I write books in between dealing with other human beings, and I somehow find the time to write while being swamped under a university degree. This is because I find not writing for too long physically uncomfortable. I didn’t just buy an iPad because I wanted to read eBooks on it and play around online with it, but because I discovered this device could allow me to write down the thoughts of my every waking moment so I never miss an idea that might be worth something. I’m the kind of person who traditional pen and paper writers would be confused by, I even switched to mainly ebooks because a feature of my high functioning autism is, I don’t like getting my nice books creased and scuffed up so I back them up to my hard drive from Kindle where possible via clandestine methods the MPAA and RIAA would frown upon. I’m a product of my time, in the better way than the kinda way you use that word to mean outdated un-PC humour from old films like The Kentucky Fried Movie or The Flintstones’ racial stereotyping. The Kentucky Fried Movie has some good ideas in it, so does The Flintstones, but the jokes that didn't age well just aren't all that funny to me at least. It happens. I mean that i’m used to the idea of online distractions being online research tools whether you realise it or not. I’ve gone to some of my university classes with two hours sleep and i came out of there with more knowledge than one would expect an insomniac to soak in. I watch internet television - no not TV pirated on the internet, actual TV made for the internet. Screw reality television, I want to see what horrendous remnant of the Best Buy bargain bin nerds in their basement with cameras acting as critic comedians are gonna torture themselves with this week. Usually when i watch actual old media TV it’s in a DVD box set and it’s usually anime, something made by HBO, or cartoons and old TV classics like Star Trek that actually worth watching versus a bunch of crap they put on DVD because everything has to be on DVD. And i buy a lot of movies on DVD too because i enjoy movies and my film school grad brother doesn’t read nearly as many books as I do so i have to communicate to him through the second language of cinema. And i read more books on my iPad because i carry it with me everywhere and i can write a book on the same device as i read one on. And while navigating the minefield of modern life’s distractions, books somehow get read and written, because i make time for them. Right now i have no real romantic or social life to speak of, and i became a writer because i wanted to do something productive with my tenure as a lonely shut in instead of whining into the abyss of internet forums which have no love for the mentally tortured whatsoever - a stupid thing i did because i had assumed internet forums worked like they did in Train Man by Hitori Nakano where the anime nerd is helped out by his forumite bros to ask out the girl of his dreams he just saved from a drunk guy on a train, hence the title. But my attempts at reaching out to the cold heart of two separate internet forums i now no longer post on were repaid, perhaps deservedly, with scorn and bile aimed at the whiny beeyotch-ness i once was and currently attempt to avoid returning to despite multiple failures in this department. This is the reason I only post on TV Tropes anymore. I spent about sevem years in the online wilderness trying to find both a place to belong, and myself. I haven’t found either one of those things but I’m still trying. Still trying even after constantly failing to find those is what’s important. The times i just gave up on everything were some of my most miserable. Of course this is coming from a man who staved off suicidal thoughts by shifting my haterade from loathing myself to something productive, like despising the Australian government for not giving us a bill of rights after more than a century. Also, writing was the cheapest medium of art I could find I could latch onto. That and I liked reading books enough to want to contribute to the craft of bookmanship instead of just reading Roger Lancelyn Green's Tales Of The Greek Heroes over and over until the spine began to fall apart (again, this is why as a high functioning autistics love ebooks, the tech is replaced and not the books). I wanted to be part of it all, i wanted to give people my age a reason to read again, since the perception of books compared to other mediums like film and television has much less razzle dazzle. I could probably write an entire post on razzle dazzle other mediums other than literature supposedly have, but this post is getting long as it is, so I’m trying to get to the point I originally started out with. Which was gestation of ideas. Often I try to write all of the ideas at once instead of focusing on three or four points to put in lots of blogs so I maintain some kind of productivity average that isn’t awful and makes me look lazy. So I decided to write this one blog post and shortening the other about eighteen blog posts gestating and needing to be cannibalised into other, better blog posts sooner or later. I know I keep promising that blog review of Mishima: A Life In Four Colours but right now since I'm at university my existence is a bit more Jacob Martin: A Life In Four Semesters. So instead I'm going to talk about Scott Morgan and his book How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch, since I both recently purchased and read it, and going into Mishima: A Life In Four Colours unprepared and unresearched could get me death threats from Japanese right wing groups, possibly even litigation from the author's widow if I dare suggest Mishima was gay, as I found out before sidelining that project in the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts. Meanwhile let's get to the point of the whole ideas gestation thing I hope I got across but probably didn't, as my arrest record by the Tangent Police is a long and storied one.
Basically what I was trying to say is, How To Be A Whiny Beeyotch is a book that mentions different excuses authors use for not writing and I noticed that there was a particular disdain for Hogan's Heroes reruns, and maybe by extension spending time watching reruns of anything. Scott Morgan seems like a very Generation X dude since his mentions of disdain for flannel shirts and goatees does not match my Generation Y appreciation of them, not so much as a retro thing like he fears. So he's right that things like TV reruns and internet dicking around is distracting to modern writers but at the same time my high functioning autism comes into play where I hyperfocus on things I'm really interested in, so my writing generally takes priority over things I actually should be doing as well like university assignments since I'm still bad at time management and do not know how the real world outside of my parent's house actually works despite my paying the rent to live there. Also the gestation of ideas I get when I go outside and then watch something like some internet TV where nerds in their basements are torturing themselves with the latest Hollywood dreck they found in the bargain bin of a Best Buy (most internet comedians are American, as an Australian I should say I shop at JB Hi-Fi which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm aware), only to realise somewhere buried in the crazed rantings of that internet comedian that something inside that movie made that person react in a certain way that gives me a new approach to write a story or book with. And then I read an actual book, just to keep myself in tune with what the written word actually looks like. I mentioned The Kentucky Fried Movie earlier not just to cite it as an example of something that hasn't aged well on either a PC or comedic level but it's also the source of an idea I had for a short story collection where despite each short story having vastly different universes, some of them are similar enough that characters could appear in two rather than one story in cameos, like Big Jim Slade from The Kentucky Fried Movie emerging from one sketch only to resurface in another sketch unrelated to him called A Fistful Of Yen where he breaks other characters out of prison. Considering The Kentucky Fried Movie is a collection of short sketches, and short story collections are anthologies unto themselves, the idea of one character from one story reappearing in another is one worth recycling in my writing, hence watching a random film like The Kentucky Fried Movie was not a waste of unproductive time for me as a writer, it's not like I'm watching reruns of Hogan's Heroes and doing nothing with the experience. If anything watching new audiovisual material that's odd enough to be worth remembering rejigs my memory of unfinished stories or novels worth rescuing and bringing back out of the Esky Of Unfinished Concepts to be completed, since a lot of these ideas aren't bad, they're incomplete and need to gestate for a while before continuing. Which is a lot like that Mishima: A Life In Four Colours review. I'm not not writing it because I'm lazy, it's because I'm still writing other things while juggling university stuff and my research for university to obtain grades outweighs research that will help me avoid death threats from apologists for Imperial Japan. I've got enough on my plate as it is.
Oh, and as for why I trackback linked Scott Morgan? Trackback linking won me an interview with Australian radio personality John Safran before. So if I link to his website through my blog he'll probably notice, and might offer a rebuttal. Which is good because I've noticed he's been lamenting that new people don't reach out to him as much any more for Twitter discussions. Consider this the beginning of a discussion, Scott Morgan. I just rode your coattails before you knew it.
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