Eccentric Flower:200909/Daily Fail

It becomes obvious that I fail at any periodic tasks. I should have learned this over the years.

I frequently do not pay bills on time, despite my attempting to set a regular date for bill payment many times in the past. (I won't set automatic debits for any bills because I don't want those people getting my money without some sort of manual intervention step from me. I like knowing whenever anything is removed from my bank account.)

The second reason I gave up on posting a song every week was that it had become a chore, apparently - judging from my brain's stark refusal, despite memos to myself and sticky notes on my monitor, to regularly set aside the necessary few minutes on Sundays to find a track and do the necessary shuffling to upload it.

The second reason I have now removed the "One a Day" set from my Flickr sets and have removed the link to those photos (there's a more generic link to my photos now on the journal page) is because it became clear that this was in no way happening once a day, that in fact I had difficulty sometimes making it happen once a week. Some of that is because I run in the same ruts every day and run out of things to photograph along those ruts, but mostly what happens is I go home, I collapse, I play LOTRO or read a book until bedtime, and then - hell, it's too late to find and upload a photo tonight. (Upload the photo before I start playing or reading? That's crazy talk.)

The silver lining about this is that yesterday I posted 17 more photos in the Belle Isle/Revere Beach set, and some of them are beautiful, and nine more in the Montreal set. That closes out my backlog. I imagine you'll next get photos when the weather changes and there are fall or winter things to depict.

You'll notice I said "the second reason" for the two examples above. The first reason, in each case, was that I didn't feel enough people cared about the output to justify the continuing effort.

I know you like coming here and reading things and seeing things, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that you keep coming back - but I'm sorry, some days it is simply not enough. Some days I want a bigger audience, despite the evidence that I am far too lazy and apathetic to do the work to accumulate one. And then, other days, I don't give a damn whether anyone sees what I do at all. I fluctuate. I try to post something interesting daily, even just a photo a day for a while, in hopes that it will attract more people, that people will stumble upon the shiny objects and come here. Then suddenly the fit passes and I don't post for a week and all the effort is undone.

I can't stifle my creativity, nor would I want to, but I don't have much follow-through. Mostly these days I form ideas and enjoy them in my brain, where they never leave - putting them out in a form suitable for other people to see them usually strikes me as a bad cost/benefit equation. For example, I only write fiction these days if it springs from my brain almost fully-formed, which it seldom does.

I tell myself that if there were more of an audience I would have more imperative to do the legwork, and I might even be right. If I got activity on photos like Lisa does, I'd probably post as many as she does. (Of course, she also has no shortage of material.) But Flickr has something I generally avoid in all other locations (because I don't want to know because it will depress me): A built-in activity counter. I know exactly how few people are seeing my pictures, and it's depressing. It does not encourage me to post for anyone other than the small set of people who are already known to go look, just as I am not encouraged to write for anyone other than the small group of people who are already here.

There are days when I am jealous of the people who have Armies of Ardent Fans. Like Lisa. Or my wife.

And then there are days when I'm like, eh, well, the world doesn't care about me and I don't care about the world, I think I'll just go play.

Mostly these days I just go play. If writing crap like this in my journal weren't utterly effortless, there'd be almost nothing here right now. As it is, August had a mere sixteen entries - one every two days on average. Back in the day, my average month was generally about 1:1.

But the web was a lot smaller then, and it was easier to pretend it was worth giving a damn about.

Here's the deal, though: I will pursue a project if I know someone cares. Sometimes to a ridiculous degree. I spent two days hacking fruitlessly at a really fanciful idea Mrissa proposed in her journal, just because it was an idea I knew someone else was interested in seeing the results of.

I'm not fishing for praise here - nor for criticism, for that matter. I'm just making a flat statement: If I have a project you feel never got full effort, something you were hoping would see fruition or get the last chapter of or even some pages you wish I'd update or any of the thousand other dead ends I've left behind over the years, it does help to tell me so. You may not think it does, especially if you've told me repeatedly, but it does. It all gets filed away. I still have all of your story challenges from a few months back, for example, the ones I asked you for, because one never knows - just as I have a file full of old and rickety ideas some dating back to high school days, because one never knows.

Right now all of them strike me as too much work. Right now virtually everything strikes me as too much work. I found myself writing a light-operetta-ish version of a Shakespeare play in my head the other day, complete with song lyrics. Abandoned it. Too much work and what the hell does one do with Gilbert and Sullivan material these days anyhow?

But it all sits and ferments, waiting for someone to coax it out. I think that's the real problem. I'm waiting for someone to tell me that any of these ideas are worth the energy to coax out.

You must remember, as grim as this may seem (I don't actually see it as grim, but you probably will), that all these projects are in competition with online games. Online games are not always tremendously stimulating, but they are reasonably diverting for minimal effort; they don't ask a lot of me in terms of energy, and they provide a modest amount of social contact as well. But - with apologies to Mel, my online game partner - they are the path of least resistance. Some nights - rare nights, these days - I don't play because I have something to do that interests me more, even if it's more work. A good book. The occasional TV show I actually want to watch. (Mel lost me to a combination of "Top Gear" and Mary Russell last night.) Fooling around down in the shop. The trick is to make a writing project interest me more than spending the evening playing on the computer - and since writing (anything except journal entries) is more work than anything else I've named, it has to interest me a fair bit. The main thing that would make it interesting enough to me is knowing that someone else is interested.