So it started with the 50,000 words I wrote last month. NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month, after learning about it from my energetic high speed young cousin over the summer, it became something I knew I had to do. It was a simple challenge, write a novel in a month. Well, actually the only challenge was to write 50,000 words. And that I did. They were sortof like the words here. Just thoughts coming from my head. No story, no plot, no outline, no fiction, no fictional characters.
So it was really more of a journal, or a “memoir”. It covered much of my youth, my concerns, my investigation into who the self is and free will, and took a long time diving into this question of how we can feel so much like we have it, when physics says we don’t.
I also discovered some sort of unfinished business stuck in my head never expressed, and unfinished business I complain about every day.
One thing that came to me was that I have a tendency to get stuck thinking about the same thing but then forgetting it. That totally sucks. I know this about myself, that, well, I have a short memory half-life. Some folks can just yank their algebra class out of their ass after decades and use it to solve a problem. Or recall the names and faces of people they haven’t seen in a decade. Not me.
Much of my memory is more like the Gumby train. The tracks appear in front, and the tracks disappear behind after I traverse them. This is disagreeable. I long for keeping more in my head for longer.
In writing the “novel”, I realized that by putting things down “on paper”, I had the possibility of pushing through the repeating cycle of getting stuck in the shallows of the same thoughts over and over. I could “get it out of my head” as Keanu said in a movie you might remember, but then I could use it as a springboard to going deeper.
As I continued down the stream of consciousness, easily being able to continue to spit out words that actually made some sense even as they were disjointed in time and space and structure, I wondered about what happens after the discipline of the month and the challenge was gone. What would I do with this heap of words? Is it a book to sell? Do I read it now that I wrote it? It’s about 2000 words a day which can take like an hour or two if you are generally continuing to type.
I’m not sure. I tried to feed it into ChatGPT 3.5 and gave it some prompts, but I started noticing some real glitches. I asked it to create titles for the different “chapters” I wrote, but it started blurring them. A name from chapter 42 showed up in the title of chapter seven. That’s totally a GenAI thing to do isn’t it?
I was thinking maybe ChatGPT 4.0 or Gemini could help a lot with that being much more powerful tools versus what started feeling like a step up from the Eliza Apple ][ program that pretended to be a Rogerian psychologist.
In there, aside from the stories and wonderings about how I came to be what I am and a couple of the people who over the decades sent me off in some random direction that I maybe didn’t even realize till now, were inventions and ideas, and some deeper investigations of those ideas.
One idea, which I’ve started reading about since, after bumbling through the notion of existing in higher dimensions than the three because without it, where is consciousness, was the many-worlds theory of the particle-wave duality problem. I literally took 10 some-odd chapters and tried to figure out how a two dimensional soul could change their own realities, by moving in a third dimension! I’m stuck on this at the moment, but it’s on paper, so now I can try to move forward with that.
So in other words, this whole writing thing, it suddenly became the purest link from my brain to personal creativity. By forcing me into sentences that make some sense to a reader, or at least myself, I have some structure. By forcing myself to sit quietly with nothing but a screen in front of me with these words, I have no external inputs, it’s all just my own thinking plopped into actual words. And by forcing myself to write, I’m capturing the thoughts instead of letting these furious whisps coalesce and swirl around then dissolve and disappear before they’re formed like dust devils leaving an unrecognizable visual echo and void.
This still left me stuck with what to do when the month was over. I felt energized, but at the same time, I couldn’t just take that month of writing as a bible or a life’s work. I think it was more of a jumpstart. Is it something I publish? Do I want to think about that? No I don’t. I want to press on. But what was the point of writing a “novel” if it just becomes a mental exercise that is there and gone? And I also had sacrificed things like exercise and well, some showers to get it done! That wasn’t going to work long-term for sure!
The idea of taking a writing class or joining a writing group came up. The idea of maybe taking on that actual novel idea I had came to me also, a real story, with an ending and everything. I could write that, or maybe I could have ChatGPT write it for me. I love the idea, but I’m not sure that’s what I want here. Yeah, it’s a good story. At least I think it is. I could make it work. But all those quotation marks, and he said/she said, and all that stuff. I don’t know. So it’s there and it’s something I could do now that I know at least I can apparently just keep typing without stopping for a while.
But before that, I’ve got to dig into this loss that came about after the month ended. I wanted to get over the fear of sharing and at the same time I wanted to continue to iterate on my own shit and figure out what makes us all tick, and in particular what the heck I want to do with every minute of my time given the fear that has taken away much of the time I’ve already spent.
My answer was a blog. And that’s how this came about.
I wrangled with where to put it. Post.news, Facebook, Google Docs, Wix, or some other place, but finally I figured, I’d just plop it down right on my own website using WordPress installed for me by Dreamhost. I’d worry about theme and crap later, if ever, but at least, I’d have some random heap of my writing here in my own place, hopefully to build upon. Hopefully to learn from. Hopefully to grow from.
I worry that I may just repeat the same thing’s I wrote last month, or a decade ago or more! Maybe I can ask ChatGPT to let me know if I do.
We’ll see.
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