Written early last June, directly from my head onto a big, freehand drawing of a skull colored with all kinds of colors. I wrote this after getting into a lot of talks about Edgar Cayce's readings, the late "Sleeping Prophet," and the most documented psychic in history.
Seth Godin is a great speaker, entrepreneur, marketer, and has
written over 20 books. He's written more blog posts than I have (a mere
2,400 or so for me), he's well over 7,000 posts, according to Google. Just
type "Seth" into Google search, and it comes up. Every day he writes a
post, and I don't read near enough of them, I'll be honest. In this
clip from London Real, he explains where the idea of "writer's
block" comes from, and why it doesn't really exist. It's a 3 1/2 minute
video, watch it.
I haven't written very much about writing, and
many of you reading this probably haven't seen my other blogs. I came
to realize that I'm a writer by first getting into the brand new sport
of BMX freestyle in 1983-84. I was a high school kid in Boise, Idaho,
my family lived in a trailer park outside of town for a year, to save
money to buy a house. There were a bunch of teenage guys there, and only 3
or 4 teenage girls, so there wasn't much to do. We started riding our
BMX bikes every evening, as it cooled down, on some little jumps a
motorcycle rider had made. Over a few months, BMX became our thing.
I
raced for about a year, but found the new activity of trick riding, or "freestyle" side
of BMX much more interesting. The first flatland and ramp contest
ever was held in the summer of 1984, in Venice Beach, California. My friend Jay Bickel's parents put
on the first BMX freestyle contest in Boise shortly after. A year later
my family moved to San Jose, California. I knew there were a handful
of pro freestylers, and several good amateurs, in the San Francisco Bay
Area, so I started publishing a zine about freestyle to meet them. It
worked, and by the summer of 1986, my Xerox zine landed me a job at BMX
Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines. I didn't think of myself as a writer,
but I was beginning to have fun with writing. Yet, at 20 years old, and with no college experience at all, I was proofreading two magazines.
I only lasted a
few months at the magazines, I just wasn't the right fit for that
business. I became the newsletter editor/photographer for the American
Freestyle Association newsletter after that, and suddenly had 8 to 16 pages to fill
every month. I began to realize I was a writer, though I was still
dreaming of becoming a pro freestyler. That didn't happen, but writing
zines, and self-publishing did stick. I contributed to other magazines
for a bit. Much later in 2008, while out of work, I began blogging.
Like I mentioned above, after 12 years, I've written over 2,400 blog
posts, across more than 25 blogs, and managed to draw around 440,000
total page views, (this post details those blogs). I still haven't managed to write a "real" print book,
but I wrote a 250+ page ebook about BMX, and self-published it last
winter, selling a few dozen copies. Hopefully there's a real book in my future, or two, or twelve.
While I'm light years away from
being a Seth Godin, or any other top writer you can name, I have spent
thousands of hours putting pen to paper, and fingers to keyboards. Here
are a few of my own thoughts on writer's block.
One: If you
can't find anything to write on the project you're doing, and you feel
that you have writer's block, put that project aside. Get an actual pen or
pencil, and paper, and just start writing about all the things that piss
you off. Don't worry about grammar or spelling, this isn't to publish.
It's also not an "exercise." Just vent, on paper. Get it out,
whatever "it" is that's bothering you. When you come up for air, and take a
break, 3 or 4 hours later, you'll feel better. It's also very likely that you may have an idea or two for that project you couldn't find the words for
earlier.
Two: Get up, leave the pen and paper, computer, or whatever you write on. Go take a walk. Then try again. Sounds lame, but it can really work sometimes. Julia Cameron, who wrote The Artist's Way (and other books), is real big on this idea.
Three: Have 3 or 4 projects going at once. Let's say
you are focused on writing a novel. Cool. But maybe you do a blog as well,
on a totally different subject. Or do a blog, like this one, to help
promote you and your writing. Maybe you also want to write a few poems now and
then, or short stories. Have a file of those, either printed physical
file, or on your phone or computer. Maybe you also want to just have an
"idea" list, where you jot down those random ideas, and a few sentences about each one, that you might do
later, or that may be part of one of your current projects.
Then, when you sit
down to write the next part of your novel, and it's just not
happening, try something else. You may think you have "Writer's Block," or something. You're just drawing a
blank. Jump to another project. Write a goofy, funny poem about that
weird guy who bugs you at work. Or jot down a few ideas for something
totally different. Try a short story for a bit. Or write a blog post
about that funny thing your dog did yesterday. Just write something.
No pressure, no drama, just have a little fun writing on another topic
for a bit. Then go back and see if the next bit of the novel is ready
to get typed up, or jotted down.
This is actually something I learned from BMX
freestyle. In my day, we'd go out and ride every night often flatland riding, other times at a ramp, or street riding. Sometimes it
would be just me in a parking lot. Sometimes I'd ride with a few other
guys. We'd practice our older tricks over and over. We'd also try to
work out our new tricks. It was usually the new tricks we'd get stuck
on. We'd get so focused, so determined, that all the fun drained out of
it, and we'd psych ourselves out. Some nights that new trick just
wouldn't happen. So the go to move was to stop trying that new trick, and just go do a trick we could
to every time. Do a trick we had totally dialed, something we could do
in our sleep. That would usually got us out of the frustration and
pissed off mode (the "blocked" part), then we'd try the new trick
again. Most times, we'd make progress.
It's a head trick
really. Doing that changes your mental state, and that applies to writing or other creative work as well as doing tricks on a bike. As creative people (freestyle, and other action sports are
creative, as well), we put too much pressure on ourselves to do some
things, the "important" pieces of writing. We tie ourselves up in
knots, and basically shut off the fun, the "play" aspect, and the flow of
creativity. So if you go off for a bit and to something "easy,"
something that "doesn't matter," the stress fades. You open back up
again, begin to have fun with the process, and the creativity starts
flowing again.
Once you've calmed down, mentally, you can usually
make progress on the "important" piece of writing, the one that felt
blocked. That's one reason I have several blogs at the moment. I
burned out on writing my BMX stories, and I have 3 or 4 other themes I want to
write about these days. I sit down every day, and one will seem like
the most interesting at the time, so that's what I write. I write
enough that I manage 1 to 4 blog posts a week, or more, on each blog.
Bouncing back and forth between them helps keep it fresh. Generally, I don't recommend having 4 blogs, like me, I'm just going in several directions these days. But having a few different files on your hard drive, or on paper, where you can write completely different things, can help when one project just doesn't want to happen. Those other files may add up someday, and become a whole new project, without you really trying.
So those are my personal thoughts on "writer's block."
Like Seth, I don't think it's a real thing. But there are definitely
times when this idea or that one just isn't happening. So try
something else for a bit. Then go back. Most important, just keep
writing something. Like Seth says in the video above, if you do enough
"bad" writing, some good stuff will come through, at some point.
I'm
literally sitting at the library right now, with pieces of a zine next
to me. My computer couldn't log into the wifi for some reason this morning. So I
started laying out the zine I'm working on, as I rebooted this, and
checked that, until I got the wifi issue worked out. Otherwise I
probably would have wanted to smash my laptop against the wall,
frustrated over the wifi problem. That doesn't go over well in
libraries, and is hard on laptops, so I worked on my zine a bit, and then came back to this blog
post, after getting the wifi figured out. So I actually do use these
ideas above, that's part of how I get a lot of content created.
A quote that popped in my head today, about writing and blogging. So much of what I write/blog about it just to get people to stop and take a look at where things are headed. This is sized for a Pinterest post, but will work on Twitter and Facebook. #steveemigmemes
Our world is so nuts right now, this is considered subversive by a lot of people. It's a weird world.
This crazy looking photo is one I took, minutes after I first saw Shadow, the Mystery Cat, late one night, in the southeast part of the San Fernando Valley. This isn't Shadow, this is a weird photo of the coyote it was fighting, which I now call the "red coyote." #steveemigphotos
I've been in and out of homelessness over the last 20 years, and I managed to do that without using drugs or alcohol. I wound up a taxi driver living in my cab for the first time in 1999, and have been struggling with making a decent living ever since. That struggle is a whole series of stories in itself, which I won't get into.
In these years of homelessness, I've seen a lot of wildlife, while living in my taxi, and driving people around late at night, in both California and North Carolina. In the 5 or so years I've been actually homeless and living in the woods or on the streets, I saw a bunch more. Many of the critters I've run into are those you'd expect: raccoons, opossums, deer, skunks, snakes, lizards, tortoises, rats, birds, and lots and lots of bugs and spiders. You want to have a scary Halloween, spend a night on the streets near a dumpster in downtown L.A., there really are rats as big as small cats. I even had a pencil sized rat snake show up inside my tent in North Carolina. Not the way you want your morning to start.
But I've also run into other animals, ones you don't really think of when you think of homeless people. I've seen coyotes dozens of times, the last encounter with one was four feet away when I poked my head out of my sleeping bag. That was a couple of weeks ago. I've had a mouse run up the leg of my shorts while sleeping a couple of times. I've seen wild turkeys (in NC), foxes, great horned owls, a barn owl, burrowing owls, herons and egrets, a green winged teal (Google that one, they're beautiful birds), many lesser known species of birds, and I almost stepped on a 7-8 foot long python in Orange County. I'm pretty sure that was a pet someone let go. I've seen a bobcat in broad daylight, and it stopped, giving a me a good look at it while broadside. I've had three, maybe four, interactions with wild mountain lions while homeless. They were young ones, about the size of a German Shepherd. Obviously, they chose not to eat me, for which I'm grateful. And if you 're really bored sometime, ask me about how I saved the city of Richmond, Virginia from a nutria infestation. What's a nutria? Imagine a huge, long legged water rat the size of a schnauzer. That's about what a nutria is.
This is the "red coyote," as I call it. This is a better view of the same coyote that's in the "werewolf" meme above. It came back through about dawn, and I got this shot. It had much shorter hair than the other coyotes I've seen in The Valley, and kind of a redish orange tint to it's underfur. I actually googled "Mexican wolf, to see if that's what it was. Nope, just an odd looking coyote. #steveemigphotos.
I know most of the mammals wandering around at night in urban and rural areas. But a couple of months ago, I saw a creature that had me stumped. I sleep without a tent at the moment, on a wide stretch of sidewalk. I woke to a hissing and growling commotion one night, maybe 2:00 or 3:00 am. In the fast food restaurant patio area, across the street, I saw a coyote pulling on the end of a trash bag. There were two coyotes that roamed through my area every night or two, and I usually woke up and saw them once every week or two. They leave me alone, although they'll sniff around, up close, if a wandering tweeker or someone drops some food nearby.
What freaked me out that night is that the coyote was fighting a huge black cat for the bag of garbage. Now there's a black cat that lives in a fenced off area nearby, I call her Momma Cat. She's raised three litters of kittens since I've been in that area, and she's as street smart as feral cats come, and a good mom, hence the name. But she's large, but a normal sized black cat. She disappears when the coyotes roll through. That's part of the reason she lives in a fenced in area, and comes out to hunt or scavenge. So it wasn't her.
Opossum I saw in Long Beach last year, wandering out just before dusk. #steveemigphotos
There was a bush blocking my view at first, but then the coyote pulled the bag a few feet, with the black cat pulling on the other end. It was a HUGE black cat. It was also dark, though there are several street lights, and I'm 55, my eyes aren't as sharp as they once were. The cat let go of the bag, and I only saw it for a second or two. It was so fucking big I thought it might be a black leopard at first. OK, black leopards aren't native to L.A.. But people do keep them as exotic pets, and the L.A Zoo is only a few miles away. So that was possible, if not plausible.
Seeing what might be a black leopard, a cat big enough to fight with a coyote, made me a bit nervous. Part of homelessness is going to sleep every night knowing there are about 100 realistic ways you could die before morning. Crazy people make up most of that list, and weather and disease make up a lot more. But mountain lions, stray dogs, coyotes, a rattlesnake, and a few other animals are on that list. An escaped black leopard would add to the list of scary and dangerous creatures out there.
Luckily for me, the cat was still wandering around, and I got another quick glimpse of it. It looked like a long haired black cat, except it was freakin' huge, like a bit smaller than a bobcat. So over the next few days, I looked up every wild cat around the world, so see if it was some obscure exotic cat, someone's pet that got loose. I couldn't find a match.
It didn't have the ear tufts or face tufts of a bobcat, and it had along tail. One idea was that Momma cat got knocked up by a local bobcat, producing a huge black cat. But nope, that didn't seem to be the case. The closest match I could find was an Ocelot for size, and Momma cat for the black color and long fur. While an ocelot was about the right size, they have tan fur, light color on their undersides, and spots much like a leopard. My best guess was that someone's pet ocelot got loose, hooked up with Momma cat, and produced a huge black cat. But that seemed like a really big long shot.In the couple weeks after that first sighting, I saw the huge black cat again, twice. I named it "Shadow the Mystery Cat."
One night I went to take a leak in some bushes, and suddenly these two eyes opened a few feet away. I just saw the reflected disks of the eyeshine, and it was close enough to get a quick, but good, look at it. Sitting up straight, with that good posture cats are known for, Shadow was at least two feet high. And it didn't freak when I walked right up to it to take a leak. It was just a ginormous black, long haired cat, and it acted like a feral cat, even a pet. As I finished whizzing, it crept off into the shadows and disappeared again. I saw it one more time after that, walking along the curb for a while, so I had a good view, and a reference for it's size. Again, it was a black ca, just twice the size a large black cat should be.
Then, a few days ago, I was watching YouTube videos about animals. A video about the history of black cats popped up on the side, so I watched it. It finally occurred to me that there was one thing I never thought to Google, and that was "Huge black cat." When I did, I found photos of huge house cats, a breed called Maine Coons. So I googled, "black Maine coon." And there it was.
This is exactly what Shadow, the Mystery Cat of the Studio City area, looks like. I pulled this pic off the web. Shadow wasn't a wild exotic pet at all, but probably was/is someone's pet Maine Coon that got out and roamed about for a while. And just how big are black Main Coon cats? Check out this photo below.
Yeah. Main Coons are ginormous. Freakin' huge. I borrowed this pic from the web, as well. So when you're out having fun tonight, in the east end of The Valley this Halloween, know that Shadow, the big, black mystery cat is out there, too. It seems friendly to humans, but will tangle with a coyote. So if you see Shadow tonight, don't try to pet it, consider yourself lucky to see the biggest, baddest black cat roaming the Los Angeles area. Happy Halloween.
One more random critter photo I shot while homeless. This is a vulture, there were a hundred of more of these that would gather along the might James River in Richmond, Virginia, when I was living there. #steveemigphotos
Sunset over Palos Verdes, as seen from the north end of Bolsa Chica state beach, in Huntington Beach, California. This poem is one I wrote about a punker girl I went out with for a little while, named Roberta, near the end of that relationship. That was in 1989. Another kind of sunset. #steveemigphotos
This is me (Steve Emig) doing a footplant to 180 on my bike, what skateboarders then called a "No comply." I rode with skaters at the Huntington Beach Pier nearly every weekend in the late 1980's and early 1990's, and I would often play "SKATE" against them, on my bike. It's like playing "HORSE" in basketball, so I would have to try to do skate tricks on my bike. This is one of them, from a 2-Hip Meet the Street contest in La Jolla, California in 1989. The video is by Eddie Roman, and I did the sketchy TV stills. This is me, on my way to becoming a mediocre BMX freestyler in the 1980's and 1990's. The sequence continues below the poem.
