Writing Ambition

Having seen D4D™ hit its fifth birthday recently has made me start doing a fair amount of thinking. Well, it’s more the combination of D4D™ being five, and watching “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip“. Which just makes things even weirder.

One of the things that I wanted to do with D4D™ when I started it was to build up my writing. I used to do a lot of writing of other stuff, and along the way I churned out two novel-length (OK, if I’m honest, one novel-length, one novella-length) pieces of work. At the time they were more about therapy than anything else, but they were OK – and Herself had copies of both of them from when I initially did them. I re-read them recently and while they’re not good exactly – there’s stuff that’s too self-referential and/or indulgent, and a lot of it is “of it’s time”, shall we say – nor are they bad, either.

Anyway, along the way, D4D™ has become a bit of an entity of its own. I’ve written (at the time of doing this piece) some 4,500 posts over five years, amounting to just under 630,000 words- not including the rants and thoughts. A fair amount of it is crap, obviously – but with a fair amount of OK and good stuff thrown into the mix too. (He said, modestly) But at the same time, D4D™ is a greedy beast, and I spend more time writing odds and sods for here , which means that rather than fuelling the drive, impetus and maybe even need to write, instead it’s become the outlet, and that requirement to write is the fuel for D4D™ instead.

And where does Studio 60 come into it? Simple, really. Aaron Sorkin is one of my writing gods – I absolutely adore West Wing, and I think Studio 60 is another part of that pantheon, although I can also understand why it got canned after one season.

Over the weekend, Gordon pondered what would we do if we won the lottery. The thing I would do in that circumstance would be to take a year completely out of work (well, out of paid work, anyway) and instead use that time to put fingers to keyboard, and work to bring about some of the writing ideas that’ve taken up residence in my head over the years.

And that’s the dream, really. A life/job where the creative side takes precedence, so that I can both write and take photos for a living. The odds are fairly long that I’ll ever get there, although I still want to try.

But if I’m going to do that, perhaps D4D™ needs to go on pause, so that I have to find another outlet for the writing. It’s not going to happen just yet, but it’s something to think about. And it’s something I am thinking about. I don’t know whether it would work, but it’s something that I might just have to try…