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It’s Supposed to be Fun

May 2, 2024

The whole reason I started writing stories is because it is fun. Little five year old James laying on the floor with his Ghostbuster’s notebook and pencil wasn’t making up stories because he wanted to make money, run a business, post about it on social media and all the other stuff that comes along with being an independent author. The only reason that little guy did anything was because he thought it was fun.

It’s easy to lose sight of that, and I’m certainly guilty of doing so, from time to time. I get so focused on the metrics, on fine tuning my processes, on being as productive as possible that I forget the simple pleasure of sitting down and making up a story out of thin air.

When that happens, you inevitably get bogged down, the whole thing starts to feel like a slog, like hard work. Which I think comes through in the story. If I’m not enjoying writing it, is anyone going to enjoy reading it? I can’t see how they would.

I started writing because it was fun, and most days it still is fun, but I need to get better at recognising when I’m sliding into not fun and do what I can to pull myself out of it. There’s no point writing if you don’t enjoy it.

I’m sure there are other things that we started off doing because they were fun, but turned them into hard work. I don’t know why. Part of me wants to blame it on the culture of side hustles and the nature of capitalism, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. Maybe people are just wired this way?

Cultural Refugee

Cultural Refugee

Jan 15, 2024

I wasn’t born into this world of fast media and constant connection. The world I grew up in was one with four television channels and a home computer that could just about manage word processing. Now I have high speed internet in my pocket and instant access to millions of hours of television and films. It’s not a world that I am equipped to handle.

Few of us are.

Even people raised in such a world are about to have the rug pulled out from under them with the mainstreaming of virtual and augmented reality. We can barely handle the internet on our phones, which we at least have to take out of our pockets to look at. How are we going to manage when it’s right in front of our faces, all day.

The turnaround for cultural change is getting shorter and shorter. We had the internet at home when I was at college. Then I got a computer with internet access in my room a few years later. So I would guess there is about twenty years when things were similar. Now, the changes are coming quicker than ever, I would be surprised if there are five years.

The systems that I was taught were designed for a world where you weren’t constantly fighting to keep your attention on things. If I want to continue living in the culture of the modern world, then I need to find new ways of handling things. But that is a question, not a certainty. There is always the option of not trying to live in a modern media landscape.