Writing About Writing Vol. 18... A True Story about "True Story©"

 

This was all one big happy-ass accident…
On a random Thursday (September 1^nd) in 2016, at 7:30am, I logged onto The BookFace and made a silly little status about God-knows-what.  I started it with the term True Story©…
Doing so forced people’s eyes onto the status, then only a few dozen words long to have them get all the way through the story to realize I was ABSOLUTELY bullshitting.  It was such a hit at the time, with the comment thread lasting for days, that I decided on the next Thursday to do it again.  Rinse, repeat and so on and so-forth.  With practice, the statuses got longer and longer – perhaps at the danger of being too long for social media.  Now y’all know why I am procedurally MARRIED to Thursday morning at 7:30am.

After a few weeks of this, I remembered that I do have and had since neglected a blog that I could be using for this…
Say Less™…  Natural next step was to UN-neglect the blog.  I could come on back home and make use of all the space I wanted without fear of being placed in the BookFace Penitentiary and the likes.  No more captive audiences to see me and my mania on their timeline and hide/block me.  Visitors are allowed to arrive and split voluntarily.

Whoo, boy, was I onto something…  In short order, people who I had no clue were watching and cheering for me were here and paying AMAZING attention.  Eventually, it was apparent that a strong enough number of people were excited to see what nonsense I would come up with from week to week and I was more than willing to deliver.

With more practice at what has become my “thing,” I seriously feel like I have developed and cultivated my absolute best talent.  My day-to-day is a mix of normal life with thinking about “how could I make this a story?”

 

The fun/ny thing about True Story©… and especially what it has become is that while all of this shit is kind of “true,” none of it is.  The designation is Tongue in Cheek, it is irony.  Everything I write comes from something I saw, heard, read, or otherwise encountered in a podcast.  It is what I might have done if consequences weren’t a thing.  I offer small crumbs of what actually happened in with the abject bullshit of it all.  I sprinkle the realism on QUITE heavily to skew the lines as adeptly as possible.  I take it as a badge of honor when someone texts back “wait, did this really HAPPEN!?” after I have shared with them.
One who doesn’t know better must remember that, to me, this is ALL conversational.  I write these stories the same way I would tell them if we were sitting around a bonfire in my yard, cuss words and infuriating ADHD digressions included.

I have learned to treat True Story©… as my own little fucked up Cinematic Universe.  Any character good enough to be given name will PROBABLY show up later.  There is really no rhyme or reason as to when or why, of course.  Forced continuity helps me when I am having a week where I might be short on ideas.  Circling back and continuing a previous story is a HEAVY help to keeping this ball rolling.  I learned/developed this trick after my job change and hospital stay sidelined me creatively from 2018 until Covid.

     I am infinitely thankful to the Wife Person™, who has to have the patience of Job to deal with my bullshit when it comes to these.  The real people who have become characters, plus the others who haven’t yet but eventually will text me at 9:30am on a Thursday with a “what the fuck?” when I haven’t shared the week’s story with them on time.  I am thankful to everyone who threw a “one word” at me to turn into a story when I was on that run.

     I don’t make a DIME doing this…  I PAY Google yearly for my website – moreso for consistent hosting of this army of AI-generated images I use now – and don’t really mind.  As hobbies go, writing is one of my least expensive ones.  I have never yet felt like this is work, or had an “I don’t feel like doing this” moment.  There have been periods when I legitimately lacked access or time like the above-mentioned times and when we moved, but it was never about lack of desire.  To fight that more lately, I write and queue multiple stories in a sitting or three.

     You’ve all made it this far, I won’t hold you any longer…  See you (most) Thursday mornings.