I Have No Technical Skills

I am a frayed and frazzled rope.

The other day while sharing with me his stories of misadventures in Minecraft and video streaming my son said something that stuck in my head and rattled about there.

Hollow rattle. Empty skull. Chewing gum like tenacity.

He said:

I slaughter MY cows.

This phrase stayed with me and ended up in my notebook along side some scribbled goals.

As I looked over these scribbles in such close proximity to that wonderful phrase, I realized I have entirely too many cows to slaughter.

And these scribbled goals? Well, they aren’t, really. Ideas, obligations, mental pursuits, story ideas, and other barely realized aspirations, but few actual goals.

As my daughter would call them: scribble scrabble.

These cows were not fat enough or mature enough for slaughter. Many of these ideas were but small calves not ready to come under the gaze of this butcher, and as I size up these cows I realized I am not as busy as I have felt.

I had started to feel so frazzled because I forgot to focus on what I could do. I forgot to filter and be selective, and my list got too long.

I have started the reduction of my farm to a very manageable amount of cows, and I plan on slaughtering them all.

I didn’t want to write anymore.

I had become so enamored with writing at one point, only to somehow have slipped into a bit the doldrums. I was going through the motions, learning new craft techniques, doing critiques on others’ works, but I had somewhere along the way stopped actually writing anything. I am not sure what happened, but somehow I lost the excitement I had for writing as I journeyed and worked so diligently to get better at it.

Realization of this has had me contemplating all the possible reasons for this loss of the passion, but I am honestly not sure how I got here.

So now I am on a quest to find the excitement again. First thing I am going to do is more regular posts. This free writing as I get my thoughts in order is helpful to unclog the pipes, or maybe grease the wheels, or some other fun catalyst or enzyme like phrase.

In order for this to work I have to get over the idea that every post has to be epic and super thought provoking. So I created this “Talking To Myself” category that I will assign these ramblings to.

So what cows do I need to slaughter?

One:

I want to get a time on my calendar to write. Thinking about writing, reading about writing, or critiquing others’ writing does not count. I must actually write.

This is on the calendar now. I have sort of already failed this. I missed the time frame tonight, but came back to it later. Life got in the way, and I think that is okay.

Two:

I need to draft the dead body flash fiction piece for the second chapter challenge we totally stole from Chuck Wendig. I have a couple of ideas, but hope to get to this during the week in my partitioned off slices of time.

Three:

More free writing with less emphasis on being perfect. I think this rambling blog post counts so yeah, progress.

In discussing this lack of excitement with writing with my amazing writing accountability/guilt partner we have decided to work on some sort of collaborative piece. This idea is in its infancy and is already getting me excited to write again. We aren’t sure what we are going to do or how we are going to do it. Fun!

Another idea for increasing the excitement: working on editing and rewriting one of the that same guilt partner’s previous older works (with permission of course). I am just trying to knock loose all the cobwebs and for some reason working on that piece sounds invigorating.

Well, this has been fun, all this talking to myself. I have written some very not perfect drivel, and I am thumbing my nose at the inner critic that is yelling at me to sit on this until tomorrow so I can find ALL THE MISTAKES DEAR GOD NO DON”T POST IT YET….

Posted. So there.