Blogtober 8 –
I was driving a little bit ago, and something popped into my head that I thought would make a really great post. Now… it’s gone. I can feel it in my bones that it was something really cool, something I would really enjoy writing. Of course, it was probably a rant. But… sigh… it’s gone.
Once upon a time, I used to let things like this really get to me, when ideas would evaporate out of my gray matter. How many awesome stories did I not write because my brain wouldn’t hold onto them? And no… I don’t buy into the whole idea of, “Well, the idea couldn’t have been that good if you forgot it so easily.” Rubbish! I know how to write well enough that I can make any idea into a good story. Sometimes that might take a couple of drafts and a decade or two, like with spell punk, but I could get there eventually.
So here I am, writing a post about losing the idea.
Of course, I could go into a rant about the stupid question, “Where do you get your ideas?” But I kinda wrote about that in today’s Wondering Project post over on Patreon, and that subject has been overplayed so much the record skips and the tape is wearing thin. (Gen. X metaphors.)
I hoped that by sitting down and writing about losing the idea, I could get my brain to find its way back to where the idea came from. Unfortunately, that little brain hack didn’t kickstart anything today. Oh well… Sometimes it works.
Besides, Blogtober isn’t about putting anything profound on my website, though I’ve certainly ranted a bit. I’m sure I’ll rant again before the end of the month. I’m good at ranting. as I’ve said many times. This month is about getting new material on the website and hopefully getting some clicks. Maybe even some book sales. You could help with that.
And now I remember what I was going to blog about today. But now, already have today’s post. Not a long one, but it’s something. Sometimes good enough is good enough.
Want to know a secret? Sometimes my rough drafts of stories or poems look like this on the handwritten page. I’ll have sections where I put notes or jot down trains of thought about where the story is going. Different parts of the back story, or just rantings about, “What the hell I’m doing here?” or, “Where the fuck is this story going?” Several times in the writing of my epic gunfight tavern poem I mentioned yesterday, I wrote things like, “He’s never gonna buy this,” off to the side or at the bottom of the page. (I’d show you a picture, but I can’t find the journal where I wrote the rough draft.)
So yeah. This has been a little wandering post about ideas and a bit about my process. Come back tomorrow for the post I forgot about and remembered. It is a rant. We’ll see how well I rant.
Because I couldn’t find the journal with the gunfight poem, I’ve included a picture of a page of one of my rough drafts for SPELLPUNK. Yes. It’s pink. I use pink for all the stuff that’s not going directly into a story.
