Bouncing Back: Day 21

[B] Forwards (21,372 / 1,000,000)

Whew. Viruses are not an enjoyable experience. Hey everyone, I’m back on my feet after a quick tussle with the virus-who-shall-not-be-named. All considered, I suffered little and recovered quickly. All that’s left to do is to express my gratitude to the random configuration of nucleotide pairs that constitute my DNA, for making me a resilient cockroach. I also want to express my remorse and sympathy for others who fare worse than myself when encountering the same virus.

I don’t intend to dwell on anything other than the one thing that my mind forces itself to dwell on. You guessed it - writing. Well, to be more accurate I should say my mind dwells on words in general. The formation and manipulation of them. The arrangement of words into new and intriguing phrases. Did you know that there are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766,975,289,505,440,883,277,824,000,000,000,000 different permutations of a shuffled deck of cards? That’s the actual number. You can double check my math: 52! = that big-ass number (technical term). Yeah, with only 52 unique cards, you can arrange them into that many different decks of cards.

Okay, now imagine that every word in the English language is a single card in a deck. You could arrange that deck into an infinite number of different permutations (I know, not literally. Put your katanas away, math nerds). The number is too large to even comprehend. I used a calculator to get that first number (what do you want from me?), but when I tried to do a similar calculation with the number of words in the English dictionary it literally said “This computation would take too long”. Yeah, that’s right, the calculation was too much for a damn calculator.

And that’s just English! There is a vast horde of untapped sentences and phrases begging to be slipped into a story for the first time. Any self-proclaimed lover of literature such as myself is compelled to expand the bounds of existing literature in the only way possible, by making it. Here let me see if I can conjure a brand new sentence, never before seen by human eyes. Ahem.

Luna was enjoying a joyous dream of chasing squirrels and munching on the fatty bits of ribeye leftover from her human’s dinner, when she was jolted awake by none other than her own fart!

If anyone can find that exact sentence written somewhere else, you win ten points. I’ll keep track.

Anyway, I’m going to try and not let life get in the way of making these posts. There is always something else to do in life, other than the thing you want to do the most. In fact, it seems that the longer you exist, the more you accumulate random shit that you somehow now need to do; despite the fact that, before realizing that you needed to do that thing, you had been getting by just fine without doing that thing at all. I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “But blog-dude, life is about the journey, not the destination. All the things in life that feel like obstacles - that is life!”. I reject that. I don’t have a counter-argument or anything, I just… no. I mean I know you’re kind of right, imaginary foil, but… no.

Now that we’re halfway through this post, it’s time for me to crank up the intensity. I bet you didn’t even know there was an intensity factor to these posts. That’s because there’s not, I’m just doing this for dramatic effect. Okay here it is: I think I may just write a book here on these posts. I have material leaking out of my ears that I feel would be better suited to an actual book. You know, something chronological with chapters and storylines and all that. It’s hard for me to come up with discrete ideas that will fit coherently into a one thousand word post every day. I realize that this may be… ambitious to say the least. To be honest, I have no idea whether or not a chapter that I would write would fit into a thousand words. Nor do I have an inkling as to whether or not writing that way in this format is even feasible, let alone advisable. The third question to which I have no answer is whether anyone will be interested at all in this kind of writing, but that’s just standard writer’s fear.

I probably won’t have the creative inspiration to write a whole chapter of a book every day, so I will continue to make blog posts and short stories as well. Actually, this blog will look pretty much the same, with the occasional post being connected to a previous one. I’ll try to organize it into easily understandable formats. I figured that, despite my soul-shaking writing ability, the first book I write will probably be hogwash. So, I might as well slap it up here on this blog, under the pretense that “this is all just practice, anyway”. Hah, I’ve tricked my psyche into thinking I’m not putting myself out there, while putting myself out there. The most important person to fool is always yourself! Don’t listen to me, be honest with everyone, especially yourself.

Wow, I must be rusty. We’re only at eight hundred and something words, and I’m already tapped. I guess I can put some spit-balling in down here at the end. If I write a chapter of a book, will it be written live the day that I post it? Not every time, but sometimes. If I go over a thousand words, should I just cut off and save it for the next day? That seems cruel, so my first instinct is yes. Will I be salty if I see my story in a straight-to-kindle book release that isn’t mine? Yes, but I can’t imagine that any of the few dozen people who read this blog would do something like that, would you? (Imagine I’m giving you a good glare). Oh would you look at that, a thousand words! Stay safe, be hale, and as always…

Totally nailed it,
Michael