The Myth And Reality Of The Palomino Blackwing 602

As a guy that loves to draw, one of the benefits is that people give me a variety of artistic gifts for Christmas and birthdays. One of these is examples is a lot of different drawing pencil sets, which I have begun using at home, if only at first to get rid of them. However, there are some great pencils out there that are exceptional to sketch with, my two particular favorites being Staedtler and Tombow.

However, lurking in the corners of the internet, I continued to hear one word repeated over and over again. Similar in myth and legend to the sword Excalibur, the word I continued to hear was Blackwing. As in the discontinued Eberhard Faber Blackwing pencil. It’s renowned for being able to produce a dark line with very little effort, thanks to the addition of wax to the pencil. Granted, this isn't a unique approach among pencils. I believe the Sanford Turquoise pencil works along the same principle, and it’s a piece of shit. But this pencil was used by all sorts of people, notably artists, writers, and newspaper reporters. Two of the bigger known names associated with the Blackwing were Chuck Jones and John Steinbeck. It’s regarded to be the best pencil ever made.

So when Eberhard Faber decided to cease production of the pencil in 1998, there was a push by Blackwing devotees to get the company to reconsider. Eberhard Faber declined, and the Blackwing went extinct. People immediately went out and bought all the Blackwings that they could find, and boxes of the original Blackwings on eBay are known to go for premium prices. However, the California Cedar Corporation recognized a need, and decided to create a similar pencil to the Blackwing. More or less replicating the original design, CCC released their new Blackwing under their Palomino brand, to great fanfare. Despite those who immediately took to the new design, others said that it was still too soft and dark to truly be similar to the original Blackwing. So, CCC released another variant, the Blackwing 602. This is regarded to be close enough to the original that many of those that had great affection for the original finally accepted it, although there do remain a hardcore zealot camp of the pencil aficionado group that still regard it as shit. Picky fucking bastards.

I normally wouldn't have spent money on this type of product, because the mark up for nostalgia is about twenty bucks per box. However, I did have an Amazon.com gift card that was burning a hole in my pocket, and didn't have anything else I was going to purchase outside of a book. On an idle hunch, I looked up the Blackwing on Amazon, and sure enough, there was an after Christmas sale, plus free shipping, that dropped the price dramatically. With that in mind, I went ahead and pulled the trigger.

The Blackwing 602 is a very aesthetically striking pencil. It’s gunmetal grey, with gold leaf on the shaft of the pencil, naming the pencil on one side, and proudly proclaiming that its “HALF THE PRESSURE, TWICE THE SPEED” on the other side. It also has the signature wide pencil eraser at the end, which allows for one to be able to replace the eraser when it becomes dull. It’s this replaceable eraser design, and specifically it’s clips that hold the eraser to the eraser harness, that doomed the original Blackwing, since the machine that stamped out the harnesses broke, and the pencil wasn't commercially lucrative enough to repair. The pencil eraser actually works pretty well, and you can buy replacement erasers in black, pink, orange, and blue. However, the huge downside to this eraser design is that it means that it is incompatible with a pencil extender, which many artists use because, well lets face it, pencils are a bit expensive at a dollar to dollar fifty a pop. This makes the Blackwing, at a certain point, useless, or just uncomfortable to use.

However, I'm dancing around the main issue at hand, the one that is most important among all of this pencil worship: how does it write? Well, very well, thank you. It's a very smooth pencil, one that barely offers you any resistance or friction, similar to what you get in the softest of leads. With minimal pressure, you get a nice, darkish line, similar to a HB or B lead, and with more pressure, you can get some really nice, smooth dark lines probably in the 3 or 4B range. It really is a fine writing instrument, and for this reason, I can see why so many artists and writers loved it. Plus, the lead is pretty firm, and doesn't dull very easily, a complaint I've heard about the standard Blackwing. I like this, actually.  I like it a lot.

Do I like it enough to pay the full price for it?

No.

Let's backtrack a bit.  It's a very expensive pencil.  I calculated the average cost of the pencil, with the full price of each box, plus shipping.  You're going to roughly pay about $2 per Blackwing if you are going to be a regular user.  That's a pretty steep price for what is a good, but not transcendent sketching experience.  Plus, this is still a pretty niche pencil, which means you are more than likely not going to find it in your local art supply store.  You're going to have to get it from a third party seller like Amazon or JetPens.  For about .50 cents less, and a lot more convenience, you'd get somewhat similar results from a Staedtler F Lead Pencil, or a Pentel Ebony.  The experience isn't worth the extra coin and work.

More importantly, there's this.  Tools can only go so far.  Granted, there is a difference between spending a good deal of cash on something cheap and actually getting a quality product at a good price.  But what makes the tool most effective is the person using it, not the tool.  You can't teach skill.  Using a Blackwing won't make you into Steinbeck or Chuck Jones.  I've seen people do absolutely beautiful artwork with nothing more than a Number Two pencil.  The Blackwing does add a bit of ease and smoothness into your drawing experience, but it doesn't replace the actual skill of the person wielding it.  I'll probably use up this box of Blackwings over the year, and will do so with great pleasure.  I think even the stub of the pencil that I can't use, plus the unique eraser (it'll be intact, as I rarely use the erasers on pencils) will look pretty sweet in a fedora.  But I'll probably never buy a box again, unless circumstances like what happened occur once again.

But I I have one final thought to those that might decry this Blackwing as still inferior to the original.  Just use this new one.  Regardless of whether or not it is a true successor to the original, outside of a garage or estate sale (and I look, trust me) or a eBay auction, the original has gone the way of Tasmanian Tiger.  You more than likely won't ever find the original ever again, barring Eberhard Faber suddenly deciding to reverse course and market this as a limited edition premium pencil, which will likely be more expensive.  Plus, I'm willing to gamble that much of the opinion about the original Blackwing is merely perception, as if a way of maintaining the cult status of what was a beloved, but unappreciated pencil, whose disappearance and mythology has only increased as our memories fade and the feel of the original disappears from our hands.  If you must have a Blackwing in your paws while you create, than at least give what is out there a chance.

Sources

• Fortune Magazine's Blackwing Article
• The Blackwing Pages
• Pencilpedia's Blackwing Article

(Not So) Fast Break

Photo by Grant McKeekin, check out his Flickr here.

Basketball runs in my family.

My uncles from my Mother's side of the family were high school standouts for the El Paso High Tigers, with my younger uncle playing semi-pro basketball in Mexico for a time.  My older cousin Chris was a starter for his high school team in Albuquerque, and was quite a good one too.  I remember travelling with my family to his games in Las Cruces when La Cueva would play a local team there, like Mayfield or Onate.  My uncle Emilio was a local legend in El Paso, who often played pick up games against the famous 1966 Texas-El Paso team that won the NCAA championship, and even played for Don Haskins for a couple of years before a devastating knee injury derailed his hopes of turning pro.  His two daughters were starters for their ladies high school team, the Hanks High School Lady Knights, before going off to college.   Another cousin played for his local high school team while his father was stationed in Germany.  My sister played some junior high school ball for her team, and even my brother gave a crack at trying to play hoops.  He wasn't bad, but decided to do track instead.

Myself?   With this amazing history in my family, and the potential for possible adequacy, and perhaps even stardom in my genes, I should have been amazing at this sport that I had an interest in. right?

But no, I sucked hard.

No, that's a bit too harsh.  Despite my interest in the game (I'm a lifelong San Antonio Spurs fan), the skills weren't there.  Up until high school  I stood at five feet, had no rhythm or feel for the game, and barely able to control dribbling the ball.  So, to put it a little kinder, I was absolutely abysmal at basketball.  A vortex of suck, as the cool kids on the basketball blogs put it.

Needless to say, I tended to be on terrible teams when it came to P.E. basketball teams, especially in junior high, where coaches, out of disinterest or laziness, just allowed the kids to form their own teams.  Naturally, the kids that were good, or at least competent, tended to group together, creating two or three super-teams  which naturally walloped the out of the five or six squads made up of scrubs.  So, for the month and a half that basketball was organized for that particular grading period, P.E. became an exercise of suiting up in our uniforms of old t-shirts and shorts that were a couple of washes away from being used to wash a car (my uncle coined the term P.L.C.'s for these clothes, which stood for Para Llavar El Carro) and getting smoked by fifty. Yes, it was every bit as fun as it sounds.

It was in the final few games that my particular band of unathletic misfits (who had the audacity to call themselves the Celtics, which may have jinxed the real life Celtics who went 32-50 that season and missed the playoffs), went against the team that had dubbed themselves the Rockets, who were sitting pretty at the top of our makeshift division, with the playoffs set to begin the next week in a winner gets absolutely nothing, round robin tournament before we switched over to Dodgeball or something along those lines.

Predictably, things started off badly.  That particular team had at least two of the starters from the Slider 7th Grade A team, with at least a couple of the bench guys from the B team thrown into their mix.  They could play, and had been since they were kids.  My team on the other hand, could be summed up in the following statement:  we weren't big, but we were slow.   So it wasn't a surprise that after twenty minutes of play, my team was down by double digits.  My memory is hazy, but the point differential was probably in the thirties or forties.  It wasn't pretty.

Things only got worse after what consisted of our halftime, which was generally break long enough to go run to the outside water fountain, which was usually the one fountain on the school whose refreshment tasted faintly like the pipes. Still, whatever was in that faintly lead tasting hydration must have ignited some superhuman gene within our opponents, because we were getting destroyed at an even more breakneck pace than before. It was like watching the Seven Seconds or Less Suns, but with you being the guy this time, you're on the receiving end of the beating.

That's when my teammates started leaving. It should have been expected. At some point, no matter how hard you might try, there are certain things that you just aren't able to do, simply because physically, you can't. In this case, after all the losing from the past few weeks, as the schedules were far from balanced, the running up the score on others, and the current annihilation in progress, sometimes people reach their breaking points. And in this case, someone did. I don't remember the kids name, but I just remember the look of disgust on his face that preceded a quiet, cracking voice, still halfway between manhood and childhood croaking "Screw this."  One moment, he was playing matador defense against the other team's point guard, the next moment, he suddenly turned and walked sullenly, dejectedly off the court.  The dam had broken, as once one person leaves, it's hard to keep other people feeling the same way from doing so.  In the span of minutes, I found that I was now very much alone on the basketball court.

This created a quandary, as the other team and I, were at something of an impasse.  The game was still going on, and coaches were watching to make sure that we were participating.  Quitting wasn't something that reflected well on one's P.E. grade, even if it was the difference from getting an A or a B on an otherwise useless class period.  On the other hand, there wasn't a team on the floor anymore, so technically, how could the game still be continue?  Realistically, I could leave the game, walk away, and no one would have blamed me for doing so.

Except I couldn't do that.  Call it stubbornness,  call it pride, or maybe some uncrushable part of my sense of self that I had yet to discover, but I couldn't walk away.  The idea was unacceptable to me.  Time was ticking, and a decision needed to be made.  I had the ball in my hands, and five other people were standing, wondering just what I was going to do next.

I had no one to inbound the ball to me, I just bounced it once and charged in, five on one, myself against the world.

If this were an episode of Saved By The Bell, or at the very least an episode of ABC's After School Special, I suppose this would be the moment where i discovered some sort of  hidden ability, an Allen Iverson-esque ability of basketball in which I could play in isolation, dominate the game, and somehow lead myself to a comeback.  Or that my teammates, inspired by my stubborn determination, would come roaring back to my side, and through some mixture of grit, luck, and determination, we would have emerged victorious.

But no, I got destroyed, 70-something to 4.  And I was extremely lucky to get the four.  The score would have probably been higher if the whistles not eventually sounded the final whistle for all of the games on the playground courts.  I have to admit, I was slightly embarrassed.  I hadn't expected to do well, although I didn't expect a trouncing along those lines.  However, I do remember feeling oddly proud of myself that I had at least played the entire period, and played my hardest, even though it wasn't very well.

The next day, after suiting up, I passed by the dot-matrixed printed standings of our divisions, which usually told us which playground court to go to, along with where we stood in our divisions.  Out of curiosity  I looked at my team's record, and was surprised to see that we had somehow picked up a win.  Well, I wasn't  surprised, my mind was blown.  I asked the couch if he had made a typo, and he said, no, you guys picked up a win yesterday.

I immediately sought out one of the guys from the other team the day before.  I asked him, what happened?

"You won the game."  He said simply.

"How?"  I asked, confused more than ever.  "You kicked my teams ass, and then my ass right after that."

"You didn't give up."  He said simply, looking at me like I was a complete idiot.  "Everyone left, but you stayed and you still played.  So we went to coach after the game and forfeited.  You earned that win."  And then he walked off, leaving me staring as he walked out into the school grounds as my band of misfits slowly dragged their sneaks to today's latest trouncing (we lost hard, breaking our one game win streak.)

Despite the rather unbelievable circumstances of this story, it is a true one, and I've told it as closely to the truth as a can, for it did happen almost 19 years ago.  And it has taught me quite a bit as I've reflected over time.  That being persistent and confident in one's self can help lead you to where you need to go.  That people will respect the effort that you place in a cause, even if it at times may be a hopeless one.  And that at times, even though something may seem hopeless or dire, perhaps it is better to

Maybe I do have something to add to my family's basketball history after all.  A story about a guy that took on the world, got beaten up in the process, and yet still came out with a victory, in his own way.  This is not going to be a story that will be held in esteem, nor will be told in the nostalgic, sepia tones that the tales of my uncles' hoop dreams are told then and now.  It's a story that will likely die with me, and will likely be forgotten.  But the important thing is that it happened.  And for that brief moment, as I stood in the hallway of the middle school, with the rest of my gym classmates filing past me, I might have, for that brief moment, felt like they did, when their stories were the moment, when they were young, and they were writing their stories on the hardwood.

Five Of My Favorite Disaster Flicks

Tomorrow is December 21st, 2012, the latest date that doomsday fetishists have circled for our immanent demise (and also, coincidentally enough, my parents' 33rd wedding anniversary.)   Seeing as how the world could either end in a massive technological-zombie apocalypse, or more likely, nothing, I figured I would share five of my favorite post-apocalypse films that I would show for a movie marathon.  Why?  Because it's the end of the world, what else do you have going on tomorrow?

28 Days Later

A modern horror classic, 28 Days Later is, in my opinion, perhaps the most important movie in the zombie genre since the original Night of The Living Dead.   It was revolutionary for it's departure from the zombie as a shuffling, slow, but unrelenting menace, instead portraying the undead hoards (well, infected hoards) as quick moving, violent threats that had to be dealt with quickly.  It's really a beautiful film to look at, with it's grainy, almost dirty look of the film showing Danny Boyle's point of view of post-apocalypse Great Britain.  There are some beautiful scenes: the almost picturesque views of the English countryside, allowing the viewer to momentarily forget the surroundings and circumstances of the film, the view of Jim walking through a empty and devastated London, to the intimate, brutal, and gory zombie battles, in particular the final scene when Jim leads the hoards of infected to rescue Selena and Hannah.  The soundtrack is also top notch, and is perfectly integrated with the film's scenes, in particular the zombie attacks, which gets progressively more frantic and unrelenting as the movie progresses.  All in all, it's a great film, and unlike many zombie films, it has a happy, hopeful ending.

The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow is another disaster film favorite of mine.  Granted, it's completely unrealistic (28 Days Later's zombie scenario is at least plausible, as opposed to God forgetting to pay the heat in this film), but it also knows this and doesn't take itself seriously.  It's highly entertaining, features Emmy Rossum looking incredibly cute, Dennis Quaid bring his brand of rugged awesomeness to the film, as well as Jake Gyllenthall bring youthful enthusiasm along with his brand of mediocre acting (he was great in Jarhead, though).  All in all, if you have time to waste, don't feel like exercising your brain, and just want a popcorn movie, this one's for you.

I Am Legend

I Am Legend is another good post-apocalypse film, loosely based (very loosely)on the comic book of the same name. It’s very much in the vein of 28 Days Later, in which a virus devastates the world, leaving very few survivors (in this case, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. No word about Carlton or Jazz). We have some great empty city shots, such as the driving through the empty city scene, as well as the mini-golf off of the aircraft carrier shot. Still, even though the source material is deviated from, it’s a good movie, and Will Smith does a fantastic job in it. See the extended cut with the alternate ending, it’s awesome.

The Postman

The Postman gets a lot of grief for being another over the top, over-budgeted Kevin Costner post-apocalypse film. Actually, though, it's not bad. The story isn't great, but it's plausible, and the cast manages to pull it off well enough to give it some believability. Costner's acting is good, and seeing him go from being a lonser to the father of civilization is oddly gratifying. And how can you not hate the Tom Petty cameo as the mayor of the dam city? The only problem I have is, didn't society come back a little too quickly at the end of the film? Other than that, it's not bad, much better than people will give it credit for.

The Book of Eli

he Book of Eli is a great film, centering around Denzel's character Eli, travelling through west coast, as he takes a Bible to Alcatraz to mass produce to the population, but is immediately set upon by raging atheists who want the book's power for their own means.  It's a gritty, dark and dirty film, but one that has some great fight scenes, and some good acting in the form of Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman.  It's another plausible survivalist tale, and a damn good one.

So, hopefully if you are having any end of the world parties, be safe, be responsible, and don't do anything stupid, because remember, if the world doesn't end, and you do something stupid, you're going to have to answer for it on December 22.

Taping Music Off Of The Radio: A Brief Retrospective

Photo by Tramavirtual

My office Christmas party was this past Friday, and as usual, a great time was had, with lots of conversation, some drunken observations (I never drink at these gatherings for fear of becoming the talk of the office), as well as the usual shenanigans that tend to occur between co-workers after hours.  Rewind back to three hours prior, and I was tearing open my closets like I was robbing the place, looking for a roll of wrapping paper to wrap my secret Santa gift.

It was in this ransacking of my own home that I found something that had been tucked away in the back of a closet for quite some time, the sheen of dust already turning it's oily black exterior into a sort of gunmetal grey. I paused over this dusty little container, curious to what I had in there and what may have possessed me to keep this thing over the years.

Most of these tapes were made back in the 1990's, a magical time when I went from a awkward, shy youth to a even more awkward, shy young adult.  The Internet was still in it's infancy, and still had it's potential to become something new and exciting before becoming overrun by Facebook and porn.  MTV still had music in between their reality show programming, and Kurt Loder was years away from being locked in a freezer like Sly Stallone in Demolition Man, only to be thawed out when someone big from the 80's and 90's had passed.  The highlight of the video game world was probably Doom, in all of it's pixelated gore and glory.   Woodstock had returned, was hailed as a success, returned again, and went down in a fiery mess of violence, commercialism and Fred Durst.

The 1990's were also, more than any decade in my humble opinion, plagued by the misfortune of having an overabundance of albums that had perhaps one or two really good songs, with the rest of the album being only a hop skip and  a jump away from being categorized as a fetid sewer.  Keep in mind, the average CD price was around $12 to $15.  In 90's dollars, that was the difference between buying a music just so I could have access to the song Sex And Candy, or using said fundage on a tank of gas, a cheap date, some illegal beer for a kick back, or some other tomfoolery that I may have been up to back in those good old days.

Fortunately children, or those children who are young enough to have been born after 1990 or so, there were ways to get the song if you wanted it bad enough.  The first was to see if you could bum a CD from a friend that happened to be stupid enough to buy the song, usually for another CD that you had been stupid enough to purchase.  However, if you were desperate enough, and had enough patience, there was a way to get around having to pay for the song: taping said song off of the radio.   It's a long dead art, killed by the digital age, but back then, and several generations before then, we had this down to a science.  All you needed was a Memorex, a stereo with a record option, and some time.

The process began with calling the deejay on the request line, offering everything but your first born child for the chance of the song of your dreams to be played.  This tended to be a crap shoot, as deejays, then as now, tend to ahve their own ideas as far as what is good music that should be played.  I usually had the best of luck with Glen Garza, the only guy at our local (only) rock station to play music after 1986.   I hated Magic Mike, who played a non-stop orgy of Van Halen, both from the Sammy Hagar and David Lee Roth eras.

Second, you assumed the yoga-esque pose by the radio, waiting like a lion for it's quarry.  Everyone had their own positions, usually some bizarre love child of the utkatasana and malasana poses.  Anything that prevented you from developing a bloodclot in your legs that would lodge itself in your lungs and kill you like Finney from the novel A Separate Peace.  

And there you would wait, often waiting through aggrevating commercials (like the infamous J.J. King of Beepers jingles), and at times shifting your yoga positions to something more comfortable, even taping an occasional song that you might have liked and had not occurred to you.  We all even had the songs that we knew and hated enough to use for bathroom breaks, grab a bite to eat, or go do something productive (in my case, usually something by Rush.)

And who can forget those moments waiting by the radio when your musical quarry, finally DID come on.....only to have the accursed deejay start rambling on about how this was the band's new single, how he thought it was awesome, and the name of the radio station before the song began to play. All the while, you're crouching there with the recorder going on your stereo screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP! I"m trying to get music here!"  Especially if said deejay happened to love the sound of his own voice to talk right up until the lyrics began (unfortunately, also Glen Garza.)

True, I did have enough recordings where I could remix two different sections into one complete song, and I acquired the skill (a useless one) to get it to where it was seemless.  But nothing beat the feeling of recording the song perfectly from one take to another, without interruption, commercials, or egotistical deejay ranting to ruin it.   Over time, I had even had a sort of loose network with my friends, where we each traded different mixtapes amongst each other for other music that we had.  It was like Pokemon, but without the stigma attached to it.  You would talk about new bands you had heard, shared music that you had, and just find different ways to enjoy something that you may have been passionate about.  And I think it's this part of the tapes that is why I kept them for all these years.  It was the memories of sharing and trading tunes with friends, and the different memories of a more innocent and simple time, of days gone by.

P.S.  Fuck you, Glen Garza.  I'm still bitter.

The Atrophied Remains Of My Terminated Writing Career

Photo by Thorin Nielson (check out his Flickr here)

I was cleaning out my USB drives the other day.  It's rather tedious work, as it is mostly organizing folders, old school assignments, small text file notes and other random bullshit that tends to accumulate when you are in a hurry or want to write something down on the go.  One of my more hated personal traits of mine is that I do tend to be a bit of a hoarder.  For some reason known only to my subconscious mind, I tend to hang onto things longer than I should, always out of some irrational fear that I'll need it at a later point, but won't have it.  In reality, most of it deserves to be tossed out.  Far too often, what sounds good at the time, after it's had the time to percolate and age, really turns out to have been a horrendous notion in the first place.  In the end, most of it after review is sent to my electronic dustbin, where it eventually, after a couple of keystrokes, is gone forever, blown into millions of electronic smithereens.  In the digital age, deletion tends to be easier, as we lose that physical connection that we have back when people found themselves buried under Andres mountain ranges of tree pulp.

However, upon encountering an older USB drive that I forgotten I had, I was surprised to find out that I unearthed a treasure trove of older .doc files that I had from years ago.  This was my old back up of my creative projects, back when I fancied myself as a younger, browner, Stephen King.  The amount of stuff on there ran the gamut of literary expression.  Old poems, some of which had been finished, but never collected or posted.  Various started and aborted short stories, although a few were finished.   And, incredibly enough, four projects that I was once very serious about that, but had stopped working on, all far enough along that they weren't ideas or short stories anymore, but full fledged bodies and skeletons of narratives.  I suppose the best analogy to describe them would be if you were rebuilding a car, and had managed to get the frame cleaned and straightened out, had the basic guts of the engine installed, as well as some of the necessary components that make a car a car.  Granted, it wouldn't get you very far, but at the very least, there was something there that gave you a vague idea of what the car would have looked like when finished, and perhaps even taken you where you wanted to go (like those junk yard cars that exist to solely take you from one car corpse to another.)

They were never finished, and probably weren't anywhere close to being so, but the story concepts were far enough along that each one had sort of undergone a miniature big bang, with universes beginning to form around the central outlines and ideas of the stories.  There were characters that had evolved from mere shadows that shuffled in and out of my subconscious, having fully decided to step out into the overcast light that I imagine is what the inside of my mind looks like, to introduce themselves and take part in whatever literary whim I would decide to cast them in.  There were four stories that I had managed to get quite a bit of work done.

• Battle Royale - A colaborative effort with Jesse Sanchez, a friend of mine at the time.  We had both read and watched the film, Battle Royale, and wanted to create an American version of the film, using the same guidelines as the BR Universe.  
• A Walk With Death - A random idea of mine, it would be a collection of stories of people, who, in their last five minutes of life, would have a conversation with Death himself.  Not all of them were exactly nice, uplifting stories.  Some were quite dark.  Really dark.
• A Social Experiment - Another odd title of mine, where I took the concept: what if you took a regular guy, suddenly made him the world's most wanted criminal, and dropped him into a foreign country to survive on his wits alone for three days.  I wrote day's one and three on legal paper, with the outlines of day two typed out.
• Like A Song (Working Title) - Like a song was a dystopian/sci-fi novel that I was writing, about an otherwise perfect society that we had in the future, It centered around a young man, a promising cadet for the society's security service/military forces, that wound up joining the rebellion after a great personal loss that occured, as well as how the event was spun.  It had giant robots, various tidbits of philosophy that I had learned, most notably Noam Chomsky, as well as my own various theory about religion, mythology, and other things that happened to pop into my head.  This was my opus,   This work was the most complete, and actually had a book and a half done, as well as some other future sequels finished.

After going through the words that I had once so carefully typed out, dedicated so many evenings to weaving the different threads of thoughts together, a thought came to me.

Why didn't I ever finish?

I suppose, in two cases, real world events came into play that made my once carefully crafted thoughts dated.  I had a falling out with Jesse, and tried to continue Battle Royale on my own.  Then, The Hunger Games was published, and I knew that, with a similar premise and it's own rising sales numbers, a true tribute to Takami's work would not be possible.   As for Like A Song, around the same time as I stopped work on Royale, I discovered the T.V. series Firefly, which more or less covered some of the same concepts that I had been working on in my own work.  And so, I discontinued it, fearing being seen as piggybacking off of Joss Wheldon's work (although I do love Firefly, Angel, and Wheldon's work with the Marvel Universe.)

Before I knew it, hours had passed, and it was now early in the morning hours.  And that same thought lingered in the air, as sobering and depressing as the smell of a lost love's perfume, enough to bring back some fond, happy memories, but the absence of the person making it all the more apparent that the physical presence is gone.

Why didn't I ever finish?

I knew the answer.

Fear.

Fear of being labeled as being too similar to another writer's work.  A fear of being labeled of not being quite good enough.  Most importantly, it was a fear that the work that I had put in heart and soul into, spent hundreds upon hundreds of hours working on crafting thousands of different cranial synapses together, and something I had truly cared about and was passionate about, being rejected as not being good enough to share with others.   Around 2009, I abandoned any further attempts at a writing career.  I felt that I was too old, and that many of the ideas I had written were already now out in the public.  I deemed that the stories had been told, in one way or another, and that rather have them suffer the fate of being labeled as unoriginal, and savaged as such, I would just archive them and do nothing.

However, none of it is as bad as I may have thought.  Some of it does have some originality, and the narrative is a much different than what I would have thought.  I'm thinking of finishing some of it, and rather than submit it to publish, just sharing it here for free.  For at my best, even though I have a great number of things I like to dabble in creatively, I'm an daydreamer, and a story teller.  Perhaps, just by putting it out there for the general public to read and receive it as they choose to, I'll have achieved both.