Tag Archives: Personal Writing

Blah

Posted on by

There are days when it’s a real struggle to get words on the page. Sometimes just writing a short, easy statement can help with that. Some days is doesn’t help at all. Sometimes the stress of life puts a real, genuine damper on the production of words.

Most days I will tell people that I eat stress for breakfast then head out to take on the day. Most days.

Last week really pushed the needle on the stress meter. There was simply a ton of things that went pear shaped – not just for me, but for family and super close friends. Losses of jobs, medical diagnoses, calls from the consulate regarding a certain family members ability to get a visa, court dates, project deadlines, last minute school arrangements… It was an awful lot. I’d say I need a vacation, but that doesn’t help a whole lot these days either. The pandemic has made things so much more challenging across the board.

Long, deep, soulful sigh ~ insert here.

I’m back at the keys and clacking away. I’ve got a deadline tomorrow that I can’t miss for work and a deadline I can’t miss tomorrow for the kiddo. Work should be easy. Writing an essay about what I’ve learned as a parent as part of my daughter’s journey in martial arts? That’s going to be a challenge.

Psuedo-mood

Posted on by

One of my favorite authors once said, “I don’t have a muse, I have a mortgage”.

I struggle with this constantly. I really am a mood based writer. It’s terrible because there are times when something springs forth from my forehead as if a Greek god headache has produced something whole and complete. There are other times when I simply can not force myself to sit at the keys and work.

I think that’s a significant part of this. It IS work. There is time and effort and a willingness to give up a piece of yourself to the consumption of others. It is draining to me. I’ve heard of others that are energized by the completion of some piece of their art but when I am finished working on something like this I am spent. Pouring out some of myself onto a page is a challenge, but I really do love to tell a good story.

I’ve got a story that’s been “in production” for a quite a long time now. No, not the 2 novels that I’ve been so called writing for a decade now. A story. I know there’s a seed of a good idea in this story, but it’s just not working.

Today I think I caught a little of the right mood. I listened to a scary story. I know – sounds childish to say it that way, but that’s what it really is. It’s a scary story. There are a large number of other scary stories where I found this one. The particular scary story I found happened to be ‘Take a Walk In The Night, My Love‘. It’s from the podcast Pseudopod as presented by Escape Artists ~ folks who deliver some genuinely excellent content all the time. I mean consistently over years. Go, support them.

I’ve never been good at telling a scary story. I’ve got an excellent handle on the ridiculous. That’s easy, I just have human interaction, mess it up the way I normally do and then write that down. Easy. Scaring somebody? Scaring somebody is a far more challenging concept ~ at least to me.

So here, on a bright, sunny summer afternoon I sit behind the keys and attempt to tell a scary story. I’ll let you know if it turns out to be as scary as I hope.

The Obvious

Posted on by

I wrote previously that writing is still hard. Among other obvious statements, I’m going to continue that train of thought.

Work is still work.

After a couple of weeks getting our balance with the way things work now people seem to have gotten the hang of remote working. I say this because teleconferencing has spiked for me personally. Others may or may not have been experiencing this before ~ it’s a new thing for me. I had 5 teleconferences yesterday. I’ve got 3 lined up for today. I had 2 on Monday. Three days, 10 meetings. I bailed early on my on-line book club meeting because I was just exhausted by the end of the day. It’s just the same as when I was at the office being interrupted… I got very little actual work done.

I will admit it’s nice to see other faces, but it’s still work.

So, I don’t have all the “extra” time that some people have right now. I’m thankful to still be working. There are a lot of folks out there that aren’t and they’re suffering because of it. Yes, I’ve taken a 20% pay cut, but I should survive that. We’ll go right back up to full levels as soon as work in the construction industry picks up again.

I’ve been trying to give my creative needs outlet. As always, I have six or eight projects that have cropped up in the “OH! I should to THAT” category and got notes or nascent beginnings. I’m really trying to focus on the things that I know I have opportunities for though. There’s a lot going on – and I’m doing my best to stay on track and continue to function. We’ll see how it all shakes out as we go.

I’ll continue to share things here as they come up. Hopefully there will be exciting stuff on the way!

Written Work

Posted on by

Programming note: Writing is still hard.

I’ve seen a ton of posts about all the time that some people have on their hands these days. I’ve seen posts, some joking, some serious about how much some people accomplished in the past when under quarantine rules. I’ve seen numerous posts about how one should feel about all this time, your personal level of anxiety and how much work you should get done.

A friend of mine posted an update on how much had been written during this time of not leaving the house… and questioned its value.

Writing is still hard.

Extra time at the keyboard doesn’t change that. Some people might not even get extra time at the keyboard. Some people might not be able to take it. I am extremely lucky to still be working. I am on the same hours / schedule I was before the modern plague hit the world. I still can’t sit here in front of the machine for 12 or more hours at a time. I reserve a great deal of time for work here on my computer – the day job kind.

That is not to say that other projects are still lagging. Quite the contrary actually. I’ve been chipping away at things little by little. The biggest boon to me is the reduction in travel times along with the reduction in number of meetings. There are no places I have to go, no drive time involved in going there. Very few people clamoring for my attention. that has made a certain amount of focus easier for me, so I’m getting more writing done than I have in a while.

That is not to say that it’s good writing. There is a lot of anxiety floating out there and as I have stated in other posts, the panic can and will rub off. I’m hoping that as we adjust to the way things are right now that the new schedule will allow for even more work to get done.

In the end – writing is still hard. IF you’re creative and you’re struggling – that’s OK. If you’ve got scads of free time and you can make a go of it – then you go! Get cracking and make something awesome. If you’re not a maker, be a consumer when you can. Authors, freelancers, small businesses are all going to undergo changes in the coming months. IF you’ve got the time, dig up a new author or a small press and see if you can find something you like.

Hopefully I’ll be able to pull my bits and pieces together and keep forging ahead.

The New Normal

Posted on by

And there it went. The first full week of the “new normal” is in the books.

Covid-19 is rampaging across the world and killing thousands. Everyone is getting a little crazy about the whole thing – with some justification. Something like this has not occurred in our memory. There was the Spanish Flu back in the 1920s, but there are no people alive who can relate to us how society was at that time. We can read about it, but that’s all we’ve got.

We’ve also got a dramatically different method of communication at our disposal. We know more about what’s going on in the world around us at a faster speed than ever before. Hopefully this will allow us to get ahead of this virus and stop things from reaching Spanish Flu levels. Right now thousands are dying and that’s bad. The other one? Yeah, that killed somewhere between 20 and 50 MILLION people.

Million.

I would never attempt to diminish the loss of a person, or collection of persons, but as a question of scale we’re doing… as well as can be expected. Honestly, probably better than can be expected. Yes, the virus has forced us to change the way we conduct ourselves. No, we don’t know how long this is going to last. Yes, after two solid weeks of news, media and home grown “experts” yelling at us about coronavirus it seems like it’s been here forever, but it hasn’t been that long. How long will it be? No idea. Nobody knows. Lots of people are making predictions, but until we get there we won’t have any idea.

I am fortunate to still be able to work, at least right now. I have shifted to working from home and connecting to everyone via my internet connection. My lovely wife has been given the same opportunity and has a similar computer station set up next to this one. We’ve been in the same house along with the kiddo for a full week + and haven’t gone completely insane. In fact, we all seem to quite like it. We’re much more relaxed. Work has a lot of the same kind of stupid, but it’s muted by the overwhelming noise of change. I’ve heard there are people out there not handling the social isolation very well. I hope those folks take advantage of the technology we have access to and stay as connected as they can without actual physical presence.

So – big changes. Things we were told would never be a thing have come to pass (particularly the sudden ‘realization’ that certain jobs CAN in fact be done remotely). Life will be forever changed by this event. My daughter will have this as a marked point in her life that she will remember long into her adulthood much the same way I remember events like the shuttle disaster that happened when I was in high school. No where close to the same level of impact – but a bright and clear memory of that time for me.

Forging ahead. I’ve gotten a bunch of things done around the house. That’s the thing – when you can’t leave, you have to make it a point to actually create and stick to a schedule that works for your household. What am I trying to say? Well, just this: I’ve been working essentially the same schedule as before. Sure the commute is a hell of a lot better and the dress code is pretty lax, but I’m still on schedule. It means that I’m spending all that work time here on my home computer. So when I “get home from work” I have even less desire to jump on here and keep working than before.

I’m hoping to pick up some creativity soon – but given the circumstances of the world, I’m not sure I’ll get there. Maybe I’ll start cranking out the words. Dunno. Hopefully you’ll keep coming back here to see.

Working on Working

Posted on by

Make no mistake, writing is work. I know there are people out there who throw down thousands upon thousands of words and they just seem to flow out of them, but even for those people this is work.

I’m beginning to get myself back to a creative place and be able to do this work more regularly. This is a boon for actually putting words up here. Sometimes there are extra words that don’t actually fit in the stories I’m working on and they slop over the side of the cup. On good days I can mop up those words and squeeze them out into something vaguely coherent here.

Sometimes those words just leave a ring shaped stain on my desk.

The most difficult times are when I really want to lay down a screed about something that has caught my attention in the news and I just don’t have the ability to get here and do it. It’s a spoon thing for folks that subscribe to that analogy. I just run out of spoons.

A good example of this is the latest Star Wars film. I went to see it on opening day. I was at the theater for the earliest show. I went early and had my favorite seat, right in the middle in the middle. Popcorn in hand I was on board to see more Star Wars!

I watched it. I was confused by so many parts of it. It was big, it was splashy and decidedly a “need to see it on the big screen” kind of film. That was the best thing I could say for it. There were a ton of clearly fan service moments in there. There were a ton of really questionable story telling choices. I would honestly need to see it again just to parse out all the weird combinations of stuff that either did or didn’t work. What I really needed to do at the time was jump on here and write all those things down while they were fresh in my mind…

And here I am a month later mentioning that I wanted to talk about it.

Would the words still be relevant? The moment is past. There are a half dozen other things that have come up and made waves since then. There are tons and tons of reviews in either direction (love it or hate it ~ take your pick) and my take would be a rehash of various parts of a lot of them. I didn’t get to the work in time.

That actually brings up another point. Work. I like putting my thoughts up here and having a place where I can land all this stuff that is my own. It’s my web site ~ I own it. I will put what I want up here, when I want to put it here and not worry if some massive company is going to accidentally “ban” me for a month or whatever. It’s my own and I will do as I please. It is my own, and this doesn’t pay. All these words are free and sometimes I need to focus on the words that pay. I will be the first to tell you that they don’t pay well, but they do pay (from time to time).

So I’m going to continue to work. If you’ve meandered with my train of thought all the way to the bottom of this ~ thank you. I appreciate that you’re reading. I’m off now to hammer out some more of those words that are supposed to pay.

If you’d like to see a really amusing take on all sorts of aspects of the most recent Star Wars film that didn’t really work head on over to YouTube and check out Pitch Meeting. I thought it was more than funny, it was pretty right on.

Habits

Posted on by

Habits

Habits are difficult things to break. There are a lot of things I do that happen simply because they’re what I have always done. I have a listing in my internet bookmarks called ‘daily review’. Every time I am on the computer for any length of time I open that list of bookmarks and roll through each of the sites there. I don’t need to see any of those sites. They’re a mix of news, entertainment and web comics that I follow. It’s important to keep up on the news of the day, but there really isn’t a single one of those web sites that I couldn’t catch up with at some other point in the day OR just skip. Seeing the latest “Off The Mark” comic strip is not something that’s going to deeply change my day. I could skip all of them and not really miss anything at all. It’s a hard habit to break.

As it turns out, it’s also challenging to create new habits. Doing good things, making long term positive changes is not easy either. This applies to anything, but it is particularly difficult for me to do this with writing. My writing tends to take a back seat. There are a lot of reasons for this. The main reasons aren’t easy to pin down, but I think the biggest are lack of inspiration and fear of judgment

Writing at the level I really want is work. I tend to write when I am inspired. When I have that spark the words come pouring out. I have pages and pages of hand written notes with almost no scratch outs or edits. I become the Zeus of the story and chunks just pop from my head fully formed. The problem with that is combining inspiration and the actual time needed to sit and get all the words recorded. There’s at least a novel worth of words that have faded away because I couldn’t manage to get them to the page when the dream was fresh or the mood was in full swing. I can’t afford to wait on these pages. I need to sit and write and keep it all in some kind of recorded form, whatever that form may be. Typed, handwritten, voice recording – doesn’t matter. Get the words out there and do it all the time.

It’s easy to hear others talk about these things. I know that Ray Bradbury used to write ten thousand words a day. Sounds like the perfect recipe for writing books. I’ve often snatched a line from one of my other favorite authors. When I heard Jim Butcher talk about writing he said, “I don’t have a muse, I have a mortgage…” I knew there was truth there. Writing is work. Work needs to be done on a regular basis. I do not do enough of that kind of work.

Judgment

The other part of my inability to start good habits is this fear of judgment. If I put myself out there and claim to be a writer I will be judged by my ability to string together coherent statements with the proper use of grammar AND it will all need to be spelled right. Then, after all the basics, I need to actually have something to say.

Two main parts to that. First the spelling and grammar portion is not easy. I am terrible at spelling. I can look at this page alone and see at least 3 words with squiggly red lines under them. They are words that I absolutely should know how to spell and I just can’t seem to get them right. I don’t know why, but they don’t stick. It’s physically difficult for me to keep typing and not go back to edit while I’m letting the words continue to come out. Going back to edit can and should be something that is done after all the words are out. Too often I stop what I am thinking to go back and craft the perfect phrase or clean up all the spelling that is glaring at me in red. Breaking the flow stops the words and just as often as not they don’t start again. Grammar is worse. Grammar is one of those things that I know I should know, but I feel a bit like Gandalf in the LOTR movies, “I have no memory of this place…”. I am faking my way through it all and anyone that has half a clue about how grammar works probably cringes at the word salad I toss out.

Impostor

The second part is the judgment All this writing is out there for people to read, and very few people actually read it. The fact that I can name the people who interact with me when it comes to my writing says a lot about my success. That’s the true judgment part. It’s not having some troll throw angry words down about what I have said, it’s that all of this amounts to nothing. Getting somebody to react, somebody to actually read what I have labored to create would allow them to look at my terrible spelling and grammar and think, “this guy is a writer? I could do better…”. One of the harshest critiques I’ve ever had was at a book signing. The book signing had a line of authors from the anthology. As people shuffled along the line of authors this guy asked me, “and what story was yours?”. When I told him his face froze in place and then he said, “Oh. That one was… nice.”. I thanked him again and he stepped down the line to the next author. That really sucked. He’d read it and it did nothing for him. That was a tough one to overcome, but I’ve kept going in the hopes that I’ll sneak in with the cool kids again one of these days. It’s not easy. I am slowly slipping into the land of old men standing in the yard and yelling at the sky.

After all that

This is the sort of rambling, writerly life-style post that would normally end with some promise not to blog fade or to use the coming new year as an excuse to claim great changes are on the way. I’ve done all that before. I’m sure I’ll re-post one of my successful habits in the coming days about that. What I am going to say is that this is all a work in progress. I have seen some short videos lately that have resonated with me about habits, work ethic and the tool box fallacy. I’ll keep going. In the future somebody will dig these words up and bring them back for judgment – at least I will have made them react.

Post Script:

This is one of those “fully formed” examples. More than a thousand words that poured out all at once. Now to edit…

Digging into things

Posted on by

Since I wrote up my post about the gap in my blog I’ve been going back and digging stuff up that I’ve been meaning to talk about. I often grab and save links to articles that spark something in me. I want to be timely in my discussions, but never at the expense of decent writing and forethought.

Back in July I saw this article over at Tor.

Was 1999 the Year Nerd Culture Began to Take Over the World?

You should read it. The two things that caught my eye were the claim of a ‘coming out’ year for fandom and an acceptance of the label(s) geek / nerd.

The first part about the coming out year caught my eye. I’ve written before about the influence of films on my own fandom. Movies that are still resonating today came out when I was a young teen (Terminator anyone?). I somehow thought this was a thing that might not have been repeatable, but then there was 2015. The movies that hit during that year were big and amazing. I’ve written a couple of times about how I think / hope my daughter will have positive memories and just as much influence from these films as I had with the crop from back in 1984. What I failed to understand was that this type of influence could be just about any year. The author of that article could have been on to something. I don’t agree with all the movie choices, but I wasn’t a teen in 1999. I absolutely agree with the assertion of the Matrix being a massively influential film. Things since then really have heated up.

The second part of that is more problematic for me. For a very long time my “nerdom” was something I made every attempt to hide. It was never popular to be called that when I was growing up. D&D wasn’t accepted as an influential part of culture, it was a derided thing that cost me friendships because some parents bought into the panic about the game. I learned to avoid talking about my favorite hobby. I was not immune to the social pressure to fit in and get along. That formative experience hasn’t left me.

No matter how popular “nerdy” things become I don’t think I’ll ever shake that. I hold my fandom close and tend not to share it.

I actively question the hot new trend to claim to be a nerd or a geek or a comic fan because you’ve seen all the Marvel movies. I’ve seen some of the so called celebrations of geekdom and I don’t think they’re as celebratory as people want to believe they are. The amount of things out there relating to science fiction and fantasy is stunning. It’s an unprecedented level of availability. All of those things feel temproary to me. It’s a bunch of people that don’t really care about fandom, but they DO care that they can make a buck from it. Media and movie folks are looking for any way possible to come up with, package, and sell the next ‘hot’ nerd thing. They don’t care about what’s in the package, just that they can sell it.

Suddenly everyone is claiming to be a geek or a nerd of some variety. The glut of marketing material for these ‘geeky’ things brings to mind a quote. “It’s the burning of the library of Alexandria by way of the Hot Topic t-shirt printing press”.

In short, I don’t buy it.

Another topic belongs right here – and that is toxic fandom. I won’t go into it right now (perhaps another post) but it’s a real thing. I suspect it’s a backlash to the popular thing. The ever present push back of being ‘cool’ by not buying into the trend.

I’m very glad there are folks out there who enjoy so many of the same things I do. I love the level of availability of all the cool things that tie in to my favorite books or games or movies. I’m thrilled to see an influx of diversity. I will continue to be wary. I’m in fandom for the long haul. I hope you are too.

A Hole

Posted on by

There’s a hole in my blog. We’re going to call that hole August and September.

Most people have the overwhelming urge to apologize for not posting. There will be excuses and statements declaring passion and a list of things that are going to show how the blog has not faded and will be moving forward at a great pace!

That’s not me.

Yes, I probably could have been on here and working at keeping this up. Probably. Maybe not. Sometimes other things get in the way. Life happens. The day job stomps in and grabs up all your time like it was lunch money and you were the kid on the wrong end of the deal.

Sometimes depression sneaks in and strangles your creativity. It uses stress to open the door and before you know what’s happened you’re sitting and staring at reruns because they don’t challenge you and it’s nice to laugh sometimes… right?

I have never actually been diagnosed with depression or anything so official. It certainly felt that way. I didn’t read. I didn’t write. I didn’t paint or draw or create in any way. It was rotten and miserable. I really was busy and the day job was crushing. Lots of things to adjust to in my life added up to me just not having the drive or motivation to do anything but sit and stare. More than once my declared intention was to get home and stare at the wall.

The good news is that seems to be getting better. I’m still crazy busy but certain aspects of things seem to be getting better. Sometimes hanging in there is all you can do. I was hanging and not falling – and that’s the part that really counts.

So – no apologies or grand plans. The hole in the blog remains. I’m starting to work again and we’ll see how that turns out on here together.

Sharp Eyes and the End of the World

Posted on by

One of the panels I was on at Philcon was titled “A Creative Apocalypse” and the description was, “What creative and original – but scientifically plausible – ways are left for storytellers to destroy the world?”

I kind of struggled with this question initially. Creative I can handle, it’s the scientifically plausible that I was worried about. Part of me really wanted to separate out destruction of all human life from actual destruction of the planet, but that line of discussion didn’t get far. Not much of a story without the people (still horribly narcissistic if you ask me).

Then I seemed to recall something about massive ant colonies that spanned across vast distances. I didn’t have a chance to do any research on it, but it was in the back of my mind that I had seen this so I presented it (when I could) at the panel. I find a plague of bugs to be a less than ideal concept for the end of the world (YUCK!).

I took a moment to see if I could find the information I remembered and found this fun little piece about floating colonies of fire ants in Texas.

Smacking into one of those would certainly ruin your day, but it wasn’t what I remembered. Hunting a little more brought me to the mega-colony. Yes, it was a huge colony and it actually reaches far further than I seemed to recall. Crossing continents. Almost all of them, and they don’t’ seem to fight each other. This could be very bad news for people should these bugs ever band together.

A sharp-eyed friend of mine then pointed me to a whole different point of view. What if all the bugs GO AWAY?

Turns out we need them. We need as many variations and weird combinations as we can keep. We need to learn as much as we can to preserve ourselves. The bug-pocalypse could just be that we don’t have any. A distressing thought indeed. Now to turn that into a world ending story…