The Expansion and Shrinkage Of The Couch Potato Chronicles.

The reason I never became a novelist is that I have a real laissez-faire attitude towards the past. This is something that was shaped by all the years I spent in advertising doing one thing after another, and really having very little time or inclination to reflect on what I had done, because my mind was so occupied with what was in front of me.

Inadvertently, this shaped my attitude towards writing in general and caused me to steer clear of reflective novels, novellas and short stories. At that time, (the early 80s) I wrote mostly lyrics that I would, and still do, give to composers to play with in the hopes of becoming the next Bernie Taupin. This, of course, was at a time where there still was a songwriting industry of some sort.

I also wrote screenplays, which I quite enjoyed doing, mainly because there was a pretty easy format to follow and a good length was only about 100 pages. During this period I wrote about 10 originals (sci-fi and thrillers mostly) and adapted a couple of novels. But even that had a short half life, especially if you're not willing to move to LA, but that's a whole other story.

The Expansion Part

One cold snowy winter day a few years ago I took the time to compile them into a single Word file that turned out to be pretty close to 1000 single spaced pages.

The idea was to see if I could fashion some sort of book from this but then I ran right up against my deeply rooted and highly successful avoidance of things past. (I consider the very fact that I am writing about this stuff now, a minor achievement or maybe just a indication that my life is flashing before my eyes, LOL).

The column itself was, by the standards of the day, reasonably successful and and at one time I did a little poll with my readers which almost everyone responded to, asking them how many people they forwarded my column to. This was because several people I didn’t know had emailed me and asked to be put on the list from having had it forwarded to them by somebody on my core list of about 400.

My best guesstimate was that, at its peak, it was reaching about 7000 people all over the world.

These columns tended to average about 2500 words, which was really quite long, but I didn’t care because I was having a lot of fun.

Up And Then Back Down A Notch

At one point, on a reader’s suggestion, I actually considered the idea of seeing if I could get published into some sort of community newspaper or other print media.

So I got hold of a national newspaper TV reviewer who I knew personally and asked him some questions about that area of the business.

He read a couple of my pieces and told me he thought I was a good enough writer to probably get a gig with a newspaper or magazine. But….

I always shudder at Buts. And then he continued by telling me that the writing I was doing would be a good foot in the door, but that the subject matter of the writing I would have to do, would be dictated to me by editors and or publishers and that I wouldn’t have a lot of say in the matter for about 20 years or so until I became a columnist.

So then it was really a question of whether I was willing to do that, because it would inevitably entail writing about stuff I thought was absolute crap and criticizing it just enough to not piss of the advertisers.

Since I had been writing advertising on demand for close to 25 years, I just saw this as more of the same, only much more tedious and much less spontaneous.

So I thanked my contact and politely declined his offer to pass my stuff along to his editor. And that was the end of any journalism dreams I had.

But it wasn’t a bad thing at all. Because I was old enough to realize that not every writer wanted to do every kind of writing. And finding out the kinds of stuff I didn’t want to do was just as important as the converse.

The Shrinkage Part

By about 2009, I had migrated my column over to a WordPress blog site. But at the same time, social media was starting its devious work of shrinking attention spans, and so instead of writing about several different things in each column I just picked one and wrote as concisely as I could in the hopes of catching as many readers as possible.

Yeah, the good old social media dream of chasing likes.

The other reason that I decided to shrink it all down a bit was fatigue. I was approaching 500 columns in the longer format and although I loved the ‘almost Gestalt’ of writing it, I was getting a little worn out from the effort.

I carried on with this for a couple more years, but I was kind of up against an ever shrinking attention span factor out in the world, so after a good deal of consideration, I moved into a Phase 3.

The Mighty Meme

This, hopefully final phase of the wind-down, actually required a lot more discipline than either of the other two formats which were much more free form and not restricted in any way, word count wise.

And so here we are with the most easily digestible bite-sized bits of entertainment journalism designed specifically for quick and easy consumption.

All of this, now a more than 20 year hobby, came about as the result of friends, who knew I watched a lot of TV and movies, constantly asking me for opinions, which I was happy to give.

The column itself was simply a way to tell a bunch of people the same thing and save me the time of telling them all individually, which was very time consuming.

But make no mistake, I have enjoyed every minute of this activity. And at some point over the winter I will republish some of the earlier pieces, just for for the hell of it.

jim out

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