Hope Vision Repeat
So, because my creative life has become my entire life and because this creative life doesn't involve some other sort of organization, it's all just me and business Goose media. My life now consists completely of my house, and considering the fact that I work nose to tail at home and the fact that. I can get anything delivered to my doorstep very quickly. In a kind of shocking way means that leaving the house becomes a conscious thing.
I have to like make the choice to do that and everyone should make the choice to do that. It's hard for me to do. I'm kind of a homebody. I like being at home. I like looking out the window. I like working while I'm looking out the window, so I had to, you know, make this conscious choice to get out of the house, go for a walk through the neighborhood, stuff like that.
And I found that I was much more prone to leave the house if I had a camera with me, a camera that was not the camera in my phone. And so I have a, a nice camera and then I got another nice camera. And, uh, I like photography and I like taking pictures. So it was nice. I walk around, take pictures of, you know, birds, the sky.
Strange things I see on the street, stuff like that. There's no reason for it really. It's just an activity that gets me outta the house, right?
So as I enjoyed this more and more, the other morning there I was in the most dangerous place on the internet when you have time and money, and that is eBay. And I bought for the first time since I guess I was a kid, a film camera, and not just a film camera, I mean a film, capital F camera. This is a Ralieicord five.
Medium format. You open the door at the top and look down into it camera, and I ordered this not having any idea how it worked. Just kind of rolling the dice. The camera arrives. I order some film. This is all of course delivered to me right at my door. And uh, I went out the other day and I took a few pictures with it, and it turns out the camera works.
And it turns out the pictures I took looked fine. Now, as it turns out, the camera is not 100% functional. There's a few things that need to be fixed, and now it's sitting in the hands of some, you know, camera repair person, probably out in the Inland Empire somewhere.
But I have to say I really enjoyed shooting with the film camera. As opposed to my digital cameras that I have. I mean, I like shooting with my digital cameras, but there was definitely a different feeling to it and I'm not really sure what it was, and I've been trying to put my finger on it.
I think what it was is the fact that it's all hope. It's hope and vision. Shooting with film. Because you can't look at it and you don't know if you did the right thing until you get the photographs back a couple of weeks from when you shot them, and, and there was something kind of familiar about that for me, and I guess.
Because it reminds me of what it's like to write something. You know, you have a vision and you have hope that it's going to work out, and you just kind of go for it, and you're not gonna know if it worked out for a long time. So it's almost like shooting on film is this expression of the writer's life.
I can't think of anyone who's ever sat down in front of their, you know, Underwood typewriter or whatever, and it's just like, this is gonna rule. This is gonna be so good. Holy shit. Look out. I'm feeling it as I'm typing it. Oh, it's gonna be amazing. It's all just complete guesswork. Flying blind. You have no idea.
But you have hope and you have vision, and then it all comes back to you and you see, you know, what your hope and vision has has brought you. And the more you do that, the same thing with shooting with a camera, with a film camera. The more you do that, the sharper it becomes, the better you become at it, the sharper your vision gets when you're out there shooting.
I've been in the middle of putting together these classes for our Patreon, these sort of like how to write, how to be creative, how to do audio drama, stuff like that.
And it's surprising when you realize how much of the writer's life is just doing it over and over again. Over and over and over again. And that's really the only thing to do. There's no, you know, magic potion, there's no shortcuts. Good writing comes from writing and writing and writing if it's gonna come at all.
' Cause you can keep writing and it can still be bad and you hope that it's not. But you wouldn't stick with it if you didn't have that vision and that hope. The same vision and hope that I walk out onto the street with when I have this film camera. So now I instantly want to go out down the street again and shoot some more pictures.
But of course the camera's in the shop, so of course I bought another one. It's gonna be delivered to me tomorrow probably. Anyway. Hope, vision over and over and over again, and that's all you have.