If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Puffing your own sail

Left to my own devices I can stir up a lot of trouble.  The phrase," getting in over your head" applies to me like a colorform to a refrigerator.  "Biting off more  than you can chew", even with my big mouth and extra girth is always a mainstay.  Like Pinocchio and his nose, my infatuation with challenging myself is always growing.
Saying no is almost impossible.    Either I am just not afraid of anything (except hairy spiders), too bold, too egotistical or perhaps just plain ignorant, I can never be satisfied with done.  Hard to express in words sometimes but it is just never finished.  I have to take one more step, write one more word, grow one more plant, paint one more wall.  If I finish all that then it probably will need to be re-done in a short period of time.  I'm ok with that.  (Wife probably not.)  The whole point of this is if you look over to the right hand side of the page you will see a new badge.  The A to Z challenge.  Click on it for details but the basics are write one blog for every day of the month except Sundays covering the letters of the alphabet.  Start with A and end with Z.  This begins in April.
Now anyone who follows me knows I have a soft stance on blogging during the week and this will be quite a challenge for me.  Sure I could start now and write all my blogs ahead of time and save them until April but that isn't much of a challenge.  That's more like homework.  I could pick my topics ahead of time and then I would have months to think about them but that feels like cheating. 
My plan is to write each day with no pre- planning.  When I sit down that day I will pick a topic at that precise moment and blog about it.  The challenge lies therein to keep it entertaining.  What good are words if your not moved by them.  It should be interesting! 

I have started my new book.  It isn't progressing like I would like but Rome wasn't built in a day right? 
I love the idea and I get this fluttery feeling in my heart when I think about it but writing is hard.  Especially without any formal training or college or whatever it is that you have to do to write books. 
One of my favorite books of all time is Stephen King's book titled On Writing.  Now Steve is a gozillionaire and my all time favorite author but he really boils it down to the basics.  He states if you want to write than read.  The more you read the better.  He also states to just write.  It doesn't matter if it works or not the progress comes from just doing it.  He also says he doesn't like adverbs.  Yeah he did get a little grammatical but when you look at it they really are just filler.  Damn exemplifiers anyways.  Good writing doesn't need any.
I think the really (adverb) hard part comes from the self doubt.  You want to succeed in the worst way but are terrified of the outcome.  The judging, the criticism or just the outright denial.  Steve was turned down hundreds of times and one of his first pubs was in a magazine.  Just a little short story that he made like $300 bucks off of.  Don't quote me on the amounts or anything I'd have to look it up in the book but it is something like that.
So all of this talk about challenging myself and when it boils down to it.....I guess I am a little afraid.
Self encouragement only takes you so far.  I mean how far can you puff your own sail?
So just because I need a bit of encouragement (even if it is just so I can puff my way a bit further) I want to share a excerpt from my writings.  I won't give the title or what the story is about because I don't want anyone on the web stealing it. (it's a  good title and storyline).


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Forward


To whom it may concern,


I write to you this day with a heavy sadness upon my heart. A burden I can no longer carry and one that drags my soul into a deeper pit of hell than I hope you may never have to imagine. I have lived a life of torment, shame, ridicule and abuse. I will no longer suffer myself to such torment. I will no longer bear the pain of a lost childhood, the death of my children and deterioration of my abstract life. I will no longer accept the possibility of a self-awakening into a happier place. It is done. I shall be of no great loss, as my place in this world of yours was nothing more than a passing glance. A brief nod, received more as a gesture of contempt than of acceptance. My mediocrity is my downfall. I only ask that you remember me for who I should have been and not who I was. Lord have mercy upon my soul.



Prologue:

It was this note that started everything. My end of all ends, my grand finale, the “easy” way out. My only downfall was I linked it to the damn Facebook page instead of hitting the print button. It wasn’t meant to be there, on Facebook that is, It was my private thoughts which I believed to be my last. Read by only the closest to my miserable speck of life and not half of the Facebook nation. Little did I know the effect it would have and the repercussions that lay in store for me. Good, bad or indifferent everything has a reason. Fate intermingles with destiny and reasoning wrestles with imagination. It is here now many years later that I write to you my true last thoughts and without hesitation and without censorship. My one, my last, Suicide Writing.



Chapter 1

Cause and Effect

There were a lot of normal kids in our neighborhood. Kids that played basketball,  football and pick-up games of baseball in the vacant lot across from our house. They were good at it. Born with a healthy physique they were strong willed and most of all naturally gifted. I wasn’t one of them.

I was the kid that was always picked last or more often than not told I was odd man out and had to sit until someone got tired. No one ever got tired. Not even the kid that stuttered and had asthma. They picked him before me and I believe he was even slightly retarded. My days consisted of reading books and lying for hours on end with my vast collection of Legos and dreaming of faraway places. Little, square headed men building space ships and heavy defenses against an invasion that would never come.  This was my sport.

There was even a point that my step mother, at that particular time, took me to the doctors to see if I was all right. I was only about 12 or 13 at the time. The Dr. was a freak and checked my prostate. I think he was a pedophile wrapped in a white coat. Nothing was found of course, in my ass or otherwise, and I continued life at its abnormal pace.

I had accepted my role in life as a loner, subservient and buried myself in books and any other imaginative process that would carry me away to far lands where I didn’t have to be strong or talented. I was reading a book a day by the time I hit Jr. High School.
Girls? Forget about it.
I often wondered if I was a result of tragic childhood experiences or if I was just a freak. This was the time of the great talk show debuts and you could trace everything back to a childhood experience. In fact people were being murdered and the cases were judged not guilty because the defendant did not get what he wanted for Christmas when he was 9 yrs. old.
It was a sad time and I remember thinking that I would not ever blame anything on my childhood. I was the biggest advocate ever of “You are what you make yourself”. Not “you are a cruel example of what can go wrong in the early years.” I believed this for almost 30 years.
I wish I still did but the evidence states contrary my dear Watson. Time heals everything they say but what they don’t tell you is time also grows everything. Like a tumor it hides in your belly and as the years go by it grows. Sneaking and growing, crawling up and out and when it’s too late it bursts. Unfortunately now there is no time for healing. No time left. You’re stripped, left naked and exposed. Like a nerve in a tooth, as the layers are peeled away every touch becomes more and more painful until finally the tooth must come out. It was time to stop.

There are many examples I could list. Perhaps half dozen of those talk show episodes would be needed to cover them all. In the end it really wasn’t about me. Never was. I was and still am just a pawn in the game, slightly more than an extra but nonetheless not a major player. Waiting on the sidelines until someone gets tired and then and only then do they come calling. After all these years I finally get to go in the game. The pinch hit, the winning field goal whatever the cause I will be the effect. It was finally my time and boy did I ever shine.

Hope ya liked it
-Bushman



4 comments:

  1. This was absolutely fantastic. Really great writing. Life can be so cruel but it is what you make of it that counts!

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  2. Puffing your own sail? I tried that, but ended up in the hospital.
    By the way, what Barb said. Great post!

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  3. I can relate to this too well. I was also more content to be alone. It wasn't even that I didn't like girls or that I hated other people, I just liked doing my own thing. I liked being alone.

    Also, On Writing is probably one of my favorites as well. That's always sitting on my desk, at the ready.

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