Intro to Terminal Habit

For Fun Days

For gradeschool homework assignments I would stage two people talking to each other to explain the water cycle or plate tectonics or how the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. Those early oneshots were me explaining the answers to my schoolwork to myself, for a grade. My first middleschool English teacher, Ms. Christian, goaded me to tell stories rather than single scenes. She taught me vocabulary and etymology, sowing the seeds for a budding interest that has only recently flowered.

In middleschool, my friend Brenden and I huddled in the back of the classroom, ignoring our math teacher, to write fanfiction of books, movies, and shows. We even included people we knew in real life and threw them into the madness of an alternate universe - the only place these matchups could possibly make sense. While I was focused on developing original characters to place in these pre-established worlds, he took the existing characters and made them fight, or be friends. I've always been slightly jealous of his output, back then. While he had terrible spelling and didn't quite understand what a paragraph was, he churned out page after page, day after day. I would fill notebooks as he would fill binders! When Brenden graduated he went to college to be a journalist, and then a chef, and then dropped out. I don't think he writes anymore, fanfiction or otherwise.

In highschool, the art magazine was edited by me and a handful of others. The flow of submissions, despite pasting our ad on every wall, was barely above a trickle. We had to fill the gaps with our own poems, drawings, and serial stories. Though it wasn't successful, it felt nice to have something staple-bound to hold in your hand. The same teacher in charge of the magazine, Ms. Brennan, gave me an opportunity to participate in NaNoWriMo (National November Writing Month) and be exempt from that month's homework. The goal was 50,000 words over 30 days. I wrote 40,000 of it in a week (not recommended), and paired with the premise of my story (a school shooting) I burnt out on fiction for a year. During that time, Ms. Cravedi kept me busy with poetry slams.

Blogging into the Void

Post-graduation the daily structure of school scattered to the wind. All words that made it to page via pencil, pen, manual typewriter, electric typewriter, and laptop keyboard, up to that point were "just kid stuff". It was time to get serious; time to earn that capital-w as a Writer; time to write... for The Internet. It was no longer a habit, or a hobby, but a Title.

Me and a friend from tech school, Dave, decided to be business partners in a silicon-valley-esque plot to be bought. We were inspired by Rooster Teeth. Being an internet personality, playing videogames, getting smashed daily, and getting paid for it? It was a basement-dweller's dream come true. I'd gotten permission from my wife for bankroll - $500. With it, I learned video production and editing; wrote skits and scripts; bought all the sound, video, and website requirements to replicate their lightning in a bottle. Not by producing a popular fanfiction machinimation of our favorite videogame series, no, but by making our own lowercase-l lowercase-p Let's Play channel centered around Minecraft and League of Legends intending to be bought and absorbed. We'd identified a larger trend, and sought to exploit it. Bulletproof idea.

Only trouble was, the other friends we'd recruited couldn't edit video or maintain websites or write material or afford the same equipment. It was just me. I was the only user producing anything consistently for the front page or in the forums. The site we’d made was a graveyard of hubris. Typo Warriors, our failed Rooster Teeth, died after six months. Later, so had my The Legendary Casual, Moaning Turtle, KarmaPuddle, and Casserly's Notebook v1 through v4.

Journaling for Nobody

Three years passed, and having spent a frankly gross amount of money on web hosting - far more than the initial $500 allowance - I had to take all my website projects down. I've printed out and stored all the posts in manila folders. The photos and screencaps of tweets are on an old hard drive. Any web-writing since then has been hosted on free services. Blogger, Wordpress, Tumblr, Medium, and Write.as are home for several more of my start and stop blogs. They don't get much traffic and the majority of (blocked) comments are bots trying to sell me brain and boner pills.

Because my only goal was for people to read what I'd written and I didn't engage with ongoing conversations or read other people's work - like a responsible netizen - I was isolated. My freewrites, and blogs, and reviews, and open letters, and notes, and fanfiction, and fiction stayed in paper notebooks or in digital vaults such as Evernote, Scrivener, Google Docs, and Obsidian. Admittedly, Journaling for Nobody sounds like a bad ending.

Fear of Stagnation

Two years and some change later I received a letter from my boss's boss's boss's boss (or boss^4) from down in the Florida office. (I live in Ohio.) It was meant to congratulate me for “5 years of service" at my dayjob. It was 4 months late, but understandably covid was a front-seat priority. The cardstock landscape-oriented paper reads

... followed by a lazy signature in gold sharpie.

After receiving this piece of paper in the mail my panic attacks returned with a force and frequency I hadn't experienced in years. My Fear of Stagnation led me to quit that job a week later, get a new dayjob the following week, and enroll in college the next. The thought I'd spent so long being a call center rep for an insurance company rather than a library tech or even a bottom-tier editor somewhere - anything related to my passions - scared me to death.

Terminal Habit

My For Fun Days as a lowercase-w writer ended at graduation. I fooled myself into Blogging into the Void for three years as an uppercase-w Writer before I ended Journaling for Nobody other than myself. A letter in the mail asked me for a vibe-check and my Fear of Stagnation scared me into reconsidering my relationship with writing.

I would argue it was inevitable I'd be here since the very beginning. The plus side of having ideas and building a system around saving them in notebooks, notecards, digital vaults, or manila folders, is that they'll be there for you when you decide to wake up from your stupor.

My friend Emily and I had a late night talk months ago, about continuing as a hobbyist or continuing as a professional. I've committed to keeping the lowercase-w, for now, as a mental valve to regulate unnecessary pressure. I've learned writing is something you can pick up and put down, but will ultimately kill you; it's a Terminal Habit.