Friday, August 06, 2010

An Even Further History of Mostly Harmless

The dawn of 2008 finds itself in the middle of my sophomore year, and, in between time spent discovering ultimate frisbee and racking up hundreds and hundreds of hours on Team Fortress 2, my blog is suffering. January and February had a total of five posts containing a total of two original stories and two photographs. I had lost my camera charger very promptly, and so the pictures were just not happening. My memory can't account for the weird, emo poetry, but whatever the cause, it was there and that was that.

In March, I broke down and bought a new charger, and, by April and very suddenly, my posts were photographs and stories and the stories were not gross and violent anymore. This seems silly to say, but these posts were the first ones on this blog that I'm not generally embarrassed about. April 2008 - I discover my format. Let's write this somewhere important. It only took me two and a half years.

The first fish-eye tests showed up mid-July curiously around my birthday, and it quickly became an addiction. I managed to give it up in August, and, although I didn't realize it at the time, this move marked a pretty decent change in direction for the blog. I began focusing less on the photographs and more on the stories. I was influenced by what I read (noticeably The Things They Carried) or I came up with better ideas or I did something, something. I wrote essays and scenes and stories of love, love, love, for friends and for words and for writing utensils, whatever, I wasn't picky. Love was in the air, apparently, and I wrote it down.

On November 12, I posted my first round of scenes, which were just little vignettes I thought would be interesting enough to read. In December I posted four scene posts in a row, which is ridiculous by any standard. Luckily after that I wrote a three-post long story about a guy that kills himself, so, you know, problem solved. That story, along with The Anti-Jeff, were my first real attempts at multiple-post serials. For a brief time I toyed with the idea of putting all those miscellaneous serials on one blog, but it proved to be more effort than it was worth. Miscellaneous Serials is now all but abandoned.

As the year drew to a close, questions remained unanswered: would my stories ever gain in depth and intelligence? Would the downward trend in photograph quality continue? Just who is this masked man, and why has he never been photographed together with 6-year-old millionaire playboy Calvin? FIND OUT NEXT TIME ETCETERA!

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