I was in bed, but I cannot sleep. This must be written. Tonight, watching one of those Special Features they ahve on DVDs for movies about the Visual Effects and how they were created, which put me in midn of the lust I have in my heart for Weta Workshop; and discussing how this entire planet is on a path to doomsville and how if only we could stop consuming so much and so wastefully it might be slowed down, at least; and reading Emily’s Quest, about a girl who can do nothing but write and becomes actually successful at it... made me realize how .. flat my life has become. I do nothing. I have the capacity for so much and yet I sit and do nothing. I play games online, I read the work of others, I watch that devil of a television set... my life has become a prisoner of the cathode ray tube, and all the while I don’t even want to be there. And even so, even as I sit and do nothing, even as I want to do something, anything creative, I still do not. I have come to a terrible, awful truth about myself:

I have no Drive.

I have nothing to motivate me. i do not have that which makes people do the things they were born to do. I can do SO MUCH, i can learn anything I need to or want, my brain is logical and artistic all at once.. and yet I sit and do nothing.

My beautiful guitar sits unplayed, the book I so faithfully followed every night for an entire week staring at me underneath. I have two books on my desk which I paid for out of money I should not have spent at that time: “How to Tell a Story” and “45 Master Characters - Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters." Neither spine has yet been bothered with a crack, and Novel writing month approacheth quickly. I have a novel from last year, parts of which are really fucking good, and my one attempt to edit lasted approximately 45 minutes. My workroom gathers dust, many dollars worth of supplies for dozens of crafts left unused, hundred of projects abandoned after such hopeful starts.

I get distracted. I walk away. I don’t look back until i am distracted from another project; and it seems that I’ve been distracted by all my projects one too many times and they bore me. My jewellery seems countrified and stupid. The designs in my head I never try. People give me projects, people have such a high opinion of my work that they actually seek me out, and I sabotage them by my lack of Ambition. I have an unfinished book review whose awful, awful existence and my inability to finish effectively wrote me out of all my local writing jobs - including the one that paid; I have several pieces of Burmese Amber which I should be learning to wrap properly because the woman who normally does it (at $200-800 a pop) is retiring soon, and oops! I forgot; I am supposed to, this very minute, be redesigning a logo for Weldon who never charges less than a grand for a logo.

Kevin tried to explain how I must not see what he sees; I must not see all that I can do and all that I have done. And maybe that’s true, but he doesn’t see all that i am not doing now. I am doing nothing. He does not see the hours of every day I spend alone in my apartment surrounded by dozens and dozens of things I could and even should be doing - for make no mistake, this failure of ambition spreads in all things (work, play, cleaning, exercise, better health, good nutrition - in all i try so sincerely, and in all I fail to achieve and in all I struggle to re-start. I am nothing if not consistent) and instead of doing them, I watch Jeopardy. i don’t even LIKE jeopardy, but it’s easier than doing something. Easy. life has become difficult, and I’m too much of a fucking coward to stand up and push against it.

I love my life, and yet I wish for bigger and better things... and I am taking no steps to achieve them. I haven’t (until tonight) even had the ambition to make a damned list of the things I want to do.

Until tonight. Enough is enough. Before I allowed myself the escape -yes, the utter escape into another world (written by one who had more creativity and Drive than I could ever hope to achieve - LM Montgomery) I made myself start that list.

I have much more to say. I have not thought this entirely through. i have not edited. My fingers are screaming for a rest, and a rest they must have.

I will do something with my life and my creativity and I will keep trying. I have to keep trying.