brendan halpin

Regular readers have been reaching out to me and asking why my blog has not been graced by a professional wrestling recap in quite a while. “Have you fallen out of love with wrestling?” they ask in tremulous voices.

No, dear readers, I have not. I have simply gone legit. Which is to say you can now find my wrapups of Chaotic Wrestling events on the Chaotic Wrestling website!

That’s right, folks—I’m official!

How did I get this gig, you ask? I wrote the Chaotic Wrestling folks and said, “Hey, do you want me to do this?” and they said yes.

And folks, I was positively giddy with excitement. This is actually one of the biggest thrills of my entire writing career. And I am having a ton of fun writing these things. (I think they’re pretty fun to read, too. Check out my latest entry—I think you’ll find it entertaining even if you do not follow Chaotic Wrestling.)

It’s fun for me to lend my talents to an organization that puts on what I really believe is Greater Boston’s best live entertainment value, and it’s also great for me to be able to feel immediately successful. Here’s what I mean—writers are almost always defining success upwards. (I don’t think this is unique to writers, but that’s the area where I’m most familiar).

So, for example, let’s say you write a great novel. Can you call this a success? It’s something a lot of folks talk about and not that many actually do, so yeah! But then you’ll start thinking, well, it won’t really be successful unless it gets me an agent who finds someone who agrees to publish it. Great! Success! Most novels never get published. Except then is it successful? Well, it’s not selling well. Maybe, though you’ve already had more success than the great majority of writers, you’re actually a failure!

This kind of thinking can really sap the joy out of making art. What’s great about this gig is that I send this off, they put it on their website, and I count it as a success. No metrics needed! No reviews needed! I had fun writing it and somebody thought enough of it to read it! Boom! Here comes success! Here comes my Chinese rug! (Iggy Pop reference. He sings that line at 0:40 in this version in which he’s backed by members of Queens of the Stone Age and Arctic Monkeys)

Now, look. I’m not gonna tell anyone not to try to get published. Au contraire! But I am going to encourage you (and this is really hard) to define success for yourself and not get caught up in numbers. Because that way you’ll never be happy with what you’ve done.

So. Go make stuff! Have fun! And celebrate when it comes out exactly the way you wanted it to!