel and think so much better. It's infuriating. I'm on day 60 and I haven't had a headache in that entire time.
It's probably contributing to my new creative increase. I forget who said it, but I remember a tweet from author that said "the brain is just a computer in meat, and the better you take care of the meat, the better the computer runs."
Feels like that.