It’s been a while since I posted, but it’s not because I haven’t been writing. Just the opposite, actually. When I started this blog last February it was more of a travelog, documenting my experiences living and working out of a camper in warmer climates to avoid some of Minnesota’s roughly 346 days of winter.
After my travels ended, I transitioned to writing about whatever I felt like: mostly about myself, not because I am a narcissist (at least not completely), but just as a way to get my thoughts down on paper, as a kind of self-care/therapy and creative outlet.
Lately I’ve found myself drifting back towards humor and creative writing, which is something I did more of decades ago but didn’t stick with, mostly because I was too busy abusing whatever drugs and alcohol (which is a drug) came my way so that inevitably, whenever I’d get a good thing going I’d self-destruct by doing something ill-advised or just disappearing face down into a ditch of depression.
After about 28 years of that, I got most of it out of my system so that I am now a partly functioning adult who abuses only the drugs our society deems socially acceptable. Anyway, all of that behavior was a sort of reverse sublimation (there is probably a psych term for this) to cover up my intense fear of and fretting about failure to the point of near total paralysis. But now, I’m trying again, and the fear is mostly gone.
My goal initially in writing here was just to get words on paper and try to write for about 60 minutes a few days a week or more. I find writing difficult and mentally taxing most of the time, but an hour seemed like an attainable goal. And so I would rarely work on any one thing for more than an hour. But since I began this project, I’ve now written about 80,000 words, and I’m feeling more and more comfortable, finding my voice again and even feeling fleeting moments of confidence and an occasional “can-do” attitude that makes America proud.
And so within the last few weeks I’ve decided to spend more time on each piece of writing*, not publishing things after working on them for just an hour. Instead, I’m going back and editing, revising, etc. My problem with creative work has always been that once I’m done with something, I’m done with it and I don’t want to think about it or work on it again. But it’s important to put in that extra effort if you want to put your best work forward.
In the last two weeks I’ve written a couple solid enough pieces that I sent them off for consideration in a humor publication through the Medium writing platform with 150,000 subscribers. I found out this morning that one was accepted and will be published in a month or two, so I can’t share it here. So I was feeling really good today–it was the first thing I’d submitted and they accepted it.
Then later in the day another piece was rejected. That felt shitty and kind of canceled out my good feeling from earlier, but I also had suspected when submitting it that I should have worked on it longer. It had some inconsistencies, I knew it, but I was tired of it so I said f*ck it. After years of online dating, you’d think that I would have become rather adept at rejection, but it always stings (writing rejection actually stings more, in fact). I think the problem was that I wasn’t entirely committed to the idea. But the one that they will publish in a month or two is pretty original and I reread and tweaked it half-a-dozen times, and I still like it. So that’s something.
I also may have started writing a novel, which sounds almost embarrassing to write OUT LOUD, and which is not something I ever thought I’d do. Also, I have only one page done. But the concept is so solid and original that I’m saying it out loud now, and who knows, in 5 or 10 years maybe I’ll finish it. In the meantime I’ll publish the rejected piece tonight or tomorrow and I might even offer some self-critique in the margins about why I think it didn’t work as well as it could have.
Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it.
*I spent 80 mins on this with no revisions.
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