The Daily

Introduction

Someone recently said to me “If Mike doesn’t write there is something wrong in the world”. I shared this and others agreed with it. While it slightly amused me, it also really warmed my heart, and made me feel valued and loved.

Carrying on from this I sort of feel that I need to share something every day, which is a slight pressure but the reality is that I do do it anyway, so the pressure is all by me and not by my friends and audience.

So How Do I Find Something To Write And Share Every Day?

I feel that when we are online, age is often absent, so when I chat with people, they just see me as me, not an old white man. I often get surprised when I see pictures of people I correspond with, their age range varies from teens to pensioners, but to me people are people.

The point I am making is that I have sixty five years of life experience to draw on, so very often something will happen that will trigger a memory, which I then feel I can write about and share with my audience.

I love writing poetry but I try to write just one poem in three or four Vocal stories. I do the same with playlists as well. I feel they are easier to produce although often they take a lot longer than I think they will.

I am inspired by people, conversations, music, reading , walking and many things.

The fact that I am writing this piece is because of the sentence that was said to me that I detailed in the first line of the first paragraph. The reason I write things like this is the hope that someone will read this and think that they can do something because of something that they have seen in the story that I have written.

This is one form of daily correspondence with my audience, but tomorrow there will be something different, I hope. I do have a fear of repeating myself or plagiarising others, but I cannot find a definition for this fear.

The nearest I found was Atelophobia,a fear of imperfection or making mistakes that can lead to depression, low self-esteem and severe anxiety.

I don’t think it makes me anxious but I am aware of the possibility that things like this might happen.

When I write I have a generally set format, often with an Introduction, body of the story and a conclusion, and always try to include a pertinent song or video for people to enjoy while they read my story.

I also try to use the available formatting options in the Vocal editor, with images and videos to make it more presentable to the reader. Only you can tell me if I am successful at applying these to my creations. People have suggested that I change to a more bare bones format with less formatting and images, but I feel that would not be a “Mike Singleton” story. I do like the visual representation of my words to be something that affects the reader in a positive way.

Conclusion

Although I am now using the Vocal editor directly a lot more (I do for poetry and playlists), I am creating this piece using Google Docs because when I write a longer article, it does not continually scroll off the page, so is an easier interface.

As you can see I have used my standard format for this story, and I hope it has given you a little insight into the way that I work. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need any advice.

The music is "Sunday Papers" by Joe Jackson which is vaguely related to the subject of this piece.

This has been today’s Daily Issue from Mike Singleton.