Oh, hello, large, daunting white screen in front of me! I recently figured out how to full screen the blog writing page on squarespace (although saying "figured out" is a bit generous, since it's just an arrow in the top right that any idiot could have found ages ago), so while it will give me a lot more comfort when I actually get some words on the page, it makes it far more daunting to start out. Although creating huge run on sentences right off the bat surely helps out with that issue!
I was about to sit down and do some planning on what I wanted to do in the future for some creative projects when luckily I thought "Hey, I have a blog, let's just write them out in a post on there". So this might be a little bit messy, since it's just going to be my thoughts kind of spewed out onto the page, and then I will go through it later and organize everything nicely and make calendar events and all that jazz, but for now you guys get the spew. Isn't it nice reading an unorganized and sporadic blog?
Quick "in the life of" section before we get into the main course of the post, I've had a couple things going on in my life recently I didn't touch on in the last post. The first is that I stepped on a damn nail. Yup, 23 years of living and growing up on a farm and it had never happened. I was seriously starting to think that I might never experience the feeling. But then, on Sunday, my Brother-In-Law and I were shooting some guns and walking through the bush, and on the way back to the truck I stepped on a board with a nail in it. The worst part is that it didn't even look like a useful board! It was like a 2x6 that was cut to like 5 inches long with 3 nails sticking randomly out of the bottom of it. Maybe it wouldn't have been so bad if I had stepped on a nail that had held the roof of a house up for years and years, supporting a broke family of 11, and had valiantly performed its duty until the day that it was ripped apart by a rogue hurricane. But nope, I had to step on some random-ass nail that had no reason to exist. Great. I'd post a picture, but I didn't get one while it was fresh, and as of right now it just looks like a brownish dot in the middle of my foot. Still hurts though, and the bruising makes it a tad painful to walk.
The place where the magic happens, if magic means "spending hours and hours browsing reddit instead of actually working, then hating yourself for it when you lie awake at night"...
The second thing I wanted to mention is that my PC of 5 years finally ran its last program shortly after I returned from Europe. I was watching Bojack Horseman and playing minecraft when the voice of Will Arnett turned into that of Satan himself and the screen slowly froze. I tried rebooting several times to no avail, and for some reason any keyboard I plug in doesn't seem to work so I can't even get into the bios. I have a few tricks left up my sleeve that I haven't gotten around to yet, but until then my trusty old laptop will have to suffice. She's a 2011 MacBook Pro, and she would probably have been updated by now if Apple would ever actually release a new laptop! Seriously guys, it's been like 3 years since the last one! The point is, I took down my triple monitor setup in favour of the smallish 13 inch screen of my mac. She looks a little small on the desk, but she works fine for now. I've included a picture so you can admire my perfectly ergonomic and truly beautiful set up for my writing. If you're wondering why the laptop is sitting on top of two taped together boxes, it's so it's at eye level and I don't have to look downward, lest my weak, flabby neck succumb to the strain of tipping slightly downward for a few hours a day. No one said being a writer was easy.
So, on to the topic at hand. First off let's list some of the stuff I want to do. Shockingly, writing novels is high up on that list. Along with those novels are short stories or novellas, which I always seem to accumulate dozens of ideas for. It's really easy to think of something that would work out in a one or two scene little story that would take up at MOST 100 pages, if I get really long winded, but it's a much bigger battle to tackle a full novel. Or at least so I've heard, my own writing on that front has been a bit, er, lackluster, to put things lightly. More bluntly, I've written essentially fuck all! But that's a whinge for another day. Right now we are in the planning phase of projects, which is coincidently the easiest and most fun phase. Funny how I always come up with all these plans, but never follow through on them, eh? Ok, it's getting a bit too real. Let's get back on track here.
Other than the obvious writing stuff, which includes my little fun time stuff on reddit, I have a few ideas for creative type stuff. Firstly, and perhaps the one that will take up the most amount of time apart from writing, is vlogs. I would expect that nearly everyone reading this knows what a vlog is, but I know my Grandma reads sometimes as well (Hi Grandma!), so I'll give a quick rundown. I want to record myself, probably just my face with a few visual aids, talking about stuff. What that stuff might be I'm not entirely sure yet, or how it will differ from the blog will be a question for another day, but something about recording, mixing, rendering, and publishing those videos appeals to me. It's a different medium, and I do love me some medium experimentation, so that will be a nice change of pace. Plus I have a few limited ideas for some interesting videos that would seem out of place just thrown up on the blog, so a channel dedicated to videos could really build itself as a home for those one offs I think of. If anyone reading this has any ideas for what might make for interesting vlog topics that may not be suitable for the blog, or would simply work better in a visual medium, hit me up. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
My second idea is one that I've been toying with for awhile now. Anyone who knows me knows that I have recently become utterly obsessed with podcasts. It started when I was first driving truck and I needed something to break up the monotony of music for 15 hours straight, but it really has bloomed into a full on obsession. Pretty much every waking hour that I'm not writing (I listen to tunes when I write) or listening to an audiobook, I've got a podcast going. They've come very close to replacing TV and Netflix for me, and I'm down to a very few number of TV shows that I still watch. Speaking of which, if we want to go off on a slight tangent here, I'm nearly done the second season of Daredevil and I can't sing its praises enough. What a wonderful piece of television.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I know that nearly no one will listen to the podcast right off the bat. Hell, with what I have in mind I doubt even my family will listen. The plan right now is to put out an episode probably once every week or two, although it may be once a month depending on how busy I get with other things, talking about world building. I've recently been listening to this podcast called Artifexian. They have a youtube channel as well. Basically it's two dudes that talk about worldbuilding, among plenty of other nerdy and geeky things. Most of my writing is going to be fantasy/sci-fi based, as those are my two favourite genres by far, so I'm going to have to build some worlds for them to take place in. My idea for the podcast would be to kind of walk everyone through what I had been working on that week/month and maybe do a bit of building live on air. I would probably dedicate a bit of time each episode after the first to follow up and maybe a taste of what had been going on in my life, but for the most part it would focus on the creative side of building a world to tell stories in. This one is still in the extreme early stages of planning, it certainly wouldn't be starting up until the new year.
As you may have been able to guess by now, I like my different mediums. I've always dabbled in writing, I spent a lot of time researching audio producing in high school, and more lately I've been thinking more and more about the logistics and nuances of video recording. While this is a lot of work that will likely cut into my writing schedule (although currently that schedule is non-existent), I think it will be really fulfilling and a great way to connect with my audience even more. Or, maybe it will just be another way for me to procrastinate. After all, if I don't find more stuff to do soon, I'm going to have to actually sit down and write a novel!