Confessions of the 21st Century: We Don’t Read Anymore

Many of us don’t have “time” to read. That’s a lie.

According to the Solution Research Group,

“… Right now, the average American, 12 and over, spends 6.1 hours per day with video-based entertainment.” (Check out the article at http://www.i4u.com/article18085.html).

It also claims that in the future, this number will equal our sleeping time. I think they meant the time that people should sleep, because right now, we are sleeping less anyway. Is watching videos more important than sleep? Think about it!

This post isn’t about “reading awareness” or the “downward spiral of our society.” I understand this evolution: I’m a clear example of this. I’m a writer, and writers are supposed to read. The last book I tried to read, I dropped after twenty pages, and the book before that was a school assignment. My excuse to sit down and watch an episode of Lost is that it’s teaching me “plot techniques.” I know this habit isn’t making the quality of my writing any better and I know that I should be ashamed. But I don’t write to write beautiful prose, I write because I have stories to tell. And it just so happens that the way of communicating stories is changing. Say, I wrote a novel and it wasn’t half bad. It gets published. How many people would read it? Probably my friends, my family, and the few remaining believers in the written word. The number is just not enough. Hey, I’m no JK Rowling. I don’t want to be. It's just that my target audience can’t understand my language because it sits watching TV, YouTube, or listening to its iPod. My dilemma is that I’m not a producer, YouTube blogger, or singer. How am I supposed to adapt to today’s society? Because I want my voice to be heard, no matter the medium.

I’m willing to explore all mediums of communication: I paint, draw, [try to] play guitar, write novels, write scripts, write rants, write journals, make visual journals… but in the end, I’m still searching and waiting for the right one. It may not even be discovered yet. Taking myself as an example again, I listen to my iPod more hours a day than I watch TV (1-2 hours a day, the ads annoy me). But I never bought an audio book for it, so I’m not sure that anyone else would consider that either. Music is complicated. It needs a band, a singer (because I’m one of the few people that appreciates instrumental music), and songs that I would write would be too personal. In a novel, an alternate universe is created and the writer is shielded from becoming too personal. But TV and movies are not personal enough. TV shows have multiple writers and while maybe my main points would be kept intact (if I hypothetically get a chance to create one), the rest would be up to the other writers. Movies are a one time thing and two hours or less with the viewer isn’t something I’m looking for. Whatever it is that I create, I want to be watched, read, or listened to over and over, with great interest. But isn’t that what all artists want?

A Brush with Death & Just 4 days until script frenzy

Earlier today I had a close brush with Death. It's my novel I'm talking about here. Actually, I had all the good intentions, it's just that I was doing things in the wrong order. My computer's been acting very weird for the past few days, so I assumed that it was a virus and ran some "quick" scans. Nothing came up. Then yesterday, it threw up in my face - any window, any program I opened was blank. It was scary, but it was late and I was lazy, so I went to bed. Earlier today I went back to it and decided to run a full scan on it, to make sure there isn't anything terrible hiding in the cracks. Well, Norton 360 requires this back up thing, and I've never let a program to back up for me before... to put things short, it "backed up," but had all of these errors and didn't update the message that I wasn't backed up and... it was a disaster. Finally, I told myself to stop wasting time and go do what I was supposed to do - write. Right? Well, apparently, my file didn't "exist!" I ran the "restore" option, praying that it would somehow work (which it did by the way), my heart skipping beats. I think I forgot to mention that I haven't backed up my work in progress at all. It takes 2 seconds, but I'm just too damned lazy :/. Now I'll be scared into using good back up habits (for about a month or two, then I'll probably have the same incident). But now I'm still worried since the virus scan didn't find anything and I have a suspicion that one of those nasty April Fool's viruses is lurking on my system. Let's hope April fool's isn't Doom's day for me.


That's a snippet. The dialogue is threadbare, but I couldn't keep up with all the details in the movie in my head. My head is weird, ok? (The formatting wouldn't trasfer into blogger, so I had to take a picture).

Next time I post, it'll probably be either on April Fools or very close. I'm still wondering just how my script will start out...

PS: One of my inspirations for my novel (hopefully not too creepy) :http://aerated.blogspot.com/2008/05/so-you-wanna-look-like-trent-reznor.html

Am I April-Fooling Myself? & 13 Days 'Till April

It's been several days since I've come to the realization that I've set myself up for TWO (that's right) writing contests in one month. Judging from my previous success (ahem) I don't know what to hope for and that might be good so I won't disappoint myself. Speaking of my "success," I think I can now safely say that I've climbed out of the non-writing hole and my Muse is resurrected. She refuses to say where she went, if she'll leave again, and most importantly HOW I make sure she won't... so I must use every second I have with her productively. For several days, I've kept a steady pace of about 1.5 pages per day, so I think I'm doing okay. Of course, it's no match for "crazy contest" pace, but it's better than back in November (one of the few times I allow myself to use "epic fail").


Going back to the real subject, I've decided to set a low goal for the current project, probably around 6000 words, but do Script Frenzy full scale. I'm a little worried that I'll drop the novel because working on two things at once never works for me, but if I can keep up my steady writing pace throughout March, maybe April won't be so bad. Or at least not an epic fail.