Day Three hundred and thirty - I'm fine

As the year finally draws to a close, and so too this little experiment of mine, I am - as has been patently obvious - struggling to find something to write about every day. But today it strikes me that I may not yet have written about this project's secret origin. You see, my initial idea - one whose genesis occurred sometime in 2023 - was to write a book. I wanted to write a novel, and maybe I'd initially serialize it in chapters here on the blog. But I was worried about possible copyright issues, and that was enough to cripple my initial musings. I also became aware just how not great of a writer I am, and that's ok. Not everyone has to be exceptional. I much preferred to be true to myself. Now, the idea for the novel itself - and its title would have been 'The House of Sorrow and Regret' - would be a multigenerational story about the house I've lived in ever since I was a child, the house where my mother grew up in, and the house where my maternal grandparents lived in. Of course, this being a story that would revolve around and involver my family, a great deal of research would have been in order, something I wouldn't be able to rightly do, for reasons all my own. I then decided I'd do something completely fictional - though still based of a modicum of truth. It became far too big a story, the scope grew and grew, and it became a hurdle I could not manage to overcome. I couldn't find a structure for the story that pleased me, and what meager writings I did for it, were very disjointed and unpleasant. They were unpleasant for me to write, and were unpleasant for me to read. Though every now and again I revisit those ideas, and try to edit them into something usable, maybe I just give up the ghost on that one for good and all.

Then I came up with the rather novel and original idea of telling the story of my life, though at first I entertained the notion of doing a very fictionalized version of it. There was a gist to it, a germ of an idea, that I initially quite liked it, and there were a few tentative writings about it. Everything out of order, of course, with no set timeline, and my idea was to write it that way and then build a puzzle around the story. But it became far too fictional, I started taking things too far - at one point I'd turned my brother into a serial killer and there was this whole chapter where I was explaining to my young son why we never talk about my brother. Ah, a byproduct of those early days of confinement when all I did was listen to true crime podcasts, something which, I guess, we all did. I was never happy with that story, and though some of what I wrote there wasn't that atrocious, and bits here and there I repurposed and refashioned for some of what I ended up posting here, ultimately I decided to forego with that idea. And I almost gave up even before I started, it felt more like a dreadful imposition rather than something natural - which at times it does still feel like - and it took me writing some posts for myself, to try and figure out how confessional I felt like being, to decide to pursue this iteration of the idea. I'm not... wholly pleased with how it turned out, but in late December I shall be analyzing my journey here (hopefully) in a more thorough manner. Now it's time to return to Gerard Manley Hopkins, and maybe tomorrow's post will be about revisiting that old favourite of mine.