A sometimes half-arsed record of the process of writing in its' variegated many forms.

Saturday, December 29, 2007

The nitty gritty AKA the show

So in the intervening years between my youth and the now, I have worked at a rather lurching pace with an overwhelmingly ambitious scope. I am now as an older, wiser, and somewhat beaten down man trying to take a more measured and steady approach, which has a highly unsettling effect on me, but it also keeps me honest and just a little more straightforward. Not an easy thing to do for someone who is way out in the universe of vagueness and abstraction most of the time, but what can you do? We are who we are.
Anyway, before I actually get down to the nitty gritty or get the show on the road, by which I mean actually getting into what this blog is meant to be all about, I wanted to get meta for a minute. It's a bit strange that I've been drawn to this form of self-expression given that I don't actually have much to do with what's going on in the world of weblogs. I don't read any on a regular basis. Mostly I've looked through a couple and found them wanting. I want more than just the daily accounting of movement and action. It's out there for sure, and I've seen some good stuff. It just still feels like wading through a thick molasses of dulling detail that doesn't give me the innerlife without great effort on my part. That's just my first impressions of the little I've seen, and undoubtedly my mindless ramblings will be of little interest to anyone else also, so in the end I guess it evens out.
All self-deprecation aside, the point I was trying to get to is that this kind of freeform journal writing has a lot of draw for me regardless of the content that it inspires in others. I'd been keeping a journal since I was about thirteen, but in recent years it had become this thing, to put it rather blithely. It had become about immortal words being laid down for all eternity, and, like, way too heavy to just sit down and thrash out right quick, which was what I wanted and needed. So that's what I'm trying to do here. I really like that I can come and throw off random thoughts without having to feel the level of intensity that was starting to amass under the idea of The Journal. It is my intention that this particular blog will be more focused on the structured creative writing I'm trying to do but in a loose way. We'll get to that at some point.

The Process

So I felt like it was important for me to seperate my personal blogomania into a two-pronged approach. The one being an all over the place full on rambling rant about whatever comes into my head, and the other (AKA this) being a slightly more structured focus on the process of writing. Initially I was going to call this blog simply The Process, but alas someone started a blog back in '01 with that title. He only kept at it for a few months, and it was way more content focused than I think I am capable of. He talks about adding new characters to his novel, and his ideas on the character's sexuality, which is pretty low in the list of important things in the lives of my characters. Mostly they are like me, so they have no sex life. Actually I just read his first post and it turns out he was blogging about the process of writing erotic fiction about the BDSM world. So there you have it.
I, myself, am working on two projects specifically, which I'll get into in more detail in a minute, but the pork chops just binged at me, so I'm gonna go do that right quick. More on the exciting details of my personal quest for self-fulfillment through writing, and then 10 easy steps to achieve it yrself. Okay...