CONSISTENCY AND CONTRADICTION

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.” — Mark Twain

Back in 2016, just a few months after I started this blog, I was in Vancouver, B.C., on a video game gig. In case you don't know, a good part of how I made my wages when I lived in La La Land was by working in the VG industry, and if memory serves, we flew up to Canada to work three days on "Gears of War III." Well, one morning, as we ate breakfast before going to the studio, I remarked to my boss that I had begun blogging to support the release of my debut novel, CAGE LIFE.

"How often do you blog?" He asked.

"Whenever the spirit moves me," I replied. "I don't really have a schedule."

With a look of faint contempt, mingled with pity, he shook his head like a disappointed schoolmaster. "Do it religiously. Once a week, every week. And drop the blog on the same day, preferably at the same time. The only way to get a following is to be consistent with your content creation."

Now, God knows I tend to bristle at anything I do being dismissed as mere "content," but even I must confess that blogs, however brilliantly or cleverly or passionately they may be written, usually fall well short of art, and mine, being almost always written off the cuff and subjected to very little editing, probably fall even shorter of that mark than most. Unlike the weekly columns my dad wrote for The Chicago Sun-Times back in the 70s and 80s, they are mere outpourings of thought, the one similarity being the occasional effort I have made to whip them into some kind of coherent, structural shape. I certainly don't get paid to write them. Indeed, Goodreads long-ago removed the meter which showed how many views these missives get, so I have absolutely no way of knowing how many people are still reading them, or indeed, if anyone is reading them at all. This, however, is not the reason I have struggled with the consistency that my would-be mentor encouraged me to display six years ago. The fact is, somewhat ironically and paradoxically, that I am a writer. And being a writer, I am also a Bohemian. A creative type. A free spirit. In other words, I'm undisciplined, lazy, and generally incapable of sustained effort over long periods of time. I hate obligations and deadlines, and even the good ones tend to fill me with anxiety and dread. At the same time, I'm riddled with guilt over my frequent failure to bring in my personal projects over the finish line at the appointed moment. The trouble with being one's own boss is that one usually has Homer Simpson as an employee.

I suppose I do have one good reason for my inconsistency amid a host of lame excuses. Because I am a Bohemian, I literally cannot work 9 - 5 hours on a creative project for many months before I begin to experience severe burnout and mental exhaustion. To quote Captain Kirk, "genius doesn't work on an assembly-line basis: you cannot simply say, 'Today I will be brilliant.'" It is often necessary for a writer -- for any artist -- to take a day, a week, even a month or a whole season, off a project, and let the creative well replenish itself. Otherwise the final product will resemble a loaf of bread left in the oven a few hours too long. Such is what I tell myself, anyway, when I miss a deadline.

In the last two months, however, I have finally managed to release a blog every Monday night. It is my earnest hope that I will continue to do this all throughout the coming year, even if it is just a few lines of well-meaning nonsense. The reason for this is simple. However Bohemian a man may be, he also requires discipline, which finds definite expression in the act of consistency. Most people think of themselves as undiciplined and inconsistent, but if they held their lives up to scrutiny they would see many small examples of these things in their daily activities. Everything from brushing one's teeth in the morning to taking the dog for a walk to going to the gym or yoga or dance class is an act of discipline. It is only because some of these acts are so deeply ingrained as to require no thought at all, and others pleasurable to a degree, that we do not see them as such. Disciplining yourself to consistency may be as much an act of self-hypnosis as anything else, a sort of Huck Finn confidence scam, except that you end up painting your own fence, and enjoying it.

When I was a boy, I was unable to maintain enthusiasm for anything for any length of time, including exercise. All my natural athletic talents atrophied because I was not able to slay the dragon of indiscipline until my mid-late 20s, by which the boat had sailed. From a creative standpoint, until I was probably in my early-mid 30s, my life was a litter of half-finished projects: I abandoned everything short of the finish line. After graduate school I was able to come to terms with this failing, and since then have generally gotten the better of it when it mattered. But I have also discovered that this is one dragon which will not stay dead. Any weakness on my part and he roars back to life, incinerating my sense of responsibility with his fiery breath.

In everyday life, I do not find consistency to be terribly difficult. I don't find it terribly easy, either, but I've grown comfortable with being uncomfortable in that regard. It's simply part of life, something necessary. When I finish this, I'm going to the gym. I won't really enjoy it, and I'd rather be doing a hell of a lot of other things, but I'll do it anyway. I'll be physically present but mentally absent, get the work in, and go home. Writing, however, is a different animal. One cannot write anything worth reading without totally focusing on the object at hand. And if one wants an audience of any size, then one must also be consistent enough in one's production to attract and maintain that audience. The best television shows in the world would have bombed flat if viewers had tuned in at the appointed time each week not knowing if they were getting a new episode or a test pattern.

This, then, is the contradiction of the writer's life. He's a lazy, shiftless, aimless bum, generally content to sit around in his wife-beater and sweats, eating pretzels and drinking beer and watching "Murder, She Wrote," rather than working on that goddamned novel; but he is also haunted by his own laziness, his own lack of production. Those half-finished stories gnaw at him and goad his conscience. He cannot truly enjoy his idleness when he knows he could be using the time productively.

All of this is a rambling, roundabout way of saying that in 2023 it is my intention to become much more consistent with writing both here and in the arena of fiction. I have fallen into some lazy habits of late, hitting the keys only when the spirit moves me, and overlooked the role this blog could play in my reclamation. By posting here consistently, week in and week out, every Monday night for the fifty-two weeks of the coming year, I hope to habituate myself once again to hitting deadlines -- both the ones I set for myself and the ones others set for me. Fifty-two blogs in 365 days is a lot of blogs, but hey, this is a blog about everything, and there is a hell of a lot of everything out there. Let's get after it.