Nonsequitur Life

If I dug deep enough through the archives, I could probably find a good half dozen times I’ve written about this before. (Let’s be realistic, there’s probably far more than that.)

(Effin Birds by Aaron Reynolds)

Listen, Bird…

Here’s a peek into my demented brain.

Whenever I write about writing, my brain is constantly telling me DON’T REVEAL TOO MANY DETAILS about whatever story I’m talking about. Like somebody might stumble across the post and steal my ideas. Or it becomes a book that gets published and then there would be all these spoilers just out there in the open. And I know for some those could be valid concerns. But the things I am writing at this point, even if I FINISHED something, I have zero intention of trying to publish it in any formal capacity.

Also, the odds of someone who doesn’t even know me just stumbling across my website are extremely low these days simply because I have discourage search engines turned on. Last I checked, Google doesn’t list my site if I search the exact name. I know there are sketchy foreign sites that troll by every so often because I see the hits, and those are probably the ones out there fishing for shit to steal. But short of never putting anything on the internet, there’s not much one can do to stop that. (Aside from making everything private, but I’m not delusional enough to believe that anything on the internet is truly private.)

And let’s be realistic, there’s nothing original about any of my ideas anyway.

Anyway.

I think about all this a lot because I want to brain dump about writing all the time, but every time I start writing about writing, my idiot brain starts yelling, KEEP IT CRYPTIC, and the end result is just a load of nonsense that makes zero sense even to me, especially when I come back farther down the line and reread it. WTF was I even talking about? I can usually discern which story I was referencing because of the post tags, but details are hazy because there are none to begin with. There was a time when my post tags were just generic writing or writer’s block and those are real fun to decode to figure out what stories I’m talking about. I had too many instances of being utterly clueless as to which story I was referring to before I started using story specific tags.

(Also, I am very well aware that a high percentage of my posts are incomprehensible nonsense regardless of what I’m writing about. But at least it’s an accurate representation of what it’s like inside my head.)

This website exists solely for my entertainment. I can do whatever the hell I want with it. And if that means spilling every last detail of whatever story I am currently working on, then so be it.

But I won’t.

Because I will always have hangups about it.

Valid or not.

I wrote this thing while lying in bed not sleeping and it’s been sitting in Evernote for…a couple weeks? The other night at bedtime, Bob started asking me about writing, as he does, and I started telling him about my writing about writing hangups. I find it highly amusing (and still a little astonishing after all these years) how well he knows me because every counterpoint to my own bullshit I already wrote about, he brought up (nobody is going to steal my unoriginal ideas, nobody is going to stumble across my website, I’m not going to publish anything anyway, I can do what I want with my own website, etc, etc…) to which I replied: I KNOW.

I KNOW how ridiculous it all is, but it doesn’t stop me from getting all bent inside my own head about it.

Just write shit. Even if it is shit. Get it out and worry about making it good later.

Write the ridiculous fanfiction.
Write the seventh iteration of the same characters in a slightly different situation.
Write all the details of those stories in a damn blog post.

At least it’s writing.

That’s what he tells me anyway.

It’s what I tell myself too.

I just need to get out of my own damn way.

Which is far easier said than done.

I’ve probably written that a few dozen times too.

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My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark Fall Out Boy