The Disaster Artist

Something that I've been grappling with the entire year is the progression of "The Project", which is the name I gave to my goals that I set out for the 12-month period from December 1st, 2016 and December 1st 2017. The goals are as follows:

• 5 original short stories
• 5 songs, with lyrics and guitar and bass parts written
• My planned I, Musical Genius zine finished.

It feels shitty to admit it, but this is not and will not be finished. I realized about halfway through the year that this project was not going to get finished, but I held out hope that I would have a burst of creative energy near the deadline and get everything done. Being at the end of November now, I can say with absolute certainty that this goal is not possible, but that's okay. 

Let's take stock of what I have accomplished:

• 5 short stories begun. 1 finished. 1 half-done. 3 planned out, but unwritten.
• 5 guitar and bass parts written. Two sets of lyrics finished. Others in various states of disarray.
• I, Musical Genius zine untouched.

This is not as bad as it looks though. I do wish I had done more work on the short stories, but I also put a lot posts up on here that I'm proud of and certainly drew upon the same thoughts and energy that a short story does. Guess what? Writing fiction is much harder than you think. So much harder.

I found writing the guitar parts easy, but I fiddle with my acoustic so much. I actually ended up spitting out the initial versions of more than 8 songs. Bass is easy for me because I played bass in bands already. The lyrics have been very slow coming and I find it hard to say what I want to say.

In both cases, I know that the way to navigate the issues I'm having is to just write more and work through them that way. I just need to force myself to do that. 

The zine, I am not so worried about, because I ditched my original idea of assembling my "best" piece of writing on here and instead shifted to the idea of making a zine of my favourite baseball things I'm written. Keep an eye out for that.

It was hard to write this year because it felt like every time that I built myself up to do something, work got in the way. I was incredibly busy from the beginning of September to end of October and that was definitely the nail in my writing coffin. I would get home from work really tired and burnt out and it felt like even watching TV took too much energy and free time.

At this moment though, I'm back in the University of Guelph's library for the first time in ages, I have a week off of work and have time to actually do things I like. We'll see how much I can finish by next Tuesday and I will do my damnedest to make something that matters.