2023-03-13»
Text at Gunpoint»
I remember reading at some impressionable age that there was “no such thing as writer’s block”. I don’t recall the context, but I’m guessing it was the same as my friends who said “there’s no such thing as jetlag”: a small crucifix to wield at the devil itself, rather than a statement of fact.
I don’t know about a “block”, but I have traumatic amounts of writer’s procrastination. Apart from it taking a starring role in my bio, I spent a lot of life devising increasingly byzantine ways of handling it — mostly through invented draconian punishments, and commandeering friends or co-workers to execute on them. When I wrote stage shows, my sinister manager figure, Ed Smith the VIII, literally locked me in a room to write them. When I wrote NTK, I would stay up all Thursday night until five (AM or PM) and I could feel the hot glares of its readers on the back of my neck. My columns were extracted by force. My various writing gigs were gently prised out of my hands by family who never wanted to see me suffer again.
And yet, shit got written. I just spent a few minutes procrastinating by looking through Oblomovka’s back catalogue — ostensibly to find other times I complained about all this, and a) that I remember none of this nor how it got done, and b) it’s fine. Even the 2008 Nanowrimo is okay in retrospect!
Anyway, the point of this is that I’ve been feeling some heavy back-pressure in my head to start writing things down. For the last few years, I’ve been mostly pursuing a role as oral storyteller, where I give (largely unrecorded) talks about what I think, and then people constantly harangue me to document it more permanently. I have slowly realised that I am leaning a little more heavily on my charming British accent than actual facts in my statements, so just for everyone’s safety, I should probably switch to structured text.
Secondly, back at the day job, as our duties and responsibilities have grown, so has my ability to keep it together in my head, shrunk. Processes must be recorded. Atittudes explained. Yelps of discontent justified. The Sumerian brainhack must be reactivated, Socrates be damned!
So I’m writing again. 200 words at least a day here, other wordage elsewhere. Forgive me the heavy drinking, the bouts of undirected anger, the weeping and the sleep deprivation. Onward!
(400 words)
Tags: public, writing
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2014-11-29»
)))))))))), or the dying words of John McCarthy»
It’s now a few months after my 45th birthday, which is almost exactly the date when one can no longer, with any reasonable expectation of acceptance from anyone non-senile, call oneself “young”.
My main regret regarding my youth (and the one I’m sure most of my friends would hurl at me) is that I never actually finished much. Fortunately, one of those things I didn’t finish was my own life, so I still have a few more decades to wrap things up, put matters in order, settle accounts, tie a bow on it all, and so on.
So my new resolution, this year and ongoing is to stop starting new projects, and dedicate the remaining decades of my life to completing all the things that I started and let trail off.
Given my track record, this fortunately gives me an incredible set of audacious feats to carefully back-track and re-establish. These will include:
- A satisfactory resolution to the narrative of Gagooltrix, the imaginary planet I envisaged as my alien home world when I was five or six. I foresee this including some sort of scientific explanation for the giant volcano at the south pole that allowed it move at near light speed around the galaxy, and a final tale of redemption for Leinad, the bad version of me that stuck the oven lighter into a custard tart and then ran out of our back garden and into the wider world before I could stop him.
- The establishment of “Stupid’s”, the Nineties comedy club I hopelessly envisaged producing and compering straight after university.
- Single editions of both Graduate Loser and NTK, both of which were always intended to be print-based. I may have to deliberately fashion them in retro 90s format.
- (Possibly, although technology and more accurate estimations of my own abilities could deprioritize this), my live karaoke touring band.
- Learn an instrument.
- A graphic novel based on the Irish famine, as envisaged by me after reading Watchman.
- Paaarty!, the friend simulator I had sketched out in my 2nd year of college. Probably not for the Atari ST this time though.
- Kant! The Musical, a musical about Immanuel and Brian (K|C)ant.
- That book on combating procrastination I was commissioned to write by O’Reilly over ten years ago.
- Book on the history of the five or so revolutions I have been content to sit around in the background of, noodling.
- Learn to drive or at least keep failing to pass a test up until the point where it becomes endearingly ridiculous and/or self-driving cars are a reality.
- The Mysterious Best-Selling Non-Fiction Book me and Liz have planned, but can only write under pseudonyms.
- The geek comedy night in San Francisco (see Stupid’s).
- Opera about Tesla (again, I think I can leave this one if someone else beats me to it. It’s been twenty years though! Come on! Surely there’s a time limit on this?)
- The US tour for all my British comedian friends who pined for one, but have never yet gotten.
- Actually send out Anno NTK, every week. Maybe collar Dave to do a podcast.
There’s probably some others, but that seems to be enough for the next forty or so years. The rest I think will be sitting around under a warm duvet of some design and trying to get Haskell things to compile.
Meanwhile, the first project I will officially declare completed is “being young.”
Tick! Check!
Tags: blog, fromthedeskofemacs, public
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