Yup. Here we are again, with me just spilling my filthy guts onto the virtual page and poking them about with a stick looking for dog knows what.

I am beginning to wonder if the real issue is not that I have somehow lost all desire to write more creative and ambitious things, but that I am slowly but surely becoming addicted to the quantum of catharsis this daily regurgitation brings me.

Which means I really need to unbend the old habit-forming process and allow that I should write one of these a day in addition to whatever else happens to pop into my head and hang around long enough for me to write it down before disappearing back into the soup.

It certainly seems like a time for restructuring. This thousand words a day thing is good for keeping the habit going, and I certainly can’t imagine life without writing every day any more. What would the point be? Writing something every day is my entire purpose in life at this point, as sad as that may be. Even relatively low value writing like these navel probing diary entries is way better than not writing at all.

If something happened and I couldn’t write, I would go nuts. And really nuts, not just boring old depression which never makes the headlines unless you kill yourself.

I am talking the kind of nuts where the phrase “for his own safety and the safety of others” comes up a lot and people are afraid to make sudden moves around you.

Still pondering the idea of going into “just write all the time” mode. It really did seem to make me a happier and calmer person back in November when I was doing NaNoWriMo. There is a lot to be said for discharging all my mental charge every day. Less juice to power the bad thoughts.

I could return to my idea of having an online humour magazine. That could certainly absorb a lot of my mental energy because there would always be a need for more content. An online comedy magazine is not the sort of thing that you do and then it’s done.

It’s also something that could absorb a fair fraction of the zillions of ideas I come up with per minute, especially if I keep the idea of “robust flexibility” in mind and don’t get too bogged down with overly specific ideas of what is or is not appropriate content.

If it’s funny, it goes in. Everything else is just pigeonholing bullshit of no real value.

Of course, not all my ideas are funny or can be made funny. I have a lot of serious thoughts too, and dark and bitter thoughts, and other forms of unfunny thought.

Although, if I take the example of one of my heroes, Terry Pratchett (he got incredibly rich writing funny genre fiction with surprising depth and meaning, how awesome is that?), then I can probably find a way to work even the dark and serious stuff into comedy somehow.

It just takes longer.

Right now, the main thing keeping me from launching an online humour magazine (apart from the usual ennui, diffidence, and inertia) is my inability to come up with a decent name for one.

I could go with “The Naked Eye” again, which was the name I came up with for a fake news “The Onion” type site. That is still a possibility, especially since the actual The Onion has become a paywall having, constant nagging, greedy corporate crapfest. That leaves the whole “online fake news” market wide open.

But somehow, I don’t feel like going there yet, at least until I have exhausted my capacity for thinking up something newer and fresher. It’s a good name for a fake news site, but not so great for a more general comedy site. So, maybe, maybe not.

Another possibility is that I could start a huge, sprawling, epic online novel, with hyperlinks and multiple points of view and all kinds of tripped out wacky “hypernovel” stuff. That would certainly be the sort of thing that could absorb anything I can think up, except maybe for long form think pieces, and it might be a lot of fun to write and construct and whatnot. Not totally sure anyone would want to read it, though.

Who knows, some people might find it fun to get lost in something like a Pynchon novel crossed with the weirdest Choose Your Own Adventure ever.

Of course, I could just start another damned book. You know, the normal kind, with a beginning middle and end. I know, sounds crazy, but it might be just so crazy that it is really really crazy!

And that, in turn, would involved finally finishing at least the first edit of the first novel.

I was afraid I would have that problem. My inability to go backward really hinders the whole editing thing. Once I finish something, I don’t want to look at it again. It’s on to pastures anew. And that is hardly an attitude that will get me anywhere, unless I learn to write first drafts that are so spectacularly awesome that editors don’t mind that they are rough around the edges.

Oh, apropos of nothing, funny story from my last therapy session.

We were discussing possibilities for my branching out socially, and the idea of a movie discussion group came up. And my therapist said “But you could go to a movie group and find out that everyone there thinks your opinions are stupid. ”

And I chuckled to myself and had to admit “You know, that doesn’t sound that bad. I like to argue. ”

And it’s true. It would not exactly be the warm and accepting social experience that would help me catch up on the socialization I missed out on as a child, I admit. But I really do enjoy a good spirited argument, and it would honestly not be the first time I defended my positions against a whole room full of angry people.

That happened to me a lot when I was in my early 20’s. Dunno why…..