A Month Into This Project, Here’s What I’ve Learned
Filed under : Updates
Written on March 31, 2015
There might be a few of these “update” style posts throughout this insane project, but they do not count towards the “story a day” goal, so you can ignore these if you wish. That said, I just wanted to kinda meta-blog about how this journey’s gone so far, and some things I’ve learned.
First and foremost – holy shitballs the response has been incredible. People are reading these things! That’s kinda crazy to me. I figured I’d be well over halfway through this thing before I got much of any traffic or response, but so far it’s been quite incredible. I’ve even had friends who never read anything online calling me out of the blue just to get details on a story I told that day. It’s wonderful, and weird. Just the way I like it.
When I started this project – and as I go along – I’ve got a little Evernote notebook that I’ll consult and make notes “ohh tell this story..” and sometimes add details that will jog my state-dependent memory a little more. So far, I’ve got about 175 planned stories — minus the ~31 already posted. What makes the math difficult is that I’ll write a note like “this is a 3-part story” or 2-part, 4-part, etc. Also, I’ve posted 2 serial stories thus far, comprising 7 days of storytelling. I still don’t know if I can make it to 365, but I’ve at least got enough to get halfway there and that gives me hope.
The single most difficult part of this project is the timeline of events. In the beginning, I considered just writing from my first memory onwards, but that project would’ve quickly failed because who can remember everything that’s happened in their life in the order it happened? That’s just ridiculous. Also, it would’ve given me too many excuses to skip days instead of sitting down to write and be motivated and just get this fucking thing done. So, I’m jumping around a lot. The convenience there is that I can pluck a story out of the bin, commit it to “paper”, and move on. The inconvenience is that, naturally, “I can’t tell this story without them knowing about that story, because that story would give context to this story and make it far more interesting and dramatic if they knew the background!” and so on.
I’m trying not to be too hard on myself in that regard, and just trying to jump around whenever I can and setting notes for myself where I’ll write “which is a story for another time” in the footnotes. I’ve already gone back and updated a few stories so far1 to include links to related stories instead of those “notes to self”, and I know I’ll be doing that a lot more as time goes on.
My current plan is to focus more on my early life in the beginning, and focus more on my current life towards the end. That means you’ll see a lot more Childhood Stories for the next few months, and probably nothing but Filthy Stories and Drug Stories towards the end of this project. As with all things related to this project, this is just a rough idea – I wish I had a plan – so don’t be surprised if I talk about getting my favorite ice cream with my grandma one day and fist-fucking a pornstar the next.
I think I’m getting a little better at writing. I read everything I write at least 5 times before I actually schedule it to post, and I’ll add any punctuation or clarifications necessary to make it read more natural. I’m pretty sure an english major would smear red pen marks all over this blog, but I’m doing the best I can with a high school education and my own self-learned “read a bunch of articles for 20 years and figure out what they do” method.
Anyway — fucking thank you from the bottom of my blackened, shriveled, gin-soaked heart for reading any part of these stories. It means more to me than you know.
