Well, I never wanted a blog. I mean really, who wants to read someone else’s bitches and moans and such. I really don’t fancy doing so. Well, some recent thinking has gotten me to do this. Just maybe this once.
Things aren’t honestly where I would like them. I took the job I have now soon after high school because of lack of funds for college. Its a pretty bad job, one that requires pretty much no real intelligence. I feel my mind rotting away, among other things parts of the body. Add to that a constant feeling of depression because its pretty much taken over my life.
In High School, I was pretty creative: I could draw (still pictures and comics) and I wrote some fiction. Its pretty amazing how we can lose this ability, just like a language, when its not used. I’ve learned this first hand. And to be honest, it kind of sucks. I thought of trying to get into doing such things again, maybe it would help me a bit, to be doing something good for the mind and get it off of other things.
Drawing is one of those skills that is hard to recover and required a lot of practice. A lot of practice requires a lot of time, which I do not have. I did not give this one too much thought, and made a half-hearted attempt.
I turned to writing. While not requiring practice per se, this skill is probably harder. In High School, I wrote a mix of my own original short stories, but I may be better known by two friends for my sequel to Jurassic Park. This, of course, was before Michael Crichton wrote the last world. It was decent and enjoyable, for a high school student with not much experience. The title said it all, however: “Return to the Island”. With such a poor title, how good could one expect it to be? A few years later, it was renamed “Puntarenas”, focusing on the coastal town that discovered some weird happenings. Several years later, old material was thrown out, and I started this new story. This new story too was lost to time.
I thought of writing again to maybe give myself something to do, and maybe help me feel better about myself, however little that may accomplish. Which leads me to this post. Finding something to write for the creatively challenged is not too easy. Writing original material is definitely out.
Which leaves me with something called “fan fiction”, something I had considered and the original thought behind this post. There’s the possibility working again on “Puntarenas”. The easy part of doing such a thing is that there’s little development to do: despite being criticized for his ‘cardboard cut-out’ characters (which I can only take to guess pretty typical or maybe bland), Michael Crichton has done that work for me. Continuing, of course, requires real life experience I truly lack, and at this point am mature enough to realize I can not do it. I have never been to Costa Rica, never mind Central America. so how can I wrote about a country, much less a town I have never been to?
Ok, scratch that. I enjoy a series called “Firefly” which had a short run on Fox, and a good candidate as is has a big following. The trouble with writing fan faction for this series is that there already exists an overwhelming amount. I would have to read all of it, because there’s a universe now in existence centered around the series. To be honest, a bit of it is what I would consider poor and hard to read; not that I consider myself even a good writer. Not that there’s anything wrong with writing about what one loves; however, the spelling and grammar are poor, and ideas poorly thought out. Then there is some which just annoys me. The original work had made some suggestions about what goes on in the ‘verse: relationships, politics and so on. Many of these authors have decided to follow the path of least resistance, this makes it hard for me to write what I want to. To give an example: there was a suggestion about the relationship between two characters, and those who wrote fan fiction made that relationship a reality, which ultimately fails. Big surprise. Then of course we have to get into the emotional aspect of it, which leaves the main character (unsurprisingly, if he were like everyone else) mopy, which is the antithesis of the character we saw in the show. Would it not have been more interesting to not have that relationship happen at all, and perhaps develop some animosity between the two? I think so. This is what I would write, and now I can’t.
All this thinking about getting started, and now it’s unlikely to happen.
Leave a Reply