19/08/18: 667
All right. Back to writing.
My friend and I set a deadline for finishing this current (final) episode of our co-writing project, which happens to be the 1st of September – it’s a full 2 weeks, true, but as I well know a lot can not happen in 2 weeks, so I’ve made myself get a start on it. Today’s been a bit of a restart in a few ways: I got this writing done, I went for a walk this morning after three weeks of serious slacking …
Also I watched Ready, Player One at long last and it inspired me.
Not, like, the actual story or anything. The film is decidedly mediocre, though I also did not hate myself forever after finishing it. More the premise – the opening narration has the line: “The only limit to what you can do in the OASIS is your imagination”. This premise has been used in stories before, and it’s impossible to follow through on to a satisfactory level; but something about it made me realise that it’s actually exactly the premise of one of my own projects. I had thought it was something else; I thought it was about playing with high fantasy tropes, even though looking at high fantasy never really gave me inspiration for it, and then I saw Ready, Player One and realised that high fantasy is just the setting, and instead of looking at high fantasy for answers to my various issues with narrative and genre, I instead need to seek out stories within this “genre” of “anything you can imagine is possible because I the author wish I was making a videogame instead of writing a book/making a film” for advice. And while that seems like it will take effort, I find it a kind of exciting prospect, rather than an offputting one. Personal growth? You decide.
23/08/18: 43
Look, whatever, it’s not about the word-count anymore, or at least it really shouldn’t be considering the past couple of months.
I do want to write more this week, but I’m now starting to think that maybe Weekly Words needs to morph into Monthly Words. Part of this is the “perspective is good” element of Weekly Words; having the ability to look over things that I’ve done with my time across an extended period is definitely useful, but I’m now thinking that the focus on what I’ve done, focusing solely on past-tense, is also quite narrow, and that if I shift gears into planning my goals within the context of the span of a month as the window of time in which those goals can be achieved, it might help me to develop more robust forward-planning skills, which would be nice.
Especially since the main reason I haven’t been doing much writing lately is because I am very upset about things that I keep meaning to do and never get around to doing, and the despondency just leaks out into every other aspect of my life, especially something as self-directed as writing. I don’t have to do it, I have no obligation to do it, and so if anything’s going to suffer it’s going to be writing, because it’s just so easy to not bother when there’s other shit on my mind. I had a pretty major wake-up call at this week’s Youthline session, in a good way, but that’s just with this particular thing that I’ve been trying to get done for almost two years – lack of follow-through, and lack of sensible planning, is one of my long-term learning edges (a strengths-based term for “thing that you’re bad at”). Weekly Words has helped me a lot this year, but perhaps it’s reached the end of its usefulness …
Or just needs to be supplemented with something. Perhaps I just need to get more serious about my more long-term goals – such as writing goals for the month, for the year, etc. I think that this thought is a step in the right direction anyway, even if the exact plan is not quite there yet.
Weekly Total: 710
WHATEVER.
The thing is, I really do have so much shit that I need to sort out, and until I get it sorted out I’m not going to want to write. Which sucks, because I like writing, and I like wanting to write. But it’s my own fault; I’ve put it off and put it off again, and it just keeps getting in the way of everything else I want to do, not just writing. It’s time to focus on making sure it gets done.
But the writing is not going to stop. I don’t want it to be a matter of hitting pause on every single other thing in my life just because one big thing isn’t happening for me; I want to get used to making things happen all at once, managing the balancing act. It’s what I wanted while I was marking, and I didn’t get it – but I made a start. And I intend to keep the ball rolling, or get it rolling again, or whatever momentum-based metaphor is applicable to my current situation.
I don’t want to let one shitty ongoing obstacle be an obstacle to everything else in my life, yet I’ve done exactly that for the past … I don’t even want to try to count how long. Long enough. Sometimes you need a break; I needed a break last week. But this week I didn’t need a break – I just needed to do other things as well as writing, and those things didn’t get done.
Well, it’s time to get them done, and time to try harder to make my writing work for me in the way that I want it to. I hate this week. But it’s over now. On to the next one.
Vevacha 