A Story A Day

New year, old fear: I will continue tripping down a path of mediocrity, never contributing significantly to the beauty of the universe and therefore failing to justify the continued energy expenditure on behalf of the conglomeration of atoms in which I reside.

In November 2007, I attempted my first nanowrimo novel: Marshmallow Macabre. I got through about 8,000 words in 30 days. Though a far cry from the 50,000 required to win, that's the longest story I've ever written. I self-deprecate. Yes, but I realize that building the kind of stamina I want will take practice. And so, on recommendation from a friend who knows best, I'm embarking on "A Story A Day" starting tomorrow.

The Rules
(as they currently stand)

1. Every day, I must write one story.
2. The story must be posted/linked in this blog.
   
3. There are no length/genre requirements.
4. Stories may be contiguous to stories from previous days.
   
5. There are no acceptable excuses for not writing a story.
6. No end date has been established at this point.
7. Some, but not all, of these rules are subject to change.

Unlike my approach to nanowrimo-ing, I see this primarily as an exercise in time management and discipline, as much as the actual storytelling. That said, I'm now 15 minutes past bedtime and too full of internet gobbledy-gook to continue any further examination of this endeavor. So, if you happen to find yourself tuned, please do stay that way for tomorrow's daring, outlandish, scathingly accurate, and even presumptuously precipitous: "Story No. 1!"

A Breath of Fresh Air

This is my second attempt at blogging. I plan to use this space to develop some good writing habits, and rid myself of a few bad ones, by publishing those inner monologues I care to remember here and, in case of actual intellectual content, juice up the roots of any ideas that have potential.

I'm also going to continue developing the art of the run-on sentence, because, after all, if it's good enough for William Faulkner, it's good enough for me.

That mofo knew how to make a sentence breathe!
Just imagine the expert flow through those nostrils:
sucking in surrounding particulate matter of all kind without prejudice,
until the color itself drains from the photo,
presenting us with the issue of blacks, whites and all the grays facing off between them,
making arbitrary definitions painful and fatal,
filling us up with all the space inside that olfactory orifice
until we cannot bear the sight of a sniffer swollen with such ugly history,
and, finally, exhausting these subjects in one prolonged, ghostly stream,
which raggedly flutters the wiley mustache hairs of dead white men,
in whom we have ceased to trust
and who can no longer betray our trust
unless we forget the whiskey stained nose of the writer who let it all out,
that last sigh,
frozen in time,
alternately indicting and exonerating
the perfect hypocrisy of a free life.

I have a defunct livejournal that I started in college and to which I have been sorely unfaithful. My purpose there was not so different as it is here, but I expect this one to flourish, since gmail makes everything in life so much more convenient. But maybe I'll just write this one entry and never come back. It's certainly a possibility, though not necessarily a tragedy. It could also be possible that if I don't spend any time blogging here at all, I'll become a speech writer instead and write some terribly underhanded speeches for the next GOh!P presidential candidate in which Shermanesque oaths are made under a veil of irony and sent out to the press 24 hours in advance. Throwing monkey wrenches into the belly of the beast sounds like an erstwhile activity, that would certainly benefit the world far more than web reminders to myself of how to clean one's bike chain.

Seems that I am setting myself up for failure either way, but there can be no success without failure. So really, what I'm looking at here, is clearly unavoidable success.