Threads Rewoven - A Thing A Week

And so it begins... I've just finished reading 16 habits of highly creative people and I'm going to start living #4 with this blog... "Creative people embrace challenges.".

Best Beloved, in an effort to encourage my writing, has challenged me to my own version of "A Thing a Week" just like Jonathan Coulton did in 2006, just as whimsical but not so musical. We are fans of several of his pieces including Code Monkey and the mash-up When I'm 25 or 64. It seems like it might work for me too. So let's see where this Thing goes. It could make for an interesting year.

This idea was not just thanks to Jonathan Coulton. It's also thanks to Stephen King and Charles Dickens. I recently listened to an unabridged audio version of King's "The Green Mile" which was originally a novel published in serial form. In his own acknowledgments, King tips his hat to Dickens, much of whose work was published serially. The technology required that it be months even years between Dickens’ installments. I find myself living in an age in which technology will allow me a publish an idea even before its time which is what makes this exercise so scary. Best Beloved and I were finishing up our Christmas wrapping at 3am on Christmas morning when the idea of me publishing serially came to him. BB said, "You develop your children's stories serially and refine them with each retelling. Why can't you publish that way?" And so it begins.

I don't know if blogging is the best format for this but I'm going to give it a try. This activity will be a little weird for me because I generally don't like to show people my writing. And while I'm still doing this largely anonymously, many of you know who I am in my real life. Now I'm asking you to be my witness, to hold me accountable for being disciplined about my chosen creative outlet, and most importantly to comment on my work, with the goal to helping me improve (my story, my style, my "voice"). Please be gentle, dear reader... I totally understand Anna Nalick's lyrics:

"2 AM and I'm still awake, writing a song

If I get it all down on paper, it's no longer inside of me,

Threatening the life it belongs to

And I feel like I'm naked in front of the crowd

Cause these words are my diary, screaming out loud

And I know that you'll use them, however you want to"

I'm a little afraid to do this because I'm worried that the ideas won't keep coming. Some days it seem I have so many ideas filling in my head-- some which are fleeting and some which tease me as they dance around the other more serious thoughts going about their business in my brain. Somedays the well is dry. When I expressed this fear at 3am, BB reminded me that some of JC’s thing-a-week works were real stinkers too. It worked for him, it can work for me.

I worry a little about the intensity of the words clawing to get out of me. Sometimes I carry big feelings around in my heart and in my gut which seem to need to purged before they eat me from the inside out. Is it weird to have that drive to write like that? I've always wondered if happens to other writers... (I read something about that same drive in Madeline L'Engle - she described it as a story begging to be told - and having to get the story down on paper in order to get any peace from it.)

Singer/song-writer, John Mayer sings, “Say what you need to say.” It seems important to distinguish between what I need to say and what I just want to say. Help me with this too, dear reader.

I think some of this stuff swurling (Yes, I know that's not the correct spelling but it's a play off of url... ) in my mind might be something not to say aloud but I think it might be the stuff of some good fiction. I hope to get some of that out here to get some feedback from you, on it. It could be it’s only a good idea when it’s in my head, but in the bright light of day it’s not worth the effort. So watch for opportunities to tell me if my characters are the least bit believable and likeable --- or not.

Here’s to an interesting 2009.