Yesterday, I wrote a lot. The post on my visit to Bath on gettingoutmore.org wound up becoming two posts. While I was attempting to add pictures to the posts, I thought of a clever title for Part I, from lyrics to a Sting song, All This Time. 1,100 words vanished with the next autosave, even though I had been saving drafts like crazy.
Sometimes the mechanics of writing these blogs can be frustrating. Last week, my post went out with nearly every picture of London rotated 90 degrees. My wordpress.com and wordpress.org sites don’t play nicely together. What is worse is moving between Mac and PC platforms. All of my pics are on the iCloud, and so far my smoothest way to get these pics is to upload them to Facebook as a post and then download them onto a computer so I can drag and drop them into WordPress. If I try to go straight from the cloud to WordPress, it just messes everything up.
I have been putting off writing about my UK trip, and I don’t even know why. Some of the reasons/excuses I have are that there is still a lot to digest about that trip. Also, it takes an hour to write a post. I don’t do short posts, as you might have noticed. I don’t do top ten lists. I don’t do 5 Mind Blowing Reasons Why X posts.
Why?
Because I hate reading them. Why would I want to write them?
Luckily, I have found some other travelogue type sites through association here on my wordpress reader. Unfortunately, like I said, WordPress.com doesn’t play well with sites outside of it. Such as Gettingoutmore.org. So nobody will ever see my site on the Reader. The learning curve just sucks. I would rather write content, go places, etc. than monkey around with the ever-changing landscape of WordPress. Most people can’t follow my posts. So I link them from here at Wendigo Mountain.
Which probably sounds somewhat sinister to some passersby, which is why I probably don’t get a lot of traffic to either site.
Right now, I am basically giving these stories away for free too. It’s not much different than just talking to someone about a trip you took while you are socializing at a party. Except that here you are talking, there is nobody listening, and there’s not even a party.
I have equated writing these blogs to shouting a story down a well.
There’s not even a monster that lives at the bottom of the well. It’s just your own voice echoing up. Yesterday was around 3000 words (two 1000 word posts and one rewrite from scratch) of words shouted to the bottom of the well.
I hit a wall.
Last night, I was in a serious funk. The isolation crept in. The insular effect was so thick I could feel it. Alone in my house. My efforts largely ignored. Who gives a shit? This is all vanity. Why am I wasting my time? This isn’t the life I was born into, why think I would do anything other than work for a faceless institution that would replace me by the end of the week if I were to walk out?
Maybe people are reading, but usually nobody comments. Who gives a damn if they did anyway. Lurkers. Tourists. People who just “like” a post but never read it…it’s the equivalent of giving every third-grader a gold star for participation. Nobody cares about your clay dog sculpture, Timmy.
Writing on these platforms used to be a two way street. What’s more is a blog I follow where someone posts a picture of a bird they took with a crappy joke every day gets about 85 comments and 200 likes every day.
Yes, I’m whining. I’m comparing. If you don’t like it, comment.
So, the writing. I said this was going to be a writing post.
I am involved in three personal writing projects right now.
- The first is the alt-history fantasy about World War One, set in the same world as the first book hardly anyone read. The tentative title is With Other Eyes to See. Right now, it is stalled. Mostly because I have been working on it so long that I have lost a lot of continuity. There are beautiful pieces. And there are pieces that no longer mean anything, which I will need to rewrite.
- The second is the travelogue. Gettingoutmore.org. It is the warm and fuzzy, optimistic project in which I talk about all the places I’ve been going and all the fun I have been having. Which is true. I really have been enjoying my adventures! I’m eager for the next one. So eager that I got home from work yesterday and as I was putting my key into the lock to walk into an empty house, I thought to myself, “Why the fuck am I even here?” I wanted to be on my way to an airport or a train station. My wallet feels so empty without a passport in it these days.
- The third project is something between my travelogue and the thoughts and experiences I was actually having. A narrative of so much going on, which has been happening for the last five or six years. Everything just bubbling up, which the traveling has been facilitating. It could be a novel. I think it could be a good one. It would be a deep cut into my life, but also fictionalized to protect the innocent. Mainly me.
The biggest problem I face is having so many projects, and having to write paid blogs to offset my enormous child support contribution each month. So, sometimes my creativity goes to figuring out how to write three articles at 300 words each about clamps for metal roofing.
Also, there is the lack of feedback. Not only instant gratification, but when you sit down and crank out thousands of words of a plotted story, with believable and likable characters, set in a world of your own creation, and the only response you get is “Neat story!” from readers. You just kinda die a little bit inside.
Last night, I sat alone in my house, unable to write. Unwilling to do laundry or dishes. I watched response videos on YouTube. Vocalists responding to the first time hearing songs from bands like Queensryche, Steelheart, Alice in Chains, and even Led Zeppelin.
It gave me hope that art moves people in positive ways.
Wendigo Mountain 