Happy New Year

So at the beginning of every year I like to make a blog post covering a retrospective of the last year, or a target for the next year. First, though, I should probably address the fact that I’ve not written or published anything here since July. This is for a few reasons.

First of all, I’ll mention that I do run a gaming blog, where I’ve published four (and a half) posts between July and now, including a recent 3.5k post about my top 10 games of the year. So technically I have been blogging, but not in a fashion that’s relevant to this particular space. Gaming is easier to write about because it’s a hobby and it’s what I know. And I’ve actually done a lot of it in the past year. Unlike writing.

Additionally, I did write a blog post for this space at the beginning of the December. A very detailed, very pragmatically written account of grief that I put a lot of work into and was very proud of. After much consideration and reflection, however, I decided that this was ultimately too personal to publish as a public piece and sent it to some friends instead.

2017 also saw me pick up my second job. With the two jobs combined I work 29 hours a week, mostly as split shifts and at one point, often without a day off throughout the week. This is fine, but it’s not a lifestyle that encourages the pursuing of personal projects in my downtime. When I have free time, I want to be gaming. I still love writing, but it’s ultimately a difficult and productive activity which detracts further from any relaxation. (Suck it up, right? Sure.)

But the biggest contributor to the emptiness on this page is motivation. It’s probably also the most boring thing to read about, so I apologise, but I’ll be attempting to go into detail here.

Throughout the years my motivation to write and produce content has been running at an increasingly lower ebb. This isn’t because I don’t enjoy it, but because – as well as the reason of busyness above – a sort of pit of cynicism and disillusionment grows within me with each passing day. Actively I stray from it, guiding myself to continue believing in things and enjoying events like Christmas and so on. But passively, as a default, I find myself having a hard time bothering to produce content because of a combination of prior failures and the sheer amount of people like me making content and going unrecognised by the world. I tell myself that talent rises to the forefront of creative industries, but then I find low quality content dominating the mainstream while anything thought-provoking or legitimately engaging is buried under a sea of neglected media. In this day and age it’s impossible to tell whether you’re somebody with talent who’s work has never been acknowledged, or another of the mediocre millions who waste their time giving themselves to thin air before finally falling silent.

So why bother when I could find guaranteed gratification in hobbies instead?

Nothing really happened in 2017. I got a new job. I enjoyed my hobbies. I got angry at politicians. I met nobody life-changing. I don’t particularly feel like doing a reflective blog post due to the alarming stagnation of my life. I don’t have a resolution for 2018. I don’t really want to think about it.

Happy New Year.

An Unexpected Era

For the first time in the history of me being alive, I don’t have any destinations scheduled on my roadmap. From attending / completing various facets of education, to getting a job or Best Manning my father’s wedding, there’s always been something going on or coming up in my life that I’ve had marked on my mental roadmap. But now all that’s left ahead of me are goals that have yet to form into anything tangible.

This isn’t particularly a positive or a negative thing, it’s just something that’s taken me completely off-guard. This is probably what I would have felt after graduating, if I’d already had a job at that point. But now I have two jobs that I’m comfortable in, a stable income that keeps me afloat and gives me some breathing space (if I’m sensible), and no obligations to meet in my free time. There’s nothing but open road ahead of me, and whilst I should probably get to work on moving out before I can fully claim mastery of independence in my own life, that’s currently a vague enough determination to be sitting in the ‘goals’ category of my future.

I don’t quite know what this means for me as a person yet. This could either be an era of me working towards writing and personal goals in life, or falling into a rut. I’m going to try as hard as I can to make it the former. All I know is that I don’t have any excuses left – any upcoming events or necessities to focus on beforehand – to hide behind. It’s a weird feeling.

A New Home for My Fiction

Despite my recent lack of production, I do label myself a writer of fictional works. It’s something we’ve been over recently. And I’ve spent my day today creating a website to host my short stories, rather than relying on social media websites that don’t have very good writing tools or reading spaces. You can find my new creative hub at krichmondstories.wordpress.com! It’s fully operational, though there are certain things – such as images – that I need to create or finalise, which I don’t have time to do before I go to work.

Not only that, but I’ve written my first short story in a long time. Not only that, but for the first time in an even longer time I’ve actually released it. Displaced is available to read here. I hope you enjoy it!

Please Vote Tomorrow

Voting doesn’t feel satisfying. When you walk over to the nearest polling station, show them your card, and put a little mark in that box, it’s hard to feel like you’ve contributed anything to society. However, in 2015, statistics show that the majority of young people failed to vote, despite the fact that the majority of young people who did vote voted for the losing party. This was not a landslide victory for the Tories. This was an election shaped entirely by voter turnout.

These polls are the one time in your life that you as a citizen of this country will have any say in the decisions that shape your future. No matter who you’re voting for, do everyone a favour and make your voice heard so that we can live in a country where the representations of what people truly desire can be acted on.

Kristian, Why Don’t You Write?

Alright. Let’s talk motivation.

This is not going to be a blog post about how I stay motivated, or about tips on motivation. It’s also not going to be a venting of frustration on how I’m not motivated. This blog post is going to be a deconstruction of my motivation structures with aims of explanation and self-exploration.

Why haven’t you written a book yet?

I finished my BA in Creative Writing over a year ago, and teenage Kristian’s timeline for life extended outwards from there into writing novels, having been armed with a wide array of creative inspirations and techniques. Almost a year on from graduation, I can count the number of writing projects I’ve begun – none completed – on one hand. That’s one short story, two introductory concept chapters and a map. Clearly, something didn’t go as planned along the mapped route of my life. It wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t finances. It was the same beast that’s stopped countless writers from budding; it was a lack of motivation.

A quote:

Discipline is reliable, motivation is fleeting. The question isn’t how to keep yourself motivated, it’s how to train yourself to work without it.

Whilst I haven’t heard this perspective articulated before, it’s one that I’ve attempted in the recent past. In September of 2015 I pledged to do weekly updates across my two blogs, and that lasted for the most part until the beginning of this year. It was one of the first times I devoted myself to completing a task without the drive of inspiration and motivation. At the beginning of 2016, I wrote a blog post declaring that I would attempt to write even if it felt more like work than enjoyment, stating that “You don’t need to feel motivated to continue trying.” And around that time I also began my Name A Day project, which I updated psuedo-daily for all 366 days of 2016.

The first half of 2017 has seen slowdown on all of those fronts. I gave up on this year’s Name-A-Day in March. Blog posts aren’t coming weekly any more. And any discipline I’ve built up around writing without motivation has trickled out of my ears.

How did this happen?

The easy answer is that I got lazy. But to be lazy you have to rationalise to yourself why it’s okay to be this way, and so I’ll present my rationalisations in an easy list.

Priorities.

I now work two jobs. Two jobs which, I might add, I enjoy! My ultimate goal in life is to be happy, and I’m happy working where I work, doing what I’m doing, for who I’m working for. But these jobs also have nothing to do with writing. This eats into the free time I previously had to update my blog and to fail at pursuing my writing. But I don’t work 30 hour weeks. I still have free time. Which brings us onto our next point.

Time management.

This is where the lack of discipline really comes into play. As much as I enjoy writing, it is hard work without motivation. My biggest non-productive joy in life is gaming. And don’t mistake me, it is a legitimate source of happiness. I’d be perfectly happy to devote my life to videogames if given the chance, which so few of us are. But in the meantime, my go-to activity in my free time is gaming, with friends or alone. Because it’s easy, and it makes me happy. And that would be fine if my short-term happiness played ball with my goals for lifetime fulfilment.

Lack of interest.

Motivation does come, though, and I don’t just write with the creativity that comes to me. Since childhood I’ve expressed creativity in other forms, from video-making to web-designing to, well, Minecraft, not that I’m any good at architecture there. And in all of my endeavours my creations have failed to garner interest. And I’m not talking woe-is-me I only have five thousand active viewers on my Youtube gaming channel. I’m talking flat-out barrens. And it’s hard to discuss this without sounding entitled, so let me dispel any notion that I feel like I’ve created anything worthy of renown. But… you know, the odd head-turn outside of people I know personally would be nice. I know that if I put a lot of time and discipline into something, I might create something that draws more attention, but to get there I need to create and to create I need to get past this barrier. The barrier of public disinterest.

And that’s pretty much that.

So now that we’re all up to date on how I’m a part-timer who plays too many videogames and whinges about how nobody acknowledges his talent, what am I going to do to rectify it? Well, for the present, nothing. No promises. I’m still in my protective cocoon with a sign on the front that says “my life is going through changes and I’ll be a creative butterfly when I’m familiar with the outside world again”. But I’ve had these ideas for worlds and characters knocking around at the back of my mind for months, and they’re getting harder and harder to ignore. But I want to justify the motivation to create these worlds and characters with the discipline to follow through with these promises of stories, and so I’ll start dipping my toe into the pools of discipline very soon. I’ve even been browsing to-do apps…

My April

Little is going to change.

The words sounded hazily through the void, reaching ears left unhearing for… how long?

This doesn’t mean a return to the dark ages of one blog post every four months or so.

They seemed to be telling him something. Urging him into something.

More perturbed bumblings coming your way soon.

Oh. Oh right. That didn’t go so well, did it?

So, April’s been pretty sparse. It’s probably something to do with the fact that I’m still getting my life together, though from what I can tell so far adulthood is 99% ‘getting your life together’ and 1% feeling actually organised and awake enough to go off chasing dreams and ideal activities. When I’m not working or sleeping I’m typically gaming, because it’s something that brings me joy in life. So, of course, is writing, but that’s not quite as easy or as instantly rewarding as settling down and playing a few matches of Overwatch. All I can really say on the blog post front is that I’ll try to do better, which is a very unfulfilling remark indeed. But not an empty one.

A quick summary of April, then. Other than the aforementioned working, sleeping and gaming, I’ve also been doing a lot of walking. To and from work. And the only reason that’s worth bringing up is because I’ve been listening to The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson as I commute. I’ve already reviewed his Mistborn trilogy, and spoken of this venture into Audiobook territory in the same post. I’m not going to review The Way of Kings here as I’ve not finished it (and doubt I’ll be able to stop myself from diving into book two before pausing to review the first). I do, however, have some words to say about Sanderson as an author of fantasy from what I’ve read of this book and his Mistborn trilogy.

The man’s a genius. (I promised myself I’d try and focus a bit more on criticisms than praise so as to give my reviews a little more weight, but as this isn’t a review, so I’ll continue.) He’s a damn genius. I find myself interested in his educational background seeing as he seems to be a master of conjuring up civilisations and the origins behind the landscapes of their societies. I typically don’t like my fantasy to be too convoluted with different races and places – it can get hard to keep track of over multiple series – but the way Sanderson develops them and ties them all together as the narrative goes on is astonishingly well done. As somebody who’s a fledgling at world building themselves, I envy his talent and aspire to be even close to his level at evoking worlds, normalising their unique attributes and making familiar the unfamiliar designs of the world. His worlds and powers are among some of the most unique I’ve ever seen, though thematically coherent all the time.

Rampant fanboying aside, I also have some more words to say on Audiobooks, having given them a longer try at this point. Personally, I’m loving the audiobook for The Way of Kings and will be very sad when it’s over and I have nothing to keep me entertained on the way to work anymore. I also don’t know how I’d feel about listening to an audiobook that wasn’t narrated by Michael Kramer or Kate Reading. Of course, this is purely ignorance and inexperience on my part – I’m sure there’s plenty of excellent narrators out there – but I’m hesitant to leave these two who have narrated so wonderfully to me for so many hours. I actually hear Kramer narrating this very blog post as I type it. And now that I read what I just wrote back, that was actually kind of creepy.

Speaking of which, there was an excellent moment the other night that could only come about from listening to the Audiobook. Not wanting to stop listening as I arrived home from work and went to bed, I continued, but began growing sleepy after a little while. As much as I tried to keep my focus on the book, my attention was waning as I drifted off. It probably wouldn’t be long before I paused it and collapsed into slumber. But then, an exceedingly creepy moment (which I won’t spoil) occurred right out of the blue, and I was instantly awake and listening in horror in the darkness as the nightmarish scene played out. Kate Reading did an absolutely spectacular job of scaring me out of my sleep, and if I was reading the book instead of listening to it I wouldn’t have had quite the same experience.

Well anyway, that’s enough rambling for now. I don’t have any news on the writing front to share with you as, if I did, I’d likely have been writing here as much as anywhere else. For the moment, as far as fiction goes, I’m kind of waiting until I finish Sanderson’s works before I try to write any more fantasy; not because I want to copy him, but definitely because he’s an inspiration that I feel like I can learn a lot from as far as world building goes. Heck, as far as anything goes.

Regarding Weekly Blog Posts

To the people who read my blog: Thank you. Do not worry. Little is going to change.

However, I have to admit that this ‘weekly’ blog post thing has been a little bit shaky lately. That’s because I’ve just got a new job with hours I’m not used to, and so I’ve not found much time to sit down and write new posts. I can’t honestly promise weekly Tuesday blog posts any more, at least not for the time being.

This doesn’t mean a return to the dark ages of one blog post every four months or so. I’ll still aim for weekly posts, but there’s going to be times when that doesn’t happen. Hell, this is the first blog post I’ve made for like 2 weeks.

But stay tuned! More perturbed bumblings coming your way soon.

No Blog Post This Week

Come back next week!

Big Mouth, Small Audience

Before starting this blog post, I’d like to remind my readers that this blog will soon be changing to the domain name kristianrichmond.wordpress.com. If you frequent this blog via bookmark or web address, be sure to adjust your navigation accordingly.

I have a feeling that this will break a multitude of links across my blog posts, where I refer to earlier blog posts. Please bear with me if this happens.

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I’ve been churning out all sorts of content on the internet for almost a decade now, from the honestly too-young age of 12 to the 21 year old creature that I am today. And whilst a decade might not seem like long for other age ranges, teenage years are extremely formative and developmental to who you ultimately become as a person, and therefore much of my growth as a person and as a creator has been documented across various stations of the internet throughout this half of my life. Many of these have been deleted, privatised, or otherwise locked away never to see the light of day again – much to the benefit of anyone who would stumble across the inane blatherings of my teenage self. Others still exist.

It all began with my Youtube channel back in 2007. Youtube was a very different place back then. Monetisation wasn’t really a thing, and the idea of a single Youtuber having a million subscribers was ludicrous. It was more of a hobby. And 12 year old me wanted in on that hobby. And so, with no video editing or creating experience, none of the necessary equipment to do so and being far too young to create anything watchable, I set out on my mission to become one of the popular Youtubers I aspired to and watched. The results looked a little like this feat of video-making ability. Oddly, this Youtube account amassed the largest audience I’ve ever received for my content, and whilst the videos obviously improved in quality over the next 5 years before I shut it down, it’s still something I find strange. I use the account nowadays to upload 30 second gaming clips for my own archiving purposes, and to share.

It didn’t stop there. I won’t bore you with a full account but my creative instincts caused me to branch out into contributing to short story and poetry websites and starting multiple blogs (none of which were as well maintained or frequently updated as this one). I also discovered social networks along with the rest of my generation and joined Facebook for my ‘real life’ contacts, and Twitter to create and voice my internet persona. Twitter is, I think, a keystone for the topic of this blog post.

I’ve been tweeting for nearly nine years now. According to my profile statistics, I’ve tweeted a grand total of 32,708 times, but for all of those tweets across all of those years, I’ve amassed only 200 followers. And as contradictory to the existence of this post it may seem, I’m perfectly fine with that. I value my followers. I’d probably still be tweeting if I had 10% of that number. And that, finally, is where the name of this blog post comes into play. The question I ask myself every six months or so. Am I just simply talking to myself? I have a low interaction point with my 200 followers. This blog has been updating almost weekly for a year now and it has little over a hundred (very much appreciated) readers. Blog statistics tell me that each blog post gets less than 10 visitors, and whilst I’m aware that many people read from their feed or their emails, I’d be lying if I said that this statistic, among others, wasn’t disheartening. It’s easy to interpret these as being signs pointing towards me being boring or unlikable, and on some days this is all too believable.

But enough whinging. Rationalism tells me that people like myself form the bulk of the internet’s content creating community. It may feel like there’s an abundance of successful people with large audiences, but that’s merely because you don’t hear about or see those with followers in the hundreds. And whilst part of me does wish for an audience to give my words and creations some gravity, a larger part of me acknowledges that most of what I do is out of either enjoyment, practice or ventilation. Even if I did feel defeated at the notion of talking to myself, I’ve proven to myself before that just giving up these outlets for discussion and creation causes me to slowly crumple inwardly, making for more moments of anguish and irrational upset than before. So hey, if nothing else, it’s therapeutic!

PSA – Domain Change

So for some years now, this blog has been registered under the domain kristianrichmond.net. However, current financial arrangements mean that I may soon be losing ownership of this domain, and you’ll have to find this blog by typing in kristianrichmond.wordpress.com instead. Update your bookmarks! Or simply give me a follow, if you like. I do plan for this change to be temporary, but I can’t give an estimate as to how long it’ll be before I can afford to drop £20 on a .net domain again.

If this domain persists, then I’ve been unable to get my money back from WordPress billing me a month early and without my automatic consent. But every cloud, eh.