Shit Things I Never Completed
For many reasons (which I won’t go into right now), I’ve ended up with a lot of time on my hands over the past couple of years. To fill in the time, and prevent early onset dementia, I’ve tried my hand at a few old passions of mine. Hobbies that I used to love, but gave up because they would never result in food on the table.
I went back to playing the piano, I went back to drawing, I went back to making games, and I went back to writing. For better or worse (mostly worse), none of the hobbies stuck; except writing.
I’d always enjoyed the experience of writing. With the exception of one important aspect; pushing the publish button. I have always dreaded the experience of publishing. As a startup owner, it’s expected that you’ll be out there out their spruiking your wares to the Interwebs, doing your best impression of a “thought leader” and all that guff, so I eventually got used to it I suppose. I acclimatised to the discomfort. Like a frog in slowly boiling water (which isn’t true btw).
The funny thing is, though I’ve published dozens of blog posts, I’ve never ever shared my personal writing. Sure I’ve written some personal blogs, but they’ve always been topical ‘click-baity’ fare, but never fiction, never something from my imagination. Nothing that is truly from within.
Over the past year or so I had started writing at least a half dozen stories that, for one reason or another, I could just never finish. Sometimes I got stuck digging myself into a major plot hole. Sometimes I’d created a plot so needlessly complex that even I, the author, couldn’t keep tabs on what was happening. And once I started writing a story about time travel and very nearly drove myself insane. It turns out it is incredibly hard to write about time travel, not because of causality, but because of grammar (just ask Douglas Adams).
Most of the time, what happened though…*deep breath*… was that my underdeveloped, unlikeable characters would simply resort to talking endlessly about things that didn’t really matter and therefore fail to move the story along simply because I couldn’t find a way to get them to leave the room they were in and onto the next sub-plot because no matter how clever I tried to be I’d always end up leaning on a ridiculous MacGuffin and so instead just tied myself (and my characters) into a mind-numbingly boring loop of endless exposition!
Recently though, I’ve found myself deep into a story that I’m actually really enjoying writing. It’s so far along that I actually have a clear path to the end. I know what the next 10–15 chapters are about and I’m churning through 2000–3000 words a day which means, with some luck, I will finish it in the next month.
So then, naturally, I panicked.
What comes after “done” when you write? I’ve never got much further than 10,000 words, and here I am within reach of actually finishing!? The fear of someone actually reading my writing hit me like a tonne of bricks a few days ago, and I become paralyzed to the point of just… not writing.
What if people hate it? What if I’ve spent a month working on something and the Internet laughs at me. I haven’t experienced the fear since my early days as a startup founder pitching investor and doing radio interviews. I can tell you it’s no less debilitating now than it was then!
Then I had a moment of clarity. A strike of brilliance!
What if I publish some of the things I hate. Then it doesn’t matter if you hate it too! If I hate it and you hate it, we can both hate it together! We can point at the words on the paper and say, “Lololol what a stupid thing to put on paper!”. We’d be laughing together! You could turn to me and say, “Al, mate… this is a bit shit”, and I could say, “Yes, friend, I know! I already told you it was!” And then we would laugh until we cry, and then cry until we laugh again.
The goal, in short, is to prove to myself that I won’t die from publishing something substandard, overly verbose or just a wee bit naff.
And so, from today, without fanfare and without shame, I will start publishing a collection of “Shit Things I Never Completed”, or STINC for short.
Jun 5 2019: STINC #1 — The one about Brain Hijacking
Jun 6 2019: STINC #2 — The one about Cops and Time Travel
Jun 7 2019: STINC #3 — The (other) one about Time Travel
Jun 10 2019: STINC #4 — The one about Spaceships and War
