Thinking

Lazy should be a pathology. It should be in the DSM. There ought be to be treatment for it. Because it can grip you like a irritated pimp and slap you around.

I thought it might be coming, because I’ve seen it before. It eats you up inside and you don’t even know that it happened. Starting off with the best intention, you’re gung-ho, you’re on fire and ready to shoot the gun, and so you do.

Later it sneaks up on you and bites hard. You stop in your tracks, you don’t progress, you don’t accomplish anything. You don’t…DO.

Is it a hump? Can it be navigated over, around or across? Can you sneak past lazy? Can you boldly assault it?

If you want something bad enough, can you just say “Fuck you” and push through?

I Didn’t Mean It

After all that hooey in the post below this one about flexing the muscle, and the story I’m working on is just a practice, I had a couple of epiphanies about it thanks to some profanity-laden sage advice from Chuck Wendig. Specifically with regards to character and dialogue. It was good stuff and I want to put it into practice. I still feel like it’s a practice piece, but when I think about it, I’m in a better place with it now than I was yesterday.

Hopefully as time permits (what’s that?) I’ll get more than a few hundred words down per day. But it’s quality, not quantity, right? RIGHT?!

Morning, Really?

Mostly, this is just another post to test Twitter connectivity, but then my mind started to wander into the dreamlands. That’s not an expression. I’m tired as fuck and sitting at this computer waiting for a morning’s worth of calls to get started at the real job is making me something something tired. I did manage to bang out over 850 words last night on an idea I had. Not even just a story or a short, because unless I put it through the grinder, there isn’t much story there. I mostly did it to flex the muscles.

That’s a lot of what this blog is for, to put me in the frame of mind to where I want to get the words out. Even if it’s just a short hey-howzit? The old incarnation of Broken Fiction had a segment I liked to call 15 Minutes of 365 Days, where I loftily set the goal of writing for 15 minutes every day for a year. That petered out after a couple of months. It’s not that the pace was tough, it’s just that I’m lazy and it was too disorganized. No structure to it. No goal other than just to do it.

That’s a little what I’m worried about here, too. Flexing the muscle is a great idea, but unless there’s a concrete goal and structure set around it, I am so fucked. The asterisk in these confessions is that the flexor that I was working on last night was generated. Yes, I literally went to a story generator to see what came out, and took it with another idea I’d read about a few weeks ago. They may say that writers now stand on the shoulders of giants, but I prefer to think of it as distracting them while I pick their pockets. This story will be good to run across the finish line, as practice you know, but it ain’t worth shit.

Geek Dad

My oldest boy has Cub Scouts tonight and as part of his Wolf badge requirement, he has to create a collection of something. Well, the examples in the Cub Scout manual lack a certain, oh, I don’t know…21st century style. Rocks? Stamps?

(“Dad, what’s a stamp?” “Well, son of mine, way back in the pits of time, we used them to pay the postage on letters.” “Oh. Hey, Dad, what’s a letter?”)

So in the spirit of avid indoorsman everywhere, we did not in fact frolick in the woods looking for unique acorns. Instead we hit the LEGOs something fierce and created a minifig collection.

That book seriously needs a modern makeover.

Oh No. Not Again.

You simply cannot believe anything you read. For instance, I wrote down once on a piece of paper that I was going to be a goddamned writer. That made it true, right? Because I PUT IT DOWN ON PAPER. That may be a circular argument, but it was the only way that I had to contractually obligate myself to getting all of these ping pong ball ideas out of my head.

It’s even worse than that. They’re electrically charged half-formed ping pong balls. They bounce all over my brain, full of made up shit and half formed ideas and “Holy Shit that visual is a GREAT idea, now if only I had some kind of story to wrap around it!” Yeah, that’s a lot what my brain is like. I have an ADD that’s informed by having too many ideas and not being able to do anything with them. I get antsy and when I decide I want to try to let them out, they splatter onto the page like puke and afterwards I’m exhausted and don’t know what else to do with them.

Funtimes.

I would like to try once again to organize them into some kind of coherent structure. A short fucking story or novella at least. There’s these two assholes I’ve had in my head forever and I cannot let go of them. Character details haunt me in my dreams and make it difficult to care about the day job.

So here we are. Broken Fiction v.3? I think it’s more like version 28 in my head. We’ll see how it goes, yah? Blogs aren’t nearly as hot as Twitter and that Facebook crap anymore, but I’m old school. What’s a little Excess Bloggage between friends, amirite? Stick around, I’ve got a big sack of cliches that I’m dying to try out on you guys. So here goes.

Once Upon A Time…