Oh, The Thinks I Can Think!

I've been taking a break from social media for a little while now. I can only handle name-calling and anger for so long at a stretch before I burn out. Then I start turning nasty, myself. As Nietzsche said, "He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you." I was becoming a certain kind of monster, and was well aware of it. The first thing I did was cut the people out of my life that showed such a marked tendency toward viciousness, and then I stopped subjecting others to my own bad behaviour. I'm well aware that once you start in with the name-calling, you've just as good as admitted that you've lost the argument. Name-calling is the sign of a person who no longer has reason backing them up. It's not necessarily true that the name-caller is always wrong, but by that point you've crossed over the line from debate into mudslinging, and the argument isn't going anywhere but down.

So, I've made only brief appearances on Facebook, in some cases to thank the people who have come on to tell me they've got my back, and in some cases for tentative forays into humour. I've avoided commenting on anything that hovers around the edges of serious discourse. And you know what? I'm a hell of a lot happier, I think. I'm also catching up on a few things. Not finding news items to blog or write articles about has actually turned my brain back toward my real passion in writing - fiction. At first I started organizing some of my notes, and then as I was pulling notes into my OneNote folder for that particular novel, something strange happened. I opened the document for the book in order to glance over it. Then I read what I had written. That's when I started to write!

At first I was just doing a bit of minor revising; phrasing I didn't like that I decided to alter. I got to the end of what I'd already written, realized I'd stopped writing without finishing the chapter, and there I was...suddenly adding another thousand words.

Almost as interesting to me was the fact that I actually started considering doing some fiction work yesterday - short stories to be added to my website. Of course, I opened up the back-up pages of my website to see where I could put in a short-story section, only to realize that my website isn't properly set up for it. Instead I wound up meandering around online and adding WordPress to a section of my site (that isn't really publicly available yet, but probably will be at some point), so that I could move my blogging over to it. This is what attention-deficit disorder gets you. You start out doing one thing, realize there's something else you need to do and wander off to do that, and in the middle of that you notice there's something else that needs to be done, so you work on that for a little bit. Nothing ever seems to get finished.

Thankfully I've curbed my ADD when I'm doing stuff for other people (usually), so I'm able to accomplish things and meet deadlines in a professional sense, but when there's no obligation or time frame that has to be adhered to it's not surprising I lapse more often than not. I get stuff done for the show, because there's a weekly deadline. In fact, I rather surprised myself and got ahead of schedule there. That helps, because I'm not even thinking about the show now. It's not niggling at the back of my mind, distracting me from enjoying other activities. In fact, we've got some pretty amazing shows under our belts now. Our last one was an interview with a retired colonel who used to work at the Pentagon. He talks about the current situation with IS and the Islamic extremists, and really knows his stuff. If you want to have listen, go our our Podcast page. It's well worth your time. I learned a lot, myself. The Twitter memorial account for Charlie Hebdo actually retweeted our show, if that tells you anything.

Knowing that we're going to be moving probably helps, too. We've hated this place since we moved into it, and looking back I know that's why I could never bring myself to unpack completely. We stayed more than two years, and that's more an indicator of my laziness than the fact that I didn't unpack the boxes. I've been so unhappy living in this hole, surrounded by people who are content to live at the bottom of society, and who spend their money on alcohol so they can pretend they're having a good time. I don't eschew the odd evening of intoxication, but they happen pretty rarely for me. Once every couple of years maybe. For many who live in my building, every weekend is a party. Knowing I was living in a slum didn't exactly make me want to get up and dance every morning, and my natural disinclination toward domestic activities was exaggerated - in other words I became even more of a slob than I'm comfortable with, which is a saying a lot.

We may be buying a house, which will be further cause for celebration should things go according to plan. There are a couple of 3-bedroom houses (with two bathrooms) we're interested in, and having a third bedroom means having decent work space. I can set my desk up properly again, close the door, and really concentrate on my writing. Since I'm not in the midst of any sort of romantic entanglement, it also means I won't have any worries about anyone interrupting me, or getting pissy with me because I'm more interested in working than watching TV. My daughter respects my need to be left alone while I write - probably because she doesn't like being bugged either.

While many people fantasize about falling in love, I daydream about setting up the perfect office and being left alone for days at a stretch. In fact, that's actually how my tailbone got destroyed. I worked for more than 24 hours in a row once, sitting in a really cheap steno chair and only getting up to venture to the bathroom and grab a sandwich. When I finished the draft of the book I was working on it took me about fifteen minutes just to stand up. It was never right after that, and kept getting worse until I finally had to have it removed about four years ago. It had a major curvature to it that even I could see from the x-rays was far from normal.

Part of me has been pondering getting back to my fiction work for a while now. Yet somehow I've been thinking I would wait until we had moved and I didn't have those external distractions. Instead I've already gone back to it. I think all I really needed was to get away from the kind of writing I find so aggravating. Aggravating not only because it isn't the kind I want to be doing, and also because of the subject matter being more than a little controversial, so I ended up with trolls here and there. There are still some serious topics I'd like to dig into at some point, but they're major pieces that will require a lot of work and monetary compensation. They're also the kind of work that will take me away from fiction in a big way, and now that I've finally gone back to it I don't want to leave again for a while. In fact, when I started this blog I wasn't planning to do much other than just chat with people and get my thoughts 'on paper' so to speak. Much like a journal, except that it's public. I certainly didn't intend to spend the next couple of years writing for various online publications about so many controversial topics.

Life is funny like that, isn't it? As much as I feel like I've accomplished as a writer over the last 30 months or so, it was very different from what I had planned to do. I don't consider it to have been a waste in any way - just the opposite in fact - but certainly it was a completely different path from what I intended. I read an article a year or so ago about how many words a writer had to write before they were ready. I don't think it was even the author's idea, but rather they were talking about someone else's notion of the amount of practice it took to be a good writer. Apparently a million is the magic number. Yup. A million words. Now, maybe that seems like a lot to some people, and especially to those who don't normally write, but a regular novel is around 100,000 words. Anything less than about 60,000 words is more like a novella. The average article is anywhere from 500 to 1,500 words, usually, depending on the depth of the subject matter. I once wrote an article that I believe was over 5,000 words, but then it was on the aftermath of rape - not something to be taken lightly, and there was a lot that needed to be said. A blurb just wasn't going to cut it.

However, just taking the average length and multiplying it by the number of articles and blog postings I've written (well over 300), I've actually got about half a million words floating around out there online. Never mind what I've written that hasn't been made public. I've finished one full novel, of about 120,000 words, that I've rewritten a couple of times. (It's a book I never intend to publish, since it was a romance I wrote when I was young and full of silly ideas like that.) Then there's the work I've done on other books that I have not finished. Then there was the half of a book that I wrote as a teenager, and I was writing fiction stories starting at the age of twelve. Being 43 years old now, I'm pretty sure I hit the million mark some time ago, in addition to having 'matured' 32 years. Yes, I used scare quotes, but that's because I don't really consider myself to be very mature. I spend far too much time playing computer games for anyone to call me mature. I don't care how grey my hair is. [Funnily enough my daughter was just saying I might be able to pull off a Jamie Lee Curtis with my hair, and I was more than a little flattered by that (no she's not prone to flattery - the opposite if anything). I respect any woman, particularly in Hollywood, who ages proudly.]

Maybe now I'm ready. I'm looking forward to it at any rate, and it's been a while since I really got into something I was working on. I can feel my focus coming back. Again it's an area where I didn't plan to do any writing, since it's within the fantasy genre I would say, but at least it's within the realm of fiction. I started plotting out this book a year ago, doing research on any relevant historical topics, but since it's about demons and other mythical beings I can really have fun with it and make it what I want. The fact that everything can be made up is both the joy and the challenge of fantasy writing. J.K. Rowling probably had a blast writing the Harry Potter books, but with everything that you make up you have to be sure you keep track of it. That same thought occurred to me when reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings again. You can make up an entirely new planet if you want to, but then you're starting completely from scratch. You can't take anything for granted, not even the invention of the wheel.

If I really got serious with my current effort, I could have the first draft written within a month. Since it's intended to be the beginning of a series, however, I won't be finished even then. It's going to be a smaller book than the ones I'll be writing for my serial killer series, so hopefully I can bite the bullet and just get the thing done already. Okay, I'm off again to do what I do best - daydream and make things up as I go along. I'll be around, though, and will keep everyone posted on my progress. I'll talk to y'all very soon!