After the initial emotional aftermath^[1] of the recent breakup of my three week relationship with someone not worth naming, I am feeling the increasing stirrings of my long-smoldering desire to do something more than these meandering missives with my considerable talents.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing my little article each day. It gives my mind and creativity much needed exercise, it lets me try new things and explore my ideas, and most importantly, it gives each day a sense of purpose and direction and makes me feel like I am doing something with my life, that there is a point to all of this, and I am not just biding time until I die, waiting for life to start.

For someone with my kind of mental and physical issues, purpose is more important than life.

But this doing 750 or so words a day about whatever was never supposed to be a destination, just a stopped point between the massive accomplishment of the Million World Year and that misty mystic mystery known as Whatever Comes Next.

I should know better than to give myself an out like that. Complacency is my worst enemy. Sometimes, the ability to adjust to anything and get by on very little is a bad thing. It makes it far too easy to settle for far, far less than what you really need.

Sometimes, the best thing in the world for you could be something that makes you very angry or sad in the short term…. if that pain spurns you to finally do the things that will make you far more happy than you were before the painful event.

I really feel like this recent romantic misadventure, though it ended in pain and anger and sadness and bitter disappointment, also helped to clear out the emotional deadwood in my soul, like a prairie brush fire, and after that, came a cleansing rain of tears.

I am still not “over it” entirely. That will take a while yet. But I am over the worst of it and feeling feisty and pugilistic.

So I am trying, in my sideways and inconstant way, to get a thing or two done on some more ambitious projects I have been thinking about lately, and see if I can “do the next thing” already instead of just treading water like I normally do.

One idea I am poking around is the idea of started my own “fake news” type online magazine. I tried this a little bit once before, ages ago, but it never really went anywhere.

But I have a name, The Naked Eye, and its tagline, Your Source For Objective Reality, and the basic idea that it would be, in a tongue in cheek way, an incredibly snide and self-assured news magazine, in the style of a top flight news rag like Time or Newsweek. It would feature “fake news”, fake columns, fake sports, and so forth and so on in order to provide a platform for a lot of different kinds of comedy written entirely, at least at first, by yours truly.

The idea would be to set it up like the website for Time magazine, with all kinds of little cubbyholes that need filling, and hence to provide an open-ended (as opposed to once daily) creative stimulus.

The faster I come up with enough content for launch, the sooner I launch, and so there is incentive there as well. It would give me a reason to just write like hell.

Of course, there will still be the sticky issue of promoting the darn thing. Oh well, one thing at a time.

Another thread : pitching an idea for a radio show to CBC radio.

I already have a show in mind, an idea for a short skit comedy series I had last year during the Million Word Year, as detailed here.

Luckily, those darling people at the Ceeb have an open pitch process , and while the response time is three months and the odds against my pitch being successful are considerable, I have enough confidence in my ideas and my talents to think I at least have enough of a shot to be worth bodging together a proposal and binging it to then via email, and doing my best to then completely stop thinking about it.

After all, I can put together a funny and compelling pitch document.

I just have to snap out of this summer vacation mentality and get down to it.