My Writing Pitfall

Writing is, without a doubt, a very skilled craft that requires many thousands of hours of practice. One must hone their ability to write over years of doing it non-stop, nurturing their ability to form sentences from jumbles of words. It takes concentration to collect your thoughts, organize them and chew it over, spit it out and organize it again, repeat ad nauseum until your brain hurts, and then because you have to be a little bit crazy to be a writer you push a tiny bit further.

Here's my problem. Collecting thoughts before writing. I don't know what it is, but sometimes I just like to sit down and let my thoughts formulate in front of me. It's a bad practice for anyone who has serious intentions of being a writer. It really is something I need to learn to overcome.

Stream of consciousness, that's what they call it, does have a place in the literary world. The works from many of the writers and poets during the Beat generation could easily fall in this category. It's like a ride through a thought process, small connections being made in real time, only to be fleshed out in the written word. I'm no Kerouac, I'm no Ginsberg, but I still find myself stuck writing with no direction.

I could easily place blame on teachers, or even the lack thereof considering I was only able to afford a single semester of college, but I'm not going to. The only person I can blame for my half rambles is myself. The inner workings of my mind are a hard thing to deal with, but I know with sheer willpower I could manage to sort myself out. For the next few weeks, I want to focus on a specific thought or experience I have had, really find the words with what I want to say and begin trying to hone myself into becoming a better writer.

I will start with offering up my first topic. Sound. The attention I somehow manage to provide to the way things sound. The focus that I am able to place on them. And maybe, someway that I can correlate that same focus to writing as well.

A Plea to the Gods that Be

Once in a while I get this urge. An urge so overpowering that I start to go just a little mad. The urge to move forward, pack up all the loose ends in my life, and hit the high trail never looking back.

That urge has struck me again recently. Perhaps it's a symptom of the general unrest with the company at which I am currently employed. Seriously, the place I'm at now is like poison for management. I have been working here for just over two years, and starting tomorrow will be on my fifth general manager. It's not a horrible place to work, I like the work I do, I like the people I work with but for whatever reason it's just unable to get a good grip to push itself out of the mess it's in.

I don't know much about corporate politics and the red-tape that follows it, but I do know that it obviously is having nothing but detrimental effects on my office. Each successive manager I have worked with has been an increasingly better fit for the role (don't know much about the newbie yet) and yet they still keep dropping like flies. I've had great relationships with many of my bosses too. The last two that have come and gone I could have seen as mentors should they have stuck around long enough to be such.

Though I have been fortunate enough in my careers to have had many great people lead me along the way, teaching me their ways, showing me how business really works. It's been tremendous to work with such great people, and I have learned a great deal from them all. I think the greatest thing I have ever been taught though is this, "you either shit, or get off the can."

The one thing that has been a recurring factor in my learnings is that if you aren't happy with your current position you either learn to deal with it, maybe finding a way to better suit it for yourself, or you find something else to do.

That's where I sit today. It's time for a reinvention. I need to regenerate, this Doctor's body is all used up. Sure my new body may come with a goofball attitude and an affinity for bow-ties and fezzes but is that such a bad thing? I don't think so, change is an inevitable function of life and it's best to learn to embrace it with open arms so as not to get slipped up in a moment and finding yourself lost with no idea of where to go or what to do.

I've begun a journey in search of finding my new Doctor, I've found something highly promising and exciting, and now I wait. I wait with the bated breath of a dancer about to perform his first solo act shrouded in the intense white stage light. I wait with the patience of a younger me the night before Christmas. I wait sitting here typing these words as a plea to the gods that be, hear my prayer, hear my cries, help me to move forward once more. One more step closer to the other end of the board, to the checkmate, to the dreams that inhabit my mind.

Oh, and thank you.

Man oh man, I need a nap.

Man oh man.

Talk about neglect again.

It's partially my fault for not having had any updates. Does it matter? Not so much I guess, but I do link to the blog from my about.me page. Who knows, maybe someone has stumbled upon it from there. I don't really have followers though and not much motivation for full blown blogging. I stay pretty active on Twitter and Google+ with micro-blogs but really I should be doing more here.

Other than myself though, my current job has had me swamped for the past year. There's been management change left and right, my work load jumped astronomically as the economy started to pick back up, and then my core work duties have been increased at least three-fold if not more.

I need to get back in a better habit of keeping this thing up to date though. Work on BumStar projects has basically come to a halt. I did devote a lot of time in to building resources, purchasing the necessary equipment, and coming up with ideas. Though there are still a few pieces of tech I still need before some things can really get underway.

Initially I had dreams of BumStar being some sort of new media enterprise, I realize now that my ambitions far outweigh any practicality of it becoming such. One does not simple create an empire. Instead, BumStar, is really sort of an experiment. A means of flexing my creative muscles and focusing my energies and attentions on actually creating something.

I had been (and will continue again) working on creating a web-comic detailing the humorously exaggerated adventures of my wife and myself. This is actually pretty simple to work on. I've got a pretty significant amount of comics written, though illustrating and formatting them takes more time. This helps me to focus on my writing in smaller chunks while still trying to form an overall narrative arc. It's also been helping me to develop deeper characters and their dialogues with one another. Having worked on this gave me the motivation to start working on something more long form that's definitely years down the road.

Also in the works, a podcast of some sort. This, I really don't know what to do with yet. I've mulled around some ideas, made a test recording (which was utter shit), and mulled ideas around again. Also, trying to find the time to sit down and record has been a hassle.

My third piece is a secret. I need to keep it internalized so as not to allow myself to feel accomplishment for it until it's actually ready. I think it's going to be great, utterly fun to make, and I really think people will enjoy it once it's done. Unfortunately, it also requires the most equipment to really get started, but the thought of making it excites me more than anything else and I continue everyday to work towards getting it out in to the world.

I need a nap.