A new light

So I’m streaming my writing sessions on twitch now. I couldn’t find a text editor that looked pretty enough, so I’m using Sonic Pi for now. That way, I can also make a little music for my sessions in addition to the visual bells and whistles.

It’s a pretty interesting experience, having folks watching me right poetry on the screen. My first two sessions were poetry writing based on prompts I came up before going live. I like that, but I think I prefer writing poetry in private, so I feel capable of being more honest, then sharing it. So, what I’m going to do is probably write and edit short stories in my live stream. Since I’m working on a collection of short stories for 2019, I think that will go well. I’ve already got a lot of them started, so I also won’t need writing prompts.

There’s another reason I changed the content for my stream, though. The little experiment I was doing with what I like to call “micro dreams” is kind of rough. I believe I wrote about my goal on this blog before, but I’ll recap, just to do it.

If you’ve read either of my poetry books, or some of the stuff I’ve posted here, you know my writing can get just about as honest as it gets. After my second collection, I felt kind of burnt on that style of writing. My source of inspiration felt tapped. I’d just finished watching Twin Peaks: The Return at the time, and was really inspired by the over-arching theme of dreams. I thought it would be neat to do a poetry collection each page would tell a brief story, or inspire a specific mood. Not super complex poems, but ones that could still be meditated on a bit.

For example, I’d write a poem about driving through the desert at night with a girl in the passenger seat. Her eyes light up the road, so you turn off the headlights. She closes her eyes tight right before a hard turn and you can’t see, sending the car flying off the road.

It’s is a fun exercise in something I didn’t normally do. I think a lot of the poetry that is going into my next collection is some of the best I’ve written. It’s definitely new territory, though, and it takes more thought. A lot more imagination, since my previous style of writing about myself didn’t really require much.

So, the stream. I’ve got the start do dozens of stories that I’ll be working on live. I’ve also got another novel that I may throw into the mix. Either way, I really think I’m going to enjoy this experience. A few other folks stream writing sessions on Twitch, but they’re fairly regular writing sessions. Since I tried to spice mine up a bit, I feel like I’ve got a tiny edge. It’s a late night session (for me), there’s chill music that I program and change throughout the session, and my pink, embedded cam feed fits well with the aesthetic of Sonic Pi. It’s good. I’m trying to make it very interactive, so people can participate in prompts and edits, or whatever. I feel good about it, and I think it’s a tiny bit of the future of writing. There’s much more to come as I stream more and more.

As of right now, I’ll be live at 9 pm MST, Tuesday through Thursday, for an hour or so. My channel, if you’re interested in checking it out, is https://twitch.tv/amlangston.

Thanks for reading. If you check out my stream, make sure to say “hi”!