I wrote exactly one goddamned blog post during the entire year of 2012.  I decided that I should change that.

So here I am, but with a new purpose.  What I’m going to do here for the foreseeable future is talk as often as I care to about the processes and struggles that I’m going through to create things that I like to create — that might be writing, or pictures, or podcasts, or some other project that requires me to invent something in my brain and expose it to the world.  I thought some focus might help me to saddle up here again.  Also, I’m clearly not getting enough mileage out of those 140-character quips.

I talked to the K-Bear last week, and we thought that we could both use a little writing review/motivation, so I’m going to grab the bull (I am really loving these ranching metaphors) and be the first to toss something out there.  I have a long-standing project that I probably just haven’t had the courage to complete.  I want to write a fictionalized account of my misadventures with my best friends from middle school, and the days we spent biking across snowmobile trails, reading comic books, playing arcade and/or Super Nintendo games, throwing knives at trees, stealing Playboys, and other dumb stuff that 13 or 14 year-old boys do in the Northwoods.

It’s been tough for me to build up some momentum on this project because while the memories are very important to me, it’s hard to see a compelling narrative emerging from the stories.  My best friend, Ben, passed away in 2005, and it seems obvious that that event will come up in this story.  But how do you transition from the simple joys of youth to the heavy reality of adulthood?  Up to this point, I’ve taken time to write down things I remember, I interviewed Clint to get some of his thoughts, and not much else.  This is a project that I absolutely want to finish (at least the first complete draft) in 2013.

So, I’ll send Joe and Wordy a couple thousand words, and next week I’ll try to send them a couple thousand more.  Gotta start somewhere.