A Little Housekeeping

Now it’s been a month that I’ve been posting daily here on Medium.

I’m just gonna go ahead and say this post might be a little disjointed and all over the place. More getting my thoughts in order and making a few tentative announcements/statements of intent than anything else. So if you’ve been reading my posts daily or even been casually interested in them you might find something worthwhile here. But if this is the first post of mine you’re reading, well I apologize but I doubt there’ll be anything in here you’ll care about.

So now that’s out of the way.

First off: I sat down tonight to write another story to go up on Medium, but after I got a couple pages in — or even a couple paragraphs, really — I realized this story is gonna end up at least novella-length, maybe more than that. Which don’t get me wrong, I love writing more than anything, but if you think I’m gonna churn out a full novella in an all-nighter you got another thing coming.

So probably most of my fiction-writing energies will be going towards that story for the next few weeks, or even the next several months if it ends up I’m reeling in a novel on the line. I’m still planning on posting to Medium daily, but unless I get a sudden inspiration for a quickie it won’t be fiction. Maybe some more essays, some personal reflections, things like that. Maybe I’ll get back into writing poetry and start putting it up here. We shall see.

Next: all this writing is doing me a world of good. Maybe it’ll sound like I’m exaggerating, but I really do need to write. A lot. Probably even more than I am now. Analogies with physical exercise come to mind, especially with something like marathon running. But that’s still not quite right. There’s a certain capacity that has to be exercised, or else it’s as if my mind ferments on itself and becomes poisonous. So after a month of daily writing (and keeping off the sauce, let’s not forget) I’m finally beginning to feel more or less like myself again.

It’s hard to describe, because there are a lot of parts. Aristotle’s discussion of happiness in the Nicomachean Ethics comes to mind — he talks about happiness as “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue.” Now I know there’s one or two of you out there who might have a (let’s say) less than positive opinion of Aristotle, but I think he’s onto something here.

We usually think of happiness as some end state — where once you “get it” there’s nothing more you need to do. Now, why that’s our default way of thinking about happiness I don’t know, because there’s nothing more destructive or misery-inducing than thinking about it that way. But Aristotle talks about virtue (you can also translate it as “excellence,” which I like better because it’s a little less freighted and also sounds a helluva lot more badass) as a habit. So you develop these various excellences through habit, and as you do that the soul becomes more (I guess you’d call it) actualized, which in some way amounts to happiness.

(I am not at all happy with my beyond bare-bones summary of the Nicomachean Ethics here. I sincerely apologize to Aristotle’s soul, which did not survive the death of the body if Aristotle was correct. Just bear in mind that most of what I said above is questionable if not outright misleading. I haven’t read Aristotle in years….)

So the reason I brought that up was because I wanted to explain why I’m feeling so much better now that I’m writing. Which probably isn’t the kind of thing that actually needs explaining, come to think of it…

Another thing I’ve heard is that the happier people are, the more creative they are, and the more creative they are the happier they are. So there’ s kind of a virtuous circle going on there if you can increase either one of those.

Common sense, really. If you’re a melancholic type who likes writing, get writing and you’ll be less melancholy.

… this is what happens when I start a post without a clear idea of where I’m going.

I’ll be better tomorrow, I promise.