Start on writing, but also reorganize everything

content/writing/01.md

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+date: 2019-08-27
+weight: 1
+---
+
+Today, my therapist asked what the plot was to this new writing project.
+
+> Me!
+
+Pretty sure you're just the antagonist.
+
+> Come now, don't say that about yourself.
+
+Right.
+
+I stammered something about how it was more about overriding themes. I wrote about alcoholism. I wrote about dad. I wrote about all those little side-quests. "It's about the way creativity affects and is affected by all these different things in my life," I said.
+
+"Were you not creative when you drank?"
+
+"Certainly not as much as I am now that I've stopped."
+
+"This sounds exhausting," she said.
+
+"Well, it is, in a way. It's very easy to write. It flows onto the screen far easier than any fiction or article I've written before, but it leaves me totally beat afterward."
+
+> You're really good at wearing yourself out. You spin in circles around the smallest things. You wind up exhausting yourself on the daily.
+
+I suppose I do, at that.
+
+> Well? You sound unsure of how you answered her.
+
+This project is sort of ill-defined.
+
+> You are ill-defined.
+
+Not going to deny that.
+
+I'd say a lot of this project is accidental, unintentional. I stumble about at the end of your lead and, as you say, spin circles around the smallest of things. It's hard to come at this with some sort of idea of a plot. I can't even work chronologically, because if we work from the beginning of Matthew's life back in 2000, we keep having to double back and look at proto-Matthew's life before that, and to understand that, we keep having to look at all these other people.
+
+> There are too many of you.
+
+Says my ally.
+
+> Point well taken.
+
+All the same, I'm not sure that I answered her incorrectly. The core conceit of this project is one of creativity. Not anything so guided and structured as *writing* or *composing* or *programming*, but that raw, primal thing from which the others spring.
+
+> Or seep, depending on the day.
+
+It's about the ways in which this idea, this entity impinges itself upon various things in my life. It's about the ways I shape and am shaped by it. It's about turning it back in on itself, as much as I can, and applying creativity to the idea of creativity itself.
+
+> Using words.
+
+Well, mostly words so far, yes, though I'm slowly incorporating bits of other things in there, too.
+
+> There's another metaphor to be made here. Remade, actually. You keep winding up stuck on these very abstract concepts. You keep talking about your complex feelings on your dad or on the way Margaras' death affected you or on mysticism, and then you circle them again and again, now narrowing, now widening, in an attempt to triangulate some imagined center.
+
+Writing, composing, programming, those are all inexact tools to apply toward inexact goals, though. Is that so wrong? Is it wrong to try and focus through words? Is it wrong to try and figure out more of how you think through something creative?
+
+> No, but it **is** important that you be cognizant of that fact.

content/writing/02.md

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+date: 2019-08-27
+weight: 41
+---
+
+All of writing, all of creativity is selfish. To take some idea or some concept and to set it down on paper and say, "I made this" is selfish, of course, but to then take that thing and show it to others with the expectation that they might get something out of it as well is taking that several steps further.
+
+To sit down in front of the keyboard and to say, "I am going to write a story about a person who runs away from home to escape her fundamentally unhappy life" and to then take that story, post it on the internet, submit it to anthologies, publish it in a collection and attempt to get others to read it, is selfish. It's an act of improvement for the writer, sometimes on a very real basis, if there is money to be made in the process.
+
+To sit down in front of the keyboard, however, and say, "I am going to write a story about me when I ran away to escape my fundamentally unhappy life", well, now we're up to three levels of selfishness. I try and nail down an idea to paper or screen and say, somehow, that it is *right* and *good*, I make that idea about *myself*, and then I try to show that idea to *others*...
+
+> Is there no good to be had from memoirs, then? From any autobiographical content?
+
+There's certainly good to be had for the writer, for the creator. On my end, I'm making something that I both feel proud about and am learning from. I'm learning more about this art, I'm learning more about all of these problems I'm tackling --- I didn't know, for instance, just how conflicted I was about my dad until I started writing that section of the site. I though, *oh, I'll write about my past and make the final point that I've had to accept that there's a certain amount of my dad that I'm comfortable having in my life, a certain level of relationship that's acceptable*. I was not expecting to learn, through writing, just how conflicted I am about him still.
+
+> And for others? Is there not enjoyment to be gained from that which you create?
+
+*Disappearance* was good, I thought. I got a lot of good words sent my way from some folks that mean a lot to me for it. The story left an impact on them, they came away from it with some sort of enjoyment, or at least some level of emotional resonance.
+
+This project, though? I don't know. there are bits that I've tried to make enjoyable. I had fun with the <a class="pulse" href="/koan">koans</a> and <a class="pulse" href="/birds">birds</a>. I put a lot of emotional investment into the bits about <a class="pulse" href="/margaras">Margaras</a> and <a class="pulse" href="/dad">my dad</a>. I tried to do some fun mixed-media stuff with <a class="pulse" href="/fursona">the fursoña animations</a> and <a class="pulse" href="/poet-and-mystic">the mysticism stuff</a>. I can see those being enjoyable.
+
+> And the rest?
+
+I don't know. Honestly.
+
+> What about applicability?
+
+I...hmm.
+
+> You came into this page thinking, "Ah yes, time to dunk on myself again", didn't you?
+
+I guess I did. Self-deprecation runs deep in queer lives. Self-doubt plagues artists. Self-deception runs in the family.
+
+> Selfishness is defensible when it leads to entertainment, applicability, or self-improvement.
+
+To an extent. At some point, it's just narcissism. At some point gets so "treat yourself" that one loses sight of collective improvement.
+
+> Of course. Are you really in danger of such?
+
+Constantly, feels like.

content/writing/03.md

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+date: 2019-08-27
+weight: 42
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+
+The first poetry I remember writing was back before high school. At some point I picked up the poetry bug and decided I was going to try my hand at it. Finding it hard, I quit after the first poem I wrote. It was something really, *really* bad, too. Something where all I knew about poetry was that it should rhyme, so I sacrificed...well, everything in search of a rhyme. Readability. Sense. It was horrifying.
+
+> You find a lot of your old stuff horrifying. Play can be creative.
+
+Sure. Play teaches us how to be creative. A lot of creativity is playful.
+
+This went a step back from that. Play is important, sure, but it didn't make anything I'd actually call a poem. It was an innocent mockery in the same way as a boy trying on his dad's shoes and blazer.
+
+I suppose it's a good thing that a lot of my early works are lost to time.
+
+> You filled reams of paper and countless blank books with drawings and doodles and words. You drew maze after maze on copy paper. You grew exceptionally fond of creating parabolic curves with straight lines. You went through a phase of drawing elaborate worlds of ramps and springs and houses for tiny spherical creatures with horns for mouths. Do you miss none of that?
+
+In a cute sort of way, I suppose. It was fun. I would laugh at it now, but I wouldn't find anything new to build off of it. After all, this project is built off writings after I was born. All that is from proto-Matthew.
+
+> You drew an entire comic set in the world of Garth Nix's Abhorsen trilogy, except the main characters were foxes. You filled a few notebooks with furry art, too. You kept a diary well after your dad destroyed the first one, intended originally as letters to send to your friend. You called it Julene. You later feared that would be creepy, and changed it to Kai. Do you miss none of that?
+
+I kept some, of course. Some of it is irrevocably online. I couldn't remove it if I wanted to.
+
+I burned the journal, though. It was a remnant of proto-Matthew. It was from before I was born.
+
+> At what point did play cease being just play, then? At what point did creativity assert itself?
+
+When I started singing. When I first heard Madrigals sing during my first choir concert. When I stopped drawing and started writing. When I realized that there was more to art than playing at art.

content/writing/_index.md

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+type: serial
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