Category: notes

I hate to admit it

But I’ve actually been so busy it’s barely occurred to me to use any blog I have at all. I’m a contributing editor for Maxim magazine, editing their website on the weekend, and in October I wrote a book. I can’t tell any more about that right now because of contracts and confidentiality and just being cautious, but needless to say—I worked my ass off, man.

And I’m still working, and though I am surprised at how tired I am sometimes, I cannot complain.

I did buy a URL and may just direct it at this blog soon, because why not.

For a while…

… as an experiment—and to be clear, I view almost everything I do with blogging and social media as an ongoing experiment—I will switch what personal blogging I do back to my Tumblr: http://stevehuff.tumblr.com/. If you are on Tumblr as well, please follow me there. I will preserve this WordPress blog to keep my options open.

My ongoing work for Maxim, which continues to be ridiculous fun, is here.

Huh…

I’m always meaning to update more. Recently I got a freelance gig writing for Maxim Magazine, though, the last week and a half has been about adjusting to that.

I haven’t had a blogging gig in a while (if you’ve only read this site recently, my bio will tell you they aren’t new for me) and realized I may have even missed it. My specialties, if I have them, have been crime and tech, but I’m re-discovering pop culture blogging with Maxim and it’s fun.

In fact it’s sort of made me re-think my old ‘writing is blogging is writing’ philosophy. On the one hand, that’s correct. Writing is a skill. If people pay you to do it in any capacity, you should work hard to be good at it. But I’m remembering how the pace of blogging is so different, compared to, say, drafting and then polishing a short story, essay or a long piece of reportage. A lot of conventional writing wisdom says you draft sloppy first, then re-draft, refine and so on. You can do a truncated version of this when blogging, but for me at least, it won’t go fast enough unless I edit on the fly. And I can do that. It doesn’t always end up in a perfect product, but it’s often one I can live with and don’t feel dumb directing friends to read.

What I’ve begun to realize is I think I had an idea that blogging might be bad for other writing. It’s not. In fact, it might be excellent practice, and a route to instilling something too many writers lack: versatility.

I can’t promise I’ll do this–I’m also a dad and since I work from home the main housekeeper/cook most weeks (my wife is a better cook than I am but we tend to save her wicked skills for holidays)–but I could see how my gig with Maxim might actually lead to me updating this blog even more. I see stuff every day that I consider pitching to post for Maxim, only to see it doesn’t quite fit what they’re going for. But I think I may start popping that stuff here–which would actually make this blog what I intended it to be when I made it: one guy’s curated newsfeed of the weird shit that interests him.

Posting more stuff here, writing about a broader range of stuff than I’ve covered so far, will only feed and add to what I do for Maxim. Blogging is writing, sure, but after doing it for the better part of 15 years I’ve come to see it is its own particular skill, and there is no shame in my mind in making a conscious effort to get better at doing it.

On being boring

Every day I write a little in a moleskine. I date each entry. Most entries are just a paragraph, and often just things I tend to observe–the weather, something that happened with one of my kids, sometimes my exercise. Anyone finding that journal hoping to see some sort of Secrets of Steve situation would be disappointed; it’s seriously fucking boring.

I don’t do it in lieu of blogging, I just do it for me. It feels like, at this point, an oddly necessary practice. And for someone who has always prized trying to make his writing interesting, it feels almost like a zen thing: let yourself be boring.

A brake on my blogging–there are many–is that fear of being boring. I only recently realized this, and realized it was keeping me from writing at length in a way that I used to do every day. That daily or near-daily blogging, even before I had paying jobs doing it, mattered to me. I feel confident I can tweet something mildly amusing once a day–tweeting is pretty easy. But a whole blog entry? Apparently I’ve developed the attitude it must be Received Wisdom of the Ages or nothing at all. That’s arrogant bullshit, because honestly, I kept blogging after I began the practice (and blogging is a sort of practice) 15 years ago because I enjoyed it, not because I thought I was great at it. Having blogging and writing jobs later was a total surprise to me, and sometimes still is.

I think I still might do this thing on a regular basis if I just chill out and don’t worry so much. I’ve said before (I think) that I keep this space open for a reason, even though I don’t touch it for months. I think that’s true.

I recently read somewhere a good way to fuck up a goal is to tell people about it. So I’m not going to get into any goals I have re: blogging from here on out. I’m just gonna give it a go and see what happens. Practice is practice.

On Midnight in the Month of June, On Fiction

At some point I decided this was my main blogging space. This is recent. What happened was I found myself dissatisfied with a return to Tumblr and casting about for a space that would by name and content give me the most latitude to blog what I wanted–personal stuff, true crime, history, weirdness, you name it.

I realized that space was sitting here all along, I’d already established it, and I’d been ignoring it since September of last year because–no lie–I forgot the elaborately complicated password I made to sign in to WordPress.

I know how dumb this is, don’t give me shit about it.

Anyway, I feel like one feature of my decision to focus on this space as my only blog, the place where I’ll put everything (I plan to eventually get a standalone URL, too) should be me giving myself permission to just randomly blog my inner monologue. At least once in a while. Ello is a good space for that too (shut up, it is. I like Ello), but today I’ll say it here.

I’ve been writing poetry and fiction for longer than I’ve been writing nonfiction or journalism. As my paid work has entirely been in blogging/journalism/nonfiction, that’s easy for even me to forget.

And regarding fiction, I’ve developed a concern: what if I’m geared toward short fiction? WHAT IF I’M A SHORT STORY WRITER?

This may sound silly, but it’s a legit concern if you ever want to sell your fiction to anyone.

I mean, I don’t think the short story is dead (I swear I’ve read musings contemplating this very thing in the last few years) but I do think that unless you’re George Saunders (whom I love, and keep your contrary opinion to yourself), short fiction is not the thing that punches a writer’s ticket these days. Everyone wants to be–thinks they are–a novelist.

And hey, I am fairly sure I have a novel in me. But not yet. When I write fiction these days, it’s always short.

Is this a function of having a ferocious case of ADHD? A limited set of functional, fictional, interesting ideas? I don’t know. At least partly, re: ADHD. I don’t think so, re: limited ideas. But I do think this maybe true, for me.

What I also think is that in general, the short story isn’t appreciated these days for its fundamental power, its ability to grab even the most random reader and draw them into an imaginary world.

Many of the stories that hit me hard at an early age were short fiction. One example that always comes quickly to mind when I’m thinking about this stuff: Ray Bradbury’s amazing “At Midnight, in the Month of June.”

I first read the Bradbury story in a collection of horror fiction when I was 12, and it blew me the fuck away. Passages like this:

She stood against the door in the dark. If moonlight could have struck in upon her, she would have shimmered like a small pool of water on a windy night. He felt the fine sapphire jewels come out upon her face, and her face all glittering with brine.

Or this:

He remembered that sometimes when he played hide-and-seek they did not find him at all; he would not let them find him. He said not a word, he stayed so long in the apple tree that he was a white-fleshed apple; he lingered so long in the chestnut tree that he had the hardness and the brown brightness of the autumn nut. And God, how powerful to be undiscovered, how immense it made you, until your arms were branching, growing out in all directions, pulled by the stars and the tidal moon until your secretness enclosed the town and mothered it with your compassion and tolerance. You could do anything in the shadows, anything. If you chose to do it, you could do it. How powerful to sit above the sidewalk and see people pass under, never aware you were there and watching, and might put out an arm to brush their noses with the five-legged spider of your hand and brush their thinking minds with terror.

… Were to me the quintessence of great scene painting. Everything about this story sang of the blue-lit and silent watches of the night, of silence, of madness. I had been that secret boy high in the tree, hiding as the summer night blued then darkened to indigo, studded with stars. Bradbury was painting a portrait of wrath and murder, yet I was reading it and immersed in and sympathetic to the memories and mind of the killer. No matter how psycho crime blog readers once assumed I might be, that’s not me. Yet Bradbury put me there.

That’s magic. And the story is what, maybe 10 pages long?

God. Damn. To me, Bradbury becomes a wizard in those few pages. He invokes the scents, the taste, the light, and the howling vacuum in the soul of his essentially psychopathic protagonist.

So maybe I’m a short story writer, when we’re talking made-up stuff. Maybe that’s my general bent.

If so? If I can get even one story out there one day that in a mere 2000 words does what Ray Bradbury did for me reading his cold poetry of murder for another reader?

Well, fuck yeah. Good enough. Let’s go.

Hey y’all!

Wow, sorry I haven’t updated more often! Things have just been nutty around here, and my attention’s been scattered. First a mile-wide asteroid destroyed the closest nearby city, killing over 1 million and driving this hemisphere into a nuclear winter! Then I had a pretty bad hangnail. Also internet service is spotty. Anyway, don’t worry guys, totally updating more soon!

Puzzled

As I review this blog and what I’ve already posted here, I am a little confounded as to why I stopped posting. The original intent I had for this space–even the name struck me as just right, at the time–was for me to finally merge all my blogging impulses (news, crime, fitness, humor, weirdness) in a way that made sense. I was on my way to doing that here. Then I stopped.

I can only blame major mood disorders–chiefly depression–and ADHD. Perhaps especially the last.

And this post is a bit more navel-gazing, but it is in keeping with an effort I’m making to write more and about what’s really going on in my head.

A funny thing that happened

Ha-ha, I lied, this wasn’t funny at all. After I wrote “Digging Ditches…” about my brother’s suicide (and received a great response, which felt good), I suddenly had a goddamned hard time writing again. I have another post in draft about Richard Parker (who pled guilty to murder earlier this summer) but it has been hard to finish. I think this is because it treads across similar territory. And way back in 2004, after I’d already been blogging for 4 years, I started a blog about crime stories in the news in part because I realized I fucking hated writing about myself and my life. I tend to save all that shit for solipsistic conversations with friends, my wife and one of 2-3 different pretentious-ass Moleskine notebooks I have laying about any given time.

I have refused to admit to writer’s block since I’ve had a Twitter account, because even when I couldn’t eke out a paragraph even for a paying gig, I could still tweet. But that’s a low bar, to be honest. My Twitter feed (from my @SteveHuff account) will always be kind of ragged and discursive, because I’m not angling for a comedy writing or social media editing job, I’m experimenting, which is easily done 140 characters at a time.

All of this is to say I feel self-conscious about not updating this blog more often, yet I’ve actually kept up with it better than any personal site I’ve created in the last 5 years or so. I think I will double down on that and pay WordPress whatever to add a unique URL. We’ll see if that’ll make me feel even more obligated to make a practice of this.

Because I do feel blogging, something many writers have mixed feelings about, is a valid form of writing or if nothing else, a valid way to stay in practice as a writer. So. Stay tuned, I guess.

Acknowledgment

I’ve been pleased and surprised by the response to my previous post, “Digging Ditches…” which was about my brother’s suicide and our mutual struggles with mental illness. Several people whose own deeply personal writing influenced my decision to write the essay were kind of enough to link the piece, and I’m not sure they’ll ever know how grateful I am, as it was surprisingly hard to write, and that’s the kind of thing I find I both really want people to read and am a little afraid for them to. 

It may have been my wife who unwittingly provided the spark to go ahead and do it, though. She recently attended a digital storytelling workshop in Denver, Colorado. Denver is Dana’s hometown and her grandparents live there. The result of the workshop and staying with her grandparents was a moving video essay, which you can watch in a post on her education blog, here.

I can be voluble and quick to show emotion. Dana can be reserved and uncomfortable with emotions and talking about them, as well. So when I watched her video essay, I was struck by just how deep she reached to express the great love and regard she has for her grandparents, and how frank she was about her childhood. She writes in her post on creating the essay how she was able to do that:

The [workshop] facilitator looked at me, a pointed expression on her face, and she asked me, “Dana, how is this story about you?” I was startled by the question, but I thought for a minute, and then, naturally, I burst into tears. It was about me because of everything my grandparents had done for me. It was about me because they are elderly, and I don’t know how much time I have left. It was about me because I will be devastated when they are gone.

“Digging Ditches…” was just going to be about my brother, but in the end it had to also be about our family and me. I’m not afraid to admit I can easily make a lot of shit about me, it’s a character flaw, but in this instance it was about things that even after years of therapy, I am afraid to admit and speak freely about–like how I was a little afraid of my brother after things started getting bad, like being suicidal enough to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital. 

I could probably re-write everything I’ve ever written and not truly be happy with it, but with this one I can say I at least did much of what I intended to do, and am glad that people have responded to it. And a lot of credit for that goes to my wife, who somehow manages to teach me things even when she’s off-duty from being a teacher.