Posts tagged lifer
Last comments on yesterday’s unfortunate events.
World, I get you. I get what you are saying. You are saying, loudly, clearly, and with examples, that it is time for me toBook pitch got turned down.
— Chris Collision (@cfCollision) June 1, 2012
take my paycheck
accept my place and fade away
I’ll think about it.
I’ve been bummed as hell recently at the explicit ends of two of my long-favorite web projects. UK:Resistance and FreeDarko had been there—and been awesome—for years. They’d been there—and they’d been awesome—since back before a couple good writers did good projects on blogs and ended up with book deals, before stunt-writing villains jumped onto the platform and started tarring us all, before publishing entities decided their presence as presence was necessary.
It hit particularly hard because, at the moment, every one of my collaborative projects appears to be dead in the water. Selavy? I’ve got nothing. SHSH: that ship has sailed. NHAZ? Most recently I spent a couple months trying to get people fired up about it, and the response I got was “I’m tired of kissing your ass about this project”. tl;dr? Never happened. Reviewiera? 2 guest posters with one post apiece (maybe 2), lifetime; Dregs is too busy making movies to write about them; Tinzeroes has twins to raise; basketball seems far from me, and all my video games are in storage. And as I get older, and a little less lonely, things are less interesting to chronicle; thus gets the pull of reviewing weaker. Clear the Crease? Just me fucking talking to myself about rich men playing a rich man’s game. (Again, I spent some months trying to get the other guys excited about doing stuff for the site. At least with this project, none of my possible/putative collaborators actually insulted me, they just have better stuff to do.)
So with two of my primary inspirational/aspirational projects going dark, and all of my own sputtering into silence, maybe it’s time to call it. Maybe it’s just the end of blogs.
The End of Blogs
(Looks good like that, doesn’t it? Yeah, I think so too.)
I mean, I like writing. I do it a lot. I think I’m okay at it: I can make an argument and crack a joke; I think I crank the occasional phrase that sticks. But I’m not gaining any traction, here or anywhere else, toward getting paid to write anything I care about. And it’s been kind of a lot of years of this now. (I really don’t want to have to go to grad school.) And as the net community stuff dwindles—obviously my own collaborators don’t have much for me anymore, and the main hubs for the stuff I love are, as noted, crumbled to ash—I’m wondering why I bother. Borges said somewhere “I write for myself, for my friends, and to ease the passing of time”. Which is mostly what I do and how I do it: but I can ease time and write for myself without wasting my time typing things up and spamming (fruitlessly) my friends.
Yesterday at my day job I got a raise and a promotion. It is likely I will not have time during the day to do research or write. At home, I live without the internet, for there are glowing screens enough in my practice. I have not yet decided/discovered what the new gig is going to do to or for future writing projects; I have not yet decided/discovered if there are going to be any.
At least FreeDarko and UK:R have real, robust bodies of work. Go to those sites, get interested, and you’ve got vast quantities of that splendid material to feed your soul with. I look back, and I’ve got maybe a couple hundred blog posts. (Not one of which, to my knowledge, has ever been linked to.) A dozen short stories, if you squint and round up. A few minutes of a podcast. A couple nice connections with some wonderful writers.
Harry Crews said to Jim Knipfel once, toward the end of his career, “I just thought I’d be better.” I guess I’m about as good as I’ll ever be, and I guess I’m basically okay with that. Not that there’s nothing, I just wish there were more. More of a body of work there. More connections. More actual success.
To you, blogs, I dedicate this, among my favorite songs.
To my past projects, I suppose I (must) say “thanks, yo. Was fun.” To the future? Well, there’re dates to go on, bikes to ride, books to read. Maybe those are better hobbies than continually “rattling at length against a world that has refused to recognize” me. Maybe it’s worth finding out.
