How This Blog (is Supposed to) Work(s)

Why hello there, would be readers. We’re going to get a bit meta with this week’s post and outline exactly how this blog works. Or, well, how it’s supposed to work, since it’s a bit on the fritz lately, much like everything in my life since the birth of my daughter. Babies are not one for routine, it seems. 

We’ll start at the beginning with the naming of this blog as the source of the topics for each article and we’ll move through with the breakdown, why that isn’t happening as frequently, why I’m having to force myself to write at the end of the week now as opposed to the beginning of the week like when I started the blog back in [checks notes] March? That doesn’t seem right, but okay. 

I hope this is somewhat entertaining if not just sort of elucidating a bit how my mind works when it comes to writing. If nothing else, it’s therapeutic to get this out of my head, which of course is the final bit we’ll cover, the why write of it all, so let’s just get into it without stalling much more for time. It’s not like stalling for time does anything in the context of writing anyway, since you’ll be reading this long after I am done writing it and how long it takes to write usually isn’t too apparent in the body of work since it is all presented as one complete piece. Here we go. 

Recursive Thoughts 

Those of you who program might already be familiar with the concept of recursion. For a fun little demonstration of the concept, anyone can google the world “recursion” and see it in action. When one does so, the words Did you mean: recursion pop up at the top, like when a googled word is misspelled.

In programming, a recursion loop or error is when a function calls itself within its own definition to solve a problem by breaking it into several smaller subproblems, according to the definition provided by Google. The result is an endless loop of the function calling upon itself to solve the problem in an endless execution. 

Any early form of recursion.

For those of us who do not program, recursion is simply an endless repetition of an idea broken into smaller forms of that idea, usually in an endless loop. Fractals can be thought of as a visual type of recursion. The mythical figure of the Orouboros is another visual representation as the snake eats its own tail, forever. 

When I first decided to make this blog, I had no intention of naming it. Names and titles can be a struggle for me at times, but to be honest I never really even thought of naming the blog. I was telling a good friend who also has done a bit of blogging in his day, albeit in the realm of architecture, when he asked me what the name of the blog was. 

This question of a name put the blog into perspective for me in a way I hadn’t considered up until this point. I was several weeks into posting weekly entries at this point under the guise of writing every day and only publishing what seemed good enough to post and that seemed to be the purpose of the blog. Everyday Thoughts? Was that a good title? Evoking the concept that writing is a form of thinking for me and the occurrence of that thinking taking place every day? Also, there’s a play on “Everyday” in that it suggests these are normal thoughts, commonplace, when my writing style is, shall we say, a bit too elevated to the point of obnoxiousness at times. 

Probably too soon for another picture, but you don’t write about Ouroboros without showing it off.

I hated it, so we moved on, but the form of the thing had taken place. There’s an idea in the creative field for those who work for clients or bosses who commission work to be done. It’s much easier for those in charge to critique something endlessly than it is for them to put into words exactly what they envision the end product to be. It’s hard for some people to start from scratch, in other words, and having some of the form on paper down to mold into a more accurate shape is easier. 

I’m not one of those people, but much like woodworking, I could see the end product within that first attempt. A blog title shouldn’t be too long. That’s what article titles are for (I just like being needlessly wordy - I find it humorous, spare me). So there was something in the form of “Everyday Thoughts” that I liked and could envision being close to the end goal of a blog title. Commence the encircling. 

Encircling, for those of us who have traveled through the frontier wilderness, is a concept whereby a train of covered wagons forms a circle to protect their charges from the outside elements, usually at night, while they rest. For me, it is the practice of obsessing over an idea until that idea has been completely surrounded by my thoughts and understood to the point where I feel confident that it should be put down to paper. This practice happens almost without effort in the spare times of my life - showering, driving, traveling from one spot to the next - basically any time when my mind is at “rest,” it is doing this encircling process. 

The rub. If I never write down the concepts that I’ve been obsessing over in this encircling process, it never actually ends. I keep encircling. The wagons are always circled. The concept never goes anywhere because there’s nowhere for it to go. The only way out of my brain is through my fingertips (or my mouth, I do podcast some of this stuff out (www.zerocredits.net)). The ideas start to fold into themselves in repetition - hence, recursion. 

Never miss an opportunity to self promote.

Recursive Thoughts. A place for all of the obsessive ideas that haunt the spare times of my brain. 

The Process of Writing a Post (and Why It’s Not Happening as Much Now)

Well, I pretty much covered the how in the reasoning behind the name. An idea pops into my head from the active part of my day. Talking to people, reading about current events, watching various television shows (currently watching Portlandia for some reason), or any other sort of active action puts the idea in my head either consciously or subconsciously. During a brain down time moment (the spare times), that idea starts to worm its way into the center of the circled wagons and becomes an obsessive thought for me to process through. Once I feel as though I’ve obsessed enough over the thought, I start writing out the ideas and all of those encircled ideas spill out of my fingertips as easily as breathing. 

It’s a pretty straightforward process and kind of airtight, when you look at it all on paper. The bulk of the work, the encircling, happens almost automatically since it’s done by the passive part of my brain. So why isn’t it happening as much lately? In a word, I’m tired. 

Juggling raising a newborn and a fulltime job is not something I’ve read much about or heard much about in the avenues of my life beyond the very tiresome quips from those who have done it before, long, long ago in a completely different societal environment. So let me be the first to say it without an ounce of sarcasm or mean-spirited humor: being a parent and a full time employee is the hardest thing I’ve done. 

Pictured: Stressed office worker

It’s funny and I don’t want to dive too deep into the gendered nature of this experience, but when I mention I’m tired to people at work as a father, there is little to no sympathy. Instead, I am met with jokes to the tune of, “you think you’re tired now. Wait until [insert some future milestone that will no doubt bring me endless joy because every milestone for my child is pure magic].” There’s this weird need to forecast doom with early childrearing. “Oh, they’re actually sweet at this age and I miss when my children were that young. Before, [thousand yard stare] it all changed…” 

And, yeah, maybe it gets worse, but the fact of the matter is I’m still more tired than I’ve ever been right now. And maybe I’ll be even more tired when I get to whatever milestone it is they allude to, but that doesn’t magically make me less tired right now. 

I haven’t gotten more than five hours of sleep straight in months and I used to sleep six to seven hours on the regular.

The compounding result of this is that the spare times where I used to ruminate and compose are spent fighting to stay awake or wake up (the drive home after work is the worst for this). There’s less thinking going on and that means less polished and less thoughts overall escaping my fingertips.

This is why some of these articles keep hitting a wall halfway through that I just sort of power through for the sake of completing the article (see: Back When Tigers Used to Smoke). 

Why with the Writing, Then, Mr. Sleepybrain?

The short and simple is that for me, there is no difference between writing and thinking. They are one in the same action with different results. There’s no evidence that I’ve been thinking without writing it down is the only catch. 

I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of writers out there, but the process of thinking about what I’m going to write and the act of sitting down to write are basically the same action. All of the thinking, all of the pre-writing, flexes the same writing muscles that I use when it comes down to actually putting fingers to keys and pounding out the letters and words that make these sentences. 

So the answer to why is a simple one - because the thinking truly never really stops. Sure, I’m spending my spare times fighting to stay awake, but how do I do that? By thinking. And sure, I’m trying to wake up in the morning in the show and I accomplish that by thinking. With all this thinking and thinking in these spare times, there’s a backlog of thoughts piling up in my brain and with the recursive nature of how I think, they’re starting to repeat to the point of being tuned out altogether. 

The one difference between thinking and writing is that when a thought is written, it leaves my brain. If I don’t write out a thought, it gets tuned out and ultimately fades after a period of time. And when a thought fades, all of the work encircling that thought, carrying it through weeks and weeks, and developing it to a point where I feel confident about putting it to paper fades with it - lost, like tears in rain to quote Bladerunner. 

Pictured: My thoughts fading

At some level, I feel obligated to write down the thoughts I’ve been carrying if nothing else to free up space for my brain and also to ensure those thoughts and the work that went into forming them doesn’t disappear. It’s a matter of finding the energy and time to sit down and pound out the keys so the letters form the words and sentences, but it’s something that is important to me, ultimately, and so that’s why with the writing, folks. 

A Sad Secret

There’s been a sort of half-truth woven throughout this article, or well, I haven’t been completely honest with the scope of what we’ve been talking about. You see, I’ve framed this thought-to-writing process as the method by which this blog works, but the truth is much larger. What I’ve outlined in this post is actually how my brain approaches any form of writing, including and especially including my work in fiction. 

And the sad part of this secret is that I haven’t been writing fiction, not for quite some time even before the birth of my daughter. The thoughts still happen - I still compose the ideas, scenes, sentences that would go into my work. But the writing isn’t happening. All of these thoughts just fade because it’s kind of easier to just let them disappear then to put them down to paper.

This blog is a way to get into the practice of writing my thoughts down again, of figuring out when and where the little free time that I have is and to commit to getting back into the habit of putting words to the fiction I like to create. 

The other half of the sad secret is that it is ultimately easier to write down my personal thoughts than it is to craft fiction. I can be confident in what I think is what I think and throw out any notion of whether or not what I think is good, but that barrier still exists when it comes to my fiction. 

There’s no easy way out of that and I can’t pretend that writing a personal blog will help, but that is why I try to challenge myself with off the wall topics that are outside of myself sometimes. Either way, I love writing and I want to continue to do it in whatever form that writing takes. I hope you enjoy it, too, but to be honest, I’m just trying to clear my head a little.

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A little post script for you:

The blog isn’t dying or anything, in fact, I’m trying to improve it more each day. There’s a new RSS feed to subscribe to, if that’s your thing and you want to know the second there’s a new post without waiting for me to lose a coin flip and post to my instagram. You can find a subscribe button at the top of the main blog page and also right here, if I can figure out how to post it here.

I’m considering adding comments as well, so we can form a little community, but that’s much more down the pipeline. For now and as always, stay tuned.