After my silent rant last night, I actually started writing a new story, so something good came out of it. I also find myself wanting to do more work today. I am still having some issues connecting to the words that want to come out of me, and I think that might be my real issue.
I think a lot of these feelings come from not completely coping with the lost of David Bowie.
I am still so raw. His music has played in the back of my head since I heard the news, and I cannot listen to his songs without crying. I feel like I have something inside me that needs to get out, but the connection is weak. Not because a lack of skills, but a fear of letting myself go there. I thought I went there when I wrote The Loss of Lady Stardust, but that was me dealing with a character's feeling, and not really my own.
What if this is my American Pie moment? Not in the sense of the movie, but the song. Sunday night was when the music died... I have found it hard to listen to music since, but that seems very melodramatic, even for me, but Bowie is only second to Paul Stanley when it comes to the heart of my musical soul.
I've felt like this before. When Rozz Williams died, and again with Pete Steele, but those are losses that I still haven't dealt with either.
Maybe it is Bowie's connection with Jim Henson via Labyrinth that is making this so hard. I haven't been swept away into flights of pure fantasy as flowed from Henson so perfectly. Maybe I feel like I will never experience anything like the art of Henson and Bowie again?
Why can't I take myself there?
It would be the height of arrogance to claim that I am next Jim Henson, because there will never be another. But in a world where I have lost Henson, Bowie, Steele, and Williams, Anne McCaffrey is gone, and with her the Dragons of Pern. George Lucas isn't giving me any more dreams to watch... Maybe I need to take what I love and miss and entertain myself.
Maybe the true source of the pain I feel over the loss of these people I have never really known is my fear of the responcibility over the dreams and visions that entertain me. Maybe I am forced now to accept the fact that I have to make my own myths.
What if I am not sad, what if I am afraid of the responcibility to forge my own vision, and not bask in the shared dreams of others.
I am going to have to think about this even more. Let me know what you think. Have I diagnosed the real problem?