Dateline 1-11-2016
/Alright I'm back. I'm not quite ready to announce my next on going experiment quite yet but I am ready to chime in daily to keep you posted on my progress.
I spent most of last year feeling completely lost as to what I'm doing with my life. Up until about two years ago I was hell bent on making it as a writer and had all my eggs in that basket. I have high confidence in my work but low confidence in myself which is quite a hurdle when trying to get into such a competitive field.
I also like to write non-traditional material for a pretty narrow audience which is another major hurdle especially when it comes to screenwriting where the script itself is not the end product. Most of the ideas I have would be a gamble to produce and as I wrote more and more quirky material and got a better understanding of the film industry through working as a grip, I finally realized after close to two decades that film may not be the medium for me at this time in my life.
Once this realization set in I lost interest in working in the film industry all together so I quit.
I spent the first year away from film working on writing standard prose. I wrote my first novel but found I was in the same boat as finishing a screenplay. I need help refining my work for a second draft and can't afford an editor. I could ask friends but it's hard to get anyone to do this sort of work for free.
I've been waiting for years to be able to afford to hire a team to support my hobby but with all my efforts tied to writing, I never really focused on how to make the money to pull it off. This waiting for input has led to stacks and stacks of first drafts just waiting to be revisited.
During my second year of giving up, I used my 365 Days of Resolution to through shit at the walls to see what stuck. I was also trying to figure out a way to make money writing articles or ghostwriting scripts but all this did was make writing, in general, less appealing to me.
I did find that I really like art. I never really knew that I could draw and paint and the best part is you can share the end product and get feedback much easier than getting someone to read hundreds of pages of text, but there's still no money to be made as a beginning artist.
I found a simple, legitimate work from home job and have been able to squeak by, still lost as to what I'm doing with my life.
Then, I discovered affiliate marketing through a free class on Udemy.com and it got me thinking that this could be a way to make a couple extra buck while I continue to figure things out. I felt all I need is a couple web sites and a few good products and I could passively be broke but with a bit of an income.
I currently use SquareSpace.com to makeTheWickerBreaker.com which is perfect for what I need here but I've been leaning more and more toward web building so I wanted to learn how to do it from scratch.
I started a class about a month ago and I haven't been this excited about learning something new since I taught myself screenwriting back in 1998. Where I used to stay up all night thinking about story idea I now can't sleep because I'm thinking of websites to build and not just lame affiliate sites.
I now find myself watching coding tutorials and being entertained. I also found that I love coding editors because the color coded syntax is beautiful. I used to like the look of a properly formatted page of a screenplay but there is nothing better than typing a word and seeing it change colors when you get the syntax correct.
It turns out I just like the act of writing and could care less whether or not there is an actual narrative.
With that, I'm going to spend the rest of this month taking classes and updating TheWickerBreaker.com and when I'm doing I will announce and start my next Wicker Breaker experiment. Until then I am going to legitimize The Daily Breaker and start posting daily updates sharing my progress.
I look forward to sharing this year with you.
Thanks,
The Wicker Breaker