Born Out of Boredom

Okay, so I have enjoyed writing all my life but, until 2024 it was a hobby I indulged in sporadically when the urge arose. Months might pass between the times I sat down to write something, and I was much more likely to start something than to finish it. You see, it is very easy to abandon a story when the going gets rough – and it usually does.

But by early 2024 I had grown bored. My wife had us subscribed to Netflix, Amazon and Crave but we had already watched all the worthwhile shows and there was nothing left that interested me. Sure, there were promising new shows being released all the time, shows with good casts and great production budgets but for some reason, the studios always skimped on the writing budgets. The stories were predictable, derivative, they dragged on or skipped over important plot holes. These were mind numbing retellings of the same character arc over and over again, the only difference being the colour of the superhero’s costume. I was tired of characters being twisted against their own established codes of conduct in order to serve the plot.

And yes, I am one of those annoying people who will go on and on complaining about the dreadful screenwriting. At least until a voice in my head asked if I thought I could do better. Teddy’s Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena speech popped into my mind. It is all very well for the man seated on the sidelines to criticize the man out there on the playing field, so who was I to sit there judging the work of other people trying to make a living by creating entertainment for the masses?

Fine then, I said to myself, if they can’t entertain me, I’ll do it myself. And so, saying, I sat down to write. It was hard at first, but I quickly adopted Stephen King’s suggestion from his book On Writing. One thousand words daily. Every day. No matter what. Oh, Stephen King was right. The first few months were hard. Sometimes I sat down my mind empty, my creative reservoirs dry and tried to force words onto the page one by one. Making my thousand-word quota often felt like pulling teeth. But sometimes the effort to squeeze out one hundred more words, forced me to go deeper into the story, past where I would have ended it and into more interesting realizations.

But, as the master had predicted, with practice, my muse grew less elusive and more reliable, showing up just in time for our daily routine. Of course, there were times when the creative reservoir overflowed providing several days worth of material, making it difficult to stop at just one thousand words. And while much of what I wrote should never see the light of day, bit by bit, my junk days where I wrote throw away pieces, grew fewer and farther between and the frequency with which I wrote something that I actually thought promising increased.

For me the trick is not to censor the work. The standard is one thousand words per day. Not one thousand good words per day. And there is no restriction on genre or topic. Fiction is my favourite, but I’ll wade into non-fiction if that is the direction the muse is leaning that day. Philosophy, memoir, political commentary, professional insights, I’ll write whatever comes up. Same with fiction. At first a lot of what came out was dark fantasy and horror. My favourite of these will be collected in Bleeding the Dark Humours. There were quirky, reality bending, science fiction-adjacent stories that I have collected in Snap Shots of the Multiverse. Some days I wrote erotic fiction. Unexpected since I had never read any before. But there were enough of these that they deserve their own collection too. Some of them were deeper than expected, even romantic. It was a surprise. Then there were some creative exaggerations of my personal experiences, my life told with tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. But my favourite of all is when my muse stumbles into comedy. I wish I could write comedy all the time, but I can’t force it. Sometimes when I try it comes out as dark comedy or even horror. But every now and then, my muse spits out something that makes me laugh out loud.

The first comedy project was born of a writing assignment from my writer’s group. Our task was to do a rewrite of the fairy tale, Hansel & Gretel. This led to my writing Gingerbread Bandit. My mom laughed out loud at all the right parts when I test read it to her, so I thought I was onto something. And my muse so enjoyed satirizing the familiar fairytale scaffolding that I went on a tear converting no less than eleven popular fairy tales into my hilarious collection Not the Tales You Remember which is scheduled to be my second book release.

But my best writing streak came late in 2024 as I sat staring at a screen as blank as my mind when Jill aka Bubbles spoke up out of nowhere saying “I think a little gratitude is in order.” And there she was in her cosplay mini skirt, purple bob, blowing a bubble of pink chewing gum and blasting away monstrous alien invaders while Mikey aka Peepee cowered in his sodden underpants.

I could not help following them through their adventure as the aliens dubbed Gorgons fought the people of Arizona. Bubbles was looking to add to her kill count, Mikey desperate to survive and me, I was just chasing laughs. But no sooner had their tale ended than I heard the voices of other locals impacted by the alien invaders and each one had a funny story to tell. In the end I found I had completed a short novel’s worth of story as told through five distinct character perspectives. It was the most entertaining writing project of my life so far and the one I am most excited to share with you. With Soiled Undies & Other Gorgon Encounters I had truly achieved the goal I set for myself when I started out in early 2024 trying to rescue myself from boredom. I had succeeded in writing something that had kept me entertained. Now I hope my off-beat stories will entertain you too!