Writer's block

I don't know why but I've been trying to write and not able to get anything even remotely satisfying. It's not that I don't have ideas, its that my writing out those ideas is crap. If you saw my last story you know I like the cold open. But right now everything I right has way too much set up. Any ways, I've been watching Kill La Kill. How the fuck do these people do this. Its so stupid but its the good type of stupid. I want to be able to do that. Its really easy to look at this stuff and get really discouraged. Well, I guess we get better. There's nothing to do but get practice here.

So I need to fill a blog entry huh. Well lets talk about stuff I think I would like. I'm a big fan of anti-heroic sociopaths as protagonists. Probably comes from Darker Than Black. Good show and you should watch it. Similarly, I like having some powers for a protagonists. It's much more interesting than if they're static, normal people. One of the issues I have with the Cyberpunk 2020 setting is the lack of any real special things that distinguish the player characters from others. Even when you're playing a normal, non-magic characters  in Shadowrun you have edge, a resource that represents a sort of cosmic backing or supernatural luck for the characters. Characters aren't just random schmucks, they're Shadowrunners, with all the implications of that. Compare to the Cyberpunks who don't have much special to them. You can see why one might be more interesting. (Does Cyberpunk have an edge system? If it does, it's not as clearly defined.)

Speaking of Shadowrun, I also like the consolidation of magic and technology. It sort of makes sense. If magic really existed, we would try to evoke modern technology with it. Modern tech has a lot of things going for it. Its reliable and accessible to the common person through easily sold, cheap to produce accessories without having to give commoners access to the actual tools used to make them, limiting their ability to revolt or build weapons. Its a more sensible setting than, say, the average D&D setting where there are old ruins and tombs everywhere for no reason.

My writing challenge

So I know I'm kind of a shitty writer. I come up with novel ideas pretty often but I lack the clarity of vision and the motivation to ever really follow through (hence the pathetic conclusions). If you've read the first story of Mage: The Awakening with the journal then you have some idea of what I try to replicate (stuff like "Note Important Capital Letters. Magicians Use Lots of Capital Letters" pretty well reflects my humor). Unfortunately, I have to set aside time to really work on my writing alongside programming.

Lately I've been playing with Racket and its really interactive which means its really easy to get into a flow. Compare that to writing blog posts where it feels like a monumental effort to make even a small amount of content and its easy to get lost. I try to avoid being a passive consumer of content but its hard. There's so much good content out there at Shamus Young's blog, various comics, and on youtube(I'm not linking that) that its easy to get down and convinced that you really aren't worth reading.

My solution to this is that every day, for one hour from 10-11 PM, unless I have to be away from my computer, I am going to go into the blogger editor (or find something that doesn't make me feel like I'm bashing stones together) and write from now on. I don't care if I'm super tired, I'll sit down and deal with it. I've got 12 years experience of worming out of things I don't want to do and I need to get over that before college. That doesn't mean that I'm going to have a post a day, it just means I'm going to write. Some stuff will be too personal and some will be too large to finish in 1 hour. Still, I might post them later.

Anyways, I was wondering, what sort of things do you do to be more productive? It doesn't matter how old this post is, it still might help the next person like me who just doesn't know how to deal with everything and just run away.