My main project for this afternoon was to cruise the forums for Cracked.com. This is harder than it sounds…a LOT harder. Because the thing is, just being there makes me freak the hell out.

Why? It’s hard to articulate. Too real, I guess. It’s a place where I have a real chance of finding some kind of work that would use my amazing comedy writer skills. They have an open editorial process and that means anyone, even just some fat guy in Canada, can pitch ideas, and if the pitch is accepted, write the dang thing and have it show up on like, the top comedy site around.

So just being there makes me incredibly nervous. That is what has kept me from really engaging with it in the past. I signed up ages ago, and very tentatively poked a toe in the water, but got extremely mildly admonished by one of the higher ups there and fled like a startled gazelle.

Since then, I have tried to go back many times, but the fears always got the better of me. But today, I decided that I would stay on the forum, with only a chat window open for moral support, and poke around some.

Previously, I had asked about how to get list ideas. Well, what I asked was how to make the list, but that’s approximately the same thing. First someone pointed me to their post on advanced Google-fu, and while informative, that’s still not much help.

But then someone pointed me to the official “where do you get ideas” thread, and that…. also didn’t help much, to be honest.

That’s when I realized that, as usual, what seemed like a practical problem was really an emotional one. I could probably whip up a list in a heartbeat, or at least an afternoon, if I wasn’t so damned anxious about the whole thing. It’s the fear interfering with the operations of my clever and creative mind that is the real problem.

That stuff really gums up the works and makes the whole damned machine shut down.

It’s true that I don’t naturally think in list form. My mind goes perpendicular to that. I follow connections, the more disparate the things being connected, the better. Connecting similar things is the opposite of that. It will take me a while to train my brain to run in that direction.

I am aided by the fact that they no longer insists on strictly fact-based articles. It could be something like Ten Reasons Why Star Trek Is Full Of Shit or Six Ways You Think Wrong and that would be cool. Some of their highest grossing articles have come from those sorts of articles. So I have an “in” there.

So it’s really about taking my existing ideas (of which I have just a few… hundred… thousand) and somehow formulate them into a plausible list format.

Put that way, it doesn’t seem so impossible. I can even go back over my previous think pieces (of which I have a few… ) and see if I can turn them into some kind of list.

It’s not impossible that I could learn to do the fact type listicles some day, though. I like to say I have poor research skills, but that is not really true. I have poor research patience. Again, the real problem is emotional. When I think of the tricks I have come up with in my search for something I wanted in the past, it is clear that I do not lack the necessary verbal skills, inventiveness, and insight.

I just lack the sort of patience that lets one search source after source after source in order to come up with your list of six precious fact based entries.

Just thinking of that makes me go…. man, I just want to be funny! You know?

What else… well I am still baking, obviously. Last experiment was a recipe for gingerbread cake that did not turn out that great. Granted, I only had half the amount of ginger needed, but I think even if I had the whole thing, the flavour would still have been too heavy with molasses flavour.

I mean, the thing called for a whole cup of molasses. And this is just a regular eight inch round cake.

At first, I worried that the thing was, if not exactly inedible, then utterly unpalatable. That heavy molasses flavour really needs a strong spice component to make it work. If I ever make that recipe again, I am going to bump up the spice content considerably. Especially the ginger.

Anyhow, luckily I remembered something from my children that pointed to a way to make the thing palatable. I remember that when my mother made gingerbread when I was a kid, it was always served with butter.

A ha! I have it a shot, and yup, with enough margarine melted into it, the stuff is okay. Thus, it is edible, and not a failure. It’s not one of my rousing successes, but it’ll git et.

Tonight, I am probably going to do some kind of cake, because I am feeling lazy. Possibly choco-mint… the last time I made it, it didn’t turn out as well I had hoped, so I have an itch to make it again even though I made it last Thursday.

I am also influenced by the fact that I can make that chocolate frosting recipe work now. Last time I tried it, it turned out too bitter again, so I added a whack of Splenda to it, which gave it the right sweetness but then it was grainy.

Grainy frosting is gross.

Luckily, after letting it sit for a while, I discovered that the extra Splenda had dissolved into the frosting all by itself, and that it was now creamy and chocolatey and wonderful.

Okay, now I am drooling. I think choco-mint cake with chocolate frosting is in the offing tonight.

And I will talk to all of you nice sweet people again tomorrow.