My name is Cody and I am going to walk across the United States… true story. Why would a person decide to do this? There are several reasons for it. The biggest reason is because I was brainwashed by J.R.R Tolkien. No really. The Hobbit was the first book I ever fell in love with. I was only eight or nine at the time. Reading that book planted a seed in me which grew into a dream to walk across country. I have never been able to shake it and I doubt I ever will. So it is time to just do it.
I am also walking as a means to self discovery. I am not even sure what this means exactly. I suppose I will discover that as I walk but the few people I have talked to who have made this journey say you learn a lot about yourself and your world.
I am also going to walk for charity. I am an avid video game player and will be reaching out to the gaming community to try to raise money for Child’s Play. Child’s Play is a game industry charity that helps provide hospitals worldwide with games and toys.
Games and the video game industry (including gamers themselves) historically get a lot of bad coverage in the media. You rarely see anything good like the work they do over at Child’s Play or any number of gamers who give our hobby some direction toward doing good in this world and helping out where we can, even if it is just one solitary gamer going for a little walk.
“Now shall I walk, Or shall I ride?
“Ride,” Pleasure said; “Walk,’ Joy replied.”
Gaming
As my moniker suggests I am an avid gamer. I want to make this walk as game themed as possible. Microsoft has “Achievements”. Sony has Badges. I am going to have “Feats.” The feats shall all be locked and to be silly I shall use the made up term “Unfeatified”. When I unlock them they shall change to “featified” If you can think of any feats for my walk leave them in the comments section and if they are doable I shall toss them up.
My writing process
One Christmas season long ago when I was but a pup I attempted to write my own version of A Christmas Carol. I used a Crayola marker and a large piece of cardboard. I could not find any paper. I wanted to write the story in reverse; it would be a tale about a kind, jolly old man who is visited by three spirits which twist and corrupt him into a mean, miserly and cold, old grump. This is my first memory at attempting to write. I never finished it. I am sure I got distracted by something shiny. I also remember re-writing the words to Frosty the Snowman around the same time. I wrote it as Frosty the Gangster… I suppose I had a bit of a dark sense of humor for a child and a knack for plagiarism. My point however is I have had a passion to put pen to paper and create since I was young.
Along with this love of writing I also acquired a hatred for it. More specifically just a hatred for my writing… and perhaps the works of Robert Jordan but only because he took what could have been the best fantasy tale since Tolkien and turned it into a nine book, almost nine thousand page, painfully drawn out tale that was mired in its own backstory. Then he died before he could finish. But I digress.
I both love and hate writing which makes doing it a bit tricky. The process right now, this instant, where I am alone with my mind, computer and coffee, and my fingers dance across the keyboard bringing some sort of order to the jumbled mess of chaos that usually passes for coherent thought… I love this. Then I actually read what I’ve written and I hate it. I hate it so much that I used to often delete things on the spot – a habit which I was broken of by my wife. Sometimes I get so upset about it that I do not write anything for months which makes it difficult (to say the least) to attempt to make a living as a wordsmith.
This blog has been an immeasurable source of help. The walk has given me motivation. Even when I go back and read this, and hate it, I will still post it. A blog with no posts is not much of a blog at all. And one cannot hope to walk across the United States and try to raise money and awareness if they refuse to post anything out of some ignorant sense of self-loathing.
So now to the point of this post. How do I write? I throw my thoughts and words at the page then go back and make all necessary edits and changes so it does not appear a chimp was banging its head on a keyboard. What I have been doing is my norm. I hit “publish post,” which for me gets it out there past the point of me deleting it. I know I still could delete it but it is a little mental trick for me to help me overcome the whole hate thing. Then I go back and edit. What I did not know was WordPress was emailing everyone who follows this blog my first draft, so I hope you all have been enjoying the chimp head drafts of my posts. In an attempt to be a little more professional I am going to start editing these before I publish.
And you know what? Sometimes now, since I started all this, when I go back and read my posts or even bits of short stories I occasionally take little jabs at, I do not always hate them. Sometimes I just dislike them… and sometimes, rarely, I think to myself “That is not half bad.” Baby steps… baby steps.
Read more at my blog page.