I’m stumped, damnit! Stumped!
Servusamanu always gives me these fits. Normally I brush it off and ignore it for another week. This time I’m engaging it for a just a bit. It’s a decadent decision but how else am I going to proceed onto next week.
Problem: I don’t know what the hell to do with servusamanu. I’ve had this problem before and I’ve never really solved it.
Relevant Background: I’m hoping to be a writer and this is my ‘author’ website. That’s more or less where I ultimately see Servusamanu going but in the mean time I’m not a writer so what do I do with it? Plenty of people have ‘blogs’, characterized either by relevant discussion on a particular topic or on personalized story telling, but I don’t fit in to either catagory. I briefly thought to make Servusamanu about writing, but what is there to actually say? I read, I write, I try to get published. I don’t have enough time to throw up unpublished freebies and I don’t have enough real-life adventure to fill the pages with anything else.
There is the opportunity to just write about things as they come up. Lately I’ve been doing that a bit more – the trouble here is that I’m naturally opposed to typing anything especially ‘real’. Far from just sanitizing names, I actively avoid mentioning that other people even potentially exist. I’ve written about entire vacations without the slightest indication that I was not traveling completely alone. It works insofar as privacy laws and good sense, but it’s rather hard to be an entertaining raconteur when you’re stories are self-bowdlerized.
Take, for example, the list of ‘ideas’, I had for this entry.
1. I cooked banana ice cream. This was an article I saw on Reddit. Turns out it’s a real pain in the ass to blend frozen bananas. I think a food processor might have worked better. Other then that, there’s nothing to write. It’s one recipe cooking…
2. I’ve been playing LA Noire and Witcher 2. I might mention the obvious hard-boiled background behind LA Noire. It’s Perry Mason, Raymond Chandler, and James Ellroy put into a game. Fun times more or less but a little slow and somehow lacking in places. It’s a B+ game and there’s nothing else to write.
3. I got a new camera. I’m not a photographer. Here’s a picture I took of a squirrel. 
So far, this isn’t a blog material, just a list of things that I’ve seen and done. I might as well take photos of road signs and post them for everyone to gawk at. It’s nothing, a waste of time.
4. Earlier this weekend I traveled to Rehoboth Beach. The original plan was Virginia Beach but that turned out to be about 5 hours further than anyone would want to drive for a pointless beach excursion. I didn’t actually take any pictures of the beach and I didn’t do anything but lay out and tour the boardwalk. Travel writer I am not. Again, this is where my hesitancy comes into play. I obviously did not go there alone but I have no particular interest in describing anything more. How do you tell a story about a vacation without stories, anecdotes, curios of life and conversation. Impossible.
5. Next, I have my company. Amongst writing, infrequent travel, my day job, books and video games, and school, I’m trying to go full time with my own company doing websites and IT consulting. The problem here is slightly different. When it comes to websites my niche is cheap, fast, and modular. I’m not an artist, or programmer, or anything like that. My talent, if I have one, is finding simple and profitable ways of providing services to under-paying clients. I’m neither cutting edge nor visually impressive. I’m efficiently mediocre and by design. That’s my niche. Low cost – good enough product – solid support. As far as I’m concerned it’s a phenomenal business direction but it lacks pizazz. There’s nothing to show, nothing to explain, and nothing to brag about. Ingenuity requires talent that I lack, time I don’t have, and clients willing to pay for the privilege. I’m not there.
6. Lastly, there is my ‘field’. I work for libraries. It comes with certain frustrations and in person I can rant and rave on a thousand different angles. When it comes to servusamanu, I simply lose interest. I’m trying to sidestep myself out of the industry not wallow it’s it’s absurdity – kind of. It’s pretty easy to drop back into a rant and I’ve done that a few times. On the other hand I’m probably better ignoring the whole mess. Bad-mouthing my job is counter-productive at the best of times and largely unfair. Good days don’t bring me here so only the bad gets play time. That’s a recipe for disaster.
It all comes down to that clarion cry of the inadequate – I have nothing to say. Hopefully I will one day, but at current there’s just nothing to talk about. Choice 1: I continue tossing up bits and pieces of my life without actually saying anything. Choice 2: let it fall into abeyance until I’ve actually gotten something published. I suppose choice 2 is solidly obvious, but I’ve been tacking a half-ass crack at this for so long that it seems rather silly to put it all away now. The stock-market loss fallacy in practice. I justify everything to myself as ‘practice’. When it comes to writing, practice does actually mean something. One can get better.
This brings me to an idea – being generated in real time.
I have a long long list of stories that I’ll realistically never be able to get to. They’re silly ideas, or too long, or I’m just there yet. Some I’d like to write someday. A whole bunch I’ll just never really follow through on. Since I already allocate a piece of time to writing at Servusamanu, perhaps I should explore some of these ideas a little more. I certainly never have to finish any of the stories. I can pick them up and drop them the moment I get bored. If an idea looks good than I can change a few things, extend, actually do some editing, and have a real story to work with. That’s only if I like them. The rest of the time it’ll just be the detritus of writing left around. How does that sound? Shall Servusamanu become a notebook of failed sketches. At the moment that sounds about right anyway. Hmm.
It always amazes me how long I can make these things. This article is over 1,000 words. It takes me days to get 1000 words of story done. (Editing takes forever. Shows just how long proof-reading actually takes. Luckily, I don’t even skim this thing before I hit publish.)
No final conclusion. Maybe I’ll do that. Maybe I won’t. Here’s a picture of my back window in black and white.
