Getting Back in the Game

Instead of writing actual stories, I decided to waste time detailing the writing issues I'm encountering as I do my ... 65-75% best to get back into writing. Basically just a dumb list of of things I'm encountering since I fell off of writing for almost a full year. Why even give this the time? Because it feels good to complain, and really, isn't that what the internet is for? Also, I was listening to an interview with author V.E. Schwab (Shades of Magic series, Vicious) when she responded to a question about her writing process, "I kind of love any opportunity I have to procrastinate on one thing that needs to be done with another thing that needs to be done." And that's the same advice I heard from other writers too, if you don't want to or just can't write, maybe just do something writing adjacent. I don't want to work on Project A so I'll do Project B. And I know that this doesn't need to be done, but it seemed like something fun, so here we are.

Also, just to give some background without going into a lot of detail, it was just a lot. I had these ideas ... for short stories and responses to Reddit prompts that I scrolled through daily, those vacation posts I wanted to finish as soon as possible and instead ended up taking a year to put together, longer story ideas for a series (if you remember my Pokemon fanfic which I promise I'm still sort of working on), an actual novel idea, different projects I wanted to start on as regular weekly or monthly posts ... and I just couldn't settle on one to work on without two or three other ideas coming into my head, like bored children jumping up and down asking when it's their turn to play. And just like slapping children, slapping at ideas is frowned upon by society, especially in public where authorities tend to be called.

Concentration is the biggest hurdle right now. Sure, it has never been my best quality, but I swear I used to have at least slightly better focus than I do now when I have a pen in my hand. Typically music helps with that by becoming the background noise that drowns out the other background noises, but even that trick has abandoned me. Now everything needs to follow a specific system or else it all just falls apart. I deleted all my writing playlists a long time ago. I assumed I didn't need playlists filled with anime theme songs, k-pop, and Chemical Brothers anymore since I could write with whatever was playing. Now, I NEED silence to start. That's the time I use to come up with the ideas to focus upon. Only AFTER I've got some idea, direction, and hopefully a couple sentences written can I put on music, and very specifically, the music I used to use (meaning I should probably get started on a new writing playlist). For now I just shuffle the kpop genre or Scandal on my iPod, or else put Youtube on autoplay.

On the topic of music, when I use Youtube for music, I now run into something newly annoying: Grammarly Ads

The worst part: I watched several Grammarly ads just to find a screenshot to use, some of those ads I watched all the way through. I'm not sure if Youtube is associated with Blogger or if Skynet is just being an asshole, but without fail anytime I'm typing up a post a Grammarly ad is sure to pop-up. Look, I get it, I'm not good at this. I don't need our AI overlords taking a heaping shit on my hobbies. 90% of them are skippable after the first 5 seconds, but it does break my rhythm and already fragile concentration to stop my typing to switch to another tab to skip the ad which most times is actually almost done, only to repeat the process every 3 minutes and 30 seconds.

As much as I prefer writing on paper, eventually it does need to be transferred onto the computer or else what's the point. Plus, how would I bother those handful of you that actually waste your time reading this thing? Typing, I find, is a hurdle all on its own. My laptop isn't the best, nor the most convenient. Being over 10 years old, it isn't the fastest to start-up nor does it have the best battery life.

Also, since I don't use it often, it's also always buried under a stack of paper and books (relax, they're not hardcovers). Without a table, that stack of books in the picture on the right also gets moved so I can get to the binder underneath. I already spend 8 hours in front of a computer so doing it again for several more hours isn't really an appealing way to spend my night. It's also never as simple as just typing up what I've handwritten word for word. Typing up anything immediately becomes a revision of my work. If it's going onto Reddit, the main issue is that the word count is always too high so I'm spending time cutting things out while trying to make sure it makes sense. Just knowing that I'm going to re-read and edit it all six or seven or eight different times before I decide that it doesn't completely suck fills me with dread. Anything, really, could stall the task of trying to get my words typed up. Then comes the obvious hardship of trying not to get distracted by all the entertainment the internet offers: Plane fares for an upcOming tRip, clips of aNime fight scenes, POcket knives, new Reddit writiNg prompts, kPop music videos, cOmedy stand-ups, Reading other people's blogs, New books to add to my reading list, etc.

I tried to find someplace quiet to write on my own without worrying about other people bothering me. Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, every other week or so I holed up in a library someplace on one of those days that it closes up late, around 8pm or so. Obviously not so much right now. I've never been comfortable writing in front of people mostly because they have an annoying habit of talking to me, usually with one of the two (or sometimes both) of the popular questions: 1)What are you writing? or 2) You know what you should add to your story? And there's only so many times I can tell people that I'm working on my suicide note before they start referring me to a hotline, or I actually get around to finishing it (it's going really well). At the library, the general public doesn't care about me as long as I keep to myself and because if I start looking around, parents tend to hold their children a little closer. No, I don't have a library card but there isn't a bouncer at the door. Most have free parking. If I can get there after work, in a usual 1 and a 1/2 to 2 hours of silence and lack of distractions I feel like I can get a lot more written than at home. I'm still not sure if it is because I'm able to focus more at the library, or if I can just get more written at 5pm than at 9:30 or 10:00pm?

With a lot of my writing coming from Reddit, before I wanted to write for only the newest, most upvoted prompts since I believed that was the best way to get my story read and get those upvotes. Starting back up again, I've found that I don't care about that kind of shit anymore. For one, I can't stay up that late anymore to first post a story to a popular prompt. I do most of my writing after 8pm nowadays and to spend several hours on a story usually means finishing up, if I manage to finish, around 11:30pm, or 12am, or 1am. You know when you're watching a show and you tell yourself, "okay, just one more episode because I've gotta get up to go to work tomorrow," and then all of a sudden you realize you made a mistake because you need to be up for work in an hour? Yeah, same thing. I'll look at the clock and just think, "Maybe I can just finish up this part and tweak that part and then I'm done." Then it's about 1:30am and I'm just thinking, "I made a mistake," and even my inner voice is saying, "You made a mistake." I'm also trying to do the prompts with few or no responses. I figure if only one person replies then the prompter is probably more likely to read it. Plus there's less pressure on rushing to finish since most are already a day or a week old, giving myself more time to be the shitty writer I am, and so I can stop writing when it starts to get late and go to sleep. My brain just doesn't work well in the fog as it used to when I could function off of a couple hours of sleep for a few days. Even just for blog posts like this one, I'll typically finish up late enough that I can't re-read it properly, and so the editing and tweaking gets pushed to the next day, usually during my morning cigarette or while I'm eating lunch (as long as no one else is in the lunch room).

And right in the middle of this writing revival as I got back to picking up my pen and notebooks with some regularity, I committed THE cardinal sin - I stopped writing. Call of Duty came out and as long as it took me to still not finish Devil May Cry V, I sped through the campaign and did something I never do, I started on the multiplayer and got hooked on it. No, I still suck at it, but luckily, I'm not easily discouraged or else dying 20-30 times a game would be a real turn-off. So of course, I fell off and needed to work to get back to writing again. I think I've gotten that little addiction sort of squared away, feeding it every so often, but at least I'm starting to write more of those horrible stories again.