My creative writing calendar

Well it’s the start of the year and this will be a short post about what I did last year. A short post by my standards mind. 

Last year I wrote a lot. Like a lot a lot. Despite this, I failed the get your words out challenge as I was only counting creative writing and not writing in general. I have various writing projects. Some of them are story projects, other ones are more for things like this, blog posts and essays and stuff. 

So I failed the yearly challenge. I was aiming for 240 days of creative writing (500 words minimum each day) but I only got 211 days. It’s not so bad, I practically stopped writing fiction for August and September, but I still didn’t get those last 29 days.

In total I wrote 30 short stories and one novel, throwing down 234,575 words of creative writing. Not too bad, almost a quarter of a million words of creative fiction in a year.

The final writing push for nano. I locked the doors and wrote… but somehow still got distracted despite being set up with supplies and not needing to leave.

Then I counted all the other stuff I’d written.

As I mentioned I also write essays, thoughts, goals, basically all kinds of shit. I picked a few non-fiction books and did some self directed learning (it’s far cheaper to learn this way compared to the rates university are asking for the same knowledge) along with some online writing courses. All up I wrote for 264 days in that project. That’s a little over 5 days a week, every week, that I was writing on top of my creative writing. 

When I add up all the creative writing, the free writing, the journals, research, goals, and career stuff, it works out to 614,031 words. 

That’s the point of this post. Despite everything that happened and the feeling of failure I got from not hitting the GYWO challenge and from not releasing anything musically, I want to acknowledge that last year I wrote over 600,000 words and wrote on average 5 days a week.

I think it’s fair to say that I’ve cultivated a writing habit. 

Yet despite this I only shared one blog post for the year. I started 3 others but didn’t post them. This year who knows.

I had 450 words here with some thoughts about the term ‘hierogifs’, Topham Guerin,  What the Murdoch press have control over, and the repercussions of speaking your mind online when keyboard warriors doxx people due to textual misinterpretation that gets spread over social media.

But I’m going to cut that out and try to keep this short. Going on those type of tangents is why I write a lot but rarely publish.

What else happened in 2019 you ask?

In brief: 

– I patched things up with Bec in February

An enjoyable weekend together in December

– Stopped smoking

– Sent a bunch of postcards to people within the /r/edefinition community 

Matty King doing his postman thing

– I recorded a 5 track EP with Sam (but didn’t release it)

– I did 3 The Amazing Sloth Rider gigs and 1 Sectape gig

– Released 2 sloth rider video clips: Things that we lost and AI Panopticon

– Did a Soundscape and a Dronehell jam

– Decided to finally graduate uni and drove to Ballarat with Tommy to pick up my certificate

– I moved house and came back to Geelong

The crack shack look didn’t last long

– Started 2 permanent jobs

– Met a sick cunt called Marcus at one of the jobs

– Got some new pedals

– Had some amazing experiences that are now blurry memories

So that’s my year in a nutshell. Now I’m sitting here with the new year stretching in front of me and all I can think about is how these bushfires up in East Gippsland are burning out of control. Most of my extended family live up there and there’s a very real fear that some of them may die or lose their homes. It makes all of the above stuff seem pointless. I want to do something but there’s little I can do beyond donating money or canned food and stuff like that. It’s a powerless feeling, compounded by following our prime minister’s atrocious attempts at humanitarianism.

It’s really frustrating to see people who I perceive to have real power be so blind and short sighted. Murdoch has far too much power for an old cunt in England who owns a newspaper. Reading Dark Emu and learning snippets of how the aboriginal/indigenous first nation people used fire on this land makes me think there’s no point anyway. We are too far gone and we need to burn it all down and start again, without having such an apex of power. There’s obviously a lot of money being thrown around and I have no doubt that if we truly became revolutionary (as in changed our way of life to become more local and sustainable), we would piss off other world powers and just cause more of a shit fight.

But now this is turning into a ran. I don’t want to be just another voice amidst the noise, another arsehole with an opinion. I’d just post on Facebook and be done with it if that were the case.

So 2019. A year when stuff happened but likewise nothing truly amazing, despite me wanting it to be otherwise.