Hopes and dreams

I haven't been posting here much lately because there hasn't been much to post about, as the films we've been seeing have been somewhere on the spectrum of typical, bland, and mediocre. Most of my writing time has been going toward a semi-new project and I don't have particularly high hopes for that one because it, like every other writing venture I've been involved in, likely won't find an audience and will come to nothing. That's how I tend to prepare for things like that, anyway. My ex- once asked me: "What are your hopes and dreams?" I said: "I don't have any. I kinda just take each day as it comes and deal with it." I have interests (way too many), desires (like any human), and make a lot of plans to do this or that thing, some of which even come to fruition. But dreams? No. I've seen too many of those dissipate to spend any time hoping for one of those to come true.

I've never written anything for myself. Some people like to engage in that; journaling so that they have a record of their thoughts (and dreams!) and observations about life. That's a worthwhile endeavor. It's just not something I engage in. If I'm going to put down my thoughts, as I'm doing right now, it's always for someone else to read. I don't need to spell things out for myself. I can do that already. Everything I write is for someone else to hopefully get something from. The problem I run into too often is that there either aren't enough people who get something from it (that's my fault) or there aren't enough people who care (which isn't anyone's fault.)

I wrote about American Fiction a while back; the film that I thought was the best of 2023. It sang to me from the opening stanza because it was about a writer who never seemed to get his message across to people or at least not enough people who cared. I know that feeling better than any other in my life. I get it every time someone reads something and doesn't react or gives the most harmless of platitudes: "It was good." that tells me that it didn't register with them at all. I feel that sensation even more when I know that they didn't bother to read it at all; as I look at things I've blogged about where the unique views are in the single- or low double-digits. I mean, I guess I should be happy, right? If I was "writing for myself", the only unique view would be mine; the loneliest number.

My friend, Jeff, and I are returning to material I created for our comic studio, Fifth Panel Comics. He's decided that he needs to be drawing again and I have several hundred pages of script, prose, story concepts, scenes, characters, and setting that have never seen the light of day. So we're going to try to turn it into something again, 30 years later. I don't have any hope for it. I can't. Every time I think of 5th Panel, I think of the hilarious times we had in the studio and doing conventions and just speculating- dreaming, you might say -about what we could make it into. But I also think of the time that we stopped into a restaurant with a couple of our artists and the guy behind the counter asked us what we were talking about and we showed him the anthology book we'd created, Razorwire. He asked everyone to sign it and both artists signed their stories and Jeff signed as the publisher and then the guy looked at me and said: "And who are you?" And I had nothing to say because, despite being the nominal editor and having come up with the title, neither my name nor my work was in that book. I had made other people's dreams come true (at least partially), but I hadn't even been able to write something for me. Or, at least, what little I had that had been published hadn't been good enough to become something noticeable.

So we're back at it. We have a website and some of the old artwork and I, of course, have every one of the hundreds of thousands of words that I've written for, about, and of the world that I created. Will it come to anything? I don't know. The dream, of course, would be that it takes off and Jeff and I can both retire from our day jobs and do this thing that we love for as long as we want to do it. But that's the kind of dream that I find myself unable to believe in (which is, y'know, like all of them.) I believe in Jeff's intent. I believe- kinda -in the work, although you'll never hear me say it. I'd like those around me to believe in it, but most of those people just aren't interested, which doesn't make me think that this time is going to be any different from the last one. You can't blame people for not being interested. That's the first hurdle in writing things for other people. They either are or they aren't the camel that can be led, presuming you're even leading them to water. If there's no water, it won't matter that they've been led in the first place.

When we get the material rolling and the site loaded with stuff, I'll post the link here to whoever still notices this outlet. "Hopefully" someone will. Maybe it will even be worth your time and attention. I'm afraid I was always more writer than oneiromancer. Or, at least, that's what I claimed to be. For someone else.