I remember a few years ago, when comics writer Kurt Busiek, then writing The Avengers for Marvel as well as his own Astro City title, was being slowed down by persistent sinus infections. That is, Astro City was slowed down; he found he was still able to produce The Avengers regularly. It was a different kind of mental process, he tried to explain to fans; as I recall, there was much puzzlement.
But I think Busiek had the right of it. Personally, I’ve been trying to work through a sinus infection lately, which has not been fun. I’ve been taking antibiotics lately, and I think they’ve been helping. We’ll see. The point is, I find that I’m able to do some mental tasks while slowed with a sinus infection, but not others. Essays, such as the ones for Black Gate, I’ve mostly been able to do. History articles I’ve been able to do. I’ve been slower with both those things, but mostly able to complete them, except when I also caught the flu and spent a prolonged time trying not to move.
Creative writing … that’s been beyond me. In writing a paragraph of fiction, there are a lot of tracks, let’s call them, that I normally don’t think about. The internal structure of a sentence, how the sentence connects to the sentence before and leads to the sentence after, what it’s doing in the structure of a paragraph; what it’s doing for the character, and how point-of-view is maintained; how the vocabulary’s right for the world and story moment; how it moves the plot forward; how it may set up or pay off other things — all these sorts of things, when I’m healthy, are basically instinctive. When I’m sick, they’re too much to deal with.
I have been feeling better, and I hope to be getting back to fiction writing soon. I hate not writing. It’s depressing. I’m hoping the antibiotics, and other medication, will kick in. With luck, then, more story updates soon.
