It's probably fairly obvious, but I'm no longer maintaining this blog. I'm also quite unlikely to resume doing so on any sort of basis (beyond this little update), but I thought I'd try to wrestle the goodwill of those that were following it over to my....
(this blog died so nevermind)
Yeah. It's more of a writing/creativity focused one than random talking, and will likely not be as insane as this one had been. BUT it's going to be great. I've been pretty consistent with it so far, and plan to maintain it indefinitely - even after I'm rich and famous. If you can help me make that happen, I might even post it more frequently!
Would love for you to join me over there.
I Forgot These Need Titles
So... where to now?
I've realised that it's been a while since I last spewed nonsense into a bucket, tipped it out onto paper, and proceeded to transcribe whatever complete inanity I found once it dried. Yes, I mean SINCE I BLOGGED. Here at least. Yes indeed, I have a sekrit blog that is decidedly less fun and more mature, so that I can continue being an absolut moron here. I'm also one there, except I do it in a more mature manner. It's like the Clark Kent to my Superman, except my Clark Kent is more like "Verily there was faeces!" and my superman is "hurrr poo lolz"
NaNoWriMo finished. I haven't written a word since. Well, not true. Yes, I lied. It happens. I haven't written a word of FICTION since, just mah continued blogginess. I plan to get back to it ONE DAY REAL SOON.
So, the rest of the year. There's just over three weeks left, and all-in-all, I'd say it's certainly been a year for the record books. Not just because it's currently the most recent year on record, but because... actually, I don't know. It's been a fair-to-middling sort of year, but a most productive one. A MOST PRODUCTIVE ONE,TED. Fun Fact: Back in the last days of the 20th Century, fellow imbibers of strong beverages bestowed the name Bill upon me, for a perceived resemblance to Bill S. Preston Esquire. The Guy who came up with it was on the receiving end of Wally, as given a red and white jumper, he could have passed for the title character of Where's Wally. Yes Merkans, it was our version of Waldo.
I'm currently in a point in life not too dissimilar to where I was last year, yet it's all different. Anyway, this blog entry didn't really have a point, other than going out of my way to make a point of updating my blog. I'll save the next one for when something notable happens :)
Why is there an Elephant Riding A Motorcycle?
I'm not answering that question, and I never want it to be asked of me.
There are things that I love about NaNoWriMo, and there are things that I hate. I approach it a little differently to the official stance on how we should be writing (if such a thing could be said to exist). While I'm writing, deciding on the rules as I go and have all the freedom to write whatever I damn well please, I won't jump out of the rules of my worlds. It isn't that I'm incapable of it, but I just refuse to do it out of principle. My written world might have things that could be considered anachronisms in our own history, but they fit within the rules of that world.
What I loathe about NaNo, is the write-ANYTHING approach, though the main instigator for this is the NaNo dares. As a disclaimer, I don't loathe the people who write the dares, and neither am I adverse to spontaneity. I started using an absolutely awesome app (tm... I think it needs a tm anyway. And why arent they iApps or something redundant like that? someone ask iSteve?)... an awesome app called The Brainstormer. Not just any Brainstormer, and definitely not Brainstormer Who. It's like a convenient version of cutting up lots of cardboard, putting random words on each card, and fishing them out to form random sentences.
Guess who discovered that AFTER cutting up lots of cardboard and putting random words on each card? Yup. That said, it's awesome, and gives me a means to randomly throw a custom list of adjectives, nouns and verbs together, which gives potential ideas that could fit inside my world.
But if the daily dare is "Have An Elephant Ride A Motorcycle", well fuck that.
I want something at the end, where I can read through it (or more likely, someone else can), and not get lost with random abstractions that only detach the reader from the world that they're experiencing. You may as well have a dare that asks you to remind the reader that they're reading a novel, and none of it is real.
I'm not saying I could never write something that involved an Elephant Riding A Motorcycle, but it would be a world pre-established where that kind of thing could happen. In such a setting, I'd imagine that a surprisingly sane serial killer would be equally as incongruous. Things belong in their own worlds. You don't see MY alternate self coming into this dimension and messing around with her giant claws and lightblooms.
By the way, you're reading my blog.
Addition:
Breathe
There's days where I think the world is all sunshine and roses; the kind where a walk in the pouring rain can't convince me things aren't bright and bubbly. There's days where I'm sure something bad is going to happen, or at least, that nothing good will. They're crushing days, but I've seen some rough ones over the years.
Then there's days like today.
I'm exhausted - seriously so, but it isn't just that weariness. I feel numb.
It's something that comes and goes with me, but I can't help but see the futility of what I do. I can paddle up or down, but I'll never change the course of the river I'm floating on. If I'm confident or scattered, it doesn't seem to make a difference. If I try or don't, I always end up somewhere in between, as though any choice is just an illusion. It doesn't help being right so often, though it'd be nice if it was about the good things too.
If I feel like something bad's going to happen, I invariably fall flat on my face. If I'm sure that things might be different, that maybe things might start going my way because I'm feeling particularly optimistic that day... I fall flat on my face. The only time I'm ever right about good things, is when I change my mind later and learn in hindsight that I was actually on to something. Sometimes I'll feel like I ought to do something, like it's predestined for me to try, and I'll choose not to - I'll purposely self-sabotage, because sometimes I can't stand the futility of it. At those times, I'll have a cold feeling wash over me, lying somewhere beneath my skin. It's like standing in front of an open freezer, yet when I touch my skin, it isn't cold at all.
That feeling of wrongness is there with me today. Maybe because I'm writing this. Maybe just getting out of bed this morning was the wrong thing to do.
Usually when I get this feeling, I panic. I scramble together to do the things it feels I'm supposed to, trying to catch up to the destiny of a minute ago. Ordinarily I would, but I'm so mentally exhausted.
A lot of it is surely the pressure I'm putting on myself. I need to make changes, but due to my situation it feels like my buffer for mistakes is non-existent. If I make a wrong choice now, there could be no coming back from it. Given time I'm sure I can make the changes I need, but it feels like there's a huge lack of it... time... also. Please cross your fingers on my behalf.
The Great Write Hope
Fifty. Fifty thousand words.
Yes, I'm fricking crazy.
Again.
Still?
Yes, it's probably still.
I'm most likely going to be repeating myself here, but here's the situation. No, not the oompa loompa - I mean MY situation. I want to write. I've always wanted to write. Even when I didn't feel like writing, I still wanted to write. This November, I'm going to write.
I'm taking part in "National Novel Writing Month" (aka, NaNoWriMo), where aspiring writers (and some actual ones) attempt to write FIFTY THOUSAND WORDS over a mere THIRTY DAYS. That's like 2 million fricking words a day... well, it feels like it at times. It's my second venture into the murky NaNo waters, and I'm a little nervous. There's a lot to live up to, especially cause I made it to the finish line last year, I've done more planning this year, and cause I talk a lot of shit to people about how it's not that hard.
Why, though, do NaNo?
Simply, because.
Convinced? No, me either.
I do spend a lot of time trying to get my writing right, when there isn't some alternate deadline attached. Even this sentence, which has taken three hours, feels like it could use some kind of improvement maybe *fix this later*. Some people might call me a perfectionist - I have no idea what they mean nor why they would think that, since I don't condone perfectionism, and some of my friends are perfections.
Okay, I have to stop using that joke.
I do often spend an ungodly amount of time trying to get my words right, which lead to one particular setting of mine being worked on sporadically over an eleven-year period, that ended up being an EIGHTEEN-THOUSAND word outline. YES, OUTLINE DAMNIT. I think I then spent a few weeks writing a first chapter of a mere 500 words using that outline, edited it into a better second-draft, and had a usb stick fricking die on me, meaning all my world-class edits were lost in time. How could I even ATTEMPT to edit that first chapter again, knowing I 'had it right'? Yes, I probably didn't, as time since has shown me, but that's how it felt.
Last year, though, I somehow managed it. I wrote a novel. I wrote it in a month. It was the biggest single piece of writing I've ever done, and it turned out better than I could have hoped for.
Was it perfect? No.
Was it entertaining? N... actually yes! It was.
It was raw, rough around the edges yes, but it had heart. Yes I repeated myself at times, cause it was raw - a little rough around the edges. It's stuff I didn't realise when I was writing, but could see it in editing. Sometimes even the editing was a little rough around the edges... raw.
The miniscule amount of editing I've done on last year's piece though, has opened my eyes a little more. Yes, what I wrote first up was good. When I first read it, I had a mini-cringe, but came to love it. Then I edited. My second draft felt like a revelation... I had unearthed the diamond, and it was now polished and shiny. NOTHING COULD COMPARE ohwait, I read it again. Oh, there's a typo. Oh, that word is used a bit much. Hey, that line is awkward. So on.. so on...
Obviously it could go on indefinitely, but it was a comfort. I might get it right the first time. I might make it righter the second. I could no doubt improve it at every stage, and thinking that I could have it right from the very start was just... stupid. So, given that I've done a fair amount of planning (far more than last year), that realisation has come at exactly the right time.
You needn't think you'll just be writing unfiltered crap. You will be writing unfiltered crap. However hidden in there will be specks of imagination of the rarest sort that must be extracted. You will find serendipitous outcomes. Your characters will not only do things you don't want them to, but that you don't expect them to. You will be sucked into a world every bit as real and engrossing as any you have ever read, and you will feel like the passenger on this tumultuous trip rather than the pilot.
All you have to do is try.
Shifting Gears
Time is like... actually, Time is just like Time.
So, I think that this blog is going to be the last of my time analogies. That, or it's at least the first where I decide to no longer make an analogy to time, though it's possible that some view blog entries might make the comparison.
I've had an interesting weekend. Probably one of my most-filled weekends in some time. I always tend to count Friday night as being part of the weekend, since my brain is no longer stuck on school-night mode (and indeed, this week even Thursday had a healthy dose of that). It wasn't so much a 'party-mode' weekend, but just one with lots of varied events. Kind of like the Commonwealth Games, but without things falling apart. I tend to save the falling-apart stuff for when I don't have anything on, and stay at home with a tub of ice-cream watching Only You, Poltergeist, and When Harry Met Sally. :'(
Hug?
I had work drinks on Friday, which is always interesting. Unlike most work drinks, I went out for dinner afterwards. Yes, there was more drinking, but unlike other times where I've eaten, it wasn't a seedy hotdog at three in the morning before catching the nightride home. The people I had dinner with were friends of a work friend, and of course my friend from work.
Now, I've historically been fairly bad in social situations, though somewhere along the line, I think I've come to have a greater appreciation for myself. Maybe it's the writing thing. Maybe it's the messy legal entanglements I don't speak about on this blog or Twitter, but that some do know about (it's the sort of stuff you share over drinks). Well, not the entanglements themselves, but the progress that has been made through them. It could even be my taking stock of where I want my life to go, and jumping at a chance to carve a niche for myself once again. That is, move out.
It's not often that I really think of myself as funny. I know that I'm a nice person, and yeah, I can make myself laugh, but I guess the bar for awesomeness in my eyes is always a fraction or two past what I can normally achieve.
Somehow, I've been exceeding myself.
I think this year's NaNoWriMo is going to be good for me - it's not just challenging me to stick with things, but to also try and be more social, to organise more than I might normally do, and to really step outside my comfort zone. I found myself speaking a heck of a lot about my writing on friday night, and to my amazement, captivating people with what I had planned. Not only was this not my last-year-established-piece-that-can-make-you-cry-and-laugh-within-30-seconds-of-each-emotion, but it was my as-yet-unwritten 2010 NaNo Novel.
Even just my concept had some people saying I really know what I'm doing.
I think that's where my life has to go next, though - into the writing. While I can do the sort of work that I do, I never feel quite as fulfilled as when I'm doing stuff related to writing. Whether that's writing my own stuff, editing, talking to others about their stuff, or.. really anything.
I once had a dream where I was walking down a road, trying to decide which story I should write. I came to the realisation that one of my ideas was THE idea, the first that'd catch people's imaginations beyond what I could fathom. That idea was once I lovingly refer to as "Once Upon A Time In The Sky".
That's not what I'm writing this year. No... this year's is something different, but not by much. Trail to the Sky. An immediate prequel to the aforementioned subconsciously-noted plot.
I have a great feeling about it, though only time will tell if it is the first step toward a life writing, or if it is merely putting on my shoes.
I might be a Mary Sue...
Time is like watching a movie. As you sit there minding your own business, things just happen. Of course if you're watching it at home, and it's on a DVD or (gasp) video, then you can pause it and things stop happening until you start it up again. Time doesn't have one of those pause buttons. At least that's the official story.
One of the things that's becoming clear to me as I traipse through this stupid world, is that it's pretty fricking stupid. Though the thing that's even more clear is that I myself, am awesome. I know lots of people say they're awesome, and they tend to turn out as pretty damn lame, BUT TRUST ME I'm awesome.
I've noticed over time that while yeah, I'm pretty shy/reserved for the most part, some people just become drawn to me. I don't mean that OHTHEYWANTMYBODY (cause not even I want that), but they just want to talk to me. I'm gonna completely and utterly disagree with what I just said: The world is pretty fricking smart.
No, not that thing. Sometimes, I don't think I'm awesome (or at least, special)
It's not that I think poorly of myself - it's just that I don't see the things I do as anything out of the ordinary. It's probably why I get frustrated with some people like I do, cause I think if I'm capable of it, then anyone should be. I also know there's things I can't do, so I'm amazed by people that can do them. It's like, conversation. I can do it. I'm not brilliant at it, but I genuinely talk to people and if their competency level at actually doing... stuff... isn't going to cause me any issues, then I try my best to be friendly and listen, maybe engage them a little.
A recurring pattern I've found is that I'm a sincere genuine person. This is a problem. It is a problem because I go around life expecting everyone else is naturally like that, or that they should be. Though they're not. It also means that on occasion, when someone is generally drawn to that sincere way of mine - it freaks me out. My thoughts start going "WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON, OH GOD, I'M GOING TO FRICKING DIE". I never do, but I think I do."
So, something like this happened yesterday. For the first time, in 7-8 years, someone actually approached me in a bar. So I'm talking, doing my best to make them feel comfortable (cause they seemed nervous), and asked if i'd like to be friends.
Actually, it kind of reinforces a self-believed tragedy. I'm too awesome, hence it's best to be friends with me, cause the alternative is not having me around at all. It's happened before (at least it seems like it), and it's infinitely frustrating - like that jar of roasted capsicums I could never get open and eventually just gave away. No, it's no olive theory, but it's a start (plus that was a load of crap). Sometimes I think it'd be easier if I was a jerk. I tried it once, for like 30 seconds. I hated it, and quickly reverted to being myself.
Can't deny my awesomeness. I'm the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being you've ever known in your life.
Aside: The example labels for the posts in blogger say stuff like "scooters, vacation, fall." In my mind, the next is 'cliff'!
