Reading Blogs About Blogging Makes Me Want To Write

Are you familiar, sir or madame, are you intimate with a certain fantasy series known as A Song of Ice and Fire? If not, you should probably stop reading, because I highly doubt you care, unless it's your thing to read drunken, poorly thought out rants from undergrads procrastinating on their philosophy essays. If you do like reading such things, well, by all means, please, stay a while.

Stay forever.

Where was I? Oh yes. So, there's this book series. A Song of Ice and Fire. Fun fact; for about five years, I thought it was "A Song of Fire and Ice." You know, like the Robert Frost poem? Five years, and nobody told me I was making an idiot of myself the entire time. Although now I'd argue that I managed to achieve that particular goal in far more entertaining and offensive ways than simply misreading the title of a fantasy book series.

Anyway, the next book in the ASOIAF series was supposed to be out, like, five years ago. This wouldn't be noteworthy, except that the author continues to promise again and again and again on his blog that it would be done in the next six months... and every six months, the promised date would come and go with nary a whisper of progress from said author.

Now, I'm not exactly a model of writerly discipline, or authorial focus, or whatever. I make and break promises about when I'll be done with my book all of the time. The only difference is, I'm an unpublished nobody that's taken far too long to finish his undegrad and drinks far too much to ever really be trusted with a keyboard. I don't have an international book deal that I'm reneging. Or an upcoming HBO series. Or several metric tons of merchandising crap to go along with the books I wrote.

You're probably wondering, do I have a point? I mean, I took the whole goddamn summer off, without any real substantial progress on my book. I certainly didn't blog, which is a shame, because I had a really good streak going for a while that slowly, but surely ground to a halt. Man, I hate the fact that my gmail account is linked to everything these days. I feel like I could have made a case for myself, said something like "oh shits, I totally forgot the password to the blog." But that's not true. Which is probably good, because if it was true, that would make me seem like even more of a drunken idiot than I already seem.

My point, anyway, is that this particular author's lack of progress with his books has spawned a number of highly amusing blogs urging him to, among other things, finish the damn book. Even if you don't have any interest in this author, or this book series, or anything I have to say, I suggest you click that link and take a read, particularly if you're an aspiring writer yourself. The aforementioned link leads to a very interesting argument on the merits of the various excuses an author might have for not finishing. In particular, there's a bit about the difference between a Freewriter (a writer who doesn't outline and has absolutely no idea where the story is going to go) and an Outliner (a writer who has the only thing planned out before he or she even starts.)

Honestly, both descriptions sound too generous to me. In my opinion, a Freewriter is one who has no fucking idea what they're doing and just makes shit up as they go, while an Outliner is a control freak who has to have every last little detail planned out, down to the very last goddamn thing.

If you haven't already pieced it together, I'm a Freewriter. And yes, I stand by my interpretation of what that means.

Anyway, reading this blog (Finish the Book, George, not the author's actual blog) has gotten me thinking about my own blog and my own book, and just reminded me of the single most important rule of being a writer.

If you want to be a writer, you have. To. Fucking. Write.

Every day.

There was an admittedly brief period in my life where I managed to do that. Even with a job, even with all of my classes, even with a profound and troubling addiction to a certain video game (Dragon Age: Origins), I still managed to write, every single day. I made it though 50,000 words in 30 days alone.

Fallen has, what, maybe two or three chapters left before I'm done? I had all summer to work on it. There's no excuse for that.

And here I am, blogging again, and do you know why? Because I firmly believe that even though this blog is just me ranting and whining and talking about nothing in particular to nobody at all, the fact is, when I post on this blog, it has me thinking about writing. It gets me writing, and by the time I'm done blathering on for whatever length I feel is sufficient, I feel the need to engage in something real and get back to work on my own damn book.

Let me put it another way. Posting on this blog may be one more way I weasel out of doing real work, but so far, it's the only weaselly thing I do that gets me back on track, gets me back to working on that novel. Video games don't do that. Browsing Wikipedia or Tvtropes for hours doesn't do that. Drinking (mostly) doesn't do that.

I highly doubt that this post was waiting an entire summer to read. I don't have any excuses for that, except that I am a horribly, horribly lazy person. And if anybody out there is still bothering to stop by now and then to look for updates, let me just say that I'm humbled that you've done so, and that I want you to know that, although I cannot say I'll ever become a better, more productive person, nothing will ever stop me from continuing my best to try.

I'm not sure if that's worth anything at all, but it's all I have to offer.