Henry J. Young

Authorial Intent Doesn't Matter

daily_001

Yeah, yeah, we’ve heard this story before.

Some creative-type comes out of the woods after a year and some change of complete radio silence, and swears up and down that they’re going to do a daily __________; be it upload a vlog, or blog post (hi, kettle, you’re black), or photo, or song, or whatever. Before you know it, the well runs dry, and they’re back to dodging comments and questions, like “what happened to the daily uploads?” and “do you know what a ‘hiatus’ means?”

I promise this time, I will keep up the tradition for a while before dropping it.

What does “a while” denote? Who knows, man. Maybe it’s two months, up until I move across the country for the second time in the last year. Maybe it’s two years, two and a half times longer than my weekly podcast lasted before our big “content drought” struck in June of last year. But this time, I’m really going to do it.

Everyone who’s ever dealt with an addict should recognize these phrases, but I guess we’ll see if I’m up for it.

Remember the “Addict for Creation” rebrand? Man, that was a wild ride. I wrote out five posts for that in a fever, some kind of blistering haze of self-discovery, wherein I “realized” that I was, in fact, addicted to creativity. Anyone who has felt the “inspiration” well begin to flow understands this feeling; you really believe that you are addicted. You get high, like you’re floating off into Never-neverland, Faerie Dust Express, no stops baby.

Turns out all I was addicted to was smoking, and staying off my wordpress site. (minus a few aesthetic updates for my querying resumé).

Now, I’m being a little self-deprecatory here; I did complete my first novel, edit it, start a second one, move from Colorado to Nashville, start a third book, and complete a litany of other tasks and milestones since my email chain last graced your inbox (let’s face it, the only people seeing this right now are those that signed up for the email chain, my SEO is abysmal).

The deprecation is intentional, however reductive it may be. I think sometimes we need to be a little more critical of ourselves, to really get a spacious enough perspective to do some actual good work. After all, I am sitting here, *checks addiction tracker* 587 days since my last drop of nicotine.

So here it is. Also intentional are the three digits in the title of the blog post; “001”. Not just because it looks a lot slicker (James Bond understands this), but because it’s a bit of a promise. If I just put “daily_1”, that doesn’t really lead the reader to believe anything can come out of it. It’s easy for anyone to count to one. But I’m hoping I can get to the pseudo-palindromic “daily_100” before I have a screw up.

Let’s see what I’ve got.