Well, hello everyone and welcome to 2012 with Cartoons and Creative Writing! Is this going to be the best year yet? Well, certainly, but it still would not be possible without you – the readers. So, this is a very appropriate time, I think, for a Thank You For Reading!

Further, on the topic of thank yous, I’d also like to thank those of you who downloaded my 2012 Discworld calendar. If you are a procrastinator like me and you haven’t downloaded it yet, but would still like to do so, you still have time! I’ll leave it up for download a while longer – probably until the end of January, at which point, I suspect, it will become a bit obsolete. To download, check for the widget in the sidebar, with the name “Cartoondramas downloads” and click the .PDF icon of the calendar.

I received my annual report for this blog this week. Actually, I’d like to ask, is this a new feature? I’ve been blogging with WordPress for longer than this blog is old, but I have never received an annual report before. Anyway, according to this report, by leaps-and-bounds-far the most popular search term that people have reached my blog in 2011 was “library cartoon”. Which was, incidentally, how I tagged the very first post that I ever posted on here. Well, well, well. That the first little post would turn out one of the most popular…

Fun fact: I got the idea and started this blog while procrastinating on studying for a test. That was at the end of May; thus, just over 7 months ago. And it is, probably, also the reason why procrastination is such a popular topic on this blog!

Aside fun fact: I failed that test mentioned in the previous fact. Semantics and I are just not friends.

Now… my dilemma is whether I should just continue on with this reminiscencing post on how this blog developed and so on, or whether I should show you a cartoon. On second thoughts, a bloggyversary would probably be a more appropriate place for the reminiscences and this-time-last-years. Bring on the cartoon!

Right. There has been a very specific reason for my silence as of late. There were very few cartoons and no creative writing. The fault lies, you see, with the Well of Creative Writing.

I once heard (I think it was on the NaNoWriMo forums) someone say that creative writing comes out of a well, and that this well needs to be constantly refilled, or it could run out, just like a regular well containing water.

That set me thinking… never mind all the other analogies and connections with wells that I could come up with… I thought of this story that I read as a kid. It was, amongst other things, an explanation of where snow came from. It made a fascinating story for someone like me who has never seen a snowfall and thus it stuck with me. It went something like this:

At the very bottom of a deep well in the ground lived an old woman. She employed a young girl as maid. This girl had at some stage fallen down the well, but this is besides the point, at the moment. The girl had to shake out all the mattresses and pillows in the house every day, until the feathers flew about her head. Obviously she didn’t like the job and thought it unnecessary to do it everyday. Then she refused to do it. After a while, the old woman showed her how the people of the earth were complaining, because no snow was falling and they wanted snow. Thus, the snow was made at the bottom of this well, by shaking out feather mattresses. I don’t know how the story explained how snow came from up in the air, but was made at the bottom of a well…

The point is, if snow was made at the bottom of a well, designed to go upwards, then what would it look like if inspiration was also manufactured at the bottom of a well that had to be refilled all the time? Well, I have no idea, but I do know what it must look like at the bottom of my well:

Definitely a strike. That is why my well is not getting filled up!

The NaNoWriMo pipe definitely drained it during November and sucked it dry beyond the reach of other writings, but it is now January and I am still so uninspired… I actually have two ideas at the moment, but I am mostly just looking at them. I have so many half-drawn cartoons, but I don’t know how to make them funny so that I can finish them. Someone help me tell those inspiration workers to get up and go back to work, please!

Bingo! I am uninspired to make a post, so I just made one about being uninspired to make one! And now I’m just rambling… I’ve been doing a lot of that lately. When I did my 750 words’ journaling today, I started off about Angry Birds, ended up on a rant about Disney princesses, and had an afterthought about when did I become so cynical. So that is rather wide apart.

Now, I’m breaking my own New Year’s Resolutions (or as I refer to them: New Year’s Revolutions) already, which is no surprise, by staying up half the night again. I really don’t want to go through another year like I went through 2011. The most sleep I got a night was 5 hours… Only now in the holidays when I am getting rested, I am realising that I went through life with a permanent haze of tiredness behind my eyes and that I got so used to it that I didn’t notice it anymore. I really want to try a healthier sleeping, exercising and eating lifestyle this year. I can’t live so haphazardly.

Speaking of which? Have you made your New Year’s Revolutions yet?
Tell me in the comments!

Hoping to become more inspired and less rambling,