The musings of a madman...

  (New WaW image, y'all!)      Y'all know True Story© is a whole construction/production process and I am 90% of the crew? It starts with a spark. I see something out in the world as I do my daily "life" thing. Something will happen in my field of view/hearing and--... Wait... Y'all DO know that there is always some element of something that happened in every story, right?      Anyway, spark... I see something out in the world and I use that as an idea. I break out the ol' phone and start typing furiously in a Gmail draft that will auto-save as soon as I navigate to another app or out of that message: (okay, so maybe not a REAL story forming) I will continue to grind out that wall of words, really only concerned with the idea of the story, minding grammar and making sure to establish properly-formed sentences and paragraphs. I do this in my Gmail drafts because that automatically saves them right where it is until I get to the PC.    ...

  Y’all know why I do this? For the practice of it! [ Phlip note : I know today is Monday, I still got y’all on Thursday! ]      Several years ago – September 1, 2017 – I made a silly BookFace post that started with the words “True Story©” and proceeded to tell an absolutely unhinged short work of fiction. It made no sense, I did it because I was bored and people REALLY enjoyed it. Because people enjoyed it and I am often thirsty for positive reinforcement, I did it the next Thursday morning and a habit was formed.      In the intervening years, I have continued to do this – at a monetary and time cost to myself – because I have always wanted to write and needed something to motivate me to do so. For anyone who has been around while I have been doing this, and I can honestly say that there are six who have been on for the WHOLE ride (no matter how many “both of you” jokes I tell), have actively seen that I am approaching this developmentally. Where...

       How goes that saying about old dogs and new tricks? Well this will be the first salvo in a new approach around here.      As those of you who know me personally know, I have expanded my lawn work to a page I created last year on YouTube as well. I feel like I'm finding my footing when it comes to capturing and editing video and I'm only getting better. Considering how very little I knew when I started, I'm quite proud of my progress.      Alongside the yard work, another thing I'm comfortable in my ability of is writing. I've always preferred dead-tree reading and have learned a shift to online reading as I have taken a shine to online writing, but I have never quite been able to get behind the concept of e-books. One thing I have noticed is that a great many others swear by being able to listen to what was written, be it in the car or the office or even just milling about their daily errands. A decision was made... ...

       I was always a creative kid… As an adult, I can sometimes feel alone in a loud-ass room full of people. Half the people milling about on Tiktok, a portion yammering on about things that don’t particularly interest me and the remaining ones “overhearing” that group. None of it is my scene.      On the off chance that I am eventually directly addressed, my brain has sometimes gone on a small field trip to whatever fictional land it is creating in a given moment while maintaining just enough attention and eye contact to not appear checked out of the conversation in front of me. This is why I prefer text conversations to phone conversations and why I need personal interactions to also include an activity of some sort, because I daydream.      Not only do I daydream, but I LUCIDLY daydream. I will never deny guilt of this but in the middle of a workout, while at work or in a yard, my mind takes things I see or hear and sends t...

  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 ma...

      Before I get started, I will say that I absolutely stuck with the established-for-the-topic image on this post… Okay, let’s boogie.      For the past several years, I have led True Story©… off with an image loosely related to the story, usually related to the very topic of the tale itself but sometimes to the punchline of the story when I was feeling particularly funny.      For the month of March – well, for the three out of five stories in March I made after this was presented to me – I started to employ AI image generators to make those images.  For the YEARS prior, I would simply Google search terms somehow related to the story, then I would scroll and sift through the image search results and simply steal and use whichever one humorously partnered with my story of that week. … and I prayed that the rightful owners of the images never said anything.  Thus far they have not.      The ...

“Just talk it out…”      That seems like a simple enough instruction to follow, right? Well let me explain something.   I am a middle child by birth order, a creative weirdo by nature and a bit of a misunderstood outcast due to both of the above. …   I also talk about writing like underground rappers talk about rapping.   It is something I enjoy and I am good at.      You know what I DON’T do a lot and never became particularly good at?   Talking! This isn’t to say I am inarticulate or lack vocabulary, I am just used to “sit down and shut up” as a parenting technique that I tend to silently watch a room until I need to talk.      Unless I am excited. When I am excited, unless the audience is similarly interested in what I am yammering on about then I fully expect to feel the “sit down and shut up” vibe I was raised on.   The only difference is nobody better put their hands on me, lest ther...

       If I told you I noticed what was happening and specifically planned to do so the way it has unfolded, I would be lying… True Story© has created itself as its own host, as a perpetual virtual novel, if you will.   It was “officially” born on September 1, 2016 as an exercise, a place for me to flesh out ideas and keep my pen game up on the chance that one day I might realize my dream to write for a living.   Comments on The Bookface and a push from a then-girlfriend-now-wife and three other friends who I love dearly caused it to become “a thing.”      “A Thing” became, as is my nature, something I became obsessed with the very production and presentation of to present every available Thursday and I did just that for almost two years before a surprise week in the hospital and the resultant fallout in 2018.   I still WANTED to write, but sometimes being benched can throw things askew.      Two year...

     When I was 12 and in seventh grade, my aunt came to visit my English class.   She was, unbeknownst to me until that class on that day, a published author and a good friend of my teacher whose name alcohol has erased from my 41 year old memory.   She spoke of a book she had recently written and was on the way to publishing that happened to be stories of my family and her and her siblings (including my own father) during their own upbringing. These were stories I knew first hand, but the way she presented them made it so…   ENTERTAINING.   It was something completely new to me to see something so mundane as a story that every kid knows of what begat them presented in a manner that could hold the attention of 20 twelve year-olds.      I was hooked… As a middle child, also-ran, “who is that guy” kid, I have always been used to things just being whatever they are and cruising through life without any specific dream o...

     I’m spaced out in the car. I’m sitting in front of the coffee table, hands on my chin staring into nothingness. I am in the middle of a workout mumbling to myself. I randomly chuckle while I am in the shower. I take the long way home or circle the block one or five more times.      “Babe, what’s wrong?” my wife asks.  Every time, I tell her nothing is wrong, I’m just thinking.  When she (inevitably) asks “about what?” I can only shift my eyes and shake my head.  She is beginning to get it.      This is my creative process.  By the time I put my fingers to the keyboard, my map is already drawn and my hands are already driven to what must be done.  I have thought it through, I have planned where I want to go and how I will get there.  My mind is an EVER active place.  While this usually manifests itself in a cavalcade of memes on my FB timeline or in a weird dance of nervous e...

“The Elements” Back on September 1 , I explained – err, shared Will Smith’s explanation of – the relationship of talent and skill. Those are not the elements I intend to speak on this month. February 5 th was my, unbeknownst to either of you, official end to my holiday malaise.  I had been thinking and brainstorming on shit I would write when I sat down and put myself to it, but had not typed a damn thing in weeks.  The last place I had left off in the moment was my ongoing beef with Santa Claus . That morning, I sat down at work after dropping the princess off at school, and I started typing.  Pt II was born in less than an hour.  A little later, III was real.  As of when you read this, I am done through at LEAST part VI and have plans for the series. Focusing still on that same week, I wrote my Hotep Wednesday post THE morning it was to be posted.  I wrote The Bakery later on that afternoon at the end of my lunch break.  Friday morni...

     Sometimes you don’t know what the fuck you want to write, you just know you want to write when you sit down to do so. My trick when I find myself in this spot?  A key word or phrase… What do I mean? Come back to August and September with me. Work Spouse : ALL I knew I wanted to include in that story was the “Pennsylvania into her Virginia” line and had been thinking about it for THREE WEEKS before the scribe. Quaaludes : I was talking about The Get Down with someone the day before I wrote this story and the only thing I could think of was “boogie oogie Disco Biscuits.” I wrapped ENTIRE stories around getting those words/phrases into the mix.      Sometimes, that is about all the spark you should need.  A “why” to your “what.”  Having one goal to write toward is what it took to get you typing, the real fun is making it JUST there. To me, that is the fun part; sitting down with NOTHING to go on and remember...

Be a "Volume Shooter"… This guy, he was a volume shooter: What does that even mean? A lot of people saw Kobe Bryant as a ballhog of sorts.  What people were missing is that sometimes overachieving will come from an outpouring of effort.  Putting up a ton of points on a bunch of shots might be the easiest way to it.      If you write, then write .  Every time your smartphone comes out, your notes app should be available within two taps of your screen.  MS Word (or whatever word processing application you use) should be on your frequently-used or shortcutted on your computers. EVERYTHING can be written about.  Writing should be a constant process.      Stick to it, stick to it constantly.  Throw a million things at the wall in hopes that a thousand stick, and fine tune the whole FUCK out of that thousand.  Write until you're tired, but not until you're burnt out. You will write some...

     Today’s theme: Don’t Overthink it. As simple a concept as this may seem to be, it is DIFFICULT in a creative process that is constant to actually do.  The work done toward constant improvement is more in constant practice and willing acceptance of what comes back.  But that is a concept we have already dabbled in, so no need to repeat ourselves.      This is more about trusting yourself and your instincts.  You sat down to write, let that bitch fly!  What I mean by this is that your first gut feeling is usually the best.  Back over the summer, while I was in and out of vacation and away from both my home AND work computers, I was in a pinch to get things up and I kind of felt my work suffered some for it.  I would never let anyone know this shit as it is happening, but as I sit and type this, I see EXACTLY why that was. I was too obsessed with things like word count and a multitude of other shit that rea...

     “Stick and Move.” Every day I have been near a desktop computer for about the last 16 months, I make a point of opening my blog dashboard and looking around.  I make sure of the traffic numbers, I look at comments that might have found themselves in the Moderation Queue, I look back over previous posts and make small changes I may have missed on the way through the first time. Most importantly, I open my drafts queue.  In it there is usually one to three posts I am actively working on, one I am purposely never posting and FIVE I can best describe as a “false start.”      My archive goes like this: 2009 – 204 posts.  I was new and excited. 2010 – 178 posts.  I was still into what I was doing but busy in the real world. 2011 – 110 posts.  Ava showed up in July and my time was strained. 2012 – 35 posts I was slowly being dragged somewhere I wound up not liking. 2013 – 8 posts…  see above, I was actually...

Short post today y’all… “Fearlessness”      Not everything is for everybody.  Don’t let fear of catching a brick keep you from trying .  Some days, you will do something and present it to the world and at the end of the day, the only hits you’ll register are the ones that came when you visited the post to share it…  In your head you will hear the cartoon “whomp whomp whomp…” Fuck that, you stand learn more from having it happen than you EVER will from pussing out to avoid it.      Don’t be afraid to be the only one laughing.  Of course, when you find yourself in that position you should be working on what got you there to stop it.  Do. NOT. Shy. from being taken there from time to time. Don’t get comfortable BEING in that spot, by no means am I suggesting that being unfunny is a desirable place to reside.      Back to the leading thought.  You can NOT please everyone.  ...