UPDATE!!!

Hello, everyone!

I've been absent, as you know, but for good reasons!

First, let me say that the backend work for this website has been more than I bargained for. It's a welcomed challenge, but a challenge nonetheless. I'm trying to group similar posts with tags which requires a bit of coding: a skillset that I don't posses (yet). I'm doing extensive research on this front and I'm hoping to have a workable solution to this issue very soon.

Second, alongside learning how to code in Ghost, I have also been working on multiple short stories as well as a run-of-the-mill blog post for Write the Bullet. It's taking time, as all good things do, but I should wrap up the research for the blog post by Friday, 6 October 2023.

Count on it launching that morning, 8 a.m. EST.

The short stories are a different matter altogether.

I am almost exclusively trained in writing short stories and by "trained" I mean: this is all I was taught to do in college; however, I was taught poorly. I studied "Literature" which, in a pure business sense, is the worst thing to have studied mainly because "Literature" is an industry-defined term and its meaning shifts with cultural fashions. All fiction, to one degree or another, is literary. Sure, there are some real turds out there and I'm sure I'll plant some of my own on the Great Lawn of Literature in due time, but generally all fiction has literary elements to it.

I digress far too often it seems.

What my collegiate training failed to do for me was explain genre fiction. Literary short stories have a specificity to them. Plots are largely irrelevant, and the characters are usually pretty morose about one thing or another. Either that or they are waxing poetic about something mundane, which is fine and all, but how the Greats tend to make a metaphor of everything eludes me to this day.

In the seven years since I dropped out of college, I have been on a quest to unlearn most of the nonsense I was taught. You would be right to say that I'm doing the wrong thing. I am. I learned a lot of valuable lessons in college and I gained greater insight into the craft as a whole, but the things I want to write tend to be more genre than literary. I have no "grand ideas" to share with the world. My "philosophic method" is so poorly thought out that it doesn't deserve a fictional representation. Ultimately, I want to write stories that people want to read. I want the stories to be thrilling. I want the characters to be dynamic and relatable. I want people to delight in my fiction. It's a difficult road. A treacherous journey. But I must walk it.

My education caused issues for me as a creative: it tied me down with conventions and "conventions" are the styles, forms, and subject matters of all established writers. The college I attended didn't teach me how to innovate. It taught me about conventions. Which is helpful in some ways and detrimental in others. For instance, now I write with all these conventions in mind whereas I could be writing with the giddy ignorant bliss of a truly free creative child. Which is better? Who's to say. (I prefer to be giddy.) Yes, it's necessary to know them in order to break them, but this is an instant wherein ignorance truly is bliss.

Ignorance is often better than knowing where you lack in ability.

Then there are those who say, "Well, now that you know all of the conventions you can toss them aside and do your own thing. That, my boy, is TRUE innovation!"

How is that different from not knowing the conventions at all and going your own way from the start? I'll answer for you: there is no difference. The only thing you gain from learning what everyone did in the past is crippling anxiety because now you don't want to accidentally imitate. Imitating on purpose, with solid reason, now that's highbrow. Doing it on accident? Lowbrow. Get it together! We have champagne to drink!

The point is, simply, that it takes me a long time to write short stories because they always run longer than I expect and I make sure that what I've written is any good. I'm a terrible judge of my own prose so this phase usually requires the often soul-crushing task of employing friends and family peer inside my mind to tell me how fucked I am.

Damn. This post has gone on long enough. Now I'm rambling. Let's wrap it up, shall we?

I already have the outline for the next blog post so it won't be too long between posts moving forward. I now have a schedule down. Mondays and Fridays. Start and end your week with a little piece of me. Hopefully, I won't disappoint!

In the first post I will discuss the Imposter Syndrome phenomenon and in the following post I will discuss how I keep my passion for writing alive even when I don't have the energy to write because, let's face it, those days outnumber the good days. Consistency will be the main focus.

Now rush out into the world and make magic happen!