You wouldn’t know if from how well put together this place is, but blogging is hard work. As ever, it’s a finely honed knife’s blade balancing what I want to write about versus what I’m going to say that gets me in trouble at the office, with friends, with family, with society in general, and in the eyes of the law. Other times it’s just the general daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to make the cursor move across the page. In any case, sometimes there is plenty to say, but none of it seems like quite an appropriate topic. During those times you end up sitting at the keyboard smashing out something that rambles one from point to point without ever getting to a “so what” moment. Sorry about that, but it’s just the way it goes. Sometimes the only thing you can do is sit down and let your fingers do whatever it is they’re going to do and accept the final product as what it is… not exactly you best effort ever, but an effort none the less. For any of you out there who have spent any amount of time writing, you’ll know that occasionally that’s as good as it gets.
Tag Archives: writing
Routine…
From what I’ve been able to gather from my, admittedly, limited experience, writing is as much a force of habit as anything. Whether it’s blogging, the great American novel, or a run of the mill short story, the only secret I’ve discovered is that the the only way to get words on the page is to sit down and hammer at the keyboard as part of your routine. I’m sure there are methods that work for others, but that’s what works for me. Well, it’s what works 
for me until it doesn’t work. If I can be frank, the since Thanksgiving, I’ve had an appalling track record of sitting down and making any more than a cursory effort.
It might not show so much here, but my daily world count is in the pits after months and months of hitting at least 1000 words a day. I don’t know if it’s just the lull between the holidays, some kind of creativity burn out, running out of things to say, or just too much time doing other stuff, but whatever switch turns on when you’re really hitting your stride is nowhere to be found at the moment. That’s not to say that the juice couldn’t magically start flowing tomorrow, but for now it’s missing without a trace.
Tonight I’m going to struggle to get to half of my usual word count. If I happen to hit 600 words, that’s practically a cause for celebration. I’ve often thought that the best writers, the prolific ones, must be creatures of habit – that the must have some kind of internal disipline to churn out words even when they’re not feeling it. The more I write, and the more seriously I take it as a craft, I learn that no two days at the keyboard are alike. There are high points and there are slumps. I know that if I stay with it long enough, I’m going to find my swing again… but for now, I’m going to just try being pleased that I’m hitting 500 words instead of 300 on a regular basis.
Another Sunday…
It’s another SUnday morning and another five gems from the archive have just hit the streets. It feels good feeding my decidedly obsessive desire to gather everything back under one roof. Let’s just hope that WordPress is the last stop, because honestly, I don’t know that I’ve got it in me to try figuring out a way to repost six years of blog on any other platform. I suspect that this place is going to be “home” indefinitely if for no other reason than moving electronically is at least as much of a pain in the ass as moving physically. In any case, feel free to stop by and take a look at the latest news from October 2006.
A look behind the curtain…
As a fresh college graduate back in about 2001, I remember having a series of conversations with a few other newly minted professionals wondering why nothing we learned in college actually prepared us for working in a “real world” professional environment. As I recall, the group consensus was that some kind of handbook for new graduates would have been incredibly helpful in making from the transition from full time student to productive member of society. None of us took up the banner at the time. I think we lumped it into same category of conversations that ended up with us wanting to open a brew pub, build a working trebuchet, and buy a rental cottage on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Of our brilliant ideas, the only one that ever came close to seeing the light of day was building the treb – even though we never did manage to figure out how to attach the sling mechanism to the throwing arm, we managed to put together a respectable first effort at medieval siege weaponry.
Those first random conversations about the idea of a snarky little field guide for new grads has kept popping back into my head from time to time. After going to work for Uncle, there seemed to be a limitless supply of cautionary tales I wish someone would have told me before I showed up for my first day. I don’t know that it’s anything that would have changed my career trajectory, but it’s a stack of information that would have fit well into that “nice to know” category before needing to learn some of those life lessons the hard way. I have a few insights that might be useful for those coming up behind me and I like to think I give it enough misanthropic twist to keep the narrative interesting even if you’re not well on your way to a career as a office drone.
For the last few months, one of the projects I’ve been working on behind the curtain has been a first draft of what I suspect is becoming the handbook we first talked about more than a decade ago. I’ve said it here before, but it’s worth saying again: Serious writing is damned hard work, but it’s some of the most personally rewarding work I’ve ever done. That’s probably because it’s one of the few things I’ve ever written purely for my own purposes. Hard as it is to believe, spitting out well-crafted information papers and memos just doesn’t leave me with the same warm glow of self-satisfaction.
If I had to give it a SWAG, I’d say that at 13,000 words I’m probably halfway to having a very rough first draft. I’m shooting for a 25,000 word first draft with the vague hope of polishing that up to about 30,000 words in its final version. Maybe it’ll be ready by summer, maybe it won’t, but Summer 2013 is where I’m really hoping to land this thing as a well dressed ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. I’m feeling pretty good about hitting my “half draft” mark yesterday, so if there’s any interest, maybe I’ll post up a sample chapter so you can see how I’ve been misspending a big chunk of my evenings and weekends.
Lead me not into temptation…
It’s getting to be that time of year when it becomes way to easy to fall out of the writing habit. It’s easy to skip a day here, and a day there. Then it becomes two days or three. Suddenly you find it’s been a week and despite that you still have nothing to say. After we week it feels damned near impossible to figure out how it was every part of your routine to begin with. The time starts sneaking away from you and you’ll have no idea where it’s gone.
I know it’s true not just because that’s what it feels like, but because I’ve got the numbers to prove it. November and December are consistently my worst months in terms of page visits. I’m more than willing to take part of the blame for that. I’m not as focused on keeping up the one-a-day rate when I’m distracted by food, family, travel, and friends. That’s just a fact of life. The other part of the equation is out of my hands though – it’s that there are just plain fewer people hanging around reading blogs between Thanksgiving and Christmas. I know I’m guilty of neglecting many that I read on a regular basis at other times of the year, so mine shouldn’t be immune from the downturn in readers either.
I’m never going to pretent to have much of a clue about what compels anyone to read the trifles I leave here, so I can’t promise anything enlightening, newsworthy, or even particularly entertaining. What I can promise is that I’m going to do my best to keep up a steady drumbeat during the holiday season and not be led by the temptation to “take some time off” just because things happen to be a little slow. The fact is I’m lazy and getting things jumpstarted again after Christmas is just too much of a pain in the ass to want to deal with when the time comes. It’s far better to keep plugging away and let inertia carry me through the new year… or the Mayan apocalypse… whichever comes first.
The end of August (2006)…
In keeping with our new tradition, the next five archive posts from MySpace are now available for your reading enjoyment. That brings August 2006 to a close. The first couple of posts from September of that year deal with an even that was, and remains, a painful topic for the family. Between now and next Sunday, I’m going to have to make a judgement call on whether those become part of the public record here or if I save them back to my own archive. Yes, before anyone asks, I’m practicing a bit of revisionist history when these posts go live, but for the most part I’m working hard not to change the substance in any way. Most of the changes are for grammar, punctuation, and clarity. One thing I can tell you for sure is that my writing has definitely improved in the last six years. I’ll be interested to look back from 2018 and see if I can say the same about the posts I’m putting up now.
Blank…
If you read any books about writing, they’re chalk full of good ideas about what to do when the ideas aren’t flowing like “just sit down and write anything, it doesn’t matter if it’s just the same word over and over again.” Those books are clearly written by jerkoffs. Sometimes no matter how hard you smash your fingers against the keyboard, absolutely nothing useful ends up on the screen. Given that most evenings I’m usually more or less successful at stringing at least a few words together into a coherent thought, I should probably just accept a few days like this as one of the costs of doing business. It’s also an incredibly helpful reminder about why I never seriously consider one of these batshit crazy writing projects where you take a deep and personal oath to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. Even if I could manage it, I have a sinking feeling that the last 20,000 words might come out like ALL WORK AND NO PLAY MAKE JEFF A DULL BOY. And honest to God, for me writing is supposed to be a stress free, relaxing hobby. I just don’t need that level of self-generated pressure.
Begin rant…
The problem with wanting to think of yourself as a writer, or a blogger for that matter, is that you actually at some point need to do some writing. You have to write when you don’t feel like it. You have to write when you have nothing particularly interesting to say. You know to write when you’re tired or have a dozen other things that need to get done. You have to write when it snows, when it rains, and when it’s sunny. You can’t be full of excuses about why you’ll get to it tomorrow or the next day or the next week. That might be why writing in its many forms is, is a hobby. There are nights when all I want to do is bash my fists against the keyboard because words just will not come out of the tips of my fingers no matter how many times they smack the keys. If it weren’t for then needing to replace the computer, there are days I’m sorely tempted to find out of this four year old laptop will blend. But I don’t. I walk away. I leave it sit. I stew about a problematic passage for a day or two and then I come back. All the how-to-be-a-writer books say write. Write every day. Write no matter what. You know what? Some days I just dont have it in me… not three hundred words or a dozen. They’re just not there. Sometimes they come out so fast that my modified version of typing just can’t keep up. That’s the way it goes. Well, it’s the way it goes for me at least. Maybe someone out there is having good luck with the write every day no matter what approach, but I can guaran-damn-tee that it’s not doing a thing for me. Some days, some week, some months are just going to have to be better than others. And if some fancy pants wrote-a-book-about-writing expert on the subject, well, he can just suck it.
/rant
Auld lang syne…
I was rummaging around my old files looking for something this past weekend and ran across something unexpected. I had been under the impression that the posts from my original blog, hosted on MySpace back in the day, were lost amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the interwebs. But no, there they were, every post from June 2006-October 2008 safely tucked into a 147 page Word document just waiting for me to find them.
It could just be that I’m always critical of my own writing, but I’m pleased to see that there’s been a marked improvement in the style and substance of my writing over the last six years. I was certainly less circumspect back then, and a few of the posts I’ve read so far have a certain raw quality that surprised me… It’s hard to believe I said some of those things out loud right there on the internet for everyone to see. Still, there are a few real gems in the mix and it was something of an odd comfort to see that I’m still basically the same person I was back then at the ripe old age of 28. I’m a little older now, a lot more cynical, but the posts are unmistakably something that came from my keyboard.
I had planned it to be a surprise when these old posts started showing up, but I think some errant clicks Sunday may have let the cat out of the bag for those of you who get email updates whenever there’s a new post. So here’s the big announcement: Starting this coming Sunday and continuing every Sunday until I clear the archive, I’ll be making every effort to add five “new” old posts to the mix here. I’m going to edit them a bit for grammar and punctuation, but otherwise in the interests of preserving history as it happened you’re going to see them just like you would have on MySpace back in the day. Join me, won’t you, in this trip down memory lane.
Repeating myself…
This is my 709th post, not including the two years worth of material I lost when MySpace when the way of the dodo bird. After more than 700 posts, across six years, two blogging platforms, and in excess of 15,000 page views I worry sometimes that I’m repeating myself. Part of that stems from just not being all that creative and part of it is that as an adult productive member of society most of days tend to be pretty similar – which means I have a tendency to have the same experiences over and over again. I mean when you spend five days a week doing some variation of get up, drive to work, work, drive home, make dinner, go to bed there’s an upward limit of how many new experiences you’re going to have.
That of course is a little troublesome when you make your bones trying to write things that people will find interesting. Honestly, I never thought I’d still be blogging this far along. If I did, I would have been anal retentive enough to build some kind of index so I could try not to repeat myself too often. Since I didn’t do that and we’re too far along to start now, you’re just going to be stuck with whatever random idea happens to pop into my head on any given day… and when I repeat myself just smile and nod the same way you would when your great aunt Fanny tells you the same story for the 273rd time. I’ll do my best to self edit that sort of thing, but won’t make any promises. Since my routine isn’t apt to change any time in the near future, you’re pretty much stuck with it, so don’t go complaining now that you’ve been warned.
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