In the Beginning

Oh hey, I've had a few beers and I'm feeling somewhat introspective. How lucky for you all!

I've always been someone who enjoys writing. No matter what else has been going on in my life, that was one of the lynch pins of who I was. Through countless mistakes and stupid decisions and everything else, writing was there. Maybe it was me blathering on about whatever (oh look...) or creating some half-baked story idea which would never really see anything like fruition. It really didn't matter, it was just part of who I was.

And then I stopped. And then I flat out stopped writing at all. And I stopped enjoying it.

I found myself at a weird crossroads a few years back where I was stuck in a loop (No, I don't know how one has a loop in a crossroads. That sounds like a traffic nightmare in the making). I just kept changing to different variants of the same job over and over and over again. I hated it, but I kept doing it anyway because I was comfortable in my little bubble. And then I broke character and actually did something different and unpredictable. I actually changed things up. And I found myself writing. Like, for money and stuff.

Even though I have actually been paid for producing words, I have never and will never describe myself as a professional writers. I guess it's just in my head that an actual pro writer creates new worlds and characters and adventures and stuff. I just wrote a lot of stuff for a lot of company websites. It isn't that I'm at all negative about the overall experience, it's more that calling myself  'just a normal writer' seems somehow more realistic.

And it was pretty cool for awhile. Sure, there was missteps. Not realizing that I had agreed to write 50,000 words in weird paragraph introductions in a week was one. No, I have no idea what the Hell this was actually for. It was a weird job. There were A LOT of weird jobs. Ever written profiles for both sides on a dating website based entirely on rich dudes looking for young chicks and wannabe gold diggers? I have. Ever been hired to edit what seemed like a grade school child's story, only written by an adult with some sort of punctuation addiction, with no explanation of why or for whom? Yep. Ever been hired to write a PUA manual for some dude who seemed to waffle between clinically depressed and hilariously 'fake confident' before doing a bit of research and finding out what that actually is? Yep, been there. (Seriously, if you're ever feeling a bit low in the self esteem department, look up 'PUA forums' and read the words of the ridiculous children you'll find there. You'll feel better about yourself in minutes).

I eventually got tired of trying to grind out enough hours to make a total go of it just writing and ended up working part time at FedEx. It's not a bad gig. I get to play around on the airport ramp, which is just fun in that 'little boy who never totally grew up' way. Kind of fitting, seeing as I seem to have missed that whole 'figure out what you want to be when you grow up' stage of things. And I kept writing as well, at least for a while.

The first thing to go was my old blog. It had started to feel more like an obligation than something that was fun to work on any more. And of course I went with the excuse that this would give me more time to do the kind of writing that actually paid me money. But that was really just a tall tale, because I was already growing sick of that, too.

The shitty thing about freelancing is that jobs tend to be very quick things. They're here, they're gone, and now you've got to find the next one. It's a constant churn and grind to land the next gig, and you get turned down A LOT before you find it. And if there's one thing that I've learned about myself over the years, it's that I really don't handle rejection well. I don't go off and have a good cry or anything like that, but it needles at me. Less of a massive stab wound and more of a death from a thousand cuts type of situation. Either way, you find yourself eventually bleeding out all over the damn floor. Also, once you end up scoring a few gigs where you're doing the same sort of work, you end up basically typecast. Some actor ends up getting offered nothing but roles as the single guy's wacky neighbor. I ended up getting stuck writing words for one company website after another. It got to the point that I could do so in my sleep. And that was the problem. This was supposed to be my something different. And then it wasn't. Then it was just a whole different repeating cycle.

I haven't written anything for months now. The desire was completely gone. And now who the Hell am I? Once more, life seems to have grown stale. I'm stuck in my current circumstances, and now I can't even fall back on writing as that thing that pulls me through.

Tonight, I started working on a collaborative story with a couple of friends. For the first time in many days I'm actually hammering out words as quickly as I can, trying to keep up with my thoughts. And it's pretty fantastic. So here I am, writing this as well, because for some reason I suddenly want to. Maybe this time I can give myself a whole new boot in the ass by going back to something familiar.

I'm not making any promises at all for what this is going to be. That's why I'm keeping this simple. Just a simple Blogger account. I tend to over-promise and start up HUGE only to quickly lose steam because the initial ambition wears off and now I'm just over it and disappointed. So for now, this is just going to be the place I visit when I feel the need to ramble on about something.