My Writing Output

Limping Along

“It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay…”

I wrote that 2 years ago and since that time I have had significant changes to my life and my writing has completely changed in output and type since then.  I got a career in September 2017 working for my hometown’s city hall and that dominates my time.

While I do not consider my job especially difficult, once you get passed learning how to navigate the bureaucracy it is only a needlessly complicated series of checklists and meetings that could be emails.  However, the job is so time consuming and so lacks creative elements that I find myself unable to write for my own benefit.  Sure, there are exceptions and I have pressed myself to write at least one entry on this blog each month, but it is a side effect of such gainful employment that I do not have the creative spark while working there.

What I do have is a small but regular trickle of work that allows me to write in a professional environment.  It does not stretch my abilities, it is not mentally rewarding, but it is required and has consequences.  I have check what I am writing to make sure I am not breaking the law; while at the same time having no metric to follow; and having to interpret what I am told so as to tell it to other people.

Playing “telephone” via email is its own sort of writing exercise.

Not this Year

            Last year I didn’t bother to give an update on my goal of writing 1,000,000 words, nor did I give an update on my goal of writing a blog for everyday of the calendar year.  I have certainly tried to advance each and have made progress.  I only have 16 days of the year without an entry, and I have crossed the 750,000-word goal.

 

October and November, why are they my weakest months for output?

My writing has never been stronger (at least according to standardized testing, something everyone should question the validity of) as last October I retook the GRE and scored a 5, putting me in the 92 percentile on the writing portion of the exam.  I took the test in order to apply to Doctorate programs and am pleased with the results. (I will be writing more about my decision to do that and the results in the days/weeks to come.)  And let’s be clear, I don’t ever want to take the GRE again.  Two is two too many.

I have had plenty of ideas for what to write, and have a folder of “Draft Zeroes” with ideas for short stories or novels and have written out an outline for a book that is only a couple thousand words but represents something I haven’t done before, a plotted out story with a beginning, middle, and end.  There is even a rough set of chapter breaks along the way for all the shenanigans that I might want to slide in.

New ticks and quirks have emerged, with my tendency to use, “So, …” to start off paragraphs and sentences.  A reliance on evidence, citations, and stating my suppositions causing me to preface everything and then explain my point.  Trying to mix this up with the occasional, “It follows then…” or a “Taking that as a starting point…” could make my writing stronger, but that also makes it more verbose.  SO, I am unsure as to how to tackle that habit.

There are other issues I have that I have never been able to overcome.  My inability to name things is perhaps my biggest weakness when playing Dungeons and Dragons (which yes, I do credit as part of my writing.  While DnD is a game, there is tons of creative work that goes into it and issues from it, just look at the multitude of novels that surround the property).  Names are not my forte and the fact that I made two different recurring characters’ names, “Kevin” shows this sort of wekness.

I like plot and I like setting and I like dialogue, but ask me who is saying things, the name of where they are saying them, or what they call the events they are talking about… and I just don’t know what to say.  Often falling back on the blandest of proper nouns or portentous uninformative claptrap (like “Destiny” a game I dislike specifically because it does something I see as my biggest weakness).

Maybe you all see some other aspects of my writing that need improvement, be it a matter of style, content, or just that I have a number of typos in everything.  I have no editor.  I do my best… or as I mentioned at the start, I do what I can.

The Future

            My writing will continue to mutate.  I hardly ever do movie reviews anymore, not because I stopped watching and having opinions on movies, but because I did movie reviews originally in order to further an aspect of my writing.  And I see my abilities in movie reviewing as sort of complete.  Movies were something I could trust a certain number of people have seen and have tastes in, they have a language that can be understood, deconstructed, and evaluated based on a criteria of both personal taste and technical acumen.

            Essentially, movies are something I could pull apart in multiple ways and in doing so practice my ability to pull ideas apart.  I could teach myself to recognize foreshadowing, metaphor, and visual presentations of information.  I can look at a movie like “Hereditary” and see how the movie planted ideas in the mind of the audience and how well those ideas were capitalized later in the narrative.

            Being able to catch those turns and flourishes is something I think I have down well enough that I am just no longer all that interested in picking them out.  Sure, from time to time, and if I had the time and creative spark, I am sure I would have just written movie reviews for the sake of a creative outlet, but in my current state of not having the time or drive they just do not have that pull on me.

            Honestly, what I want to pull apart more than anything is the old opinions I have on this blog.  My personal world view has changed so much in the last 10 years that I feel the need to write the rebuttal to my younger self.  I feel like I did not become an adult till I was 27 and even then, I was not informed enough to hold a real substantive opinion.

Now that I have degrees, work experience, and have just had to stand by while the world around me became various flavors of strange or hostile, I am a changed man and having the young me’s writing out there informing other people’s opinions of who I am now… it is misleading to them.

SO, it is likely that this blog will have a few dozen entries where I look back on who I was and how I thought at the time and just take myself to task.  Hopefully, I am not just so how much better I am now, but the act of doing this makes me better still.  Maybe I can even show other people why I felt the way I did at the time, why I changed, and why the change is for the better.  Help them change for the better too.

For Those Reading This

            I cannot emphasize enough how important writing is to who I am.  How important it is to my growth as a person.  I cannot recommend it enough to everyone out there.

            Find something you care about and write about it.  Don’t just write for yourself either.  You have to put it out there.  Even if no one reads it.  Even if those who do call you a talentless asshole.  All of that is part of it.

            Writing something that no one but you will read is masturbatory and does not help you grow, and it does not temper your skills.  You have to have some standard that exists outside yourself that you are trying to meet and surpass, even if it is the imagined judgment of potential readers.

            Write.

            Please.

            Trust me, it is worth it.

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1,000,000 Words, Year 3

            Three years ago today I started a personal project to write 1,000,000 words.  This was inspired by the adage that, “the first 1,000,000 words is practice”.  Since that time I have logged movie reviews, half-finished novels, random bullshit, and lots of grad school assignments.  I have thru this time kept a log of how many I have written.  Starting at first with a goal of 500 words each day, under the reasoning that some professional authors write as much as 1,800 words each day.  That was optimistic in the extreme.

            I quickly fell behind and even as I banged out huge assignments at school and tried to write down something about more and more of the shows I watched less and less stuff interested me as targets and I personally felt less creative in a lot of ways.

            My first year doing this I logged 139,441 words.  This doesn’t include facebook statuses, tweets, or comments in forums (unless I later turn those into blog entries).  It is work that I either put out into the world to be evaluated via school and this blog, or it was work that I wanted to one day put out in a grander form to be evaluated.  This worked out to 382 words each day.  Close to the 400 words a day I have seen recommended by Neil Gaiman an author whose work I hold in great esteem.

            In the second year I kept up the pace for the most part.  134,511 words.  Much of which came from a single massive assignment to complete my first Master’s degree.  A lot more math was required at this point, with hours of time spent hammering out projections and breakdowns as part of a political evaluation for my degree.  Writing was less a priority and less a part of my day to day functions.  Overall this was a step down, but was still in the same range of 368 words each day.

            This last year has been less a step down and more of a ladder down.  I didn’t feel nearly as creative; most of my school work was doing basic learning in a foreign language or using mathematics, mapping, and design tools; and even the yearly movie reviews I typically do just to drive up my word count… I didn’t feel the drive to put them out there as most of the movies I saw last year fell into the very grey middle for me and hardly required comment (though there have so far been two exceptions).  I was and still kind of am mentally burnt out.  I only wrote 46,886 words in the last year.  A third of what I have done in the past.  128.5 words each day… Except that is wrong, it was only 128.1 because I have to include a leap day.  This is only the 5^th blog I have written in 2016 and it is April.

            Now that isn’t the whole story, I have been writing more in forums, discussion sections, and comments on various websites so that lets out a lot of ideas before they have fully developed.  Maybe those pasts are letting out too much creative energy and I should give up on that talkative aspect of my online self.  Maybe those posts are good enough to consider as real writing effort and I should start counting longer or more in depth posts toward my log.  I will probably compromise and start turning more of them into blogs, the one from yesterday is an example of that.

I have also stopped counting the fiction I write until it is finished, which means that a dozen chapters of a novel that will never get done, those thousands of words go nowhere.  I have also not been sharing or measuring stuff for when I write a setting for Dungeons and Dragons, which can translate to thousands of words.  Maybe I should start putting out lots of stuff related to my Dungeons and Dragons imaginings.  Perhaps my actual word count is not as bad as I think.

            It is not like the exercise is not doing its job.  My writing is much better than it was.  I rarely need a second draft, and aside from the numerous typos I feel that my thoughts are coming thru in clear waves to those who read my stuff.  Heck, before I started logging my word count I was blogging in the note section of my facebook in a deliberate effort just to hammer out more words for fear that I would be too glib for success in graduate school (some of those old entries are on here, upgraded a small amount, artifacts when I only wrote about comic book characters).

            Oh, for the halcyon days when a 1,345 word blog about Black Panther was the longest I had ever written.  Compare that to the 6 part epic I did on the Florida Legislature and the need for a new Parliamentary system to combat Gerrymandering.  Or if you want to stick to comics the 8 part series I did on just making up 3 different teams of DC superheroes to be Justice Leagues.

            What I am saying is, I have most definitely met goals of improving both the verbosity and virtue of my writing.  Though I am sure many of my Professors remain unimpressed.

            I do hope that in the future I get a job that requires regular writing as part of the job’s function.  I feel that prodding is important, and being paid for writing is the right sort of positive association that will keep me writing recreationally.  And maybe this next year I will be able to push myself to write something with enough substance that even if it is not great in volume it will be greater in quality.

            For now I will just have to keep writing.  And get thru this patch.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Tracking My Writing, Year 2

            Two years ago I decided that I would keep a journal of all the stuff I wrote in order to reach 1,000,000 words.  I do not end up posting everything I write and frequently I end up with word documents with titles like “5 movies on Topic” and then just listing five movies, with the intention of coming back to write a lot more.  Other times I will go on 1,000 word diatribes about some topic that is ultimately… not enough to hold my interest for the 4,000 words it would take to explain everything.  Or things I wrote a year ago turn out to be really wrong, or totally right, or I have changed my mind completely, regardless the value of a blog titled, “My predictions for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’” which I never finished is quite nil.

            That being said I still wrote a lot of this with the intention of putting out to be read… Well, not the ones that were just lists of titles that I might write something for.  Regardless, I put some effort into these and they just went nowhere.  So I went thru and counted up all the words from the hanging documents I had… and then deleted the documents.  7,149 words that I added to the count that had previously been left out in the dark, and a fresh start on a lot of topics that I had previously only had a vague thing started.

            Overall I think my writing has improved some.  A lot of it has been oriented toward technical documents for my current graduate work, not a lot of short stories or speeches, and it takes a lot of effort to be creative, I hit a lot of walls regardless of how much I want to tell a story, or how well I see particular scenes in my mind.  Maybe one day I will actually get something published, but until then I will just keep hammering out material in hopes of pushing out the edges of my skills.

726,409 words to go.  Average of 374.78 words each day (A little short of the 500 each day I originally shot for).

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

999,500 to Go

            To get good at something requires 10,000 hours of practice.  But it works a little different with creative enterprises, it is counted with words, and they put the target at 1,000,000.  A million words of practice can be done.  I write with a good bit of frequency, and could stand to put out more and more to further this mental cause.  Now rather than count the 5,000 words I wrote on finals tests this week, or my blogs, or really anything else.  I think I need to start now.  Each day I will write 500 words.  Sometimes I will miss a day and make it up later, but I will never have it take more than a week to catch up.

            So only counting the 500 words entries, I discovered how many days that counts out to: 5 years, and then 174 days past that.  So here is how I will regulate my goal.  500 words a day, not always on the same things, but I will push forward when I like it, and edit it when I want to make more of it.  Those edits will count for and against me.  Keep a tab.  And on October 17th 2018, I will consider myself done with practice.  And maybe I will make some art at some point in there.

            Having some ideas.  Though not clear or what to do with them  I feel a creative mist hanging around my skin.

            I was at Barnes and Noble's bookstore the other night for 4-5 hours.  It started out as killing time but it had been a long time since I had been in a book store and I always get an odd vibe.  Like I am literally breathing in the room.  Looking over cover after cover and wondering what that strange ethereal hunger in me is for.  I kept thinking swashbuckling, but I also wanting something dripping with very wet and sticky magic, and then I also wanted something simple and thin and easy to get through to a satisfying end which made me smile for a bit and left me geared up to read something else.

            I remembered that years before I had thought to read some classic science fiction authors to get some perspective on the medium.  And I read "Dune", "Ringworld", and "Ender's Game".  Breaking this up with "The Hunger Games", "MogWorld", and a reread of the 10th anniversary edition of "American Gods" (my favorite book).  I wonder if I should try something similar.  That I find a list of 3-4 classic mystery or horror.  Or I could find straight up pop-literature and read David Baldacci, Clive Custler, James Patterson, and Brad Thor.  It seems unfair for my reading to consist of Sci-fi, Fantasy, comics. and some classic literature.... Maybe I will ask for suggestions from those in my life who want to watch me be unpleased because that is where my best jokes come from.

            This is one more sentence, its intention is to bring this to five hundred.

4-20, My Opinion on Marijuana Politics

            I thought I might throw out an opinion on the topic of weed in America on account of it being 4-20.  Side note, the reason 4-20 is "Weed Day" has nothing to do with weed really, it is Hitler's birthday.  The whole getting high to "honor" Hitler was a giant joke.

            Weed, and I cannot say this flatly enough, should not be criminalized to the extent it is currently.  It should not be as ubiquitous as caffeine or saturated fat, but it sure as hell is not something people should be going to jail over.

            The sanest way to look at drugs is through criteria and then weigh it against societal norms.  Basically find ways to measure Weed against the drugs humans use every day: Caffeine, Nicotine, and Alcohol.  I have 4 criteria.

            1) How likely is an overdose in the course of regular consumption?  You can overdose on Cocaine or heroin the first time you use it and die instantly.  Proper use prohibits this, but that doesn't stop people from doing it.  Currently you would die of smoke inhalation before you ever died nicotine poisoning, and drowning in coffee is more likely than caffeine overdose, alcohol is another story though.  People drink themselves to literal death everyday because this shit is dangerous, and available in cheap high concentrations.

            How does Weed compare?  Well, the difference between Drunk and Dead with alcohol is about x5 or x10, so if you are drunk at 5 drinks, 25 will kill you.  Marijuana requires about 40,000 times the exposure.  So, much like cigarettes, you would die from the smoke (or the towering inferno) before the drug actually got to you.

            2) How likely are you to become addicted?  Again with things like Crack, close to 99% of people who use it more than once, will become addicted; opium (even prescriptions, Oxycodone being one of the most abused prescription drug in the country right now) are dependency machines, rewiring brains to have a constant need for them after a steady period of use.  Nicotine is highly addictive, one of them most addictive of all drugs, with most anyone hooked after only two cigarettes, I imagine half of the lobbying money that goes into keeping cigs legal comes from the industry to treat addictions to them, the gum, patches, and various things to chew on (like the pen cap industry).  Alcohol is less addictive, ringing in at about 1 in 13, or 7.6%.

            How does Mary Jane measure?  10% roughly.  It is hard to get real test data because doing a substantive study on Weed is looked at by the United State's Congress like disposing of Toxic Waste near pre-schools.  But what data there is gives Weed a comparable measure to the drugs that are already in the system.  If the differentiation is arbitrary, and can't be justified compared to other parts of the policy, then it is unjust and the law shouldn't exist.

            3) What is the long term harm to a user?  Alcohol kills people by inches, contributing to every negative condition a human can get (if you want to bring up the glass of red wine argument, that benefit has nothing to do with the alcohol, it has to do with grapes, if you ate a shit ton of grape skins, and didn't take the alcohol you would be better off still).  Smoking causes cancer not just to the user, but to those around them, contributing to the overall indoor and outdoor air pollution that is becoming a major health problem for the whole country.  Caffeine mostly just causes ulcers and the shits.

            What about the Ganja?  Basically, all of the effect of smoking cigarettes.  The real issue is regularity of use, and how it is consumed.  Eating weed brownies dodges the smoke issue, as does using a vaporizer because you aren't breathing in heavy wet smoke, just the drug in a gas form.  The real problem is sexual, it lowers sperm production, motility, and the ability to get it up at all.  Weed makes every part of a person lazy.  That is what it does.  I would like to posit however, that this is not as bad as sclerosis of the liver.

            4) What is the ambient damage to a user?  This goes to how bad the use affects family structure, and a person's ability to go about their day to day life if they used the drug.  Alcohol is the king of this problem, ask any police officer, alcohol is fuel on the fire.  Alcohol might not actually cause crime, because there is still a moron who drank and drove, or drank and punched, or drank and shot, but there was a reason the temperance movement existed in America.

            How about the green?  People are arrested for having it.  People are arrested for selling it.  People are arrested for growing it.  Not a lot of people beating their wives after hitting a bong.  Driving: Hell Yes.  People drive stoned because they are stupid, just like the morons who drink and drive.  But people who smoke weed are not taking a depressant in the same sense as the drinker, it is a relaxer, a duller, a mechanism of sloth and non-productivity.

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            I am currently considering my Masters thesis related to the drug trade and drug policy, because the organized crime wars in Mexico and Central America are big news and likely to get me a decent job, and these are the sort of criteria I would like to study to determine whether drugs are really the economic and social burden that they are made out to be.  Prohibition and the Opium Wars have a very different context in modern hindsight then they did at the time, and modern healthcare has the potential to gather more information on the use of drugs than any point in history.  So while I have very little to go on, I am going to make this very broad statement with the information I have, Weed is no Opium, in fact, Weed isn't even as bad as Alcohol, and America drinks that up.  A new perspective is needed.

            Lastly, a disclaimer: marijuana is a substance I have never tried, along with other drugs in general.  I am a straight laced killjoy and have never had any desire to take anything.  What is more I am fairly certain that other people take drugs in order to think like I think, so if I were to take drugs I would either cancel out and lose my mental super powers, or I would become to me what I am to normal people, Josh^2 and would probably get some form of telepathy.  Either situation is probably not good.