I Talk About My Writing Endeavors

A few months ago, I pulled this blog up for giggles, hoping to ease my depression a bit by looking at how much of a fool I was as a young teen.  For the first five minutes of reading through my sometimes immature, other times maybe just a bit needed posts, it worked and I began to giggle.  But then I hit other posts and my depression started worsening.  I decided that this blog was more or less an archive of teenage me, along with a bunch of television reviews and posts about politics and other touchy subjects that I wrote in 2016-17 during my freshman year of college.  I thought I was done.

But writing is that one interest that no matter how many times I try to put it down, I just can't leave it to the side.  From when I first wrote stories in the second grade at Cotton School, to some of my more recent endeavors such as this blog and writing schedules for a brief stint at work, plus writing promotional posts for my radio gigs, writing has always played a part in my life.  There are so many projects that I had started that were never finished.  The story I was writing in my sophomore year about some friends from high school and Storybook Lodge and I all taking a trip down to Nashville and becoming radio DJs was probably the one I always thought I would see to the end, but alas it was never finished.  I found it recently going through some papers at home, the glorious seventy-something pages filled with expletives and jokes that most wouldn't understand, plus a bunch of inside jokes from camp and school.  Were I to finish this project, I would probably have to re-write Chapter Two onwards to make the story have some actual substance, at which point I may as well just restart the entire story.  Whoops I'm rambling here, please forgive me. 

Another project I'd like to touch on is a series I had dubbed "The Comeback Stories".  These stories were a "series" that I had started with a ninth grade project for English class, which was to write a short story.  After that first one, I slowly built up an entire treasury of follow-up stories ranging from five to fifty pages long, plus a seven page prolouge to lead into the story I originally wrote.  At the time, I just wrote fellow classmates into the lead roles and put others in the supporting roles.  I didn't want to focus on just one character, rather I wanted someone else to drive the plot each and every time, with a few distinct repeats for continuity reasons.  I had these characters on a trip throughout Europe, and was on London, the last stop my People To People group made in 2012, before other things came up and I stopped about a third of the way through of the story I wanted to tell.

So, back to this blog.  As you can tell, I'm a pretty unsuccessful writer.  No published books or revenue-generating blog posts.  Just a lot of fun putting pen to paper followed by disappointment when I left the notebook alone, full of plotholes and conflicts not resolved.  I may finish the stories off someday though to feel a sense of completion and success, which is a huge thing when you are suffering from depression or anxiety.

This is all alright though, because writing is no longer my first calling.  I've been chasing my passion of wanting to be on the radio instead these last two years.  Since I wrote my last blog post on here in February of 2017 (yikes!), I've gotten my own shows.  Two are no longer on the air, but one is still going strong after 34 episodes right here in Fargo.  Plus, I still semi-routinely drive up to Bemidji to host "On The River" for KAXE/KBXE, and they still get the credit for being the station where I discover most of my music, and by that I mean I find it there, and then play it here somewhere down the line, along with other stuff I find that doesn't really fit the format of KAXE/KBXE. 

I never thought getting on the FM radio waves was going to be as easy as taking a volunteer class and doing some shadow time with another volunteer.  Since then, I've been somewhat steady rocking it.  I will admit I have hosted OTRs that are absolute duds in my mind, ones that I should have better prepared for, and also an episode or two of my show out here has been a pretty terrible thing to sit through, but we have to learn from our mistakes and continue on, otherwise we just stay stuck in the same old rut and never achieve a good product. 

I tried my hand at broadcast journalism in Spring of 2017, and learned that getting in front of the camera is not something I'm good at when it's a standing report that needs to be prepared.  I look so awkward in the clips it's ridiculous.  I'd probably be more comfy in the anchor chair reading from the teleprompter, but you have to work to get there, and I'm not so sure that's something I want to do anymore, unless it's for "Saturday Night Live" Regardless, I'll always treasure the folks I met at the BIN and the memories we shared in the few short months I was a part of it.

Now that I've rambled on again, let's get back to this blog one more time.  I'm not sure if I'm going to stick around on here for much longer, but I feel that my last post, which was about Valentine's Day, would have been a pretty bad way to end things.  So, I am choosing to write thirteen new blog posts over the next few weeks to months, and see how they turn out.  If these go by and I feel like my blog is no longer the best way to reach out to friends and family, I will finish the blog proper and we will speak of it no more.  But if I hit the thirteenth post and I feel like I have more to say and there's a higher number of views, then by all means I'll keep going.

So join me for this ride.  I'll try my best to touch on different topics as we go along here, and to cover as much as I possibly can.  Let's see how it goes.

Thanks for coming back!