Dummy

Sometimes I wish that for every work I produced, I were a new person. Some fresh crash test dummy who never has to worry about what comes after his job's done. No precedents to set. No expectations to meet. Just a fresh, disposable body that no one even needs to know.

It's a little silly. I'm a nobody as it is! But even still, there's always a desire to distance myself from what I've done already. It doesn't matter if I liked it, or if I made it yesterday or years ago. I don't want to be trapped in the same car, crashing into the same wall, flying out the same windshield, no matter how good I've become at it.

That's probably why I've always been drawn to starting new projects. But lately I've been wondering how much of that is a desire for novelty and how much is just plain running away. Would I ever be able to devote myself to, say, poetry, for more than a few years? Being completely honest, that's what I want to do the most. I know I wouldn't have to do it exclusively, but I wonder if I'm capable of a true, long-term focus regardless.

Suppose we'll find out soon enough. Maybe I just need to crash the same car till the wall breaks.

5 foot dreaming

I saw an interview with singer/songwriter Regina Spektor the other day and thought it was interesting how she described her old dream of being a classical musician. She compared it to a person whose dream is to be the tallest person in the Guinness World Records but only grows to be 5 feet tall. While she admits that that kind of dream fades away on its own, she insists the first dream doesn't have to be the last one. Or even the right one.

I'm guessing most people can relate, at least to some extent. Sometimes it just seems like there's a natural dead end to what you're doing, and I'm not just talking about a limitation of innate talent (neither was Regina Spektor, I don't think). Maybe you just grow out of it, or you get stolen away by a new passion. But for a lot of people, it could be what some psychologists call the O.K. plateau.

This is when you come to a point in your growth where reaching the next echelon would require an amount of focus, passion and hard work that you're not willing or ready to commit. Whatever your rationale may be, you're content to stop. It doesn't mean you can't ever start again, but sometimes you just know when to leave it behind, even if it's disappointing.

For me, for five or six years I was devoted to animation, comics and illustrated poems. For most of that time, that was where my dreams were. But I exhausted where I could go with all of them.

It came down to the fact that I'm a doodler, not a full-fledged artist. Anything beyond the simplest poses and drawings were complete agony for me, and I had little to no interest in actually developing my skills to make it less agonizing. Sometimes I'd just think of the headache of it all and procrastinate forever.

This severely limited the kinds of stories I could tell, and before I knew it, I felt like I'd used them all up. I hit 5 feet, and you can only go so much farther with your high heels of Photoshop know-how.

I won't say I'll neverevereverevernenevnenreever make a comic or animation again. If it's a side dish, I don't care as much about pushing my limits. But I know what I loved best about both was the writing. They were perfect playgrounds for an insecure writer to cut his teeth because the visual charm can be so disarming and what you write never has to stand alone.

I'm more than ready to just write now though. I'll try, anyway. I'm not so naive as to prematurely assume this is the right dream, but It's already better in that I crave to work at it every day.

So let's hope I can be a little taller this time! Or at least fatter. I'm tired of being skinny.

Aha!

There's something remarkable and uniquely satisfying about the eureka moments that you unearth as you try to put together a creative project. The sudden connections, the sudden answers, the sudden ends of the dead ends.

Just as powerful is what can happen the day after

when you realize it's all wrong.

When are you most creative?

According to this it's when you're sleepy. A cloudy brain makes it easier to connect ideas that would've been separated by analytical walls otherwise. And then when you're more awake, you can assess whether it's insight or insane.

Any truth to this in your personal experience?

For me, the one benefit of insomnia is the rush of ideas that occasionally comes with it.

Or maybe it's the rush of ideas that's keeping me awake.

In either case, I'd still rather sleep.

Sometimes.

Newfangled Death

...that's what I'm working on now! It's the tentative name of a mini-collection of new poetry -- both free verse and rhyming -- coming in a month or so to all eReaders and PC/Mac/whatever. It'll be $1 USD and have probably 20-30 poems depending on how their lengths unfold. But no illustrations this time around, because of compatibility with eReaders and because I'd like to take a more direct route to your brain now anyway, if you'll kindly creak open your skull.

And for people who like physical books, the current plan is to release three or four digital collections like this fella and then make a print anthology of them available on Amazon.com. Somewhere under $10 I'm hoping. Somewhere within the year I'm hoping. Shipping may not be great for outside the states (that includes me!) but I'll explore other options as well.

So, I'll keep you updated on that. I'd be thrilled to sell anything at all really, with no self-deprecation intended. I'm glad there are some people who already follow what I do, but this is uphill territory regardless.

In the meantime, I spent a good juicy chunk of February writing a short story for a contest in the Toronto Star, a newspaper around here. When my girlfriend and I went to drop it off (on deadline day, naturally), the box was stuffed full of envelopes. One was even inexplicably housed in a hamster cage by the reception desk. The competition was streaming in and out the door, and while they looked like nice people, let's hope hope they are all awful writers.

I have mixed feelings about the story I wrote, which ended up being a kind of fairy tale somehow, but it's done and it was fun to flail madly at a deadline again.

Oh,

and a week ago, my sister's cat vomited a rubber band.

It was kind of cute.

Shorts

I've always leaned towards writing shorter things. They're like gunshots! They have to pack a lot into a little, or the bullet just sputters down into a penny at your feet. But if you get it right, you can take aim at your favourite organ and notch up a quick kill. I do really appreciate the kinda slow burn pandemic that only longer material can provide. But for my own work, I prefer assassination over annihilation.

It comes from the weight of brainstorming. If nothing else, I'm good at seeing many alternate paths and directions that any particular idea can take. That said, it's usually too many. More than half of the diverging paths are stupid dead-ends, but at least I can see the options. This works out well enough in small projects: there are a limited number of stops to the destination, so at least the convoluted network of good and bad roads are all in the same city. It's still an agonizing process in which I can dwell on a single word in a sentence for hours, but there are only so many sentences to torture. And if some serendipitous asteroid blasts the whole bastard to bits and reveals a better approach -- which happens again and again -- a two-thousand-word death count is just collateral damage.

I've tried longer projects, but they always feel like a giant chess tournament in my head. There are too many players, too many pieces, too many alternate routes any single game can take. Ideas clash at every move, every board, and nerds get into slow fistfights where they stroke their chins between puffy puffy cotton ball punches. When an asteroid hits, everyone dies and is simply relieved.

Of course, I might just need to get better at organizing my thoughts. But for now, let's keep it short.

Fallout of Educational Brain Explosion

I was a teacher in training, and then my head blew up. I'm not the steadiest skinny chinese man to begin with, so with the germ warfare, insomnia, endless workload and screaming children, pop pop pop went my skull.

Near the beginning I knew it wasn't really something suited to my personality type (dysfunctional), but the prospect of actually being a useful person with tangible worth made me stick to it. Plus, this wasn't an explosion without its charms.

I'll absolutely miss my kids. They were funny, crazy, loud, smart and all-around endearing. And since these are Grade 3 students we're talking about, there was an especially paternal aspect to my role with them. It hurt to leave. I also met some already inspiring teachers and people in the program. They were awesome comrades on the front line.

But I've been picking up the pieces of my head over the last couple months. Unfortunately, it kept exploding in the process. Other insane and sad things happened, but it's all helped me face up to which pieces I really want to keep and what I really want to do with my tiny grenade life.

It struck me that for all these years of holding on so tightly to the dream of being a writer, I never even tried to do it. I was too afraid to ease my grip and let it take its baby steps, because I wasn't convinced it could even learn to walk. So that's what I'm trying to do now. At least for a while, at least once, and then I can go be practical again.

This new blog, complete with new ridiculous name, will serve as the headquarters for these writing adventures. Thanks for reading, whether a little or a lot.