Reboots and Remakes

There was an article in The Walrus which I stumbled across on Twitter titled "I’m Sick of Reboots and Rewatches and You Should Be Too" and I had a lot of thoughts I wanted to share; I was originally going to tweet this reaction in a thread but it grew in length to the point where I thought a blog post would better suit, and the topic touches on the nature of writing and the creative process so I thought it would be relevant to share here.

I have disagree quite hard with this idea of abandoning old ideas and old content and focusing solely on innovation.  My retort firstly comes on the basis that most people who consume old content aren't experiencing it for the first time, but rather they are reliving their past experiences of that content. The vast majority of people don't go back and explore old content they have not already seen - reboots and remakes reach new audiences.

Drawing from my experience of content creation, of which this isn't the first blog I have run, indeed there have been many I have published over the years and their syndication varied. Some reached a few dozen people, some a few hundred, and some a few thousand. There are analytics scripts and server logs that are accessible to the publisher [me] that vary depending on the platform but they all generally provide insight into how you the reader explore the content provided here and one thing remains consistent, old content is generally ignored. You may occasionally land on an old post from a search result in Google but you'll jump to the home page after reading it and read only recent content, the remaining old content is rarely explored.

Peacocking

This post started out as a response to a tweet I saw on twitter - the account is private so I won't post a link, but the gist of the tweet was to ask if you need to impress someone in order to gain their attention, were they truly worthy of your friendship? This is my response which has mostly gone unedited.

Yes and no, impressing someone shouldn't be a requirement, but if you don't stand out in some way you don't get noticed. People use different ways to get noticed, some use their looks, some use brains, and some use wealth. What you choose says more about you than who you try to impress. A friendship can be initiated by superficiality but it can't be sustained by it, what really matters is where the interpersonal relationship goes and whether there's a depth that develops. How the friendship was initiated in time will become circumstantial and almost entirely irrelevant. A true friendship will last if that depth comes to mean more to them than peacocking that was employed to gain their attention in the first place.

Which direction?

I turned 33 just over a month ago and now that I've had some time to let that sink in, I've been reflecting on my life. A question people often ask is whether or not people can actually change. I've been looking back at who I was compared to who I feel I am now in an attempt to try and answer that question, even if the answer is one that only applies to my own life not necessarily those of others.

I always insisted that people could never truly change, that you are who you are underneath all of the pretence, the only thing that "changes" is how much effort you put into showing that or hiding it depending on whether that's who you want to be. To an extent I still hold that as true, but personal growth does have to be acknowledged. I feel like I am still the same person I always was underneath it all. The amount of effort I put into hiding that person has gone up and down in waves. I spent my teenage years in the closet afraid of people finding out I was gay because of the way I saw other guys being treated. I also grew up in an environment that was relatively conservative although in hindsight I now see that was moderate compared to what other people have experienced.

The Importance of Conversation

I need to preface this post by saying this isn't aimed at any one person in particular, if it was I would likely have approached you about this in private.  These thoughts are shared here in observation of a general behaviour pattern I have noticed.

As a writer one of the things you have to learn quite quickly is how to write characters that have realistic or believable conversations.  That is, two or more characters engaging with one another in a way you would actually expect people to engage.  In the pursuit of perfecting this skill, writers often have to pay closer attention to real world conversations they have and after the fact they pull them apart and pick at the pieces to see what they're made of and what can be learned from the experience.

Short Story: The Frog Prince

'The Frog Prince' is a retelling of the Grimm Brothers classic of the same name reimagined with an LGBT cast of characters.

'The Frog Prince' is a short story following Prince Torsten as he learns the value of his word and the true meaning of friendship and the importance of trust.

As a child I loved fairytales and the worlds they depicted but even as a young man coming to terms with his sexuality, there was very little representation of LGBT characters in those old tales.

The Eye of the Storm

When you are a writer one thing that can inspire either excitement or fear is a blank page. Excitement for the potential it holds when there is a fountain of creativity that is bursting inside of you; fear when you set about to tap into that potential and there isn't so much as a drip that flows. Life right now is pretty miserable for everyone but there is still positivity to be found, but channelling that into creativity however is not an easy feat. Turning fear into fuel is something that can only happen when you're ready to embrace that fear and explore its depths, but set in an environment that is already negative, that can be very hard to do because you know that if you lose yourself in that dark abyss that even the light of the world above from which you fell might not be enough to pull you back.