Depression's nothing new to writers--sometimes it's the paradoxical motivating force that pulls the pen across the page.  Some of the best humor comes from depressive roots, and certainly it's close acquaintances with introspection and examination.

It's also a stunting effect.  My own depression is cyclical and when it erupts, zit-like, I question the whole writing process.  Should I bother?  Who would read my crap?  Do I even have anything that needs to be said?  What makes me so great?

My depression has been entertaining a tawdry, incestuous relationship with my inner critic.

Sometimes only certain types of writing are affected.  I can crank out flash fiction but my blogging is disabled.  I can blog but I have nothing to write in correspondence with personal friends.  I can write letters but my pen-and-paper journal is neglected.

Other times, writing as a function is suspended, and along with this everything else I enjoy suffers: World of Warcraft, cooking, stamp making, playing with the cats, &c.  It's hard to read a book at all, but currently I've got a stack of books by my favorite author and each one is an admonition of my weakness.  "Look at how much I wrote," they say to me, "and you can't even plonk away at your fancy-dancy laptop?  Look at these novels!  Look at these collections of short stories!  Imagine what doesn't appear in here!  Imagine all the writing submitted and had rejected!  And you can't muster a single sentence?  For shame."

I can't even plunge into drinking.  My 12-year-old Speyside is for writers, my harsh Czech absinth is for writers, and I clearly am not one.  At best I can ask for a filtered water.

It's at times like these when every author of note and influence insists, "You've got to just sit down and write something.  Write about how you can't write anything.  Write 'I hate life' over and over and over and see where it goes."  It's like an Olympic cyclist who doesn't have access to his bike, his stationary bike is broken, and he's told to lie back on his bed and make pedaling motions in the air at the very least.

Is that right?  Is that it?

Well, there was a flare-up of activity for my Open Salon post about the plagiarism episode.  Now I'm back to regular blogging and... what I write about regularly isn't as note-worthy.  It doesn't get as much  notice, most people don't comment and few rate it at all.  I need to find something more compelling than my life to write about.

My Blogger account, I think,  is going to see more activity.  From me, anyway.  I have a lot more energy and am having a screwy day today, so I'll probably update it a few times with stuff and nonsense as it occurs to me.

This is a kind of writer's block.  One of my friends would experience depressive episodes where he had to go down to the gym and burn off energy at the expense of a punching bag.  He had more energy when he was depressed.  That's like me with writer's block: I want to chitter away about anything else in the world other than what I should be focusing on.

I just wrote a blog entry about foreign online radio, and I'm about to write one about how to make yams palatable.  I hate yams, but I know they're nutritious so I'm trying to learn to eat them.  I found a way to disguise their flavor entirely: sautee them with onions and carrots, then bury them in curry!  If I ever formalize a recipe, you bet it'll go online.

But I should be applying for jobs.  I should be looking for freelance gigs.  I should be sending out manuscripts and doing research for Helium.com articles.  I should at least be doing tonight's homework!  But I'm doing none of these things, I'm being a flake and looking for ways to expend all this directionless energy.  I may fire up Wii Fit and work out to exhaust my body and then sit down and get some decent writing done.  Maybe.

It's interesting to me that tonight's homework is to write up a short- and long-term writing schedule for myself.  What I'm going to do on a daily basis, and what I hope to achieve in the next few weeks and months.  Irony!

I know a good writer is supposed to take whatever assignment s/he can grab, build on that, use it as a challenge to grow from, &c.  I know a good writer can grab the ball and run with it and shouldn't be too proud to undertake a job.

Gods know I haven't had any assignments lately.  I'm looking for work through various channels and am excited about some of the opportunities, but at the risk of sounding princessy, there is one job I will never accept.

Marketing.  I see a lot of writing positions in the realm of marketing, and as much as I need the experience and would like the money, I can't bring myself to work in marketing.  I see it as a force of evil.  It uses increasingly manipulative messaging and semiotics to exploit an undereducated population while exploring how closely it can skirt technical legal offense.

I see these jobs that start to sound okay, like a blogger wanted for a company-wide intranet blog, but then they mention planning e-mail and mobile phone campaigns.  I'm against spamming (however they want to call it) and I'm particularly defensive against marketing through text messaging.  Marketing sees no boundary, no inviolate personal realm, no inappropriate breach.  There is nowhere you can suggest that Marketing will say, "That's going too far."  All they want to do is sell you stuff that you don't need and, once you've bought it, sell you more of it.

I don't want to use my powers for evil.  It would be a personal failure for me to design an unsuccessful Yo-J or Sunny D campaign, but it would be a larger moral failure for me to write a successful one.  I don't want a legacy in the form of unsolicited and invasive text messages on millions of cell phones, and I don't want all the anger generated from that directed at me.

At the same time... I need a job.

This is awesome: I have a list.

Last night my wife sat me down and asked me to brainstorm what it is I wish to achieve, my short-term goals and responsibilities.  I pulled out a datebook and allotted hours to these tasks.

Now I have a schedule to fulfill, and I'm elated.  I kn ow I work well off of lists--I work best with lists--but I didn't even have the discipline to create one for myself.  I would have needed a list to set up a time to form a separate list.  That's just how I am.

i worked well in the military.  I didn't do so well on my own.  With too much time on my hands, being left to my own devices, all those cliches, I got nothing done.

But now, before I catch the bus to go to class tonight, I'm going to have applied for a couple jobs, submitted two queries to local newspapers, written up a Hallowe'en-appropriate short story for a contest, read three chapters from my textbooks, played with the cats and cleaned up the kitchen, brainstormed an op-ed and a new article, and updated twelve blogs.

I am very, very excited.  I always achieve when I have a list.  I may not knock out every single item on the list, but I always accomplish at least half of the items.  At the end of the day I feel proud for a day of accomplishment, when I was using a list.  This bodes very well.

Ha!  Leapt out of the gate and fell on my face.  Why was I in such a hurry to not post anything?

Today I'm sitting in Urban Bean and catching up on all of my blogs.  Yes, i haven't written in such a long time that there are few blogs I feel it's okay to skip.  Those would be the eBay blog (none of my merchandise sold, the auctions expired, why should I go back?), Orkut (they don't even have a blog, just a kind of Scrapbook thing), and Yahoo 360 (the code there is wonky--it never shows my updates to me).

Everything else, I'll update.  No one reads my WordPress blog, but I updated it with a writing exercise from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, where I focused on environmental detail.  I hacked out a short story that's been lurking around in the back of my mind.  It was good fun, turning the scene over in my head to focus on each of... aw, crap.  I never mentioned temperature or scents.  How stupid!  I could have described the temperature of the room and the smell of the confections, totally overlooked that.

No one reads my Friendster blog (does anyone even use Friendster anymore?  Didn't think so) but it's useful to keep updating it as a writing exercise.  All I did was complain about not having blogged lately and not having submitted any queries to publications.  I complained similarly in Blogger and Open Salon, as well.

I don't know what to say.  I was afforded three months to stay at home and take a stab at writing freelance, and it blew up in my face.  I haven't achieved anything useful, I've squandered this time completely.  Who could ever have any faith in me as a writer after the past 90 days?  I submitted three queries to three video game magazines and they can't be arsed to respond.  I have a couple interviews/profiles to submit to some local publications, but I'm a nobody in this scene, in any scene.  Why would they be interested in anything I have to say?  I'm partially insane, too, so what's interesting to me is completely lost on anyone else.  I completely ruined a first date with a lovely girl by going too deeply into the sociological lesson gained from an escaped plague program that ran rampant within World of Warcraft.  Her eyes literally glazed over and everything.

So what makes me think I have anything useful to say here?