I find my mental acuity tends to decrease without a periodic rapport with enthused individuals pertaining to similar interests. The issue I find is that I feel I have no one particularly interested in my premises in which I actually can have an in person conversation with. While there is always the readably available option of anonymous internet discussion, I feel many of you can understand the wish to not allow public viewing in regards to future publishing. Without an outlet to bounce ideas off it feels like Solitaire instead of Texas Hold'em; I want to put my chips on the table. It's not as if I don't have friends and family to talk to about a range of topics. It's just I'm clearly more excited than anyone else about the ideas and theories of future technological advancement and its impact on society. This at least upholds within my inner circle. Even the people who love me, thus bear with me at times, only have a limited amount of actual interest. I love them all to death, but none of them care about the effect that virtual/augmented reality will have on the entertainment industry. Watch the show, who cares about how it's made. There will always be famous actors and athletes, no evolution towards those roles at all. Who cares that robotic chefs are possible, I've worked in the food industry 30yrs and will do so another 30 more. Sure, maybe... But what if? I like creating planets from scratch (programs for it) and then adding life to it, predicting how it will evolve. Multiple people I've told that to considered it boring. To me, it's creating my own universe. Anyone else run into the problem of wishing you had more people to discuss your thoughts and ideas with? It just gets tiring isolated with my own thoughts without a viable release. Which just means I'm losing more and more motivation to keep writing. I need my interest to be rekindled. I don't want to join a writer's group, but I soooo much prefer talking in person. Maybe I need to go to some conventions, or something, and get some email addresses.
Yes, I understand this completely. The times I was the most prolific and creative were the times I can name specific individuals that had a passionate interest & exhortations for my ideas. Their curiousity and excitement kindled my spark of creativity, and their continued enthusiasm and encouragement fueled the blaze. One time the individual broke off our relationship all of a sudden, in the midst of my writing a story. I have never finished that work. It's left exactly where it was. And I didn't intentionally abandon it the moment I was cut off from my friend—the project just fell to the wayside without the active audience, to listen, to quiz, to interject, to marvel, to dissect, to second-guess. It doesn't necessarily have to be in person, as we shared emails, text messages, lengthy phone calls, whatever means of communication, and it'd all keep my inspiration and application strong & steady. Sadly I'm in a strange state: I have one who unfortunately indiscriminately adores my writing (to the point where he thinks my academic prose or basic text messages are Shakespeare) and I have one who has the same wavelengths in thoughts and interests and desires, but has no knowledge or like of literature. The former's useless in he can't be constructive in anyway—you lose respect for the opinions of one who finds day old fast food and a five star restaurant of equal excellence, that sort of thing. The later is wonderful to discuss premises and the story in general, but isn't particularly keen on reading or the grit of writing. I never realized how blest I'd been for intellectual, avid readers who had genuine interests in my stories early on.
I'm lucky in that my brother is as much of a science and sci-fi dork as I am and we can have long interesting conversations about such things, but when it comes to the nuts and bolts of writing itself (from sentence construction to character creation to worldbuilding to theming) I don't have much of an outlet myself. It's something that's been heavily disheartening to me lately, actually. I decided that the solution was to cut it off entirely and not talk or try to talk to anyone about anything writing related, so that I wouldn't be at all reliant on other peoples' thoughts and feedback. Basically I'm trying to train myself to not want that rapport, but I can't say it's working, frankly. I had a blog for sharing scrap shorts and talking sort of into the void about my writing and a couple of my friends followed it but never commented, and I thought that removing the avenue for conversation by deleting the blog would make me not wish/hope for conversation, but eh. The only thing I really miss about rping when I was younger is that people were obligated to show an interest in your characters/plots if you were going to play together, hahah. It's been a long time since I was into it but maybe I'm still spoiled to that.
Umm, no thanks? Again, I don't want a writing group. Starting my own for the sake of talking about topics pertaining to a book I'm working on... not sure I'm that narcissistic. Expanding the parameters to include a wider diversity sounds like a LOT to ask for no guarantee of success. I use MeetUps for kayaking, hiking, and photography. Errr... and twice for board games with my younger cousins. No interest in it otherwise.
Occasional reader's interest in some of my characters and settings have inspired me to develop them more. Feedback helps, silence doesn't help. When I show my work to friends I'm expecting more than literary feedback. I'm hoping that we can discuss the story and characters and how they relate to our lives and experiences (usually similar lives and experiences, that's why we are friends). I can tell them, for instance, that this particular situation was inspired in that one time in my life when... And they can tell me that they knew a person who resembled one of my characters, and then this happened... But I'm with @izzybot, I'm learning not to be reliant on stuff like that.
