Creativity amidst worry

[breakinglight11]

Not doing great right now. Of course nobody is in the pandemic, but I’d been mostly okay until lately. I’ve gotten more and more concerned about my employment situation— I’m almost certainly not getting any classes during the summer, and though I do have classes lined up for the fall, I’m afraid enrollment is going to drop and they’ll be cancelled. I’ve also had a hard time being optimistic about the creative work that I do. Theater and film, the two arts I’m doing the most work in and attempting to break into, may not recover for years; theater, already on the down trend, maybe ever. Even prose publishing is struggling now, so working on that damned novel seems more of a slog than ever.

I’m trying to keep doing things. Writing still, organizing what performance I can. The staged readings of my scripts over Zoom are a fun social activity if nothing else. They’re tough to make high quality because of any number of technical limitations, and honestly not that many people look at them. That’s a bit discouraging to me, how hard it is and has always been to get anybody to care about the things I write. But if I don’t keep trying nobody will pay attention, so I’m attempting to keep working.

I need to decide what to do next. I should probably attempt to publish one Zoom reading a month or so, until social distancing is over at least. I also should probably have another screenplay in my portfolio that’s within my stated brand of “action-adventure stories where the action is a metaphor for the themes and character journeys” that I can pitch to industry executives. And I could work on the book, which I stalled on due to not really knowing how to edit it, though see my above comment about the possible pointlessness of it. But I have to do something, or things might even feel worse.