Its Own Reward

I've had this here trusty Macbook now for a little under two years. I bought it for myself as a going-back-to-school present after my first semester at the seminary, and it was a purchase over which I agonized because I do not spend large sums of money lightly. That final mouse click to submit my order did not come easily, but I fought my way through.

One of the items I was most excited to find on my new toy was a program called Comic Life that lets you make your own comics. A little drag, a little drop, a wee tad of cleverness, and vwalla. So the half dozen or so of you that have been reading here for a while know that I've taken advantage of this little program and its functionalities to create a few of my own masterpieces. I've enjoyed doing these, but you see, there's this one particular story that I've been wanting to tell in its entirety for a while. I've written about it in bits and pieces here, but I've never told the whole thing from start to finish. And I started thinking that maybe the story would work well in a graphic format. I knew it'd be a bit more of a challenge than any of the other comics I'd created, but I figured it would come out to 2, 3, maybe 5 pages tops. I kicked the idea around for a while, but then I finally stopped kicking and started writing.

Well, I'm waaaaay past that 5 page ceiling that I didn't think I would reach, and the end is still nowhere in sight. It would seem that I have gotten myself into a full-blown project. How'd that happen? Oh right, see above.

The thing is, I'm not sure what the hell I'm going to do with it when I'm done. All of my other major writing projects up to this point have been plays, and I always knew that they were headed for a stage. There was a purpose to them. But with this, I just don't know. It seems too large a thing to just throw up on my blog. At this point, I'm working with no end goal beyond getting this story out of me. And maybe that's enough. In fact, maybe that's for the best. Maybe the telling of the story is the most important thing, and all else is mere distraction. I read an interesting article a while back which I can't seem to find at the moment am too lazy to go hunt down. It was about writing in this age of computers, how even when a writer is disciplined enough to shut down everything on their computer but their word processing program, they still face all the distractions presented by the program itself, what with all the formatting options available to them. The article went on to point out that writing and formatting are two separate tasks, to be dealt with at different times in the process. So maybe what I'm doing is like that. The writing is the task now, the thing that matters. The finished product, assuming I finish it, is the only goal, the reward. What comes next will just have to, uh, come next.