Chicken Poop for the Sassy Soul

You know what? I'm the biggest flop-artist in the entire world. And I'll tell you why. I have this extremely disturbing habit of starting projects with enthusiasm and then promptly abandoning them to enthusiastically start new ones.

Here are a list of the projects I enthusiastically embarked on within the past month:

1. A novel. I was going to thread my favorite short stories together, and write some new ones, to create a twisted novel. (I consider this one delayed but still in progress, however.)

2. Album reviews. For about a week, I was working wholeheartedly on reviewing music albums in a humorous light that I would later publish on a website.

3. Don's Special Diary. I started a diary on ABCtales and almost completely abandoned it.

What I want to know is why am I like this? Why can't I stay focused? I already lost basic interest in my schoolwork - I'm still doing well, but I've gotten into the bad habit of waiting until the last minute to do things because, beyond the grades, I don't care about these classes anymore. This is really frustrating for me, and if I force myself to continue working on these things halfheartedly, I begin to despise them.

I'm truly worried that when I graduate from college and get my degree, I'll get a job and enjoy it for a month or so and then hate it. Once I hate something, I have almost always quietly bailed out of it. I hated engineering and changed my major to journalism. (I still like journalism, thank God, and I haven't been having any repercussions about it.) But what if I get started on my career and suddenly decide within a month that I have taken the wrong direction in life? Do I keep it and hate it for life, or do I quit and find another job unrelated to journalism? Surely quitting so soon would be terrible for my resume - it would look better if I keep it for five years. But that's five years!

The things I worry about. I hate crossroads.

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In that light, I'm announcing that I am starting, yet, another project enthusiastically: a fiction diary. In June, I officially ended a different fiction diary. Writing that diary had been extremely helpful to my development as a writer and I ultimately ended it in order to concentrate more on quality works of fiction rather than pieces of junk written in a single evening. Unfortunately, that hasn't been happening and, instead, I have almost completely lost my vision as a fiction writer. To tell you the truth I haven't written anything I'm really proud of in nearly six months - and that was for the "crap" fiction diary. So I'm going to start it up again in hopes that I will recapture that lost "vision."

My problem with fiction writing occurred, I think, when I wanted to become good at it and began using praise as indicators of it. When I originally started (in that fateful month of August 2001) I was doing it as a form of entertainment and didn't give a rat's behind about whether it was passable or what people thought of it. I look back at the stuff I wrote back then and realize that they are the best darned things I ever wrote! Later on, I wanted to continue writing good pieces of fiction, but I started using the ABCtales cherry as an indicator of whether a specific piece I wrote was good. If I didn't get one, my rationale was that it was a bad piece of work and I shouldn't have wasted my time with it. This, my friends, is the wrong mentality-what's more is that I knew it was the wrong mentality at the time, but I couldn't stop the thoughts from creeping into my cranium just the same. I hope it doesn't return.

I'm starting my fiction diary again with the pretence that everything I write doesn't have to be good nor get praise. If I do, fine. If I don't, then that's better because I know there's some aspect of it that I failed to properly illustrate. I'm hoping that by doing this, I'll somehow tap in some creative knack and figure out how to write decent fiction and know that I'm doing it! (The appealing parts of some my best pieces of fiction were done by accident, I assure you.) I have no idea if it's going to work - if this is a natural period of low-creativity for me, then it might ultimately lower my spirits and could result in me abandoning fiction writing altogether. However, I don't think that'll ever happen completely because this fiction business has gotten to be an obsession. (I just need to focus! FOCUS, DON, FOCUS!)

I'm also going to do ABCtales reviews at the end of the entries as I did last time. I know it might seem like I'm encouraging people to read through my own short stories should I happen to read and publish short review of theirs (I was really worried about that when I did them in my last set) - but I assure you that is not my intention. For some reason, if I read through a short story without the intention of writing about it, I go through it passively. But if I write about it, it forces me to think about it more analytically because I don't necessarily want my audience or the ABCtales editors to think I have no intelligence. So, the reason I want to analytically consider short stories in the first place is the hope that it'll improve my writing in the process. (I've heard it many times that you can't become a writer if you don't also read - and I have a hard time getting myself motivated to read much.)

Despite what it might sound like, I'm principally going to write humor stories in this diary because that's what I enjoy writing! I have occasional periods when I feel like writing more dramatic pieces, but those are mere phases. All I can say is that I hope I enjoy this more than you.

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That introduction was a lot longer than I thought it would be so I'm ending today's diary entry without a piece of fiction. Besides, every good ABCtales set must have a good introduction, and because I'm so special, I need a good place to introduce the title of my brand new set - Chicken Poop for the Sassy Soul. It was originally going to be simply "Chicken Poop for the Soul," and I thought that it was an original pun until I did a Google-search on it and discovered that somebody else already beat me to it. So I cleverly decided to add the word "Sassy" to the title at the very last minute as homage to the late Phil Hartman. "Now that's Sassy!" It's not quite original, but I still think it's a very good name for a set just the same.