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.

The Difference Between Writer's Block And Being Stuck

I haven't been writing as much as I was several months ago, and the fact that I haven't been is simultaneously both a source of inspiration and consternation for me. On the one hand, any time I start to feel like I'm too busy to write, or life is too frustrating, or whatever, I can tell myself, "hey, asshole, you mowed through 50,000 words in thirty days. You wrote for a month and a half, EVERY SINGLE DAY, without stopping." It's kind of cool when you can be your own personal hero, since, shit, you already achieved it once, what's stopping you from doing it again?

On the other hand, it sometimes makes me feel like absolute shit that I made it through half of my book in thirty days, and then it's taken me almost seven months to make it through the second half. So there's a bit of give and take going back and forth there.

I've been trying to figure out why the writing has been so difficult lately, why it just hasn't been happening as much. The glib, superficial, and fucking annoying answer would be because I'm not trying, because I haven't been sitting in front of a blank word document and a blinking cursor. But I hate glib, superficial answers. Even if they're correct, they're not terribly interesting. So let's assume that there's an interesting reason and explore it. Together.

Metaphors Are Like... Squirrels, Or Something To That Effect

It's probably a mistake, the way I approach writing. I don't mean that I think the way I write is a mistake, necessarily, although I certainly do make quite a few mistakes. Everyone does, though... I read somewhere that in order to master something, I mean, in order to really consider yourself an expert at something, it takes around 10,000 hours of practice. That's something in the order of practicing two hours, every single day, for something like fourteen years, which means I'm probably a master at sleeping, and not much else.

Anyway, my point isn't about the mistakes that I make when I write, because even though I like to think I'm pretty good at it, I realize I'm not an expert... I mean, hell, I need spell check to catch me when I do things like misspell "yourself," which I've done twice so far in this post.

The Good Is The Enemy Of The Creative

I had a thought that would ultimately lead to my return to my sadly neglected blog. Actually, there were two thoughts, although the first thought was substantially less interesting, something in the "wow, I didn't write a single post for the entire month of April." The second thought was about writing, which seems to more or less be my theme, and thus, the virtual text you now see before your eyes.

If you've glanced at my twitter (and I'm just arrogant enough to assume that maybe one or people do... the other 46 followers are probably spam bots, though) you'll notice that I have continued my habit of posting my word count on the novel. You may have noticed that lately, such posts have been coming few and far between, evidence of my inability to maintain my vow of "Write Every Day." I'm certainly humbled by the fact that my failure is so clearly illuminated, although at the same time, that was always kind of the point, you know, accountability and all. But I digress, and have yet to mention that elusive Second Thought, the one that I've indicated was worthy of writing about.

Male Writer, Female Character

Two things occurred to me as I was walking back to my car today after class: I had a really good idea for a blog post and it had also been a shamefully long couple of weeks since I'd bothered to write a blog post. Ergo, my presence here tonight. Tonight's also a little bit unique in that usually, I novel-write before I blog, which means that this is all happening out of sequence. I think I'm okay with that, though; the sequence has been a little bit messed up, as of late.

So, anyway, as I was walking, I started thinking about male writers and female protagonists in stories, and in particular, my own story which centers around a female main character and is told from the first person perspective. When I first started thinking about the story several months back, it never occurred to me to ask why I always thought of my character as a "she," it just felt like part of my sense of the character's identity. And, indeed, as a character takes shape in the mind, there comes a point in which you really can't just arbitrarily change these things, because by then, the character feels like a real person in your mind, and you don't just... you don't just change that. Not without possibly losing whatever sense of personality you might have had.