Good morning Crickets!!! Today is my first day back after taking a much needed month-long vacation from this blog. Up until New Year’s Eve, I had only collectively taken about a month and a half off from this site over the past five years. Keep in mind that I typically have a couple of daily challenges going on at once to where I put in a full-time job’s worth of work and have yet to earn a dime for my efforts. Well, I’ve earned seventy-five bucks through Google-Ads, but you need a hundred dollars to cash out.

Please don’t take this as a complaint, or any form of whining. Though I would get burnt out from time to time, I always loved what I was doing. I just needed a bit of a break because I was getting too stuck in my own head as I tried to figure out how to turn what I love doing into an actual career. I was so desperate to figure out a way to avoid having to replace the part-time job I lost back at the end of October that I burnt myself out by putting overtime while getting no paycheck at all.

To add to the fun, my dumb-ass also decided to take on this year’s NaNoWriMo where you’re challenged to write an entire novel within the month of November. Yes, this probably was a bad idea, and I did give up a quarter of the way through my story, but I feel the effort was a significant step in me finding my true writer’s voice.

Where this blog really helped me to learn how to write with a stream of conscious style that I enjoy, the NaNoWriMo effort allowed me to practice this new approach with my fictional work. Granted, most of my fictional pieces already have a stream of conscious feel, but I was still struggling to break free from my screenwriting comfort zone, where I wasn’t as open to letting my thoughts roam due to the rules of the screenplay format.

Experiencing this merger between my blogging and screenwriting styles started to change my entire outlook on life. This new/confident writing voice allowed me to see how, in the past, I was pussy-footing around sharing my intention in both my fictional and nonfictional work. While I always felt I was blatantly honest in all of my work, it turns out that I was still a bit timid while sharing either my character’s or my own actual intentions.

Fictional or not, writing or real life, I found that I’ve spent too much of my life trying to avoid divulging spoilers to stories that may never be told. I started to realize this around Thanksgiving Day. Around this time, with the help of the My Saturday Night Life challenge, I resolved my resentment towards comedy ever since the mainstream jokesters started to be more PC.

It’s not that I was ever desperate to hang on to any offensive content, I just hate when “creative” types get hell-bent on setting any form of rules, especially when those “creative” types are comedic, who I feel, should be allowed any tools available to expose the ugly truths. Comedians used to be the kings and queens of anti-censorship and were more critical of the quality of the joke, instead of focusing on the words used to make their point.

It turns out that I also hated the turning point where comedians became political pundits and no longer the critics of the people in power the way they used to be. Finally, I also hated the fact that I bought into the PC game and got too caught up in playing the game, “Is it offensive,” to where I was throwing out the baby with the bathwater, ignoring any insights, opting instead to make a joke about how even the most innocent statements can be twisted to sound “not right.”

Where it used to be fun to compulsively look for the humor in everything, it felt like I was living a miserable existence when it because more acceptable to hunt down even the slightest of sensitivity flaws. Since I do have quite a bit of a crass past, internally, I was also beating myself up for my own history. At the same time, I tried my hardest not to laugh at literally anything since a lot of comedy is a passive-aggressive approach to being cruel by adding just the right amount of humor.

Once I started to be more honest with myself that the jokes from my past that I felt terrible about were these passive aggressive attacks, I began to think more about my true intentions before blurting out any jokes. This approach really lightened my mood and got me joking around on Twitter, since, at the time, I was avoiding Facebook having burnt all of my bridges with any close friends during my midlife meltdown.

I didn’t joke much, but at least I was getting back to interacting outside of my blog. There was a while were my only real efforts to reach out to the world were to share the links to my content, so there was no real back and forth. This discovery of my new writer’s voice had me feeling confident that I was extremely close to figuring out how to bring in a part-time job’s worth of an income through this blog.

The only problem was, I was isolating myself from the physical world to where I started to wonder if the real me mattered at all. Though I was feeling great about my growth as a writer, my growth as a human felt stale. This is why, on New Year’s Day, the plan was to start three new challenges to run parallel with the My Saturday Night Life challenge as part of a newly developed fourteen-year plan.

The next four years will be devoted to finishing all of the challenges that I’ve already started as part of my big picture challenge to test the adage about it taking ten years to create an overnight success through this blog. Whether or not I do become an overnight success, the hope is, within four years, I’d be making enough to hire an assistant to help me rework all my fictional work from the past into a final draft. This effort would also be testing the ten years to overnight success adage, giving me this fourteen-year game plan.

All of this planning brings us up to Christmas Eve when I started to get anxious about the fact that I had this grand plan but no income stream to guarantee its success. This led me to double down on my efforts to make this site as profitable as possible to kick off the brand new year. By the time New Year’s Eve hit, and I completed my year-long Operation Achieve Anything challenge where I worked through a daily assignment self-help book, fourteen more years of nonstop work started to feel crippling.

And this is why I decided to start this year with a bit of a break, not just to recharge from my prolific past but to rest up for what’s to come. With that, I’ll be back tomorrow where I will start to share the wackiness that went down while I was “taking a break,” which was barely a break at all. I can’t wait to share my tale. Until then, it’s that time for me to wrap this one up by saying, good day and good luck to you and all of your projects.

Talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

The Wicker Breaker