humidity sucks

I couldn’t sleep well last night because of the humidity. I kept waking up wet, turning my pillow over and over to try to find a dry spot to put my head. I’m a big, sweaty guy as it is, so even a little bit of heat and humidity will make me crazy. Sometimes I find myself in public with my shirt drenched all the way through. I’ve even taught classes with a soaked shirt. Disgusting, really.

But enough of my petty discomfort. I really need to spend some time thinking through my writing. It seems to me that, in addition to freewriting, I need to be revising and outlining what I write. Pumping out a bunch of text feels great, but it all comes to naught if I don’t revise it into some kind of acceptable form. What that form is, I don’t know, but I need to begin exploring what it might look like. Let me try to brainstorm a list of what I might be able to do with this blog’s posts.

1. A diary of a depressed academic and musician, struggling to find my way through the fog.
2. A musical practice diary. This option would require a lot more writing focused on music. It would also require that I brainstorm and outline my vision for moving forward.
3. A writer’s diary about writing. Again, and revision of this blog that emphasizes writing really should begin by brainstorming and outlining. There may be some starter themes already among the posts.
4. A mini-autobiography. This would require some planning, but much of the blog so far is simply my writing about my thoughts of the moment. With a little planning I could redirect my thoughts more toward my life. In particular, I might want to write about my experiences in Africa.
5. A journal of random thoughts. This would require quite a lot of revision to make it readable.
6. A novel of some sort, fashioned along the lines of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. There may be a story among the posts. Again, I won’t know until I look.

But really, until I begin to re-read my blog posts I have no idea what I might find. I have been so focused on freewriting that there is no plan at all. This has been extremely helpful for improving my confidence in being able to crank out some pages, but I won’t have any idea what those pages are worth until I begin to go back through them.

Again, there seems to be a lot of repetition in my writing from post to post. This is something I need to manage in the revision process, bearing Gates’s concept in mind that I should be striving for “repetition with a signal difference.”¹

This blog has been extremely helpful for me. I now look forward to writing every day - something I did not feel before. I guess I’m beginning to hit my stride.