Wednesdays Words 4

I woke up this morning with my eyes feeling extra sensitive to light. This happens from time to me. It is my genetic inheritance's fault really. Some days it leads to a migraine, but today doesn't feel like one of them. There isn't that unpleasant beehive static buzz feeling behind my eyes telling me to prepare myself for the worst. It's been months since I got one of those. 

My heart isn't in this post this morning. I'm still distracted from last night. I ran a game last night with a surprising amount of success given a lack of sleep, feeling burnt out, exhausted, and hit by a caffeine crash during the break that nearly had me cancelling the second part of the game. I decided to suck it up and powered through (roll +Might = 12, WOO!). It was well worth it. The second half picked up the pace of the action and kept me going through the rest of it. I also feel like I'm getting better at story telling with this. It's given me a lot of ideas about the nature of story telling and what makes a story dynamic and interesting. Maybe that's a full post I need to do sometime. Though it'll probably end up at the other blog when I write it.

My morning got away from me, like it always does, and now I get to cram an hour's worth of morning life into the next 30 minutes. Happy "It's all down hill from here" day.

Belated Wednesday's Words: Monday Musings 1?

I missed it last week. I didn't even think about it on the day. My bike, aka my best method of getting to and from work, was on the mend due to a damaged cone nut. Panic set in a heavy blanket of background stress that kept me on edge most of last week. That panicked feeling of: what if it's totally fucked and I gotta get a new bike? How will I get around? Will I get chubby again cause I'm not exercising regularly?

I ordered parts and tools off amazon, they arrived, I set to work and realized I didn't have all the tools I needed to complete the job. I ordered more tools off amazon and set to work a second time only to realize that my freewheel as stuck on and I had to take it to a bike shop just to loosen the freewheel, then I get it all reassembled only to find out that the axle isn't placed right and the wheel won't turn. New panic set in around there, where I completely redo my monthly budget anticipating an expensive repair and/or needing to take the bus for a while to work.

Found a place that was open Sundays, took it in to get it worked on. 30 minutes and $12.18 later I've got a running bike again. Needless to say though, most of last week my brain was consumed with the bike and what my next few weeks would be like if my bike was not ride-able. I forgot my Wednesday's Words last week. This week will just get Monday's Musings and Wednesday will still have it's words, so it's a double dose of my over caffeinated morning blog posts.

http://www.tmcm.com/tmcm/

Wednesday's Words 3

I can't count the number of times my mind has brought back the memory of high school English class as justification for some wonky aspect of my writing or my methods of writing. Why am I still doing that? Today I'm thinking specifically of a time when my teacher was discussing what he felt was the great tragedy of the modern age: word processors eliminated the draft's existence. He sited examples of hand written manuscripts from Shakespeare or the idea that the change the text underwent would be lost. At the time, my head was empty of ideas and this one sounded like a solid one. I swore to myself that I'd forever write in ink so that I'd always have my original unedited piece of writing. I insisted on handwriting everything, so that my drafts would be preserved. Later on in college I decided that my brain thought quicker than my hand could move with a pen, so I needed a new method of writing. I sought out type writers, figuring this would somehow be a bargain between the speed of typing and a permanent record. Turns out they are a pain in the ass to use for the most part. Their novelty quickly wears off when you've made another typo and have no choice but to cross out a word and retype it for the sentence to make sense.

I'm not sure why I stuck with that for so long. I guess I never really questioned the idea that writing by hand was a better method of writing for me. I type somewhere between 70-100 words per minute, depending largely on my caffeine intake. There is just no way my hand can move that fast. Every essay I ever wrote was done electronically and never once did I hand write a draft to any of them. It doesn't make much sense for me to keep at that strict analog only writing method.

I think this comes back to giving myself the time to write again. That ever present issue I cause myself , needing to dedicate time to a skill rather than be empowered by some magical force that just uses me as a conduit to spew greatness into the world. Hopelessly romantic ideas about what writing is meant to be. I can't hold on to those ideas if I really expect to make any progress. I just need to keep reminding myself that changing an idea is not an admission of defeat.

Wednesday's Words 2

It's Wednesday again. I've already talked myself out of doing this and then talked myself back into it and then out again and here we are. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find time in the mornings lately. There are chores and other random things that take my attention away from this. I'm of course making excuses for giving other things in my life a higher priority than this. I have been struggling lately with the idea of writing. If you had asked me 5 years ago what inspires me I could have spouted off a does ideas that I would have written a poem about. I can't tell if my cynicism has taken over or I've just got nothing to really say. What ever did inspire me? Is it because I'm too aware of a critical audience and don't want to disappoint an unknown group of people who can't be pleased? Probably don't need to waste my time trying to figure it out.

I've always talked about inspiration while reminding myself that was just a word given to well thought out ideas to give it a more fantastical feel to it. Inspiration only gets you so far if you have no idea what to do with it. It takes time and daily efforts to make progress at it and to turn inspiration into something usable. Waiting for inspiration is a mistake. Looking for inspiration is a mistake. Creating inspiration is what I need to practice more. Hard work and effort will get it for me. Harlen Ellison, my spirit animal, once famously sat in a bookstore window for five hours and wrote The Night of Black Glass based on an unseen sentence that was given to him. He stressed that that's what writing actually was. There wasn't a trick to it. You just needed to work on it and give it time until it became what you wanted. That is something I have not done in a long long time, if ever. I used to dedicate whole nights to writing and giving up sleep as a means to do it. I have not done that in forever. I can't even remember the last time I spent more than 40 minutes working on writing something creative of my own. I should change that. I will change that.

Wednesday's Words 1

I woke up this morning and didn't think I had much to say, but then I always do. There are a handful of blog post drafts I have half finished. I usually start where I feel like I'm on the cusp of something great and then never get to that point where I think THERE it is. I'm overly critical of my own work though and I'm addicted to "what if's."

There are times when I feel like I need to just get it done. That's when I post a whole grip of blog entries at once and they all get lost in each other. I set schedules I know I can't stick to, because I feel like I should be able to stick to them. It's a matter of establishing a good habit, but even the best of habits are hard to jump right into full force.

I am not gonna filter my head one day a week. I don't know what I'll get out of it, but that's not the point. I need to build a habit and the best way to start is with a first step. I can't keep holding onto endlessly justified what-if delays that stagnate my efforts to a near stand-still.

There is this feeling I get when I start brainstorming story ideas. I like to think of it as new idea energy, similar to new relationship energy that people like to call the honeymoon period of a relationship. I get excited about the idea and cant' wait to run around with it showing it off to the world. The problem is just like the honeymoon period of a relationship, it doesn't last. My idea starts asking for more out of me than just pillow talk and grand plans I won't end up following through on. That's when I start to lose interest.

Coming up with the idea is motivation for me to get it done, but without a genuine need to manifest the idea it tends to fizzle. This has been a huge step for me in breaking that habit. I'm stealing the title of these posts from a guy I knew in college who would make a myspace post every Wednesday where he ranted about some random thing at the college or about society that angered him. It was mostly recycled South Park jokes, but who doesn't like alliteration in their titles? Also got a friend (and player) who has been spitting out a block of text daily for the past year or so just to do it. Hell if that guy can do it, I can get to it at least once a week. -AB