I\u2019ve once again fallen out of the habit of writing.\u00a0 Not as bad as the last time when the GS front page went dead, but I feel the same sort of gears locking up again\u2026<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
There are a thousand reasons why.\u00a0 Too much work, too many distractions (Hello Farmville!) and I continually blame getting into publishing as the great Creativity Killer.\u00a0 When I do hit a rare patch of spare time, working with words is pretty far from my desires.<\/p>\n
Spare time is tough, though.\u00a0 Because publishing doesn\u2019t pay, it becomes this weird life-consuming hobby.\u00a0 All the work is done once I get home, late into the night, first thing in the morning, on holidays, and while on vacation.\u00a0 Meanwhile, I work six (and sometimes seven) days a week at my normal wage slave jobs in the hopes of funding my addiction to printing highly literate works of fiction read only by a handful of lonely souls.<\/p>\n
By design, my two main wage-earner jobs are idiotic, at best.\u00a0 I\u2019m not missed when I take six weeks off, nobody knows who I am or what I do, and I pretty much float through the day without ever firing a synapse.\u00a0 At first, this was necessary to get all the publishing work down while on someone else\u2019s clock.\u00a0 But the tedium starts to drag after a while.\u00a0 What was meant to facilitate my hobbies and my writing has begun to impede it.<\/p>\n
But, in the end, all that is just a cowardly, cheap excuse.\u00a0 I\u2019m not writing because I\u2019m lazy.\u00a0 Simple enough.\u00a0 I seek out distractions, I embrace the doldrums.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve recently been inspired to take some time and re-evaluate my life.\u00a0 All part of the long goddamned healing process that began in April 07 with my miracle brain surgery<\/a>.\u00a0 Living pain free is more difficult than living in pain.\u00a0 It\u2019s not easy at all, and that\u2019s largely because life itself is not easy.\u00a0 Now I have to face my life, make decisions, and work with the consequences.\u00a0 Nothing new to the people reading this, but very new to me.\u00a0 I\u2019ve been in pain, and behind the wall of the pain (and the pharmaceutical treatment), my entire adult life.\u00a0 I never learned to shave properly.\u00a0 I never learned how to kiss a woman or make love to her.\u00a0 I never learned how to take the bull of life by the horns and ride it out.\u00a0 Everything was sheltered \u2013 a quarter or more of each year spent as an invalid.\u00a0 Every day, from 2000 onward, spent in a dizzy drug haze.\u00a0 Unable and unwilling to communicate with anyone, I drifted by every checkpoint.\u00a0 I survived only because I was on auto-pilot.<\/p>\n Now, quite literally, I\u2019ve woken up from a long, deep sleep that started when I was 21.\u00a0 Now I face the world at 35 as a healthy, functional adult and am able to recognize how much I\u2019ve lost.\u00a0 The number one distraction is not Farmville, sadly.\u00a0 It\u2019s an avalanche of anger and resentment.\u00a0 A burning hatred for the apparent act of god that brought on the pain, and the former friends and lovers who did not tolerate me during those long hard years.\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t expect people to understand, but I hung with bad folks.\u00a0 People who took advantage of the pain, who robbed me of money and time and effort.\u00a0 Being a social invalid addled on drugs meant that I attracted the worst types of people.<\/p>\n On the flipside of that coin are the friends who stuck by me.\u00a0 It\u2019s with them where I begin my naval-gazing.\u00a0 The people who muscled through those years, and who supported me.\u00a0 The ones still standing with me today.\u00a0 Their love and friendship is the foundation from which I need to build up defenses against the anger.<\/p>\n I made a list.\u00a0 Like Bill Mason in Day of the Triffids<\/em>, I like lists.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I enjoy crossing things off.\u00a0 The sense of completion.\u00a0 This list was about changing my life, and all the big shit at the top is tied to my fucking publishing debt.\u00a0 The losses built over the last four years.\u00a0 I don\u2019t really regret getting into debt, but it sure has put the kibosh on my fluidity.\u00a0 At best, it\u2019ll be two years before I see the shoreline.\u00a0 Then another year building resources so I can return to traveling, work less, and not run in circles screaming at the end of each month.<\/p>\n So\u2026fuck that part of the list.\u00a0 I focused on the stuff I can improve right now.\u00a0 The short list of daily things I should be doing.\u00a0 At the top of that section is writing.\u00a0\u00a0 Writing has been my only channel for the anger, the pain, frustration, and dreams.\u00a0 A sad, insular voice that chatters constantly in the back of my mind.\u00a0 When I\u2019m not writing, I\u2019m quietly going insane.\u00a0 This is nothing new.\u00a0 It\u2019s the reason Greatsociety was born in April of 2001, and the reason it\u2019s still here long past its original shelf life.\u00a0 Though, thanks to fresh faces and new voices, it\u2019s been repackaged a few times.<\/p>\n Despite that repackaging, the original mission remains the same.\u00a0 To try and give me a reason to write, forcing me to attempt to craft my drivel with an audience in mind.\u00a0 That\u2019s the most vital part of writing \u2013 capturing the audience.\u00a0 Luckily for me, I don\u2019t care if the audience is largely imaginary.\u00a0 It\u2019s all academic.\u00a0 Diary writing is fine for channeling anger, but writing for an audience forces the writer to think about structure and form and, through that, ease the anger (or the compulsion) a little bit.\u00a0 Create a purpose.\u00a0 Writing is also about having realistic goals.<\/p>\n A novel, I know, is not a realistic goal for me.\u00a0 In a world of self-created distractions, I need to keep writing short form stuff.\u00a0 One off articles for GS are perfect.<\/p>\n I find myself wanting to write longer stuff, though.\u00a0 Just to step up to the plate and take the challenge.\u00a0 That, then, has translated to a new plan for the page.\u00a0 Or, more specifically, a new regular section.\u00a0 I\u2019ve decided to try my hand at short stories.\u00a0 Ten to twenty thousand words.\u00a0 What used to be called \u201cnovelettes\u201d by the type of editors that made you want to lunge across the desk and bite their faces.\u00a0 I\u2019ve nearly finished the first, and will serialize it on Tuesdays starting October 6th.\u00a0 The goal will be a new one each month or so.\u00a0 Just blindly push forward until I work this particular demon out of my system.<\/p>\n The one off stuff will continue and everything else will be the same.<\/p>\n Since I\u2019ve set the standards lower than Hades, courtesy of the Boble <\/a>and my lousy novel<\/a>, I\u2019m going to post these short stories regardless of quality.\u00a0 They\u2019ll be one huge experiment \u2013 exploring characters intended for larger works, attempting new forms and styles, and essentially learning how to write all over again.\u00a0 Learning how to write without the demon of pain riddling through my brain.\u00a0 Learning how to write from a point in my life where, in the end, everything is okay.\u00a0 Where the drive, the focus, and the goals have all radically changed thanks to a few hours with a skilled surgeon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve once again fallen out of the habit of writing.\u00a0 Not as bad as the last time when the GS front page went dead, but I feel the same sort of gears locking up again\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,5,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gs-news","category-rants","category-wage-slave"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/484\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}