Another Page

Hello. Welcome to post number two thousand five hundred. This is where I admit to being very impressed to have kept this going this long, although I suppose that I've done that before. One of the things that occurred to me, when I realized that I was closing in on this many posts is that this is how novel are written. One page (or so) at a time. Eventually, one will finish. It's too bad that I never looked at that way before. I might have actually been able to write a novel.

Although honestly, the real reason why I never attempted a novel was that I never felt that I had an idea for one that I would actually want to read that someone else hadn't already written. I'd learned in college that what feels like "creativity" is often simply the result of not being very well read, and as I read more and more, I realized that the ideas that I thought I had were pretty much done to death already. So I let it drop. I was always more of a short story person.

And when I was in school, I took some writing classes, to indulge my desire to pen short stories of my own. They were mostly bad. For some reason I eventually retyped a couple of them into the computer and kept them. I go back and read them from time to time, which I how I know how bad they are. The first was a simple enough idea: I wanted to take the trope of a person "wrestling with their inner demons" and have them lose. It seemed creative and iconoclastic at the time. Now it just seems like the script of a bad Lifetime piece. Boy meets girl, boy decides that maybe girl can help him defeat the darkness within himself, darkness is having none of it, boy kills girl and disposes of the body. It's not even as edgy as it sounds. The second was also a simple idea: what if the guy on the run for having committed some dark deed... had actually done it? It's pretty bad, too, although in hindsight, for someone who didn't date at all, I did what now seems like a remarkably acurate job of portraying an emotionally abusive relationship. Maybe the people in my social circles weren't quite as well adjusted as I'd presumed they were.

Being a fan of speculative fiction, I dabbled in science-fiction and fantasy, but the stories I concocted were derivative and improbable. Being a good genre writer requires a solid grounding in the way the world would work minus the high-technology or everyday magic, and I didn't have that. Interestingly, I never managed to fully retype those stories from paper to digital. I don't think it took me long to realize how lame they were. And I also realized, the last time I looked at them, that I ran into one of the banes of the amateur science-fiction writer; having no idea what the technology would do. Somehow I'd lucked into realizing that digital cameras and streaming television would become things, but not that floppy disks would go the way of the dodo.

After college, I never really found it in me to keep writing fiction, except for really short pieces now and again. Although I did come up with a variation of the story about the man who meets Death while out shopping that I still rather like. But it appears that commentary, with the occasional foray into the visual arts, is more my thing. Not that I'm sure that I'm any good as either an essayist or a photographer. But I do appear to have more endurance for them. Although if I have the give or take 14 years that I'll need to get to five thousand posts in me, I have no idea.