As rare as my blog posts come these days, I'm going to waste this one on the much-dreaded reflection on why I don't blog anymore. In this circumstance it almost comes closer to an obituary than an apology.

After last spring's messy series of entries on being a roadie for a band, I claimed to be on blogging hiatus until I got to Shanghai. At first this was exusable by certain professional obligations I'd had at the time, but by the time I hit Asia, and surely by the time I got back and started school, I really couldn't complain of a lack of time to write, or a lack of material. In fact I can still provide an inventory of at least the following notable things I'd considered writing about:

• Working on a successful and popular video game, which at the time I'd been perfectly willing to casually violate my non-disclosure agreement to talk about
• Visiting three Chinese or pseudo-Chinese territories and/or nations
• One incredibly atrocious haircut
• Attending graduate school, and the lifestyle and protocols thereof
• Writing lots of music in the month of February
• The demise, rehabilitation, re-demise, and tenuous detente of operability of my crappy 1995 Nissan Altima

To be honest, though, I was relieved when I stopped blogging. For one thing, there's an odd kind of tension that comes around when you're trying to base your creative work on the events of your daily existence. I'm sure everyone who blogs--really, everyone who writes--has had this moment of grotesque self-consciousness where you realize you might not so much experience life as collect it, in order to craft some hilarious tale packaged for the consumption of your peers.

But it'd be lucky if the chief pain of blogging were just some kind of existential damper on one's ability to relax and enjoy the air. For me, at least, the real reason that blogging is painful is that I want it to be good, which it almost never is, and besides, writing something that is good is intrinsically stressful and hard. And so of course it is easy just not to do it.

Over the hiatus of the last year, I've gone over some of what I'd written in the past, and I find the vast majority of it cringeworthy. Not astoundingly bad, not totally incompetent, in some places even smeared thinly with interesting residue, but mostly run-of-the-mill shit. What's embarrassing isn't so much the mistakes as the all the pretension, which comes about when you have the ambition to make meaningful statements but lack the discipline to make those statments coherent. Mostly, I've been guilty of trying to have my cake and eat it too: if the writing gets too fancy, it's because I'm trying to make it more than just a retelling of what are really non-unique and mediocre experiences, and if the writing is sloppy and takes too many liberties with the reader, it's because I'm not trying to do anything "serious".

At any rate, it's still true that the blog has been the only somewhat consistent creative outlet I've had since I started it. I've always had the intention of coming back to it, but there's going to have to be some change in the way I go about the writing so that it doesn't feel pointless or lame. What I'm thinking at the moment is that in the interest of being neither here nor there about the blog, I will attempt to be both here and there. On the one hand, I think I ought to try writing more serious, focused essays, not as in humorless, but stuff that isn't merely rambling introspection ad absurdum. On the other hand, I'm severely tempted to get into far less substantial blogging that is essentially exhibitionist, informative, and trivial; that's to say non-introspective and most probably short.

The point would be to expand on both quality and quantity, but not at the same time.

These are the kinds of things I have been thinking about:

• Very soon: something purely technical on how I set up my new laptop.
• Some notes about the tricks I use to study Chinese vocabulary
• An essay on work and being happy
• Daily notes and longer pieces on my trip to the Olympics this summer
• Something political about creative work and whether we should pay for it
• An outline of how I like to format my C++ code

Hopefully you will hear from me again, and soon.

Pp. 39 to 65 in the ubiquitous silver paperback version of The Elements of Style, aka "Strunk & White" to anyone who gives a damn, compose a list of three- or four-score commonly misused words and expressions that seems at first nitpicky and then sort of discomforting, because unless you are an incredible nerd or have already read the list then you will probably be a habitual violator of a fair share of S&W's proscriptions. Maybe you break out the occasional "I could care less" when you really mean "I couldn't care less", and you will mix "further" and "farther" when you are not really paying close attention. These things are entirely forgiveable unless you are at all self-conscious about how you come off in your writing, and at that point you're on this incredibly slippery slope upon which you are constantly in danger of mangling some usage convention or grammar rule that looks really bad to at least one person or another. Even if this matters to you a whole lot, there's probably no way you can have your all of the bases covered--the thing is, Chapter IV in S&W looks anal-retentive but only scratches the surface of the vast body of solecism and sordid malapropism that goes on in writing, yours and mine, on a consistent basis.

There's quite a good article by David Foster Wallace called "Authority and American Usage", on the politics of usage and if/why anyone should even bother (as it turns out a bonafide subject of scholarly debate). I'll spare you the gory details, since I estimate that four out of the five people reading this (I said the five, and that is probably optimistic. Have you even gotten this far, or do I consistently bore the crap out of you after my first paragraphs?) most likely don't care. The one aspect of the article I wanted to point out was the massive list of misused phrases that are printed in 4-point font at the front of the article and arranged in pseudo-designy fashion around the title. I sort of consider myself post-S&W in that I'm mostly aware of its usage rules and feel like I've got a fair case regarding the rules I choose to break, but DFW's big list (apparently compiled from a mere week's worth of very casual notetaking) gave me this creeping sense of dread that I was really making an ass out myself everytime I sat down at the keyboard. Here's a partial recap:

On accident

I say this all the time. But repeat it over and over again--it starts to get weird.

Somewhat of a

Ditto. "Somewhat" is really an adverb, but the Free Dictionary lists it as a pronoun, probably due specifically to the popularity of this apparently incorrect phrase. I suspect people say this when they really mean "Something of a".

quote for quotation

This doesn't bother me when I see it, but I wonder if it bothers other people when I write it.

nauseous for nauseated

Shit. I just had no idea. nauseous is the quality of something that makes you nauseated. Actually this is canonical S&W. Shit.

To mentor, to parent, to partner, to critique, to reference, to process

All nouns that would not also be verbs if it weren't for several decades of marketese and academic BS language.

in so far as

I think (as in I'm not sure) that the objection here is that it really ought to be "insofar".

bald-faced

Really ought to be "bare-faced".

begs the question

Really ought to be "raises the question". "begs the question" is a self-enclosed predicate and shouldn't be followed by a modifying phrase starting with "that..."--it refers to a logical fallacy in which a statement supports itself by assuming its conclusion, something along the lines of someone proving the existence of God using statements from the Bible. That is begging the question. Period.

sum total, complete dearth

Checked out from the deparment of redundancy department. I'm pretty sure I've let these fly before.

At this point in time

Could just be "At this time", right? Or just "At this point"?

Boy, does it go on. Anyway, there's the very real issue of who-gives-a-fuck, but you do draw your lines about this kind of thing at some point. My guess is that most people put just enough scrutiny into usage so that they won't come off sounding stupid. But then there's the issue of what "stupid" means, and in what context your writing is being consumed, etc. Where people really get into trouble is trying to sound smart, something which I'm totally guilty of and can only partially rationalize as wanting to do something creative and interesting with the language--there is definitely part of me that is informed by the thoroughly academic instinct to intimidate and impress you with my words.

I once read that making grammar and usage errors is a kind of verbal tone-deafness, very similar to playing music out of key or rhythm. I find this analogy pretty distasteful, since it is snobby, and more than a little uncomfortable, since I also agree with it on a certain level, and this makes me a snob. While I was reading DFW's article I kept trying to find ways of justifying the usage errors he'd point out, mostly in a sort of everyone-makes-that-mistake-so-it's-no-longer-wrong appeal to custom, but in the end this just shows how preoccupied I am about being "correct" in the first place. Luckily this all has more to do with the fear of embarrasment than my judgment of others; I've yet to cross the line into being one of those jackasses who is always correcting the way you talk. Uh, right?

You can get my 24-hour story, "Becoming the Teapot," in PDF format. It is a story about kung-fu and a kid named Joey James.

It took me about 21 hours to write the thing. I started at eight in the morning and turned in about five in the morning the next day. I probably could have stayed up for the entire twenty-four for editing but at the time it felt like I woulda been doing CPR on a corpse. I had the energy but not the will for it. I stayed within the rules mostly, except for the one where I couldn't touch it after the 24 hours were up. But I was reading over the story last night and I couldn't resist fixing some things up. If it's any consolation for the purists, it didn't go past fixing typos and cleaning up sentences for clarity and flow. Actually I thought about not putting the story up at all, because the idea was just to write for writing's sake, and also because I was afraid it wasn't any good. But I'm way too curious about what other people think about the stuff I do to keep it to myself. I once read this interview with Neal Stephenson in which he said he would still write books even if he were trapped on a desert island. Lots of successful writers love to talk like that but it is probably a lot of bullshit; writing is communication as much as it is creation, and the positive/negative/unexpected way people respond to your work is a big part of the motivation and what makes it interesting.

Well anyway, I hope you dig it. After having some time away from it and getting the chance to re-read it, I think it is both better and worse than I initially thought, for a final self-rating of eh. And there you have it.

Jim and me were cleaning out the garage at my mom's house when we stumbled upon a couple of ancient file boxes containing a bunch of school stuff from when we were small. I found copies of the junior high school news rag I used to write for. I found old preschool photos of me and a report I did on the state of Washington. I found a limerick I made in the 6th grade and a plaster impression of my 5-year-old hand.

The best thing that came out of that box was a 22-page comic book I made in the 4th grade called "Green Dragon vs. Mr. Radioactive". It's a gory ninja fantasy replete with spin-kicks, kidnapping, explosions, shootings, decapitations, and deaths-by-boomerang. The plot follows the adventures of the Green Dragon as he attempts to rescue his "scout team" from the clutches of Mr. Radioactive. Most of the action involves our hero assaulting robot-infested bases designed in the style of Bowser, King of the Koopas. These scenes appear to be lifted wholesale from so many classic 8-bit video game storylines, in which the protagonist is forced to complete many meaningless, tedious objectives (generally involving pits of lava and falling chandaliers made of spikes) before confronting the villain.

The quality of the art is pretty inconsistent. At nine years old, you can do legs, animals, and weapons, but not hands, machines, or poses. I can tell I was pretty concerned about continuity errors at the time--the scenes where the Green Dragon drops his scabbard or when his arm suddenly heals were obviously added after I finished the comic and realized that I forgot to draw in scabbards and arm blood after the first few panels in which they appear. It also kind of looks like I didn't understand that I could write the dialogue first and the bubbles later, because there is a lot of text that drifts over the lines.

When I showed it to Justine and Jason they gathered everyone around and Justine made Jason read it out loud. "Do the voices, too!" she demanded. So Jason did the Green Dragon (pinched skinny anime protagonist voice), Mr. Radioactive (confident muhaha baritone), the newscasters (sorta the same as the Green Dragon, only more constipated), and the bear (bear-voice). Justine kept pointing out little features of the comic that she thought was neat. She liked how I colored only a few things in the entire comic, like the Green Dragon, and fire, and blood. She also liked how I kept the Green Dragon out of frame, ninja-like for some of the panels. Of course for both of these cases I did them because I was lazy. The "selective use of color" was due to an unwillingness to color anything else, and if the Green Dragon didn't appear in a particular panel, it was because I didn't want to draw the poor bastard another time. So if I did something neat, I did it without being conscious of it, either by instinct or by accident. That's one really cool thing about being a kid. If the inspiration strikes you the right way, you can sit down for hours on end and churn out a couple dozen pages of comics without worrying about how clever you are, or if what you end up creating is any good at all. You're not worried about technique or craft or how people will react to you when you're done.

Well, anyway, I'm sure you want to read it. Knock yourselves out.

I actually started my short story "Spring, Pin, and Trigger" over a year ago on LiveJournal. The idea was to make write a blog as if I were a super-hero, and also to juxtapose two things I happen to know a bit about: ridiculous comic book action and the mundane recollections of your average web blog. I was a role-playing nerd throughout my teenage years, and so I have this disturbing armchair understanding of guns, spell-casting, vehicular impact, and the behavior of dice. As for the blog stuff--well let's say I can hack out self-indulgent, masturbatory fluff with the best, and now it's even a daily habit.

I'd basically had my fill of the blog by February of this year and didn't touch it until I came to Japan, when I submitted a compilation of entries to the local writing circle. I got some helpful comments out of that, but since then I've been dragging me feet in making changes. I had this non-pattern of changing a single phrase or sentence every week or so. But since it's a holiday story, I figured I should have it ready by Christmas, so I took another look at it tonight. I feel it's imperfect, but I also have lost the desire to improve it, so you can now read the final draft (barring any stupid typos) of "Spring, Pin, and Trigger". Hopefully you will like it, if you haven't caught any of the earlier drafts already.

For whatever reason I don't usually read fiction, but since participating in the writing circle I feel I have this dare with myself to try to write something else. I have a couple of ideas that I like now, and maybe you can help me pick one. The first one I thougt up is about guitars and time travel and their respective effects on your friends. The other one is about being a Jedi Knight. That's right, a craven fan fic. Maybe it will give me an excuse to read trashy Star Wars novels like I did in junior high.