An Excellent Weekend
8 Nov 2009 5:17 PM
So I don't know if it's the diet* I'm on, or if it's the weather or the exercise or the circus classes or the EPIC AMOUNT OF STAR TREK DVDs IN MY HOUSE (seriously. It's like a wall of nerd. SO so awesome) some kind of excellent combination and/or feedback loop but I am feeling very excellent today!
For the past... four years or so I have had a bit of a story bumping around in my head. It's one of the reasons that I really enjoy walking to and from work every day (around 5km) and don't listen to much music when I do so. It's sort of been my guilty pleasure to plan out this huge thing in my head and live out every moment of these imaginary peoples lives. But then suddenly, without notice, a new character showed up last week and added a huge amount of pressure to the whole thing and then suddenly yesterday it was impossible not to write (some of) it down.
I spent a lot of time stressing over how incredibly awful and embarassing this thing is, but somehow after writing some of it out I don't actually hate it and it feels okay that it isn't... you know high literature or super deep and meaningful or anything. I feel like I have created something and the end product isn't nearly as important as the process of actually creating it.
So I have decided that suddenly I am writing a story. I am not doing NaNoWriMo (even though it's november and that would be a good excuse to write something too awful for public consumption) and don't think it's even going to end up as long as 50,000 words in total. I have written what feels like maybe a fifth of the story and it's around 2500 words.
It still needs a bit more work, but this bit of the story will be stand alone. And I might even Put It On The Internet once I am a bit happier with it and make sure that it's not going to conflict with anything I want to say in the other bits and decide where to put it because I am thinking The Adventures of Chifley "brand" is pretty much a comedy/anti-comedy thing and The Story... isn't.
So I spent most of saturday extremely excited about my story and what was going to happen and that sort of thing. Which was Very Very Cool.
And then this morning, after getting up delightfully early and making PANCAKES, I was listening to some podcasts and I decided to email the author of one of them (currently #2 on my "To Marry" list**) and I got a reply and everything and he claims that he's going to subscribe to my podcast which is just about the most exciting thing that's happened to my little podcast thing, so now I'm all excited about that too! In fact, too excited to actually write my podcast for next week which is why I am writing this blog entry instead!
So anyway (and gosh I do say that a lot don't I?), in my epic fangirl-squee emails I wrote something which I quite liked and I am going to repeat it here because I think it really says why I write this comic and record this podcast. I seem to have a stable readership of around 30 for the comic, and I think around 18 people have downloaded the second-to-most-recent podcast (the most recent has only been out for two days so....). Which is... not really a very large audience.
"Sure there are a billion
podcasts out there, and even a lot of comedy podcasts out there, and I
don't have a name or an audience or mass-appeal or anything like that
but I have the tools available to create something and to put it out
there into the world and online and theoretically complete strangers
can download and listen to me telling my little stories and if even
one person can listen to my thing and laugh and think that it was
worth seeking out, or worth listening to... well that's, a lot more
than something. And even if nobody ever listened to it and thought
that, well I have still created something and practiced my writing and
my speaking and my creativity and that's a lot more than nothing."
So I really do hope that people enjoy the podcast (and to a lesser extent, the comic - it's one of my favourite things in the world when I see that complete strangers have read through the archives (I can tell from my stats) because I like to imagine them sitting there looking complely perplexed. WHY DOES THIS EVEN EXIST!? they ask the universe, and they receive no answer. MUAHAHAH I am a bad person, aren't I?) but right now I am really really enjoying creating something and having it sit outside of my head where other people can experience it. It's scary, but... it's cool. I don't want to change what I am doing in order to be sure that other people will enjoy it - I'm not going to try and make the comic consistently more funny, for example (some people claim that it used to be funny, I think that they are incorrect and it's just that they used to be in on the jokes). I'm just going to keep doing things my way and hope that the people who have the right sort of funny bone, who know the right sort of people, or who follow the right links may end up here and take a listen and like what they hear.
And now I really will go and write a podcast for next weekend, I promise.
* not in order to lose weight or anything insane*** like that, I am trying out a diet for people with fructose malabsorption which means I am avoiding wheat and fruit and certain vegetables. The only really hard bit is avoiding wheat and onions. I ate a sandwich (on wheat-bread) the other day and I was kind of cranky and didn't sleep well afterwards. Obv one data point is enough to decide these things, but really I think it miiiight be helping. And one of the things that fructose malabsorption apparently can cause, is mood disorders! So I think that's what this footnote was supposed to be about.
** After Wil Wheaton, obv.
*** which is not to say that I think anyone who is trying to lose weight is insane **** it just would be really quite insane for me, believe me.
**** although I think some of them might be.
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"(some people claim that it used to be funny, I think that they are incorrect and it's just that they used to be in on the jokes)"
IAWTP