Wow - am I ever in the mood for blogging today.
I don’t know about anybody else in the creative world but I tend to work very oddly most of the time. If you feel like this too, maybe this will help you all feel less alone.
Taking a typical evening as an example, here’s how stuff normally pans out for me:
1. I know I need to do some work.
2. Last night, I decided I needed to finish my short story - Backsliding Fearlessly - for the Alibi Channel (more on this later).
3. I wrote about 800 words and then set aside at least half of them because they would be better served in a different story.
4. Then I had to rewrite the 800 words I took out and now I have two stories on the go in my head. The new story does not yet have a title and this pisses me off more than anything. You can’t have your own children running around the house and not know what they’re called.
5. Meantime, because I have come to the table with the intention of writing a lot and finishing things, all other projects have formed a disorderly queue in my head and begin randomly throwing ideas at “the wall”. This is not helpful, but at the same time, I like it because if I ever ran out of ideas, I would surely die a horrible death.
6. Outside of the story room, there are other rooms, namely the PopCulture room, the Blog room and the Comic room. I know these rooms are there and I know they all need attention. I don’t even have to get out of my chair to enter these rooms. Simply acknowledging them is enough to get me there. (I believe there is also an upper floor with an “admin” room and a “real life” room. I don’t tend to go in these as much as I should.)
7. This is a royal pain in the ass and takes a lot of effort to stay in the room I am in.
8. OK - back to point 3. From one second to the next, I either feel like a) Stephen King, b) a four year old or c) a total fraud.
...and then we end up back at point one again.
Most of the time, I like to write creatively from about 9pm and work through until about 2am. When the sun is still in the sky is when I find it’s best to do all the “other bits”. The day-time is fine time, but the night-time is the right time, yes?
And sometimes, when I don’t have anything at all to do on a particular day, that’s when I tend to have three machines on (one in the kitchen, one in the lounge and one in the study) and all my notebooks out in the open and I drift from room to room as I need to.
If you don’t work like this - or at least a variant of sorts - how the hell do you get anything done? See, I think that if you have to sit in a room with your pen or keyboard, what the hell is the point of trying to wrestle the writing game into submission? That sounds to me like a j.o.b. and as David Lee Roth once said, “just because I’m having fun doesn’t mean I’m not taking it seriously.”
Ain’t that the truth. Comments please creative ones - let me know I’m not alone!
(...and yeah, if ever there was a movie in need of a revamp by Rob Zombie, it’s Rawhead Rex for sure. Bring it on.)
