{"id":8114,"date":"2021-09-27T07:08:11","date_gmt":"2021-09-27T12:08:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/?p=8114"},"modified":"2021-11-30T15:06:46","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T21:06:46","slug":"finding-my-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/2021\/09\/27\/finding-my-way\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding My Way"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I finished, recorded, and edited a new Not About Lumberjacks<\/a> story these past two weeks. (I’ve been doing a weekly writing update on the Not About Lumberjacks blog<\/a>, by the way; in fact, there’s a new entry there right now…)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story I planned to release in October needs more time. So…I had a vague idea about a based-on-truth story about a time a friend and I made up an online persona on a bulletin board system in 1990 to mess with a dear friend of ours. (Nice friends, eh?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is this: we made an online persona we called Milkboy…who was “from Wisconsin” and loved everything our best friend, Tim, loved. Tim chatted online with a fake person he thought was sooooooooooo cool, and when it got out of hand, we thought Tim would kill us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over 30 years later, we’re still close friends…<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not Knowing Where I’m Going…<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

It hit me this weekend that the last five or so stories on Not About Lumberjacks were started with no ending planned.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had a vague idea for a story, and charged in hoping I’d find my way in the process. In more than half of them, I thought, “Hell, this might be bad…” (In some instances, “bad” meaning the situation I’d written myself into, but other times, that the story would end up weak.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The strangest thing: when I’ve sat with the stories that made me doubt what I’d been doing and pushed through it all, those stories ended up some of my favorite things ever written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Milkboy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Milkboy is a ridiculous story. It was written for my friends, Tim and Mark, and will be released on October 2 — Tim’s birthday. The story is a gift to him, a way of saying something I don’t have to say: “Sorry I was such a pain in the ass when we were in our early 20s…”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It ended up being perhaps the most “three-act story” I’ve ever written…but it wasn’t by design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you write enough stories, you just kind of find your way through them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Keep Going<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

With the exception of “A Deathly Mistake,”<\/a> (and, to a lesser degree, “Geocached,”<\/a>) I felt lost writing most of the recent stories I’ve written.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But I’m not a writer prone to many doubts…I’ve been there enough to know you keep at it, and often…even better things than you’d probably have planned arise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s uncomfortable, but it can<\/em> be part of a writer’s process. (If you’ve read enough entries here, you know I don’t subscribe to any particular process. Some people plan to meticulous detail and write quickly; others are slow and stumble through and write beautiful stories. Hell, my process often changes based on what’s going on in my life!)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, even when I think I know a story, I often find out I don’t in the middle of it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And so, for me, I step into the unknown…and don’t stop until I’m satisfied with (or even surprised by) the view…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I finished, recorded, and edited a new Not About Lumberjacks story these past two weeks. (I’ve been doing a weekly writing update on the Not About Lumberjacks blog, by the way; in fact, there’s a new entry there right now…) The story I planned to release in October needs more time. So…I had a vague […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8113,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[23,78,59],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8114"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8114"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8114\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8116,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8114\/revisions\/8116"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8113"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.christophergronlund.com\/blog\/tjw\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}