Today and This Blog

First, let me just say Happy Halloween.

(Side note: Why isn't trick or treating on Halloween these days? Halloween has completely lost its meaning. Sad, really... but this is beside the point.)

Today's one of those useless days. Well, it's a good day, I can't deny that, but I'm not getting much done. I want to be...but my mind is too full of mush. Actually, it's too full of ideas, and they all get thrown into a blender and churned up into mush, and it's hard to keep the top on...yes, sadly, I can't keep all of them from flying out, and some are lost.

I find myself wanting to do so much, to write so much, to read so much, to show the world so much about who I can be that I end up doing absolutely nothing. Nothing is never good, so I decided to start a blog.

I've started blogs before, but they were pointless ones. Yes, this is really just for my own therapy, but i feel like maybe someone out there will discover it and get hooked, and maybe care just a little about what I have to say that they keep reading. Sorry for the rambling...it's why I'm here though.

So I find myself sitting in my extremely comfortable easy chair by the wood-burning fireplace in my house on a Sunday evening, totally comfortable and relaxed, and my eyes about to close from hardly sleeping last night, and thinking about NaNoWriMo.

That's right. National Novel Writing Month. The challenge to complete an entire novel in only 30 days.

Right now the task seems so impossible that I think I might just write a fictional account of myself writing a novel in a month (yes, that was one of my ideas); being impossible, it's the perfect thing to write fiction about. But who would want to read that? I wouldn't even. So I turned that idea down before even considering that. Plenty of other ideas are racing through my head, but first I feel as if I must decided whether I want this novel to primarily be focused on a world, a character, or an idea/theme. As I said in an email I sent to my friend earlier:

"...if i want my nanowrimo novel to meaningful or just fun...if i want it to be eventful or idea-ful..."

I also mentioned that I thought a blog would be a wonderful way to complain. So I apologize in advance. Oh, I said "an ultimate complaining tool." Gosh that's degrading. I really am sorry.

Back to the novel. I'm still undecided as to what to write. That'll probably always be the case, so I suppose I should say I'm undecided as to what kind of story I want to write. Yes. That's the biggest problem right now. I have ideas I could fall back on, but my question is always: will I be satisfied with that? What if it turns out to not be as great as I thought it would be? And how the HECK am I going to start this thing?

That last question remains at the top of the list for every piece of writing I do and sometimes doesn't even seem to be answered even after I've written it.

I have a short attention span with things like this. I'm also a perfectionist. Strange combination, because as a perfectionist I take extra long on things. But I have to be thoroughly engaged in whatever that thing is, entirely engrossed it in, or else I won't finish it. And that means it has to be interesting, and deep, meaningful, fun, something I can learn from...and unfortunately those come in kind of short supply.

I haven't said much in all this writing, but the point is this: I'm stuck at the moment, and I need to get unstuck, so I thought I'd write about my stuck-ness. This makes me feel like at least someone might read it, rather than the impossibility of that with saving it on a word document in my computer.

Here's my purpose as a writer (probably should have mentioned this earlier): to express my opinion of life's challenges and my love of words through various arrangements of words, whether that be poems, stories, character sketches, descriptions of scenes, speeches, essays, ideas, mythical creatures... I also want to show who I am and what I can be and all that I stand for.

So there. My mission. In words. About words. For words.

Again, Happy Halloween, and wish me luck, whoever you are, on NaNoWriMo.