This could be the night where it finally happens. And by “it” I mean “nothing.”
I have a Gaiman sleeping on my hand (or trying to). It’s 9:30 because after I unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher, I came up to find my desktop complaining that it really really really needed to be restarted for no reason other than Windows 10 is a bit of a butt. And by the time the updates made it through their third reboot, I’d been blowing through social media garbage (but it was about old TV theme songs, so at least it was something I feel something about).
Cat on my hands and keyboard, I am giving what little I have, which already wasn’t going to be much.
I have another (newish) friend who came to me with some questions about writing today. Which is funny because I am no expert, but I guess, if you do comparibles, I’m his expert in that I’m a friend, I’m close by, and I can be the first step he takes until he outgrows me and finds his next expert. We all go through it. If you have something you want to do, you start by learning in watching or listening or reading. And then you take classes or lessons. Or maybe you do it with friends (I’m thinking of something like music, but it can be a lot of things. I just figured I’d better fill in the blanks before it sounded dirty). I actually went to college for music for a year, as much as that amounted to anything, but after trying to take lessons in guitar as a teenager, the college classes really did give me a better foundation than anything else. It just happened too late for me to still be as into it as I was just a couple years before as writing became my passion (we assume. Since I still don’t write nearly enough, passion may be the wrong word. Interest will do).
All I can do in trying to teach someone else is tell them what I’ve done. Sure, I’ll try to tailor it to their interests and goals as best I can. Since this friend wants to write an actual fiction book and has never done something like that before, I mentioned NaNoWriMo to him. He’s actually gone to something different from me already (in just the couple of hours since we talked this afternoon). But that’s great actually. He found his own thing. He has his muse that he’s chasing and I admire that. In giving advice that he promptly ignored, it doesn’t make the advice less valuable. It’s the same thing as happens to me when I read books on writing. I absorb all I can. and I pick out the stuff that works for me and pocket away the stuff that doesn’t. For right now. It may be that at some point that other stuff may be what I need to do. But I think we all take what we need and realize that following the same steps as someone else, piece by piece and bit by bit, it never really works for anyone.
I am still trying to figure out where I’m going with things right now. Why it’s so easy for me to write and post these silly journal entries without a care in the world about them, verses why it’s so hard for me to write a story and have someone else look at it. I guess one takes work and the other doesn’t, but honestly, if it’s because I’m scared of what someone thinks of me, these journal entries are basically me baring my soul. It’s a rather honest look inside my head, so if I was going to be judged on something it should be these. A story is just a story (well, up until a couple years ago where everything gets torn apart on the internet). Are my stories a reflection of me? Sure, in some ways. But I guess I also look at them as a skill. I can’t be bad at saying the same stupid shit on a web page that I would say in a casual conversation. But I can be a bad storyteller. And I guess it has to mean something to me if I am so afraid that I would fail at it.
Erin came home feeling ill (not unusually so, it’s a… monthly thing). And I made her a couch bed and fed her some of her cereal. And she asked me if it was okay if she didn’t do any art today. Erin does art practically every day. When she goes a couple of days on rare occasions not making anything, she gets in her head that she’s lost her ability to do it any more. And then she gets inspired again and blows everyone’s minds with a new piece that they didn’t see coming. Even with the sense that she could, and should, rightly take the day off with how she was feeling, she got up and started sewing one of her dolls, a new project and skill she’s just taken on in the last couple of weeks.
Erin is the bravest person I know. And if I’ve said that here a few times, well, it’s because of how true it is. And how much I look up to her.
She doesn’t worry about a project not turning out well. She’s been sewing for a week, and her new doll has a lopsided head, so she decided how to use that to make it even cuter. She “happy little trees’d” the fuck out of it.
One of the first things I wrote in my old Prodigy X-Men group was on accident. And it became a running gag after it because I didn’t know why I wrote it or what else to do with it. And it became one of the funniest things I’d ever come up with, naturally, that lasted through a couple of years and honestly was probably why most people liked me there. I couldn’t have done that on purpose. It was just an “Oops. Well, now I’ve gotta run with it” line. Not so much brave as it was just not giving a damn.
Something Phil and I talked about the other night was how he submits stories all over the place. Now, he’s got more stories than I do to submit, that’s problem one for me. But he also has the ability to just do that. I don’t. Not yet. Writing became precious to me. What i wrote became precious. It was too important that I do this thing well, for whatever reason, that i ceased thinking that I could just have fun with it. But when I’m writing, I am normally having a lot of fun. My hands get sore, my eyes blur more and more looking at the screen. I have a kitten on my wrist. But seeing the (fuzzy) words hit the screen, hearing the thoughts whiz by but actually having recorded them to look back on after, I do love doing that. Much like playing guitar though, the idea of doing it and then passing it along to someone else to judge fills me with complete dread. Hence why I skipped finals and drove out to California (and never went back to college). And maybe why I stopped trying to write for an audience. Or never really started.
So maybe I do have something I can teach my friend about writing. Just like I can learn from Phil, and Erin, and so many other friends I admire.
Right now though, I’m going to admire Gaiman and his little sleepy face. So good night.
