today i am writing some words

today i am writing some words. i don't do it very often. or maybe i do all the time. it's hard to say. i am told that writing anything means i am writer. i tell myself sometimes that's not true. and then i lose the debate. i write work emails 5 days a week. they are dishonest. i format them to have the exact amount of punctuation necessary to express an air of timidness. but not too much. i have to seem passive and weak to those above me but still capable. every email ends with "Thanks!" some times i am not asking for anything, so in order to squeeze in my "thanks," i ask them if there's anything they need, and then thank them for the opportunity to offer me what they need.

i am a terrible writer. but i am a better writer. better than i was. the time i most improved my writing was about from age 20 or so to age 24 or so. during that time i abstained from fiction, which was my passion, and mostly toiled away at the occasional anime review. i read one of them for the first time in a long time awhile back. it was terrible. it wasn't even a review. it was a spoiler intensive analysis of some sorts that repeated a lot of clumsy turns of phrase and words. 28 of 32 people found the review helpful.

when i came back to fiction writing i wrote better stories, insomuch as they were a bit fuller and more interesting. for a few years i made somewhere around 60-70 submissions to literary magazines and short story contests. 0 of the people found them helpful. i had the stories critiqued by other people who were doing the same thing i was doing, and in turn, improved the stories to a point where 0 people found them helpful.

the two years i've written the most in my life were 2007 and 2015. in 2007 i was depressed and self harming in my college dorm room when i wrote a 52000 word novel about a depressed and self harming person living in an apartment. he died. in 2015 i was depressed and self harming in my bedroom when i wrote 113 blog posts and a handful of short stories. i am no longer self harming and this year i might write 25 posts at best. i don't know what this means.

today i am singing in the car. i am not a singer. i sing every day. i write every day. i am not sure what i am. maybe that's the gist of it. maybe until i find who i am i can't find what to write. i think i will never find what to write then, and that is ok, because i am not sure anyone does. if stephen king found the end of the road, perhaps he would stop writing books.

the other day i wrote to a friend what i thought about star wars. it was no different really than what i had said in the car the night previous. maybe i was transcribing. maybe that's all i do. i see stories not in words or characters but in scenes and moods. i see a movie scene and then write it. i feel a feeling and write it. maybe that's why i used to be so attached to the idea of writing screenplays. i could skip all the filler, all the narration. building a world is like drawing, and i am no good at the latter. it'd be better if everyone could just see it and then i could write what the people inhabiting it need to say. i don't have the patience for a middle, for describing the things and places and sounds. i consider the middle everything but the first and last paragraph or scene. some consider me a few years away from middle age. it sounds ridiculous but i am 38 to 39% of the way there. to the last paragraph.

most days i wonder if i should write more words. i wrote my first story in 1st grade. if i really want to then why don't i? there are things. there are always things. i don't think i can write a novel. i think i can write short stories. so for now i should focus on writing the things i can. but i haven't written a short story in years. so maybe i can't do that. thomas would be very mad at me.

this blog could be empty. words inhabit the pages but for all intents and purposes they don't, because it is such a small, insignificant thing. every minute sees 400 hours of video uploaded to youtube, and an ungoldy amount of words and blog posts to an ungodly amount of websites. i think occasionally how the internet is bigger than the earth we inhabit in a way. i can fly to the farthest geographical point from my living room in half a day. i can not begin to imagine what the equally representative occurrence of that would be online.

today i am writing some words. i don't know if i will write some more soon or not. 3 emails sit unread. a blog post counter shows a small number increase by one. i format this post to be impersonal, neglecting grammar rules and formalities to make it seem disarming, distant, sardonic instead of simply dark. i mentally offer a "thanks" to any readers. the opportunity was all mine.