Failure, Apologies and Filters

This week there will be no new story. This is my first encounter with failure, even though this blog is only amateur in nature and all deadlines and time restrictions are self imposed, I have failed to deliver what I promise in the blog's tag line "One story, once a week..." and I find myself extremely depressed about it. Like it says at the top of the page, I am attempting to learn to write to a professional standard and one very important thing professional writers need to learn is keeping to a deadline. In this, I failed utterly and while the number of people who read this blog is small I feel that I've let them and myself down. I can only apologise to anyone who has ever actually read something I've posted at fifty-two-stories-lite, and if anyone was actually looking forward to seeing the new one, please know that my sense of crushing disappointment is far greater than you can imagine.

I don't have any excuses or mitigating circumstances for my failure, merely a simple reason... Writer's Block, a horrible condition I've never encountered before this week. I won't bore anyone with whiny, self indulgent wittering on the subject. If you don't write, then chances are you don't care. If you do write, then there's a good chance you've experienced it yourself and don't want to read someone else reliving your misery; if you haven't encountered it yet (god willing you never will) then I'll stay silent in case it's contagious or something. Suffice to say, to someone inclined to story telling a blank document or piece of paper should inspire a feeling of freedom, not frustration. This is all I'll say on the matter lest I drift into the afore mentioned whiny, self indulgence.

On a brighter note, this week I did still manage to learn something important about writing thanks to Ugly Angie. I found out that what you have in mind when you create something, isn't necessarily what other people will take from it... Her poem "Winter Has Found Me", which she has been kind enough to leave in the comments section of this post, inspired me greatly. I saw a hopeful poem, with echoes of rebirth and the inevitability of the future. The timing of the original posting of the poem (3rd of January 2009) played into my trepidation about the new year ahead of me and what it may bring. I read a message about the relentless march of time, and that however much you may wish to hide in things past, the future will carry you forward regardless. Angie is pretty sure she wrote a poem about getting tired of it being so darned cold all the time.

As the progenitor of the poem in question, Angie is of course utterly correct in what she asserts about the meaning of "Winter Has Found Me"... However in the privacy of my own head, I know that I am more correct about what the poem means. Is this because I have some deep insight into the inner workings of her creative being? Absolutely not! It's because I read something, filtered it through my own subjective experience and feelings and took what I needed to hear at the time from the poem. I suppose that once you put something out there, it takes on a life of it's own. It's no longer just the thing you created, it also becomes what that thing meant to those who encountered it.

In twenty years time Angie may read the poem again and think "Man, that was one cold freakin' month!", but she may also remember that a bloke she's never met, who lives thousands of miles away read it and decided to face 2009 with a touch more courage. I think that this what we all aim for when we create something be it a poem, a short story, a painting or a sculpture made of broken shopping trolleys. That someone heard our voice and was changed a little bit for that, hopefully for the better.