Still alive, but hibernating.

Hello, dear Burrowers.

I haven't been treating you very dearly lately, have I? Falling behind on any kind of schedule I set as soon as I can, avoiding transparency, and doing nothing with the money a charitable few of you have given me through ko-fi or Patreon. I'm going to attempt to explain myself, as much for my own sake as for anyone's curiosity.

I don't think I especially enjoy writing.

I like the idea of writing, and the ideas I write about, but the act of writing itself has become as arduous as any of my other remaining pass-times. The shift from fun to work happened right around the time I started the blog, and it grew steadily worse from there. At the time of this writing, I've posted nothing in over a month, and I've dropped out of all of the play-by-post games I was a part of. A couple times I sat here trying to delete my blog and associated pages, but (un)fortunately I've chickened out of that so far.

I've done these things, or come close to doing them, because I hate the things I make. Evidently I've had this problem ever since I was a child and it's a little less normal for people to feel than I previously believed. I feel a deep, sometimes painful need to destroy the things I create, because the fact that I was the one who made them means that they are inadequate and inferior to the creative things that other people have made or will make. This is doubly frustrating when a part of me also wants my things to be seen and enjoyed by others. That's why I started up the Burrow to begin with, after all. Had I been able to satisfy myself with just a folder of stories in my desk or on my desktop, I would have quietly continued to add to them, or burned or deleted them months ago by now.

Another reason why I started the Burrow was because I wanted some money.

Being unemployed all my life and afraid to leave my house on most occasions, let alone find a job or real social life with humans, I felt the need to save my change for years but only recently got into the habit of mindlessly completing surveys for PayPal payments and Visa gift cards. Owning a successful and monetized site was my pipe-dream, and after I rightly destroyed an abortive YouTube gaming channel attempt years ago, I eventually came to wishfully thinking that my writing could accomplish what choppy, low-fi videos could not.

Since my dislike for my own material sort of forbids me from advertising it anywhere for any reason, you can see how my blog has remained obscure outside of the posts which a fan aggressively promoted for my sake. I can't even share posts with my significant other for fear of seeming silly, desperate, improperly distracted, or whorish. And when I saw the new blogs of recent acquaintances reaching 1,000 or 10,000 page views in a fraction of the time it had taken me to hit the same milestones, I began to seriously think "why bother?" With hopelessness about my blog's future mounting on one side and resentment about its content on the other, I finally petered out last month.

I don't particularly want to get back into writing at the moment, though it would be useful to keep the empty hours a little less so. I want something to be done with the ideas that I have, especially since (in my ignorant little bubble where I read virtually nothing that other people are working on) they seem to be unique. But I don't think I'm in the head space to be able to do it comfortably. Maybe I'll come back for the new year, especially if some kind of job finds me and takes the unrealistic financial pressure off of this hobby. And, maybe once Google+ is shut down for good in April, I'll have the incentive to start sharing on places like reddit communities, since there will be literally no other option for me but to try different avenues.

So, consider this a hiatus of sorts, and forgive me if you were looking forward to new updates on Litte's road trip, or explanations of what the hell the aurikhs and Fokari are.