I decided to take an earlier stab at the blog situation this morning. It’s 9:30 AM and in the background one of my kids is walking around trying to decide if he wants to watch TV or play a video game. Big life choices are happening daily here. I think that is what inspired me to get to the blog right away: the stillness. Nobody here appears to be going anywhere. My youngest and oldest boys are engaging in mirror behaviors and are basically running in place if I am being honest about the situation. The older one spends upwards of 8 hours a day playing video games and watching shows. Occasionally he goes to work, but his job doesn’t approach full time, nor has he considered supplementing that work with any additional employment, mostly because he doesn’t have to. If he were out on his own he would not make enough money to survive. However, he lives at home and can work part time hours gaining experience in his degree field and waiting patiently for the right opportunity to emerge where he can get a full time job in his degree field. His kid brother is still in High School and still expecting to be a professional football player yet not putting in the work and energy required off-field to make that happen. It feels like both of these kids are waiting around for life to open doors for them, and we parents are creating the conditions for them to grow lazy and comfortable in the habit of doing that. Heck, they don’t even take the trash without explicitly being asked to do so–a small but meaningful gesture that would at least allow me to believe that they get that our contributions matter and furthermore that they should themselves be contributing in some fashion as a form of mutual responsibility to this space in which they occupy or at least as some basic form of recompense.
This isn’t what I was planning to blog about but it wound up taking half my time… I was actually thinking about the past–specifically I was thinking about how I used to do Idea Archives and how it felt to be so overflowing with ideas to write about. Lately I have felt like I do have good stories to tell, but I am far from overflowing with ideas. Heck, I am trying to force a ton of content out mainly because I spend time working and writing for money as opposed to pursuing the passion projects. When work comes up it is a matter if if I can do it successfully as opposed to if I feel good about or passionate about the particular assignment. In that sense I am more of a spec writer anymore than a fictionalist. I want that to change. I want a lot more balance in my writing life–which doesn’t mean less spec writing, but means more writing in general in order to have access to the projects I want to write on my own.
What are those? Let’s talk Friday.