The Scrap Bucket

Enduring, persistent, and easily ignored meme: You see someone else’s final draft and you see your own rough draft. It’s easy to forget you see the whole process and you only see the outcome of others’, so it’s easy to think you’re making garbage and other people are making great stuff.

I make a lot of garbage.

I am right now, up at 2 in the morning, with a notebook open in front of me, because I have assigned myself the task of daily blogging, and I want to make sure I do it, because if I’m not meeting all my goals, I might as well make sure I meet this daily goal. I am thirty seven articles ahead of my schedule here, and there have been times I have been sixty articles ahead.

Today I threw out a bunch of scraps.

  • An article about how being Australian means I have to pretend my childhood was like yours, American Reader, even if I know you’re not American, because America has colonised English internet
  • Another genders 101 article about how to just, stop talking about sex with trans people if you don’t actually want to have sex with them
  • An article about how sharing supportive memes can be really miserable (though not always)
  • A twine game about finding your pokemon nature based on your food preferences
  • Vague summary of my PhD meeting today. It went well! I think I hit upon wanting to make people centred technology but in this case technology refers to words
  • Something about primitives, which is a super useful term when describing design and super awful when describing people
  • An article about being angry.
  • An article about how sharing memes about how you love people even though you never put any effort into interacting with them is kinda shitty because it’s just saying ‘thanks for doing the emotional labour, and also I expect you to continue because I reblogged a cake.’
  • An article about why I don’t know what my swearing policy is on this blog especially because I swear a lot in real life and tried to avoid doing it in MTG articles
  • A project document for an RPG concept that I think I kind of want to keep in the oven to cook for a bit
  • Some example _plans for mechanics I haven’t been able to actualise
  • The story of why I wasn’t at SMASH! this year but you could still buy Senpai Notice me and LFG

None of these got made. None of them will. This is an example of scraps, of things I didn’t do in their immediate form. Maybe when I wake up I’ll feel like redoing one of them from the start. But at the moment? Nah.

I write every day. A lot of what I write I’m not happy with and feels like garbage. If you write something and don’t think it’s good enough, do not feel bad about putting it in the drawer and deciding to leave it alone. The practice of practicing is worth it.