It’s a couple week into this new experiment of writing every day and holding myself accountable. It’s also the end of my holiday weekend. And I spent most of today trying to catch up on sleep, both from staying up too late last night (even extended weekends get their schedules screwed up under my watch) and because we’re expecting rain tonight, so I’ve had sinus headaches all day.
In between, one of the “how does this count as a cable channel” cable channels has been playing what seems to be the entire run of “It’s A Living,” a syndicated show I used to watch in the Eighties. It apparently ran longer than I remembered, and had a lot of interesting guests, including some Star Trek: TNG people before that was a thing. It hit me at the perfect time to be a total energy suck today, both physically and creatively. So I don’t have even the slightest clue as to what this post is going to be.
Oh. Yeah. The thing. The thing where I feel like I need to start over-promising because I’ve barely delivered on what I’ve been doing. Writing-wise.
You see, the trick of doing these daily writings as posts on a journal has been that every day I write anywhere from what seems to be 1200 to just over 3000 words, and then I throw it on my website (which had stagnated for years, after being rebuilt when it had been stagnating before). While I am content to just have these exist in the web app I’ve been writing on, something called Skwerl, which is tracking my daily progress, I was asked by Levi to post some of the things I’d been working on because he used to read my LiveJournal and I guess he enjoyed it or missed something about it. Much like when I get to see what he does in his Sketchbooks every couple of years. While he doesn’t see a lot of his stuff being something a public audience should see, I adore every bit of it that I can sop up with a biscuit. So if he asks me to post my random thought rants, I figure I owe him.
And, as said in the first paragraph up top, it’s about accountability. I don’t expect too many people (if any) to check in on my site on the regular to see what I’m actually writing about each day. But it’s there in case they do, and I’m not making a secret of it. To me it is very much not about “clicks” or “likes” or anything of the sort, although those are always nice to receive. It’s just me getting out of my shell again. Putting myself out there in a way that I’ve been too afraid to do for some time.
But it’s also a bit of a cop-out. Because the diary posts are just ramblings. The one thing I wrote creatively was a nice enough exploration, but it wasn’t a story I had been working on, and i don’t know what or if would come of it if I explored it further (but it’s now out there, so it’s a possibility).
I am, as I’ve said numerous times here over the last couple of weeks, trying to get this project with Levi moving. Trying to get my head back into that spot where I am thinking about story instead of rants is hard. I’ve only been practicing the latter over the last few years, with very minor diversions. The lion’s share of it has been podcasting, but you get to a point where you wind up in conversations over lunch or on the phone with your best friend, and because you podcast somebody says, “Wow, this could be a podcast!”
Note: Everything can be a podcast. Should it? That’s the real conundrum. I guess if you find someone that wants to listen to it then there’s no reason not to. Just don’t expect Casper to sponsor you or for you to go head-to-head with This American Life. I did fake ads off the cuff on one of my shows just because I really want to do podcast ads and no one was ever going to ask me to (not true. We used to have two sponsors for PoT).
I used to play guitar. Before that, I used to write song lyrics. Getting the two things to meet up never quite clicked for me. One, because I was always pretty shit at the guitar. But also, by the time I started working on the muscles it took to do one type of project, the ones I used to have for the other just instantly seemed to atrophy. Or it’s more likely that was my interests. But those two things go together more than most other things that have sidelined me over the years.
My friend J-F is an incredible writer. And he’s sure as shit fun to listen to on a podcast. But he managed to turn his writing into a show with our other friend Amy (who is also incredible, in about a billion ways). J-F managed, with Amy, to turn his writing and their podcasting skills into a phenomenal show.
I am not sure why I struggle with the things that I do to make something that makes sense in my head as a thing I’d both love doing and maybe be kind of good at. I talked recently about my voice in writing, finding my style. I had been playing at trying to do an actual blog because the conversational tone I have here and in my podcasts made sense. But my blogs, like most things I write or talk about, wind up all over the place. I have hard time reeling my mind and my mouth into a controllable entity. My brain is like ping-pong balls or pinballs, just bouncing around, getting struck from all sides by random thoughts and whatever is shiny or on fire, and containing the thoughts and tying them up with a flourish and some cohesiveness is just not my strong suit. Way back in the Prodigy days, a friend who was involved in a lot of the stuff I was writing (and vice-versa) said something along the lines of, “You use words in weird ways. I always get what it is that you mean, but it’s not like you’re using them correctly. Just the context works.” Which is a nice way of saying that I often probably don’t know exactly what the hell I’m talking about. Super nice. Practically candy-coated.
ADHD or other aspects of it were around and starting to be treated when I was still young, but nothing i was ever tested for. Looking back, I showed a lot of the signs (I think, but this is totally a self-diagnosis). As an adult, seeing how prevalent those things are in my family, both after me and before me, and other stuff like Asperger’s and such, maybe I would’ve benefited from some treatment for it, or at least some therapy to see what amount of it I might have. But that’s okay. At most, people think I’m weird. I’m nice, I’m funny, it hasn’t kept me from having fantastic friendships. Hasn’t kept me from anything really. But as I look at myself, I wonder, you know?
One of the reasons I write is because I love story. One of the reasons I struggle to read, even though I love books, is because my head gets cloudy and I wind up coming out of the story into something of my own making. Or these days my eyes have as much a hard time focusing as my brain does. I’m sitting in front of a 27″ screen right now and the text is pretty large, but my eyes are blurry because I’ve gone between staring at my phone or my TV most of the evening, and my astigmatism tunes to one thing and back slowly. One of the last times I had my eyes tested, my prescription changed drastically right in the seat. The doctor was writing it up one way, checked me one more time, and I could no longer see through the lenses as he’d set them up. He was surprised, and I… just felt like that’s how it had always worked. Why was I 45 and just now getting validation on this thing I’d lived with for so long?
See? Digressing. I was talking about my brain, not my eyes.
A lot of the stories I enjoy writing the most contain at least one character that just embodies chaos. Just the proverbial monkey-wrench, walking around, messing shit up. Not to be a dick (not always). Just because that’s what they bring to the table. It is probably the most “Me” character in those stories too. Is it a crutch? Sure. But it’s just fun, and I like writing what’s fun.
I think why I like writing dialog and not writing descriptives is because I don’t look too closely at things. I get the general gist of the worlds around me, but my focus is on feelings and words, not on looks and smells and more tangible stuff. Detailed writing is too clinical for me. Feels like a job. Or school work. And we know how I did with school.
But writing IS work. Telling stories IS hard. If you want to do it well. If you want to do it right. If you want to give the reader your best.
And I do want to do that. Whatever my best is, I can’t rightly say. Other than a couple of lucky sparks here and there, I don’t know that I’ve achieved what my best is simply because I finish something (when I finish something) and I move along. Or sure, long, terrifyingly uneventful gaps between the times I write something. But in that time I don’t really go back and improve the old stuff. I just keep looking for the new shining, burning thing.
As of today, it’s been just over two weeks (if I do the math. But I’m not) of me writing every day, that couple of thousand words on average, and it’s been stuff like this. Just mental vomit. Not making story. Not trying too hard. Not even spell-checking most of the time. Write. Complete. Post. And there’s value to it because a lot of what I’ve been needing to work on is just doing those three things. I think the lowest one being addressed is the completion part simply because these are just random thoughts, so they don’t really have a structure to have to reach an ending. I just trail off.
It’s easy. I can tell it’s easy because the hardest part is, and has pretty much been for the last fifteen years, getting up here, sitting down, and starting. It’s the equivalent of when your alarm goes off in the morning, do you hit snooze a bunch of times, or call in because you’re just not feeling it that day. Or do you get up, go get in the shower, and motivate your ass forward. Because once you’re in motion, things just kind of keep moving and you survive. You get through the days, most of them unscathed, although some are particular hard, and others can be particularly easy or fun. But it mostly evens out. The biggest part is you have to Get Up, Go, and Do.
The hard part, or one of the hard parts. Let’s just say the next hard part. That’s going to be taking away the crutch of writing these diary entries. At least every day. It’s either doing more drabbles or going into full-on stories.
Oh, and I might be using “drabble” wrong. My friend Anne was the person who introduced me to the term. Wikipedia says:
I don’t know if that story about Little Byrd and her grandmother counts or not. It was just… a scene. I don’t know what it added up to. But I enjoyed writing it. A drabble, if that qualifies, still doesn’t feel much like work. I guess the real work would be writing on either side of it. What comes before or after? What is the story beyond the scene. But even taking that into account, a drabble is a workout for me, and something I’m going to try to be more consciously doing. I should, honestly, put myself on a schedule. One a week or two weeks. I want to make a goal that’s achievable enough that I don’t clam up and talk myself out of doing anything because I miss my deadlines. A few years back I put myself into writing 5k words a week. Seems low, but I think it was story, not chatter, and it was about a certain story at that. I did okay, but without the accountability part, I dropped it.
Which is scary. If I write and it’s not drabbling (auto-correct is having a field day with me right now), but parts to something bigger… I don’t know if I’m doing the “Open Door Writing” thing yet, or at all. Some stuff, like the comic, I want to hold back strictly because it’s not fair to put it out there without Levi’s art attached. So I’d be doing my daily writing, but not my daily posting. Achieving something only I can see puts the pressure on me even more to keep it up. So I’m intimidated by the idea.
But it makes sense that it’s the next step. Am I taking that step too soon though? I haven’t quite worked out all the terrain. Things are slippery and treacherous. Also there’s no pull to any one thing. My brain is still all over the place. If I can’t make the comic work yet, and I’m more aggravated about being stuck on it than I even make it sound here, what is the other thing I attack? Old stuff? I don’t know that i have much going for ideas for new stuff.
I’m talking myself out of it. Things are good right now, I want to allow them to stay good. To stay achievable.
But it’s late, and my head still hurts, and work is in the morning, and I have a few more chores before I need to go to bed. So I’m not going to make a promise one way or another tonight. I will think on it tonight, and through my work day tomorrow. Maybe the rest of the week. I guess if you see me still posting CapJournal stuff, then I’ve not moved on yet.
It’s coming though. One way or another. It has to.
