Uncategorized

If you somehow manage to stumble onto this website, and if you are in search of Scurvytown, I have moved most of those posts over to scurvytown.com.

I have a few ideas that might make this site live on, but for now I am not doing much with it. I think I’m going to renew it, though, because the ideas I have been organizing are perfect for my original intentions for the fictionarium.

My last post on here was so somber, I thought this place needed a bit of sprucing up, so I decided to re-direct visitors to the new site. I still have some high hopes for some fictionarium projects, but for now most of my attentions are on Scurvytown and my graduate studies.

Today was not a positive, happy, vibrant kind of day. It was unseasonably warm, but gray, the kind of day where even though you know it’s all boring and junk, you can’t stop yourself from talking about the weather.

Something has been nagging away at me, something about unhappiness, specifically how miserable I was at my former job. I was only happy when making my own fun, on those rare opportunities I could make someone laugh, or cheer a fellow sufferer up.

That’s it, I suddenly realized today. It’s pretty obvious, actually, the ways we make our own misery, and how when stuck inside this sort of cycle of misery (kind of like a cycle of abuse, with enabling and making excuses and all those old issues), we cannot seem to break ourselves free of it, until we reach some kind of epiphany, or in my case, when the unhealthy element was removed from my life.

I think this is why I am so thankful that I got downsized, not simply because it falls in line with my theme of the year (Purge-a-thon 2010!), but because I couldn’t save myself. I had to be cut loose to get away from that misery. And now that the misery is gone, what do I fill in the empty space? All I know is I am trying to fill it with as much positivity, happiness, and productive writing as I can cram into a day.

And you know, it’s hard work. I feel like I am working harder than when I had this awful job, maybe because of some kind of self-imposed work ethic that I didn’t even realize I had in me. I feel like I am pushing myself a little too hard at the moment, and that I need to let myself cool off a bit, relax, and enjoy this free time, the process of writing, and the opportunities that will eventually reveal themselves.

I have been giving a great deal of thought to perception lately, how things are perceived, and how that can very much deviate from initial intentions. It’s not merely about knowing your audience, especially when they can be so open they defy definition (example: open blogging on teh internets).

This recent obsessive thought process started during my Monday night class a few weeks ago, when we were discussing an article written by the professor. Now, I confess, I am not a fan of assigned readings written by the person teaching the class, but I get the relevance. Although it does bring up a discourse that detracts from the reading, arguments can be made for how it works, especially within the context of this particular course.

To get a little meta with it, if meta is the correct terminology here, this exact dynamic came to mind while reading the professor’s article. An example was cited that made me think, “Oh wait, is that a good example?” As it turned out, when I asked the professor about this, because of the positive perceptions as a result of the example, it is effective. However, he then had to state specifically in the paper that due to the positive public perception, the example works, but only within the given context. Complicated, right? I wanted to play devil’s advocate for a moment, but decided against it because had it not been a favorable outcome, I realized the example would probably have not been used in the article in the first place. Also, playing devil’s advocate when it was the professor’s own work? Yeah, not exactly advocating for my success in the classroom.

The point is, this little exchange planted a seed about perception in my head. Of course, I have been considering it in broader realms than the classroom, as well as smaller realms, like the public perception of my blog. I have no idea what people think of it, who reads it, other than my mother, and a friend or two who mentioned they added me to their google reader list. And honestly, that’s perfectly fine by me.

So, who am I writing for? I can’t say it’s for an audience, really. It’s mostly for myself, to skim ideas about my own writing process off my mind, to try to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t. That more or less labels it a self-indulgent writing exercise, but I think that is okay, for the time-being.

In the meantime, I am diving into some more deep literary theory articles, and learning as much as I can about the process of writing, and what it takes to become a more effective storyteller. I shall defer the spinning of yarns to my kitty cats.