Back in 2012, I was feeling creatively starved. Work and family… family and work. Except for the 45 minutes of my morning commute where I tried to progress my version of the great American Sci-Fi novel, I had no outlet for the ideas that struck me as funny, the things I’d see during the day that were odd and weird and deserved more than just getting filed in my memory to be used as conversation fodder during an awkward pause with a coworker at the next office Christmas party.
So with New Years Day 2013, I decided to start up a blog and write something every day. Personal Hold Music was both fun and funny. And while the “write every day” rule lasted about a week before it was converted to not include the weekends – then changed to five days in a row – I was consistent for the first half of the year. Then the creative well started to dry up. The writing changed from fun to work. Then changes at my actual work killed all of the fun that was left.
Now fast forward. It’s a couple of days after New Years 2015 and my dog has gotten me up at 3:30 in the F’in morning to take him outside. And as his pee is pooling up in a bare spot of the frost frozen ground and steam is wafting upwards, it suddenly occurs to me that how funny it would be if Wonder Woman had to deal with a sexist salesman when she bought her invisible jet.
The writing/creativity mojo, it would seem, is back. And to encourage it, I’m starting “The Writin’ Project”. This blog, unlike Personal Hold Music, won’t be limited to just funny flash fiction. The pressure to always be amusing is most likely what dried up the creativity in the first place. Instead, I’m going for consistency. Whether funny flash fiction or my thoughts on something I saw on the news, the idea is to write something, to feed the creativity. To paraphrase the mantra of the 70’s, there are children starving in Africa for creativity. When a coworker mentions a shooting he saw on TV and five of us in the lunchroom legitimately have to ask “Which one?”, that’s some creativity that shouldn’t be wasted.
The Writin' Project 