No scorecard this week.\u00a0 I left for New Orleans last Thursday and won\u2019t be back until late tonight.\u00a0 My goal for the trip was to divorce myself from technology \u2013 no laptop, no checking messages.\u00a0 Fuck everything. So, for all I know, Greatsociety blew up early Thursday morning and all these posts have been lost. Originally, I planned for no posts this week, as I anticipated that I\u2019ll be on the blood machine in a haze after five days in NOLA\u2026but I\u2019m a little bit ahead of myself.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m writing this on Monday the 8th, and I figure I\u2019ll just do a sort of Project Monday in Review post.\u00a0 \u201cProject Mondays\u201d is the third GS-related writing challenge, because the only way I\u2019ll ever write anything is if I adopt some impossible and idiotic challenge.<\/p>\n
As I dropped Two Novels and A Baby, I considered returning to the serials project when a friend of mine, having just been introduced to Greatsociety, encouraged me to go with vignettes detailing my past, my thoughts, and whatever weird internal monologue I have going on.\u00a0 She told me not to worry about form or length or tone.\u00a0 If a post is 300 words, fine.\u00a0 If it\u2019s 10,000, whatever.<\/p>\n Her idea came on top of another writerly friend\u2019s suggestion that I go with the theme of the serials project and not actually think about what I\u2019m writing. Just turn off my brain, my doubts, my fears, and rant away.<\/p>\n To round off the idea that this is a \u201cchallenge,\u201d I set some rules for myself: All of the articles need to be written within two hours, at work, on Monday.\u00a0 I can\u2019t go back and edit them unless I happen to catch some glaring typo. Once done, I read through them, run the spellchecker, then program them for the week.\u00a0 Done.<\/p>\n So far, so good.\u00a0 In fact\u2026 I\u2019m a week ahead.\u00a0 Today I\u2019ve plowed through seven articles and a ridiculous cartoon. During my New Orleans trip, I\u2019m taking a notepad along and plan to write drunken, illegible rants.\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll just scan those in next week and let you decode them\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" No scorecard this week.\u00a0 I left for New Orleans last Thursday and won\u2019t be back until late tonight.\u00a0 My goal for the trip was to divorce myself from technology \u2013 no laptop, no checking messages.\u00a0 Fuck everything. So, for all …<\/p>\n
\nFirst there was the serials project<\/a>, where I set out to write a close-ended short story of 10-12,000 words each month.\u00a0 I actually liked a few of the stories I was kicking out, but it was starting to get old and I\u00a0 jumped at a new challenge, issued by a friend, to write a full, finished, marketable novel in four months, competing against him and the December 15th due date of his baby.\u00a0 But this \u201cTwo Novels and a Baby\u201d<\/a> project quickly fizzled.\u00a0 The discipline required to write a novel demands much more time than I have available.\u00a0 The serials project was a success only because I split the 12,000 words into 3,000 word chapters and plowed through them without looking back.\u00a0 Highly-structured flash fiction, if you will.<\/p>\n