Day: August 17, 2018

Settling in to write for the day. I have a few projects that I am working on and I am also thinking about what kind of teaching I want to focus on now that I don’t have a novel writing class to work with. Odds are I am just going to refocus entirely on writing. The slow restart of the idea archive has really helped me recognize that I still have a little bit going on up there and I want to harvest what I have and keep using what is happening in the world around me to replant the seeds of creativity. 

44 days into this process I am started to see the remake as something actually possible and I am getting excited about the person I am becoming. This is me moving forward and not trying to be a version of who I was. Always Forward. 

Some Thoughts:

1. The Phantom Time hypothesis has me thinking. It is based on an academic paper suggesting that the formation of the Gregorian Calendar got things wrong–perhaps on purpose. If the research is right, then we aren’t actually living in 2018 but at some point in the 1700’s. I’m going to need to use this for class…

The preview text in the box said, ‘write your story’ and I felt it was an invitation. I need to write my story. I have lost count of how many blogs I wrote talking about how I need to write my story and to write stories in general. Writer’s Day was about that. The days in general have been adding up to a strange sort of chorus of write, write, write. 

Yet I am not writing with the courage and certainty of a man who has done this for as many years as I have.

Yet I am writing.

Maybe it is best to start with that. Yesterday an idea fell out of me and it felt very good. Tomorrow I am going to complete a project and then move on to a story I am slowly becoming excited about writing. This is a good moment and step in the process. It feels like things are starting to come together for me in so many ways. It feels like the universe might want to knock me off track, but I am going to flow with the energies of the universe and turn this life back towards something special.

Some Thoughts:

1. Turns out you have to click Publish twice to publish in Gutenberg. I haven’t decided that I like the interface yet, but I can tell you it is making me feel like I am forgetting to blog or just losing my mind. When I sat down to write this tonight I saw that I had not published yesterday. I wrote. It did not publish. This is not acceptable.

The plan is to make sure there are at least 3 out of seven days in the week where I get real writing done. Eventually that should shift to 7, but baby steps. Three means that I am devoting no less than two hour chunks to the craft. The plan, as it stands, is to start with this ten minutes of freewriting and then go directly into some creative, well, creation. I want to repopulate my idea archive. Now as a professional there is a good deal of that archive I need to keep to myself. I don’t want to give all my story ideas away. I want to be able to write some of them. I also want to be able to give some of them away, so there is a good chance I will be repopulating the archive here on this site. Expect a new page that details such things. I’ll work out the specifics within the wordpress code. 

Writing is the act of creation. It is more than just accessing our personal histories and talking about what did happen and what could have happened. Writing goes beyond that and becomes the thing that reflects our inner desires and fears. It is, to me, a kind of religion. I’m not trying to hype myself up here, just admitting that it is a fundamental part of my core being and despite a very hectic life (in need of organization and activity reduction) I have no expectation of living and not writing. I don’t believe I could or would exist peacefully in such a state. Even now when the ideas seem like the lone protozoa in an ocean of vapid thought, I know there is a need to populate my hours and thus my life with words and stories and in that fashion to recolonize the ocean of thoughts towards a goal of creation. 

Some Thoughts:

1. Yep, I am calling off the fantasy football. I’m not quite ready for the workload. 
2. Speaking of workload, I will not be teaching a novel writing class for the first semester in almost a decade.  There may have been another similar gap when I first started my new school seven years ago, but I do not remember it. This is a poor development that demands attention. I love teaching writers. It fuels me to see their passion and ideas flourish on the page.