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Apparently I feel the need to be doing something scribbly in solidarity with you crazy folks attempting NaNoWriMo, but I have NO fucking story ideas nibbling at this moment and anyway I can't seem to write fiction under a 1667 word per day deadline to save my life, judging by previous stabs at doing this. So I was thinking today about what I wanted to do instead and I came up with something.
Once upon a time when I was less permanently connected to Das Interwebs, I spent hours at a stretch filling page after page with my appalling handwriting (I can't even read it some days), without thought to audience or grammar or comments or spelling, just me and my brain and notebooks full of words. And then I stopped. Partly cause I burned out. Partly because my then housemate read it and decided to rip me a new one over shit she read in there. Y'all know how I have issues with privacy and boundaries? that's probably where it started. Around the same time period said housemate introduced me to LJ, and oddly enough my way of coping with this whole thing was not to shut down and retreat but to be all like "Huh, well if people are going to read my journal anyway well then Y HELO THAR INTERNET."
Ancient history is ancient, though. While I do use my private LJ very occasionally to vent about shit I don't even post to the [crazy] filter, for the most part I've completely lost touch with how my "voice" actually sounds. I'm not putting on an act or anything in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
bottledgoose and other readable LJs; I try to let as many of the warts hang out as I can without getting arrested for indecent exposure. But the thing about posting stuff where other eyeballs can cross your words is that you do self-censor/edit quite a bit for whatever reason - drama avoidance for the most part, but sometimes there's shit you just don't want other people reading, despite and even sometimes because of how close they are to you.
Wanna know a secret? * I've noticed over the years that since I've been journalling in some fashion on and off since the age of nine, my brain's been kind of affected by that. Pretty much if I don't write it down, I don't have to remember or deal with it. Now you know why I post so damn much everywhere, why some of my most treasured possessions are the five longhand journals dating from 1989-2003, and why one of the most final bridge napalming things I did concerning my ex was setting fire to the ream of looseleaf comprising four years of letters we'd exchanged in college. I have this insanely weird and complex relationship to my own (and to a lesser extent, other people's) written words that honestly probably points to something vewwy scwewy in my mental flosses. (Or as Tracy Jordan put it in one episode of 30 Rock, my "thoughtsicles.")
Anyway, I digress. I think my writing project for the month is getting back to that not-for-public-consumption voice I used to have. Goodness knows it hasn't had much chance to really let loose in the last 7 years. I also kinda want to get back into the habit of thinking in more than 140 characters. I'm not kidding; I haven't posted to Twitter at all today, and in resisting that particular temptation I realized just how badly my thinking's been affected by having to condense things down to one or two sentence bursts. I mean, there's a time and a place for concise, diirect communication and I'm not at all saying its a bad thing, but I hadn't realized how utterly ridiculous it had gotten in my own case. (I'm still reading and @replying). Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I was actually kinda surprised by how hard it turned out to be to crank out a journal entry that raw. ** Trying to write fiction might actually have been easier (emotionally anyway) and the idea of doing this every night for a month kinda makes me squick. I think it'll help with my headnoise some, though, and if I can sift through the BS floating around at the top of my consciousness and deal with all the crap under it, maybe I'll free up enough head space to write something "real" and/or deal a bit better with Real Life™
Just for fun, I've started calling this particular project Anjowrimo.*** I was gonna call it Pejowrimo,*** but that looks dodgy, like a big brown cartoon bear from the internet posing happily with one of those two foot long carnival pencils (suggestively held, of course) and a beginner ballet class. Not cool.
In other news, holy crap, brrr. Not only did it FREEZE around here, apparently all the trees decided to drop ALL their leaves last night. :( Yep, welcome to November, all right. So long, outdoor color, been nice knowing you. See you in 2011.
* Cause I know one... and I can tell you faster than you can say "Poopty Pewpty Pants."
** 2139, in case you're wondering. :P
*** Y'all are smart, you can figure it out.
Once upon a time when I was less permanently connected to Das Interwebs, I spent hours at a stretch filling page after page with my appalling handwriting (I can't even read it some days), without thought to audience or grammar or comments or spelling, just me and my brain and notebooks full of words. And then I stopped. Partly cause I burned out. Partly because my then housemate read it and decided to rip me a new one over shit she read in there. Y'all know how I have issues with privacy and boundaries? that's probably where it started. Around the same time period said housemate introduced me to LJ, and oddly enough my way of coping with this whole thing was not to shut down and retreat but to be all like "Huh, well if people are going to read my journal anyway well then Y HELO THAR INTERNET."
Ancient history is ancient, though. While I do use my private LJ very occasionally to vent about shit I don't even post to the [crazy] filter, for the most part I've completely lost touch with how my "voice" actually sounds. I'm not putting on an act or anything in
bottledgoose and other readable LJs; I try to let as many of the warts hang out as I can without getting arrested for indecent exposure. But the thing about posting stuff where other eyeballs can cross your words is that you do self-censor/edit quite a bit for whatever reason - drama avoidance for the most part, but sometimes there's shit you just don't want other people reading, despite and even sometimes because of how close they are to you. Wanna know a secret? * I've noticed over the years that since I've been journalling in some fashion on and off since the age of nine, my brain's been kind of affected by that. Pretty much if I don't write it down, I don't have to remember or deal with it. Now you know why I post so damn much everywhere, why some of my most treasured possessions are the five longhand journals dating from 1989-2003, and why one of the most final bridge napalming things I did concerning my ex was setting fire to the ream of looseleaf comprising four years of letters we'd exchanged in college. I have this insanely weird and complex relationship to my own (and to a lesser extent, other people's) written words that honestly probably points to something vewwy scwewy in my mental flosses. (Or as Tracy Jordan put it in one episode of 30 Rock, my "thoughtsicles.")
Anyway, I digress. I think my writing project for the month is getting back to that not-for-public-consumption voice I used to have. Goodness knows it hasn't had much chance to really let loose in the last 7 years. I also kinda want to get back into the habit of thinking in more than 140 characters. I'm not kidding; I haven't posted to Twitter at all today, and in resisting that particular temptation I realized just how badly my thinking's been affected by having to condense things down to one or two sentence bursts. I mean, there's a time and a place for concise, diirect communication and I'm not at all saying its a bad thing, but I hadn't realized how utterly ridiculous it had gotten in my own case. (I'm still reading and @replying). Anyway, we'll see how it goes. I was actually kinda surprised by how hard it turned out to be to crank out a journal entry that raw. ** Trying to write fiction might actually have been easier (emotionally anyway) and the idea of doing this every night for a month kinda makes me squick. I think it'll help with my headnoise some, though, and if I can sift through the BS floating around at the top of my consciousness and deal with all the crap under it, maybe I'll free up enough head space to write something "real" and/or deal a bit better with Real Life™
Just for fun, I've started calling this particular project Anjowrimo.*** I was gonna call it Pejowrimo,*** but that looks dodgy, like a big brown cartoon bear from the internet posing happily with one of those two foot long carnival pencils (suggestively held, of course) and a beginner ballet class. Not cool.
In other news, holy crap, brrr. Not only did it FREEZE around here, apparently all the trees decided to drop ALL their leaves last night. :( Yep, welcome to November, all right. So long, outdoor color, been nice knowing you. See you in 2011.
* Cause I know one... and I can tell you faster than you can say "Poopty Pewpty Pants."
** 2139, in case you're wondering. :P
*** Y'all are smart, you can figure it out.
