I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t end up writing anything on my short story yesterday, because there were many distractions and frustrations.  I started the day in an unusually clear-headed and optimistic mood.  I even read a bit of Quantum Field Theory, As Simply As Possible in the morning, and that was nice.  But as the day went on and the chaos persisted‒especially the noise‒my optimism dwindled.

Then, in that latter part of the afternoon, I decided to force myself.  It’s just a single page, I thought, so it shouldn’t take long even if I do it between work tasks.  So, I got out the notebook and started up.  I used two different pens over the course of the approximate one and a half pages that I wrote, but write I did.

As I wrote, I could see again my tendency to digress into details perhaps just a bit much; I need to keep a weather eye on that tendency.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like getting into details, and into the minds of my characters.  Reading fiction and getting those insights into other people’s thought processes, even if they were fictional, really helped me in dealing with people as I grew up.  That’s a potentially useful hint: if you’re a replicant among humans, read a lot of fiction.  You can get whole lifetimes worth of insight into the their minds by doing so.  Indeed, you can get more than lifetimes worth of such insight, since in “real life” one never gets to see people’s thoughts unfiltered.

I’m not saying that fictional depictions are perfectly reliable and fully accurate representations of how humans think.  It’s fiction, after all.  But across genres and works, across authors living at widely disparate times, there are commonalities that one can pick up.

There may be selection bias at work as well, of course, since all works of fiction have been produced by fiction writers, and they may have common attributes not necessarily shared by those who do not write fiction.  But when findings from fiction correlate well with, and explain well, the behaviors and speech of people who are most assuredly not fiction writers, one can begin to assign higher credence to such things.

How on earth did I get into that train of subjects?  Oh, right, I was talking about my tendency to digress a bit in my fiction.  How very “meta” of me to digress even as I was writing about digression.

If I keep writing fiction‒assuming I don’t just die soon, which would also be tolerable‒I think I may adjust my guidelines during editing.

In my published works so far‒not counting this blog‒I made a rule that I needed to cut the final word count by at least 10% relative to the first draft.  That’s right:  Unanimity was one ninth again longer when I first wrote it!  Anyway, I may decide to set my target at a more draconian 15% level in the future.  20% seems as though it might entail too much cutting, but maybe 10% is too little.

I guess we’ll see.  Maybe I shouldn’t combine the effects of handwriting the first draft (which should encourage at least some brevity) and an increase in my culling target.  I guess I have time to ponder this matter and let my subconscious mind digest it.

In other news, I did play guitar a bit yesterday‒just those two songs I mentioned in yesterday’s post‒and I guess that was a bit of fun.  It seems my long breaks at least haven’t made me too rusty in my playing; I even feel that my intuitive feel for shifting between versions of  a chord while playing has improved.  I guess it’s possible.

I also walked most of the way back from the train station last night.  I didn’t make it quite all the way before summoning a ride, since I decided I didn’t want to push things too much, but it was a good walk of more than three miles.  I hope to increase it and add a walk to my mornings as well.  This will eat into my time, of course, and I worry about it discouraging my fiction writing.  I may go back to doing this blog less often in the future if I continue to feel able to write fiction and do get my walking going again.

I still have several moments during every day in which I think I just want to walk away from reality and existence, figuratively speaking.  The world can be horrifyingly frustrating and painful for me, and since I can’t convince myself that it would be okay to destroy the world, there’s always the option of destroying the universe (from my point of view) by destroying myself.

They call it “unaliving”* on YouTube, nowadays, apparently, because the YouTube algorithms are prone to block or interfere with videos that include the word “suicide”.  How stupid are these social media companies?  It’s ultramoronic to impair the use of a word simply because it refers to a real subject that is not necessarily comfortable.  The word “suicide” never magically induced anyone to kill him- or herself.  If anything, bringing it up can help take the taboo off and allow people who are suffering to feel that it may just be okay for them to talk about it.

Ha ha. Just kidding.  Nobody really wants you to talk about it, believe me, other than professionals who deal with the issues as part of their jobs, and rare volunteers, who are alas strangers, and who I suspect go into the work because of familiarity‒directly or indirectly‒with the problems of depression and suicide.  Most people just don’t want to deal with it.  I suspect that, secretly, many of them would prefer you to kill yourself rather than harsh their mellow.

Maybe destroying the world really would be morally appropriate.  At least I can do it in fiction if I want‒and I have done so, and have failed to do so, in more than one work.

Anyway, sorry about the regression to the mean (or at least to the unkind) there near the end.  I hope you all have a good day.

*”Unalive” sounds like it should be the opposite of “undead”.  So, if the undead are, in one sense or another, walking corpses, then the unalive should be inert living beings.  This sounds more like a description of those with major depression or chronic depression (dysthymia) than someone who has killed themselves, though the outcome of the former may certainly be the latter.  The euphemism is confusing and misleading, if you ask me.  The suppression of videos and the like that use the term “suicide” does not seem likely to decrease the rate of actual suicide, but may make a person contemplating it or troubled by thoughts of it feel even more alienated than they already do.  I know of at least one case where this is so.