Alright. Let’s get into it. Let’s get into the weeds.

I was cleaning out my hard drive this morning, digital clutter, you know, the psychic weight of a thousand half-finished screenplays and PDFs of tax returns from 2014, and I stumbled upon a folder. Just a folder. Named “Blog Drafts.”

I open it up, expecting to find the usual: rants about my dog, rants about the neighbour’s leaf blower or pressure washer, rants about the specific texture of oat milk that makes me question humanity. You know, the hits.

Instead, I find a document. 180 pages.

180. Pages.

Now, I’m not a mathematician, but that’s not a blog post. That’s not even a “series” of blog posts. That’s a fucking doorstop. That’s a weapon you could use to defend yourself against a home invader. That’s what they call in the industry a “manuscript.” That has heft.

And the worst part? I don’t remember writing half of it. I mean, I do. It’s my voice. It’s that specific brand of anxious, hyper-verbal, existential dread wrapped in a pop-culture reference. It’s me. But it’s like I was on autopilot.

You ever have that thing where you drive to work and you don’t remember the last five miles? That’s this. I blacked out at the keyboard and woke up with a novella about… well, the lies artists tell themselves about marketing. Groundbreaking, I know. Call the Pulitzer committee.

But here’s the thing that gets me, the thing I want to talk about. The thing that’s sitting in my gut like a bad burrito.

It wasn’t planned.

This wasn’t some NaNoWriMo bullshit where I had a corkboard and colored index cards and a “plot structure.” God, no. That’s for people who have their lives together. This started as a connected series of blog posts. Just riffing. Just getting the demons out onto the page so they’d stop screaming in my head at 3 AM.

And it just… kept… going.

You follow when the muse leads. That’s the deal, right? That’s the contract you sign when you decide to do this stupid, pointless, beautiful thing called writing or being an artist. You don’t question it. You don’t say, “Excuse me, Muse, but I only have a 900-word capacity today.” No. The Muse shows up at your door at 11 PM with a bottle of cheap whiskey and a look in its eye that says, “We’re going to Vegas.” And you know it’s a bad idea. You know you’re going to lose money and wake up with a hangover and a tattoo you don’t remember getting. But you get in the car anyway. Because that’s the only way you find out what you actually think.

If I had stopped to overthink it, if I had said, “Who the hell is going to read this?” or “Is this structurally sound?” or “Am I just ripping off my own therapy sessions?”, I would have stopped at page 3. I would have closed the laptop and gone back to refreshing Twitter to see if anyone agreed with my take on the new Marvel movie.

But I didn’t. I just ran with it.

And now I’ve got 180 pages of pure id. 180 pages of unfiltered, caffeinated, sleep-deprived stream-of-consciousness. It’s messy. It’s rambling. There’s a chapter in there that is literally just a transcript of an argument I had with my dog. I’m not going to cut it. It stays. It’s part of the texture. (Just kidding)

Here’s the lesson, and I’m saying this to you, but I’m really saying it to myself, because I am my own primary audience and I need to hear it:

Stop overthinking the output.

We get so hung up on the result. We get so paralyzed by the idea of the “finished product” that we never actually produce anything. We sit there, staring at the blinking cursor, asking, “Is this good enough? Is this true? Will people judge me?”

Yes. They will. You are a person who exists on the internet. People are going to judge you. Get the fuck over it.

The only thing that matters is the process. The act of doing it. The act of showing up and letting the faucet drip until it turns into a flood. If you wait until you have permission, if you wait until you have the outline, if you wait until you know the ending, you will be waiting forever.

So I guess I’m writing a book now? I guess I have to actually edit this thing? I guess I have to figure out what to do with 180 pages of raw, unprocessed, marketing flotsam? Plus keep working on the other two books…?

I don’t know. But I’m not going to overthink it.

I’m just going to run with it.

Because the Muse is in the room. And she’s got her car keys out.

---