Frenetic Scribblings

Frenetic Scribblings #13: On the act of scribbling frenetically

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Thirteen days in, and I’m still not sure exactly what it is I’m achieving with this series. The splashes of fiction I tossed into the original few are gone. Maybe they’ll come back sometimes. Some days I write in a blog sort of way about my experiences. Others I just write about something that the day’s reading sparked off in my head, with no real mention of my life at all.

It feels, a little, like I’m just slapping the ‘Frenetic Scribblings’ label on my first and often only piece of writing for the day and calling it good. I am achieving my goal of writing every day, the one thing that I’m certain about what this series is intended to achieve. But I don’t know if I’m making anything more from it. I’m writing for the joy of it, which is the key thing, but I still struggle with what should be a Scribblings, and what should be a piece in its own right.

Adding ‘Frenetic Scribblings’ to the title of piece feels as if it should have some special meaning, and it often doesn’t. The crux of the issue, I think, is that Scribblings is more a format than a true series. Occasional fiction interwoven with the non-fiction thinkpiece, and a thought for the day to finish. So there’s nothing making that a daily thing. It is my thoughts on that day, but not necessarily about that day. Perhaps that’s what it needs to be to keep it special.

But I am only a little over two weeks into this project. The bare minimum goal for me to consider this a success is if I write a Scribblings every day for a year. That’s a lot of words. So I think it’s okay if it takes me a while to figure out exactly what Scribblings is, and what I want it to be.

Today’s original Scribblings was going to be on time and its value, but I’m going to release that as a standalone piece alongside this one.

Yours thoughtfully, until tomorrow.

Thought for the day:

Terry Pratchett — “It is said that your life flashes before your eyes just before you die. That is true, it’s called Life.”