Foolish Promises

It’s only taken 24 hours and I’ve already realized that my promise to write a blog post every day was a foolish, empty promise at best.

I cannot help but self-censor myself a bit. If I have nothing burning to say, why force myself to say it? Too many people have to speak out just to hear themselves speak. Perhaps it drowns out the sound of the rushing of wind between the ears?

Let’s then explore a related topic: What is the urge that makes me want to promise to write something every day? I have, I feel at times, a compulsive urge to create things.

Not things like new Ikea furniture or a tray of shortbread, but the desire to make things wrought entirely from my own mind. It’s a strange compulsion, seldom accompanied by an actual idea, but with a rather helpless sense of longing. It often strikes me while driving on my way home from work.

I used to get that sense of creation from coding computer programs, although nowadays modern programming languages are more about cobbling together blocks than raw creativity – it rather feels like the Ikea of programming. Perhaps I’m just burned out on it. In my teens and 20s, like so many others, I could spend 20 hours a day fueled by Cheetos and Dr Pepper whilst spewing stream of consciousness programming onto the screen.

Now I feel like I should be doing proper writing. Have I got the great American novel in me? I don’t feel that I do. My taste runs towards rather old-school science fiction. Perhaps if this were the classic days of pulp science fiction, I’d be right at home in good company – cranking out straightforward but ridiculous stories of life on Venus and, with a little luck, turning my ability to produce bullshit into a world-wide, tax-avoiding religion.

Ah, but I can dare to dream!

No. The plots, when they do come to mind, get quickly rejected by being scientifically impossible. It seems entertaining science fiction is dead because of the reality check. Damn you physicists and your “speed of light is inviolable” and “the electronic transmission of matter over a beam is impossible”!

You can only write old-style science fiction nonsense if you’re being quirky and ironic.

But wait! I am quirky and ironic!

There might be some hope yet.