You guys,
Before I discovered the freedom of pseudonymous writing under Charlie Bleecker I wrote a blog under my real name.
It wasn’t very good. I wrote diary entry/day-in-the-life style posts. They were long-winded with no real point. To be fair, the whole reason I started my blog was because I moved across the country. It was a way for friends and family to keep tabs on me. And they loved it. So I suppose I was writing for an audience. Just a very, very, very small one.
I recently decided to not renew my Wordpress domain which meant I had to save each of my 398 posts individually.
Side note: I’m sure there was an easier way to do this but I take the long way to do EVERYTHING.
It was such a tedious process and many times during the weeks it took me to save them I considered giving up because what am I going to use these posts for anyway? The writing is shit.
But I saved them all. And after reading a few entries I had a realization:
Our everyday conversations are ripe with delicious details and specificity.
For example: my boss at a French restaurant, Pierre, was my favorite real-life character.
When I was trying to find a place to live Pierre asked if I had checked out apartments he previously mentioned. Truthfully, I couldn’t understand where he was telling me to go. I just kept shaking my head yes like I understood.
Finally he drew a map. Then explained:
“This is Abbot Kinney. You follow it all the way around to this stop sign. At the stop sign, you go right. So you put on your right blinker so the cars behind you know that you are going to go right. Then you look both ways to make sure no cars are coming, then you turn the wheel to get onto Main Street.”
...And I thought I was sarcastic.
I’m not sure what I’ll use these quotes for or if I’ll use them. But transcribing everyday conversations is a great way to develop characters and dialogue.
Blog of the Week
I’ve had this story I wanted to write for some time. It’s one of those stories that people hear about and want to know all the details.
“You ACCIDENTALLY ate mushrooms??”
I put off writing it because I didn’t know what the point was. What would readers get out of this story?
Sometimes a story has a takeaway. And sometimes a story is just a good story. You decide.
Punny Costumes
George celebrated his first Halloween! Which meant taking pictures of him in his adorable Superman costume and sitting on the front porch for 10 minutes before naptime.
I thought about how my celebration of the holiday has changed over the years:
Truthfully, I only dressed in a “sexy” costume once. A sexy referee. I ended the night with my head in my parents’ toilet.
All other times in my 20s I dressed in costumes that were the opposite of sexy. My favorite was the year I bought a kid Prince Charming costume. I covered the entire left half of my body in blood.
I was The Half-Blood Prince.
No one got it. But it was the best costume I’d ever seen.
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Until next week,
Charlie