I’ve got a lot of reasons and excuses, a few of which I will now bore you with.

1.  I am lazy

2.  I already have a bajillion hobbies

3.  There’s shit that needs doing

4.  I’m not very good at writing

5.  I find myself pretty strapped for ideas

So, that said, here’s the plan:

I’m going to put this on hiatus for at least 2 months.  In the mean time, I’m going to think about the process of writing, maybe even write a bit without a word count staring me down.  I’ll try and read some quality writing with an eye for what makes it good.  I’ll carry a note pad and write down any ideas that come up, as they come up.

Around the first of April, I’ll try it again.  If I stick with it, I’ll take the project on for 12 months, ending in April 2013 (insert stupid end of the world joke here).

That’s it.  I’m done, for a while.  I hope you aren’t too disappointed in me.

I have a really hard time with this, and I think it’s a two part problem.

First, I can’t seem to get across the emotions and feel of the story as I sense it in my head, it’s that interface between mind and output where the breakdown is.  I often feel like there’s a bottleneck in there, I get these ideas and then try to squeeze them through, but I just can’t get to them all, and by the time I get around to it I can’t remember exactly how it was supposed to go and it just doesn’t come out right.

This is the same reason I hate getting in arguments with friends and family about anything, or getting into political discussions of all sorts that take place in anything vaguely resembling real time.  I mean, I know why I think Ayn Rand is a horrible hell-spawned demon and Objectivism is an excuse for self centered people to feel good about being douchebags, but if you sat me down and asked me to explain myself, I’d have a hard time getting my point across.  I’d get flustered, confused, and twisted up, and may the Flying Spaghetti Monster help me if you actually argued with me and forced me to defend my position!

The second and much worse part is when I come back to my writing a day or a week or a year later.  Then the self doubt starts.  My old website was swallowed by the death of Geocities a few years ago, and there’s a big part of me that’s not sad it’s gone.  I really hated going back to that thing and rereading what I’d written in the past, I always felt so lame.  I made a personal rule that I would never delete anything on there, as it was a valid record of my mental state at the times I wrote there . . . which were usually at my very highest highs and very lowest lows, so the content was either “IAMS!OFUCK!INGAW!ESOME!!!” or “Life sucks and I suck and everything sucks and I’m sad.”  Later visits made me cringe, but I didn’t want to murder past-Ian by erasing his writings.  He had legitimate thoughts and feelings, it was just present-Ian that felt weird about it all.

That’s the most extreme example, but even other things, like the short story I’ve begun work on, suffer from the same problems.  I had this great kind of weird fiction/science fantasy thing going on in my head, an idea that’s been floating around for a long time–sorry for the vagueness, you’ll get to see the finished product someday, I hope, just not yet.  I wanted to convey an eerie sense of mystery and cosmic dread and massive confusion and general weirdness, but it just doesn’t seem to be coming across the way I want it to.  Now I don’t even want to look at it, to be honest with you.

I think it was in the Harlan Ellison biopic I watched a while back, they were talking about writing techniques.  Specifically, they mentioned some writers (maybe Ellison, I can’t remember for sure) taking the time to actually type out entire novels by their heroes, just to get the feel for what it means to write a great work, and get a sense of how excellent prose is put together.  I feel like I need something along those lines, but I don’t think it would count for the 250 words project!

I’m going to have to train myself to push past all that.  I want to treat this exercise in self flagellation like carving a statue out of a block of marble.  The difference is that first I’ve got to construct that block of marble from heaping piles of the dog crap I write, and then carve that away to reveal the beauty I think is actually I hope maybe if I’m really lucky in there.

So yeah, it’s a pretty badass present.  Still, I’m starting to wonder about the authors.  It’s pretty well illustrated, but I’ve built four of the launchers from it already, and three of them have required major modifications before they were usable!

Did they actually test these items?  One of them was clearly a concept piece that in no way could work they way they designed it!  I could definitely have done better . . .

My plan has been to build everything in this book ever since I opened it.  I’ll still do that, but in the end I think I’m going to end up making a blog or instructables post about how to make each of the mini weapons better–small changes to the initial instructions designed to make things work better, or just to make them work.  The second one I made didn’t work at all until I changed the design!

Anyway, criticisms aside, this is a really awesome book.  I love to build things, and this book is chalk full of fantastic little machines to build.  I’ve only made the small ones so far, but I’m planning on working my way up to building some little catapults and trebuches before too long!  Fear me, co-workers!

As February approached, I started to think of the future. By that point I had signed up over at 365project, and I’d started thinking about continuing for the full year. Could I do it? Did I have the strength of mind and force of will to make myself do a thing a day for a full year? I decided it would at least be worth trying!

I continued the project for all of 2011, and I made it! I had to scale back a bit, to only updating the project site once every week or two—or even longer around Halloween—but I still took a picture every single day for 365 days. I fudged things a bit once or twice, counting a picture that I’d taken after midnight as the previous day (I was still awake from the previous day, wasn’t I?) or going the other way and considering those 1 AM shots as the calendar day they were taken on, but I did it!

Early on, I got the idea that if I could prove to myself that I could buckle down and do a simple thing every day, maybe I could push that envelope and do something more complex. I’d been listening to the Dunesteef podcast, and the hosts had talked about writing 750 words a day. They said that was about one printed page, so if you did that every day for a year, that would be a 365 page novel. I thought, maybe I could do that?

I thought about it and thought about it, and eventually scaled it back a bit, but decided I could make it. I’ve changed it to just 250 words (more than 90,000 words in one year), and decided I’d let myself pay it forward or catch up as need be, as I’m sure there will be times this summer when I won’t be around a computer.

So I’m in! I’m going to do this! I don’t think I’m a very good writer, but maybe by January 1, 2012 (assuming the 2012 wackjobs are wrong, of course) I will be. I’ll probably mostly be writing these journal entries and short stories, but according to the SFWA, that’s more than two novels worth of words!

And now, the real question: who’s with me?

If you’d like to join in on Ian Fagan’s Crazy Ass Year of Writing 250 Words Every Fucking Day (or IFCAYoW250WEFD, for short), here are the rules:

1. You must average 250 words written per day, every day, for all 366 days of 2012 (91500 words).
2. If you write more than 250 words, they can count towards the next day, or make up for previous days.
3. The offset cannot be greater than 2 weeks—for example, if I wrote 3,500 words in a day (yeah, right), it would count for that day and the next 13 days if I need it to, but if I wrote 4,000 words in a day (ha!) it could still only be counted for the next 13 days, or make up for 13 previous days of not writing.
4. Journal entries must be published within one week to a blog or facebook page or something, and linked to for others to see.
5. Stories do not have to be published to a blog or whatever (unless you want to), but they must be submitted for publication to an honest to goodness publishing house, magazine, paying podcast, or paying market of some sort within one month of writing the last sentence of the first draft. This is of course going to be on the honor system, but if you join my crazy scheme I expect you to be honest.
6. If enough people are actually interested, I’ll make a facebook page and a forum for us to blah blah blah at each other in, and keep track of each others’ exploits.

Okay, there it is! Let the writing commence! Including this very sentence, I’m already up to 754 words!

I decided I’d read the wikipedia page on ICP and then the one dedicated to “Miracles.”  I was suitably horrified at how idiotic Violent J and Shaggy 2 Dope are, and I began to wonder how much time slavish juggalos spend editing entries about their heroes.

All that is besides the point.  There was a screen cap from the music video for “Miracles” which caught my eye, and I wondered, how has no one else ever noticed that before?  So here I submit to you my contribution to internet memery:

In the mean time, I’ll post my last January pic-a-day here.  I call it Playgrounds in the Mist: