Overcoming Obstacles

If you've heard me talk about my larger scale writing projects or even been around when the topic of writing comes up, there's a pretty good chance that you've heard me utter some form of the following words: I hate editing.

But the thing is that I truly do enjoy writing. So why then would something related to the process bother me so much?

I suppose you could say that it's a few things. First of all, editing is an entirely different beast than simply making a draft. Drafts, first drafts in particular, are made with reckless abandon. The process appeals to my track-skipping, bounce-around, scatterbrain, giving it the opportunity to go down avenues that straight-line, focused thinking wouldn't provide. A longstanding practice of mine when making drafts is to write until I get bored, then skip to the next thing that interests me in a given section or chapter. After all, it isn't really a big deal if a scene or two never gets covered.

Of course, the larger issue rears its head when it comes for editing. Those gaping holes in the story have to be addressed one way or another, leading to the obvious question of whether or not the idea was worth writing about in the first place.

And really, part of me wants no part of this process. No matter how flawed I may know my draft might be in reality, there's still the notion that most of it is pretty good work. The thought of having to go back and cut out huge swathes of words simply because they don't fit the greater vision is a tragedy I hate to face.

Likewise is the time taken reflecting on what needs to be added. There are the gaps in story that I may have skimmed over when writing a first draft, but there are also the extra parts. They are the ideas that came after I had already gone through that particular section, or things that crossed my mind as ideas after the fact. They are the characters that didn't seem important until later, or who weren't even concepts until the process hard started. They, too need their fleshing out and work done.

I realize that the work is a necessary evil. I understand that to reach - truly reach - the next level of my work, I have to get over this hurdle and build a solid second draft. And scarier still, most likely a third, possibly a fourth, and so on.

It's a daunting task, but it's one that I want to do. So in this regard, I set a simple goal, and make an honest pledge. I hereby declare that before the end of March (and the beginning of April and the inevitable chaos of Script Frenzy), I will complete a second draft of at least one long term project that I've worked on. It's the very least that I can do. Well, short of nothing. But I've done that for a while, and it doesn't sit well with me.

Let's Try This Again...

Hi. I'm Thomas Houston. You may remember me from such strange endeavors as "House Rules!", this very blog page. And of course, a silly little thing called "Planet Houston Podcast."

Both projects were started for similar but differing reasons. House Rules! was my attempt at expressing myself through writing. At the time, I had fiddled with various writing projects and concepts on other blogs and message boards, but I didn't have one that was just me. Heck, even my initial attempts at blogging had fallen short, as for some reason I was locked out of the page I was trying to create. But after a brief while (and after some "gentle nudging" from my friend, the late Sam Johnson), I started the blog in earnest. And while it never quite became what I envisioned it, it was my baby, and I loved it all the same.

Planet Houston Podcast? I guess you could say that was a need to express myself in a different way. Yes, I'm pretty good at turning a phrase or two when I'm writing, but it's not the same as an an active performance. In a perfect world, I suppose I could have tried to do the whole video thing, but honestly, I knew that would be way more work than I wanted to put into it. And really, I couldn't have done a video podcast in my underwear. (Not that I actually did that at any point, mind you. I'm just saying, sometimes a man likes to have his options.)

But for a number of reasons (some of which I may expound on in more detail someday) both projects fell off the radar. I have tried to get the old blog page back to a more regular posting schedule, but it seems like it wasn't in the cards until recently.

So what changed? Let me tell you what changed. It was something very subtle that occurred over the course of the past few weeks. I started to notice a friend or two on Facebook talking about the blog they were starting up. And yeah, I was a little curious about it, but I put it in the back of my head as something to check out later.

But then, it spread. Seriously. All of a sudden, this huge chunk of people that I know were either starting new blogs or reviving old ones. People... blogging thoughts and ideas... and then putting up links on the internet?

"That's my thing. The thing that I do. ...I feel like I'm gonna explode!" (My apologies to Milhouse for borrowing his angsty retort.)

So once again, we're going to give this wacky crazy blog of thing a go. Goodness knows I've got plenty of random thoughts and ideas to tack on here. I just need to get myself back into the flow of updating on a regular basis. So we'll see how that all works itself out.

... or I'll see you in my next post six months from now. One thing or the other will happen.