In the graveyard: Playback Timed Out

When writing I’ll often have Netflix going in the background. I’m currently polishing off the fifth season of The Twilight Zone. But as it happens I get interrupted a lot and when I sit back down I’m greeted by the black screen with the words “Playback Timed Out”. It’s what happens when your show is paused for too long, they cut off streaming to help with server congestion (or so I’ve read). Sometimes that’s how I feel about projects I start.

Bar none; DIY, work or school papers, house repairs, anything really. But in this case I’m relating to writing. See I have this file which I affectionately refer to as “The graveyard”. It isn’t where projects go to die, it’s just where they get buried and forgotten. It’s full of ambitious projects and false starts. Whole books are buried in there, some of which only need a bit of editing to become something. There are half finished short stories and concepts as short as a single poorly jotted down sentence. All buried in the rank and file of a computer grave yard, all because playback timed out.

It’s like anything I start has a timer that begins counting down at the moment of inception, a timer at the end of which attention and excitement begins to wane and the project, once loved, finds itself relegated to that digital graveyard. I tell myself I’ll dig it up again one day, maybe cannibalize its good parts into a new story. However that graveyard is growing faster than it’s shrinking.

I have no idea what the moral of this post it. Maybe we all have something like a graveyard full of ideas that remind us that we’re trying. And maybe we all have an attention playback timer that keeps those reminders filling those graveyards. I wonder if accomplished writers have entire necropolises filled to the brim with ideas that will never be, but keep telling themselves that one day they just might be.

Go make words, and try not to bury too many.