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Out of context: Reply #75510
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- Horp0
Ehhh fuck it. Still logged in so I'm going to post again. It's going to be long and boring though. I'll log out again soon and go back to watching you all through the soundproofed one way mirror.
I've always loved writing. Typing really, rather than writing. I like to violently shart the contents of my brain into different places, in unmanageable splatterings that hit a large circumference in disorganised patterns. A hot wet mess of thinking, transcribed hastily by my pulsating epileptic sphincter. I have done this for years across a lot of platforms.
As a result, I do get people saying "write a book, I'd read it" quite a lot. However this sort of comment, whilst frequently offered, needs to be tempered by a few things:
1. I cannot write a book to save my fucking life. I've tried. Sharting your mind-mucus is not the same thing as structuring and telling a complex story with realism and well-grounded characters. It's completely different.
2. People see you doing something and feel compelled to offer encouragement. I think of this as the Moonwalk Effect.
Over the course of my life I have seen many many people do a Michael Jackson moonwalk and their gathered friends and family all applaud and cheer and clap wildly and say how very good that person is at doing that.
However, that person wasn't actually doing a moonwalk, they were merely walking backwards with draggy feet, T-Rex arms and a stupid look on their face. People cannot discern between a technically well executed moonwalk (the illusion of travelling opposite to locomotion) and just walking backwards in a party setting for entertainment.
Similarly people cannot discern between 'lots of words on a page' and 'a skilled writer'. They just see the words and think "oh look he's a writer! He's good at that... he should write a book!". My fat arse should I write a book. Ridiculous.
3. As frequent as the encouragements to write are, statistically, they are almost zero on a data chart against all the people who saw any given post and *didn't* make that comment.
It probably sits at 1 in 5000 people who reply with a "Write a book" comment. Those are not encouraging odds but we as humans tend to use selective bias when it makes us feel good. I don't though.
But I do also dabble in writing things that are just for me. Stored on my hard drives, not published anywhere. They are my projects and a few of them have been things I've picked up and put down over decades. The Planetarians, The Dolsda Figures, Frank Dandyhand (a wordplay parody of the old timey detective noir genre), All The Ham In Halifax (a deliberately stupid parody of romance fiction); a stupid fucking thing about a mad painting that's honestly the lamest piece of crap that wouldn't even make it onto a fucking blog post. It's all shit. All of it.
But, when down time is enforced by the economic climate, and I can't land my next contract or a job, I get really stuck into one or more of these things and start pushing it towards completion.
This time around it's The Planetarians. I'm at around 30,000 words and I've become excited by different format. It's not a book, it's a sequence of transcribed notes and interviews spanning decades, detailing the weird life of my Uncle Gerald and what happened to him. A mailshot series of documents that form the idea of a mystery, loosely, with the reader needing to fill in the gaps and reach their own conclusions.
I am now *SERIOUSLY FUCKING OBSESSED* with completing The Planetarians. I am *GENUINELY VERY EXCITED* about it and work on it every day between other tasks. I stay up late smashing the shit out of my keyboard, working out the structure, adjusting the timeline, working out how each mail-out would be packaged in something that relates to the particular aspect of the story being covered.
A kind of deconstructed book that you maybe would subscribe to and receive each new part in the post across months. Official documents from various sources across decades.
I'm almost ready to admit that I could start sending this thing out to people.
That's VERY important. It is important because whenever I get to that point... the point of maximum self-belief and enthusiasm, I get offered work and have to stop thinking about it. Then it sinks back into the soup of hard drive storage and I forget about it until next time I'm between projects.
Probably nobody here recalls the time back in around 2009 when I was in a similar difficult situation and I rustled up a mail-out art project and a whole bunch of you sent me $20 by post (as specified) to receive a bunch of artworks over the course of the following year.
Well, the "rescued by a job offer" phenomenon happened then. I got all the cash... $20s / £20s from QBN people in the post, and I never sent a single fucking thing out. Not fucking one person got anything in return.
Unintentionally, a grift. The thing was, I was suffering a very severe depression back in 2009 and that project was how I got through every day. But as soon as I decided "Fuck it, hit the launch button and share this project" the cosmic order said "hey, here's a much needed full time job, and you start tomorrow, and you'll be busy".
So nobody got their artwork, but to be fair I never spent that money either. It's all still cash in an envelope somewhere in my loft, mentally noted as "must be returned to senders". I found it a few years ago and thought "I must return all of this", and then I put it back and didn't do that.
(about 10 people sent me cash, just for scale. It wasn't a major scam heist... just a few friends being bilked by a manic depressive Brit on QBN)
So, ya know.... sign up for my latest writing project The Planetarians. You won't receive anything, it's another unintentional grift, but it gets me back into paid work by operating the standard cosmic mechanisms of "infuriatingly inconvenient timing" and "creative ambition thwarting".
Okay I'm done. Time to log out.
- I never said a book. I don't even know how people accomplish such a thing, but there're a lot more uses for written words outside of books. Or podcasts :)Nairn
- Oh hello! noI didn't specifically mean you Nairn. Sorry. I'd actually forgotten you made that comment...Horp
- It's actually more a thing on LinkedIn (lately). I get DMs from people saying "I love your posts you should write a book", and I always answer "no".Horp
- Nor did I mean to presume you were talking alone to me, but I was serious about my comment. You have a knack, but how you wrangle it, I dunno.Nairn
- I do believe that some things are more important to us and than mere fincancial transaction anyway. I've lost every other passion to commercialism...Horp
- across a long, varied career. Typing out a load of shit remains impervious to cash, and therefore remains highly valuable, therapeutically, spiritually, maaan.Horp
- My knack is really just the moonwalk at the party. It appears to be a decent enough approximation that it passes as entertainment, briefly. Sometimes.Horp
- Aye, the thing is - that's how most Creative is. It just needs to fool enough of the people, enough of the time :)Nairn
- See, I do LOVE fooling people. That kind of thing motivates me.Horp
- so don't write a book. write a column instead.hans_glib
- Eh, columns, books, blogs. I just like to take a big shit in different people's boudoirs.Horp
- http://concep3.com/d…Nairn
- ^Horp
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<Horp