Dan

Dammit, I’m doing it again: Every time I’ve started a blog, I post a couple of times and then… nothing. And every time I start again, I say this time it will be different.

Well, this time I mean it. I’m planting my battle standard, motherfuckers, and in the name of Write Something Every Day I am going to find something to blog about at least five times a week.

It might be the cool idea I have for the D&D character I’m rolling (Dwarven Warlord, baby), or a thought about writing, or a bit of flash fiction, an amusing haiku, or some kind of half-baked analysis of my own inscrutable inner workings, but it will be something.

Let a new age begin, then, in this place, here. A new age for all of us: an age of hope.

Among the creators that I admire, drifting gallantly in that hallowed constellation, is Kris Straub, creator of the webcomics Starslip, chainsawsuit, and F Chords (on hiatus).

Those are all well and good, but what really had me excited was his horror microfiction community site, Ichor Falls. In fact, I took an idea I’d had involving ears and the crud therein and wrote it up in such a way that it would fit into the site’s universe… only to find that the “Submit a Story” link was hopelessly broken. And now the site’s gone entirely, replaced by an “Account Suspended” message.

Frustrating! Is this a result of the same issue that took down webcomics.com?

Anyway, in the meantime my story will have to languish on DeviantArt (where, as the work of a deviant, it surely belongs). I hope Kris will reinvest in Ichor Falls soon; meanwhile, I support the guy and his desire to bust out hilarious comics all the time instead of web design or some other, less-fulfilling job. So read his comics, and then buy them.

Update: Ichor Falls is back online, but I still can’t submit stories. Perhaps someday “Earwax” will have a proper home (other than lodged in your ear canal, I mean).

In his article Fire and Motion, Joel Spolsky talks about how all you need is to get a little more done every day. Time is on your side, if you just keep improving bit by bit. He’s talking about the game of inches in terms of slowly growing a software company, and I’m interested in it in terms of slowly growing into a writer.

It’s tough to keep writing. Now that I’ve been doing it a little more, I feel like the output is a little rushed and amateurish. That makes sense though, given that I’m an amateur. What matters is I’m writing at all. It’s not like I used to write better: it’s that I wouldn’t write, and would just spend a lot of time thinking about it. In my head everything would come together beautifully, but like the artist who struggles to translate what’s in his imagination onto the page, the raw act of writing is still unformed. And the only way to form it is to just keep practicing. Just keep writing at least a little, every day, all the time. Work on improving. But don’t stop just because it’s not awesome yet.

When I used to play the guitar, I loved the idea of being an awesome guitar player. But I was never that good when I practiced, so I didn’t practice. So I never played the guitar. When what I should have been doing was playing all the time, just a little. And keep getting better every day, just a little.

Well, writing means a lot more to me than playing the guitar. Enough so that I am willing to put up with not being as good as I want to be, and just embrace the struggle of getting there, story by story. Inch by inch.

I’m staying up late on a weeknight, on purpose.

Trying to figure out how to juggle an increasingly-serious relationship, a full-time job, and the writing and software development I want to do has been giving me fits lately. I don’t want to give any of it up, either, so I’m turning to one of my idols for the grim meathook realities of the situation.

Despite that last line, no, I’m not talking about Hunter Thompson, though he was pretty fabulous.

The people I idolize these days are people who do their own thing - who make a living creating something they care about. Independent software developers, webcomic creators, indie musicians selling MP3s on the web. The man I’m talking about tonight is Dave Kellett. Dave is one of the authors of How To Make Webcomics, and he gets to draw a comic strip every day for his bread and butter. As described on an episode of the HtMW authors’ podcast (available here, at webcomics.com), Dave did his strip for eight years while rocking a full-time day job at Mattel before the strip reached the point - due to popularity and its creator’s business acumen - that it could support him by itself.

So how did Dave, married, with a day job and a commute that was no doubt several times longer than mine (he lives in Los Angeles), produce a strip a day for eight years? Determination, and less sleep than is perhaps recommended. He found the most-productive time to put into his art came after friends and family went to bed, and tackled the strip late at night before going to bed and getting up bright and early the next morning to go to work.

I’m starting to think that, if I want to get as much done as I want to, I’m going to have to embrace my natural tendency to stay up late and turn it to doing something productive.

So tonight I started writing at ten or so, and finished a short story I’d been neglecting for a few weeks. Then, I’ll admit, I dawdled by adding all my computer games to Delicious Library, before settling in and writing this post. What can I say? I wanted to wait until midnight to proclaim my new commitment.

So, work life, personal life, and now this life. Being a wordsmith for a living isn’t going to happen without sacrifice. It’s not surprising to me that sleep is the first thing I’d drag trembling onto the altar.

It’s a new year. Is this the year I get my life together? I hate phrasing questions like that, because I probably said yes to it last year. If I didn’t get my life together by the end of that year, so… what? Do I quit? No, I just continue trying.

A year boundary seems like a good time to try and change, and leading up to 2009 I’ve been going over the elements of my life with a fine-toothed comb to see what can be jettisoned to bring the important things into focus. I bought a couple video games a few months ago and I was excited about them both: Fallout 3, for me, and LittleBigPlanet for me to play with my lady. I haven’t touched either in weeks and weeks - just haven’t found the time - and I can’t honestly say it upsets me. Video games are such a timesink, and what do they allow me to produce? Nothing more than a movie or book. Video games are a narrative for me to consume, and some of them are as good as my favorite movies and books, but if they take longer to play than it takes me to read The Stand, I have to think carefully about if it’s worth it.

The short of it is, I can throw on a good movie and be guaranteed a complete experience in about two hours. A given two-hour session of a video game can’t make the same promise, even if, over time, the game’s complete narrative is compelling and worthwhile. These aren’t the only two games I’ve ever bought and barely (or never) played. So video games will continue to recede into the background for me.

Reading books and watching movies, those I’m keeping - they just have to fit into my free time around the creative projects I want to do. And what about (tabletop) gaming with friends? That’s become a key social activity for me, and I’m hesitant to lose it. I also argue that, specifically in the case where I run a D&D scenario, I’m engaged in a creative enterprise, one I’d like to pursue alongside other writing. It’s just another avenue for storytelling, albeit perhaps less marketable than a webcomic or graphic novel.

I think the important question when considering each activity is the time it takes, because I’m long on imagination, working on motivation, but severely constrained on time. Welcome to modern, urban life.

The near-term goal, as it’s been for the last X New Year’s Days, is to get to a place where I’m writing all the time, at least a morsel of writing (500-1000 words, enough to take a step towards a complete work) every day. My lady and I discussed locking ourselves inside for the rest of the winter and making each other write at the expense of most other forms of recreation and, to the extent we can do that without being complete hermits, I approve of the idea. It’s time for some tough love, I say to my idealistic self, because I’m tired of my successful career as a person who talks about wanting to write a lot. I haven’t been getting anywhere near where I want to be by just hoping I’ll straighten out my priorities, and I’m grateful for her added motivation.

We’ll just have to be careful not to drive each other completely and utterly mad in the course of this dark experiment.

There’s more to be said about creating the life I want to lead. This post was about what I spend my time doing. The next big thing is what I spend my money having.