#51

As I've now hit something of a milestone on Vocal of 50 published pieces, I thought it appropriate to make this my 51st piece. A short period of reprieve, to reflect on my earlier work, thoughts on the milestone and some ideas and goals I'd like to explore for the future here on Vocal.

First Published Piece

My first published piece on Vocal is a rather raw and somewhat jaded little piece, aptly entitled "Betrayal". I'm not a particular fan of this piece when I look back at it, to be perfectly honest, but I appreciate it for what it is: The first creative piece I felt confident enough to put out to the world in many, many years.

I tend to be my own worst critic and I nitpick just about every line, if not every word, of previous works if I ever feel masochistic enough to revisit them. Having said that, I do like the rawness of the "Betrayal." poem. I feel it has the same clear kind of style and voice I have today, just a lot rougher around the edges. Seeing how much more refined I see my current work in comparison to my first piece here is very motivational to me.

After all, I've only been on Vocal for a little over a year at this point regardless and to me, I see my current work as reaching new, higher standards than I first hit, while finding my voice in less contrived and cliche ways as I sometimes overused. With more time, I hope to keep improving until I reach a level I can find myself genuinely happy with. If it comes to it though, I'd be glad to settle with contented.

My Favourite Piece Written For Vocal

Without any shadow of a doubt, my favourite piece that I've written and published precisely for Vocal Media is my short story, "Isle of The Lost and Found."

This story was written for Vocal's "Lost Paradise" challenge and it took so much out of me to write. I hadn't actually put together a real story that I had put my full efforts into in years. As I mentioned before, I am undoubtedly my own worst critic. I've deleted multiple stories in a rage in the past at how below my own terribly high standards I found their quality to be before they ever got to reach the light of day.

For Isle of The Lost and Found, I sat around in a house on my own for an entire week, racking my brain. Thinking of the story, the characters, the motivations they'd have. I thought of how they'd feel in each moment. How they might act. How it would feel to be them. To live in their skin as they witnessed each little push of the story, smell what they smelled, see what they saw, and how these characters might want to react to their surroundings in such circumstances.

I spent a lot of that week walking around an empty house talking to myself like a crazy person, stacking up bottles of vintage port, used to lubricate the typewriter that now lived where a brain used to be. Taking a few couple-minute breaks and then immediately coming back to it, trying to write more, getting stuck, refining what I already wrote until I found a new direction to continue towards. A crazy stream of unhinged thoughts without any real thoughts as I tried to refine a writing process that I didn't even know how to begin.

I definitely feel I can write a better story than this now. One of the main things helping that fact being developing an actual real ritual for writing seriously as opposed to just embracing the madness and wrestling it towards an open page of Microsoft Word. But even so, I put everything I had into that story at the time, absolutely all I had to make it the best I could, and I believe it still holds up pretty well. It's certainly my favourite piece...For the time being.

What's Next?

On Vocal, I think one of the next things for me is consistency. Not just the consistency to be writing. Hell, I could write every day if I wanted each submission to be a page of "All work and no play". What I'm pushing for on Vocal this year, is having the consistency in challenging myself.

All the unofficial challenges help too. Between Vocal official challenges and all the unofficial challenges being created by the wonderful community, there are always fresh prompts around Vocal and so few of them are directly in my comfort zone. I absolutely love that.

I'm really looking forward to pushing myself to enter as many challenges across Vocal as I can throughout 2024. I feel it's going to be a very fun way to hone and sharpen my skills by having to write outside of the categories I've always been used to and gravitated to.

Outside of Vocal, I'll be continuing to write professionally as normal, but much more interestingly, I intend to get back to writing my own book. I started two books back in 2022 and I only ever got a few thousand words into each at the time.

I re-read one of them a couple days ago. Despite some self-nitpicking of it, I liked what I read, which is rare for me. It made me wonder, why exactly did I ever stop writing this book? It has a solid opening with a lot of directions for me to go. I think this year is the year I commit myself to going in those directions and making a real attempt at finishing it. Who knows, I might share the first few chapters on Vocal when I'm a little further in, see how it's perceived by this great community at that point.

Anyway, that's all guys. I just thought it'd be nice to take a moment to have a little reflection and goal-setting from surpassing 50 published posts in my 15 months of being part of this great community. If you read this far, then thank you! If you didn't, well...You won't see this so I'm not writing you a message.