SWAL is now 100 posts strong, well past our 3000th view and has 75 followers in a little over 4 months since we opened shop here on WordPress.
…We aren’t one of the Big Boys with gillions of traffic hits, but we have great affection and appreciation for each and every one of you, our readers. We enjoy making new friends (which in real-life we happen to suck at.) We enjoy stopping by your pages and catching up on your days and weeks and projects…we enjoy little blurbs left now and then on our posts, and we enjoy the fact that our “likes” aren’t a popularity contest…each one of them mean that you totally know what we’re talking about and are kindred spirits in these things, day to day. Or maybe, we just made you smile, or feel glad you don’t have the 9-5 job we do. Either way, today’s post is for YOU.
Thanks, for daily giving me a forum to vent and wonder and create in. Thanks for keeping me honest, and on task with each days post…even when I’m too busy or tired and don’t feel like writing. You have saved me thousands of dollars in additional shrink fees, and help rise my spirits when they land in the shitter.
I’ve learned a lot, since writing m’first post here.
…To be honest, I would really appreciate the million-viewer blog as well, but for different reasons…reasons monetary, that could help fund bill paying and other such incidentals. And I tried. But seems that SWAL had other plans in mind. She’s decided her own fate I think, and chooses to keep it closer to home. After a couple of months, I finally got that, and let her follow her own path.
…Letting go of your children (albeit even artistic ones) isn’t always easy. You might plan out this entire bright future for them that they are not designed to fit into. You can write a play that gets at fest levels and runs the gambit, but never goes mainstream. You can write a book that took everything you had in creative resources and never sees a pressing. You can have a 40 year career in Hollywood playing “second guy on the right,” never quite getting the big break you were hoping for. But if you are doing what you love and need to do, at some point you will accept the cost of it, without expecting a big payout in dollars and cents, end-of-the-day.
Just doing it will be enough.
SWAL’s blogging voice is a different character, almost completely, from last incarnations on blogs I have built in the past. She has become this other being: a slightly more butch, openly biting, yet ultimately more forgiving version of me. But she is a “character”…and with realizing that, I’ve come to realize I’ve built this person who lets me be more balls-out than I usually am in real life, and helps me build up a little more urgency to my life force as a whole.
I like her.
…She’s ain’t elegant or necessarily subtle, is much more effusive and daring, but she’s who I needed when I needed to create something new. As I’ve learned more about her, by writing her, I’ve come to respect her own voice, and will even go back and edit out (or in) certain formats of language because they either do or do not fit her “character.”
…Essentially, (from the writing perspective), I am a dramatist, a “playwright.” It’s the medium I am most comfortable with, yet haven’t created anything new in nearly two years. It seems to me, that SWAL has winked her way into my life as a reminder of what I do best: create characters. Filter life through their perspectives, yet do it in such a way as others can relate to them. Write a person you understand…parts and pieces borrowed from dozens of others you have met, that when put together build specifications and realism’s to what is in fact only a name on a piece of paper, until you make something more of it.
After three months and 100 posts, SWAL is very much her own person, and steadily pressing on. Her daily script of Improv may change, but in the end, by reading our posts, you’ve encouraged our strange little serial Telemudo to continue to grow and further it’s grasp in the world.
…And the royal “we” just wanted to say, “Thanks, guys.”
~D
