Money is hard to come by. Sometimes I want it, and sometimes I don’t want to sacrifice too much of my freedom to get it. Sometimes I feel perfectly fine about my financial state; and other times, if you listen really closely, you can hear a tiny guitar playing a slow reprise of Aloe Blacc’s ‘I Need A Dollar’, dedicated to me.

So suddenly I’ve given thought hypothetically to going into the Writing Other People’s Essays For Profit game.

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• NO really I just tried to take a sip of cold water and I swear it evaporated right on my lips
• I would kill for a basement bar like this one, but in my head I imagine lots of stories instead, books on dozens of shelves and short stories and quotes scrawled upon the walls, just stories, stories everywhere, so if you’re still sober you can enjoy one, and if you’re drunk by now you should probably be writing one.
• I had this really weird idea a half hour ago about a remix of Drake’s ‘Headlines’ all about Nice Guy Syndrome, but I’m too fucking lazy to write it right now because HEAT

How you know you’re inhaling too much smog from The Yin Factory:

someone in a facebook group upending a conversation about LGBT anti-discrimination legislation by quoting Bible verses,
so you give him a Qu’ran verse burn.

That was not nice.
Bad Brandon. Bad.

(I’m going to have to explain The Yin Factory at some point.
Also, a conversation on race in film adaptations.
But not yet.)

Sometimes we don’t appreciate enough that if we like a flavour of tea, we should probably say so out loud.

I’m a writer in perhaps the best time to be a content creator. I get to, theoretically, make something that can be seen by dozens of people at a time immediately after it’s done, who can then tell their dozens just as instantly that it’s worth looking at and sharing to even more dozens.

Unfortunately, sometimes it’s discouraging as a creator to know that maybe that doesn’t happen.

So I want to talk about The Power Of The Share for a moment.

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So suffice it to say you’re gonna be seeing more of Benny every Monday ni-

I’m sorry.

More of Ben every Monday night.

About to try a thing. Bear with me.

I kind of want to start a series of posts here about the fact that even though I’m poor, a noob, and live in a country where Pro Tour play is impractical at best, I still find myself incredibly invested in Magic: The Gathering, its metagame, and its culture.

But I don’t know who’d care to read it.

Was reading through a fan-made reference document for the rules of Spirit of The Century, an Evil Hat role-playing game that is essentially the prototype for their later successfully Kickstarted Fate Core system.

Flipping through it, I immediately thought of Brendon. The basic premises behind how Spirit works are richer in characterization than they are in plot - things happen less because they’re actions taking place around characters and more because they are fully fleshed out characters (perhaps too fleshed out for most RPG players) who have emotional responses and bad habits that may at any time flare up and change the dynamic of the entire story.

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Remember, Brandon:

just because no one else has the courtesy to let you know about something beforehand, or the decency to ask someone other than you for something once in a while, or even the respect to acknowledge that your being busy doesn’t mean you are inconsiderate or unhelpful especially in the face of mounting evidence that you’re the only person they ask for anything,
doesn’t mean you are the worthless one in the equation.

The Bocas Lit Fest is at the end of the month and I haven’t written a poem all year without the word ‘fuck’ in it.

…

(don’t say it.)

(don’t say it.)

(don’t say it.)

Fuck.

You know what mildly pleases me to know/remember?

The one episode of John Doe where John doesn’t have an encyclopaedic knowledge of human civilization aired on my thirteenth birthday.

In the April 2013 issue of The Red Bulletin Magazine, there is an article titled ‘The Lost Boys of BMX’, about a group of young BMX bikers who literally live in Unit 23, the skatepark they rebuilt by hand and have been offered lodging in by its owner, so they could be able to practice 24/7.

In the own words of Unit 23 member Kriss Kyle:

“I don’t think about how long I’ll be at Unit,” says Kyle. “Me and Jason [Phelan, a fellow BMXer] talked about getting a flat next year but, to be honest, I know I’d regret it. I’ve got this amazing skatepark I can ride when I want, I can literally get up and on my bike, I can party here with all my friends. I’ve got absolutely everything anyone could want.”

I can’t blame him.

Things like BMX build a very unique sense of camaraderie among its participants. When a group of people who frequent a skatepark get to know each other, they grow closer as practitioners of their art, and aim to get better and challenge each other not as a show of dominance but as a ritual of closeness and a training exercise. Each one aims to be the best so that the whole group, as devotees of the freestyle form, will be the best - if they’re all aiming to be Number One, then no matter who is, all of them are closer to being there too.

I wish that could happen for writing more often - not just one of those one-off retreats where you come out with a short story you’ll never share and a certificate of participation. I want a Unit 23 for writing - where the facilities are there for you to be able to get out of bed and start writing, where the food and the beds are there for you, where other people are aiming both to be the best and for you to be the best, where you are a congregation and writing is mass.

I have always wanted to be able to make that place. I want to make a building where maybe as much as a dozen or half-dozen people can stay, eat together, talk about projects, work on collaborative pieces together, even make collaborative series, even do whole-team series, even work together on large projects like magazines or shows. But that would be the hub. If you’re in, you’re in - by lying down on a bed you’re signing on to officially eat, sleep, and breathe the word.

It would be about bouncing ideas off each other, learning about style and voice from each other, having distraction-free spaces and times to work, waking up in a workshop space, sharing meals with comrades, and constantly being pressured not only to always make, but to always seek feedback, always publicly share, and always aim to be better and better than the last time you wrote.

I want that to happen. I want it to happen for people who are about to feel like they may never really get a chance to call themselves a writer (pro tip: do you write? there you go). I want it to happen so every NaNoWriMo people know there is a team that refuses to let its teammates down, and every other month we’re writing like it’s NaNoWriMo. I want it to happen so that team can get accustomed to being crazy about the word, and get people crazy about what that team can do with it.

I want it to happen because if it could happen for me I would jump at that chance.

Maybe, if I know who and how to ask, it can.

Sometimes a source of frustration is that I want to make a thing very badly that I don’t want to make a prosaic or poetic thing, but a visual thing, something sudden and direct. And I keep thinking that if I don’t compromise I will lose a brilliant opportunity to still share the thing I’m imagining, but really I want to be stubborn about it and say that it has to happen in that one way even if that one way is the one way I cannot begin to make it.

I should either stop staying in my head so often
or just furnish my head and live there.