I was going to say something, but maybe it's another...

I would like to open by apologizing to my legions of loyal followers for how long it has been since last I made a post on this blog. I have disappointed all of you, and it was never my intention to let down tens of millions of people. The last week and a half has been busy, stressful, and crummy (to put it mildly). Four out of five people in this household are sick, including myself, and there are a number of other factors that have delayed this.

Originally, I had begun writing a post that touched quite honestly on the bouts I have with depression (while it hasn't been clinically diagnosed, what else would I call it?) and what causes them.  I have, in uncharacteristic fashion, backed down from that for a simple reason: it also deals with my current job.

I haven't followed the matter as much as I should, but as far as I know, there are no laws in place to protect our privacy from our employers.  Likewise, there are no laws to protect us from our employers using information they obtain on blogs, websites, forums, or social media.  The preceding statements may not be the truth, but I will not retract them.  Nor will I do any research on them.  Because I am going to move on to a random snippet that occurred to me for no real reason the other day.

Crazy circle people
Are hanging round my door
Don't what they want
But I don't want them here no more

In my head, it is spoken in the voice of an old-timey blues singer.  Nice and gritty.

I keep a notebook nearby throughout my work day, and when little things like that come to me, I try to write them down.  One of them (a little rhyme that sounded like it'd be spoken by sailors or fishermen) even turned into a short story.  Taken in little doses, they may well sound like the nonsensical ramblings of a madman.  I'm not inclined to disagree with that.

Inspiration comes, for me, in fleeting notions that blast across my mind and are gone if I don't act quickly enough.  When it hits, and I act, I can produce an almost obscene amount of material.  When it's out of town (which is almost all the time), I tend to lack to motivation to produce anything.  I've already touched on my continuing struggles against myself, and all I do is manage to frustrate myself when I ignore that call to create.

Some ideas - and I hope they are the really good ones - simply linger, nagging at the edges of my conscious mind, requesting my attention in soft, polite tones.  The longer I ignore them, the louder they become.  Unfortunately, if I wait to long, they just leave.  Probably figuring nobody's home, or that nobody will answer the door because they are avoiding debt collectors.

I have too often ignored these ideas, these stories-in-waiting, and it always bugs me for a long time afterward.  There are several short stories that could turn out rather nicely, if I can just give them the time and attention they deserve.  All of them blossomed from some small idea that might have seemed insignificant.  Some of them from real-life influences.  There's one idea that has burned in my brain for at least a year, probably more, that I feel could be either a novel or a graphic novel.  And more recently, there's an idea for a novel or series of novels that has quite caught my attention and demanded brainstorming.

Without getting into the details (which should be obvious, considering how vague I was with my "examples" above), I would like to present this: inspiration is all around you.  Perhaps that is a given, perhaps you already know it, but I wanted to say it anyway.  Our everyday lives, no matter how mundane, are full of little kernels of information, stray thoughts, minor occurrences; all of these have the potential to become a great story (or song, or painting, and so on).

People - at least those in the United States - tend to get so caught up in everything they think they need to be doing that they often miss things that have been in front of them the whole time.  It only takes a tiny bit of effort to break out of that and start seeing the world around you for what it could be: an endless source of joy and inspiration.  Take a moment to enjoy the smell of fresh-cut grass, or the way the clouds roll across the sky, or how the sunlight kisses the mountains in the morning.  You don't have anything to lose.

Of Mice and Motivation

As something of a part-time, would be, aspiring amateur writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should be writing.  This of course doesn’t involve any actual writing, and only rarely does it touch on thoughts about content, story, and character.  Mostly, it’s a feeling that I have wasted a lot of time doing meaningless things when all my mind really wants is to express itself through creative means.

I’d like to be honest on this matter.  I am a life-long procrastinator.  Almost without exclusion, I do everything at the last possible moment.  In school, this amounted to projects and reports being hastily completed the night before they were due (often after having had weeks to work on them) and homework often being done on the morning of the day it was supposed to be turned in.  Now, it usually means that I am almost entirely incapable of getting gifts and birthday cards any sooner than the day before the occasion.

I also suffer from a huge motivational deficit; I am not one of those self-motivated individuals that simply gets things done.  I am not much of a doer.  I understand that these are, in actuality, two different problems.  But I think it’s also quite clear that in my case, as I would guess it is in most cases, they compound to make one large problem.

Lack of motivation leads to easy distraction; video games, random articles on the internet that I’m not really interested in, online forums, video games, occasionally interesting television shows, video games are all common sources of distraction that detract from what I feel that I should be doing. 

My struggles with this have been ongoing for somewhere around nine years (which happens to coincide with the time I got out of school and started working full time).  Before that, I didn’t have much problem writing.  Granted, everything that I wrote was likely cliché and poorly done, but I was writing, and I was enjoying myself with it.

I know that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem.  There are countless others out there who face similar difficulties.  It’s a mixture of flaws in my personality that have made if very difficult for me to do anything for myself, to do what I enjoy doing and work towards it as a career.  I wish that I had an easy way to get around it, or that there was some kind of cure.

I do manage to write from time to time (and this blog gives me a way to write that I haven’t really tried before – it serves a purpose even if nobody reads it), and I have completed some of the dozens of stories that I’ve started or thought about.  One short story was for a very small literary magazine run by a couple of professors at a community college.  I wrote all 4,000 or so words, complete with editing and corrections, in one day.  That happened to be the day before the submission deadline.

How do I break past this, though?  What has worked for me in the past?  My wife has been the biggest help, even though it frustrates her to have to do it all the time.  She gives me some rather strong kicks in the ass to get me focused, and her pushing works more often than my own does.  For a little while, I was even getting myself to write regularly, but I don’t think that time counts (I was off work on injury and thus my greatest source of motivation-killer was nullified).

All that I can say is that you have to keep at it.  It’s the same advice that most all professional artists have given at some point, be they writers, painters, musicians, or what have you.  You really do have to work at something all the time if you want to attain it, and I don’t think most people can find real happiness unless they are doing something they love.  For some of us, it’s hard, that’s all. 

I’ve had to ask myself numerous times if my lack of motivation simply means that I don’t want to write like I think I do.  I wonder if I should just give up.  But what else would I do?  There’s nothing else that I can think of that sounds like something I could spend the rest of my life doing.  So I’ll keep trying, and keep working against my own flaws.

I suppose, if there’s a point to all this (and it didn’t get lost somewhere above), it’s that each of us is our own worst enemy.  Whether it’s the harshness of the internal critic, that voice of our deepest insecurities, or our bad habits and character flaws, none of us can accomplish anything meaningful without first striking some kind of inner balance.  I’m still struggling, but I’ve not lost hope.  There’s no great success story here, no life-changing advice.  Only the truth as I understand it.  I’m still on the road, and it’s long and hard for me.

The important thing is to not give up.

Whimsical Wamblings

Now that I have, on a whim, decided to start this blog, I find it very difficult to remember all the things I thought I had to say. They likely weren’t very original things, nor overly clever. Rarely are any of my opinions well thought out, and I don’t typically care whether or not I offend anyone.

 Is it all just a symptom of the information age? The internet quite readily brings out the worst in people, it seems, granting them layers of anonymity to hide behind from where they can lob grenades of biased, fiery opinions and derogatory insults. Anyone can feel like a badass on a message board or playing an online game.

It’s easy to talk shit to someone when you never have to look them in the eye to do it. Easy to be rude or hurtful when you never have to deal with any of the consequences, when the conversation – or confrontation – is over the moment you close the window. We have managed to take the single greatest tool in our history for connecting with fellow human beings and remove almost all semblance of humanity from it.

I myself don’t entirely understand how it has become so easy for so many people to forget (or just not care) that there are real human beings with thoughts and emotions sitting on the other end, right behind the screen names or gamer tags or what have you. The internet has allowed a mass dehumanization of our fellows, and I think that as a society – at least in America – we are paying for it.

I suppose this has gone somewhat off-topic of my original topic, which was that I don’t have a topic. Please see the blog’s title for questions.

We live in an age that is filled with wonder we’ve all been desensitized to; the possibilities are unlimited. When have ideas ever been so accessible, so easily distributed? Anyone can create, and now that creation can be delivered directly to consumers, potentially to millions of people from all around the world. That should be amazing to us, but it’s just another detail, something that we have accepted without any thought as to the implications of that fact.

In part, that’s why I’ve started this blog. I don’t expect to reach millions of people. Don’t expect to have my thoughts read by hundreds of thousands, or thousands, or even hundreds. Dozens, maybe. But that’s enough, isn’t it? If something I write here can make even one person stop and think, help them to consider something from a different angle...well, then I’ve touched the wider world and made some kind of mark on it.

The way the world used to work – the traditional models and methods of publication, marketing, and distribution – doesn’t really apply anymore. In effect, we have been given the opportunity to cut out that middle man. The one telling us that we can’t have that happen in our story, that you can’t say that in the lyrics of your song, that you can’t show that in your movie. Creative control is shifting almost entirely to the producers of these works, for better or worse, and it is now directly up to the consumer to decide if it is worthwhile or not.

I think it’s quite an exciting time. I can allow my imagination to run wild (and it sometimes wanders to the potential downfall of corporate America, an entity (see: THEM) that I have come to loathe) and just put it out there for anyone who cares to see it. I can present my opinions, my perspectives, my ideas, to the wider world and have meaningful discussions. I can forge friendships with people who live thousands of miles away.

So what it all comes down to is this: I’m going to use this platform to say whatever it is I might feel like saying at whatever moment I feel like saying it, and you’re welcome to read it (or not read it). Agree with me, disagree with me, love me or hate me or be totally indifferent towards me, whatever you like. But I’m going to attempt to keep a degree of humanity involved here. I’m going to attempt to operate with a respect for you, the reader, as a fellow human being struggling to stay alive and get ahead in this messed up little world of ours.