2 types of Artist

It is really strange, and annoying, how these periods of inspiration seem to work for me. About two years ago I vowed that I would, like a "real" author, actually sit down and write, bare minimum, 1-2,000 words daily. For the most part, I have managed to keep my goal, and I have indeed written that amount every day. Some days -- about half let's say -- I have managed to actually go far beyond that, and get 5,000 daily.

And yet, there still always seems to come a week or two, where suddenly, no matter how inspired I think I am, everything just cuts out, in the worst of ways, and goes blank. I have noticed that it often seems to happen after the most intensely inspiring periods. For example, as July was winding down, I was flying wildly between 3 or 4  different horror/fantasy stories I was writing, averaging about 6-7 K words a day. This went on for basically all of July, even. Yet the moment August opened, boom. I just went dry. My pen died. The ink... faded. I passed the first week of August with hardly anything, and I took strong note of it. Well, I said, I'll get it next week. The following week came; I scribbled a little, but still nothing in comparison to the mad outpouring of the month previous. The third week of August -- last week -- I spent lost mostly in a haze of songwriting  ( my great distracting black swan) - and now here I am, August 20th, looking back and wondering...what in the hell happened? I passed almost the entire month not really writing anything truly significant. God damn't.

Of course I know my distractions and I know them well, and the shame of my particular distractions are that they are all other creative ventures. Like songwriting, or like turning on my little Webcam microphone here and talking into it to YouTube about ... stuff like this. And I get frightfully distracted with these other two things -- the songwriting and the Youtube talking--but the thing I wonder is .... is it a pollution? Or is it good? Is it a bad thing that I try to simultaneously still pursue songwriting as I try to write? I don't want to believe it is; but sometimes I cannot tell.

 Last year for instance I did make a sort of defined effort to utterly avoid my guitar, and my piano (the piano got buried in the back of the cellar, and the guitar locked in its case thrown deep in the closet) and it did seem to help me. I wrote a significant amount, and most times when I did get an urge to go play my instruments and sing, I would find myself lacking interest. Music bored me throughout the year 2016. For sure. I hardly even listened to anything aside from ambient tracks of werewolves howling. But now suddenly I find the music bug has bitten again, and what is strange is that now it seems all the songs that come out of me are decidedly better than they ever were before. Not musically speaking, of course. Musically I am still the same as I have been (maybe a wee bit improved on the piano). No I am referring to lyrics here. For it seems that all of my reading throughout 2015 and 2016, and then too all of my studious writing of PROSE, has definitely changed my songs in the most incredible of ways. And I think I am kind of in shock with it. So now I am getting all swept up with songs again, because the originals that I am writing are ...significantly improved. Like little prosaic stories, but in a song....

For example, prior to my big prose period, I often used to get "jittery" when I would try to just sit down and write rhyming poetry in silence. I was always able to write prose without getting distracted, and Bukowski type poetry too, but when I would try to actually write song lyrics and follow some "deep tale" within a song, I would just get jittery and bored and always want to start singing, immediately. This, as you can imagine, made it very difficult to actually write a song, and so what happened was that most of my tunes would come out as rather Sublime-esque absurdist freestyles, just "jamming". I would take my trusty Aminor and C chords, pull off a reggae beat, or maybe do a G and C country sort of thing, and just freestyle song after song that way...since I have always been able to dream up rhymes very quickly. But of course, none of my songs seemed, to me, to mean anything profound. They were not "deeply poetic". You could tell they were not written. Or at least I could. Yet no matter how much I tried to studiously write them, I could not do it. I don't know how it sounds to people who don't write music; but trying to write down, say, 15 verses for a song, in silence, is very strange. And it's even more strange once you try to sing them after you're finished writing them. In fact, lyrics that I wrote beforehand would always sound extremely strange once I would sing them  -- which was another major problem for me. It was almost as though I was trying to tear them out of their natural habitat or something. "No!" the words would scream, "we are just a silent poem for the page! We do not want to be a SONG! Don't make us a SONG!" And of course I am there screaming back at them ... "but that is why I wrote you in the first place! To make you a song to sing! I hate you as silent words, you hags. Why don't you know I never would have written you at all, just to be silent words? How I hate silent rhymes!"

And I can't stress enough how often this would happen, and how often the pre-written lyrics would sound so ..."fake" and "unnatural" once they were put over song. A lot of the problem, of course, I always suspected, was really just in my head. For the truth is that most times when I am freestyling lyrics I've never written...y'all people out there think I have written them anyways. So to the people  "outside" none of this makes any difference...but to me, as the performer, it's always been enormous, and it ruins my own pleasure I guess. 'Cause I just can't express how much fun I really do get , out of freestyling random lyrics and just jumping around like a maniac. In fact, often the very best lyrics come out that way ... (and then they look awful once written , in reverse!).

 So I don't know. I'm horrifically torn I guess. Being two types of artist is a fucking difficult thing yuh know?? But it is still a very beautiful thing and I suspect I shall go on with it and see where it brings me...... for there are worse things that I can think of....