Human Sponge and Other Bad Names for a Live Action SpongeBob Movie

I promise that header is horrendously deceptive.

My background noise while editing these days has turned to cooking shows and home improvement shows. While I'm not particularly lacking in either skill, the main reason is actually because these tend to have an assload of episodes and I don't have to look for something else to watch so often. The only exception is the prompt wondering if I'm still there/watching, with no regard for the fact that my cats could be watching even if I don't realize my TV is quiet for a while.

Because of this, I'm something of a pseudo expert now and I'd even wager I'd probably know which bitter cheese looks best on a granite countertop with a marble backsplash. Not through applied knowledge but more because, with a vocabulary for anything, I have the tendency to make uncanny lucky guesses.

Noise levels are something writers tend to toy with. Even with some hardwired tendencies, I still can't say I don't vary from time to time. Netflix and Hulu while writing and editing was a sort of multilevel thing. For one, throwing on kid's shows kept my nephews' attention longer so I could do things. For another... The sponge effect is fruitful. 

While they tend to run towards reality-show levels of whining and fake drama, these shows are chock-full of vocabulary for those weird mini roofs on big roofs (dormers) and those interesting formations under the points of them (gables/brackets). These are words that I'm grateful I don't have to look up with funky keyword chains, such as... Well, the ones I originally spelled out qualify well enough.

What makes speaking able to be absorbed or ignored is its usually passive nature. Being an observer, you'd be more inclined to not feel those FOMO vibes. English is a clunky spoken language at that, one that doesn't distract with rhythm or flow. I find it harder to concentrate with more lyrical or vowel intensive languages. Even then, languages are sometimes easier to discern because it's yet another sound in the background and without realizing it, I'm picking up cadences and accents, even trends in how native men and women sometimes speak it vastly different.

I briefly passed an article of someone claiming to help people think outside of the box. It came off as kind of desperately quirky garbage. I'm not sure why people are so obsessed with being in and out of boxes or where these boxes are at all. Over and over, it amounts to this--trust your ideas more. Some people treat their writing like it's either going to be their Anne Frank's Diary or some posthumous joke that marks their infamy or obscurity.

Think about the future as far as it motivates you. Just like passive absorption can bring endless pools of knowledge, freeing yourself to telling a story, humbling yourself to how it changes, often nets you no shortage of ideas. Some people are so married to seeing it as a movie or a game that they forget to use the media of writing to its best advantage. Delve into minds and places even your characters can't reach. Tell a story, teach a story. Whatever you choose to write, embrace the noise. Rather than get frustrated about the environment being less than perfect, ask what it can bring to your work.

People are rarely looking for who you are when everything is ideal. People often want to know what you can achieve when you're on their level. Rags to riches stories die as soon as they spark. Once we beat the hump, relatability is harder to come by. It's why it's very rare for booming authors to keep striking gold. We start to need those raw struggling moments.

Now, excuse me while I watch people whine on Property Brothers. It's one of those shows where you can get drunk over three events: every time someone panics because they own two houses before their old one sells, every time someone thinks a countertop is ugly, and every time someone compares a color they don't like to food being squirted on the walls. Don't add one for every time someone says they don't like something. You'll die.