I wanted to just give a quick reason as to why I am taking up writing blog posts instead of recording podcasts which tend to do more often.
Recently, I went through a really serious medical issue that took a bit to heal in the hospital and then a health care facility. It felt like I was in jail for over 30 days and it is nothing that I would wish on anyone.
During my time in the pen, I met some unusual characters and went through some interesting situations. I took to writing my friends about these experiences in longer than usual phone messages and decided to give the long messages more of a prose-like feel so as to keep the stories from being completely boring.
The necessity to tell my stories was not so much as to tell my friends about the stories themselves although some are quite interesting. I wrote the stories as more of a necessity to kill time and keep my mind agile and moving.
Eventually I started to type these stories into the laptop as well as any random notes and ideas. Soon I found that I had a really good amount of material for a short story and maybe even a novella.
In order to embark on my new writing project, I decided that I need a ton of practice not only typing fast on the laptop but also just getting used to putting ideas down on the proverbial paper. I need to properly construct sentences or at least approach a better way to make my ideas and themes come across in the written form.
I read a ton in the pen and realized that reading allows our brain to make up a world that is very different from any world created on the television and yet have it be uniquely ours that no one can take away.
The written form has advantages that just are not possible in the pre-cooked visual format. It may seem obvious but it really was something that I forgot about since it was a while since I read something that involved using my imagination. As a side note, I have been trying to finish the book Big Sur by Jack Kerouac and I must tell you it is very difficult to read but not because of language but because of the story itself. I will do a book report on this at another time.
It is because of my extensive reading that I came back around to the written form. I have never been any type of writer in the sense that I really have never written anything on a consistent basis. I used to have a blog but most of the posts were about my photography and light writing, usually for explaining the photo of the night the photos were taken.
Once I came to the realization that the material I was accumulating in the pen, I decided that the written form would be a better vehicle for those stories whether I decide to write one short story, multiple posts and maybe eventually a short novella.
Practicing writing involves a few more things than just putting words to paper. As stated I need to learn how to type on a laptop but that involves other things. I need to learn how to not only sit but sit in a certain way for extended periods of time. This type of sitting is different when you are continuously typing than sitting at a desk at the day job. Breaks need to be taken more often.
The other thing is the concentration and attention targeting. I did start listening to meditation music as well as some drone type stuff in order to keep me from drifting off. Come to find out that a certain prolific writer has a technique similar to the one I came up with to keep my attention on the writing project.
So in order to be more efficient in my writing I decided to write blog posts about random subjects to practice for the big project and not waste too much time since I believe it to be a bigger project than what I imagined.
Hopefully I do not waste too much time with these random posts and not finish that other project. I guess everything is a balance.
The Common Rule: A Blog by Danny De La Cruz 