A Less Kind Mirror

In the Waning Hours of 2011

2011-12-31T12:40:00.015-07:00

Perhaps waning hours is a little inaccurate, considering my time zone and the fact that it's just after morning here. Whatever. It's poetic and I like it; it's certainly better than "2011: a year in review." Oh, and hello! It's been roughly 1 million internet years since I wrote anything on this blog, which means if you're reading this, I appreciate your continued loyalty in the face of my continued silence.

So this post is going to be about 2011 and what the year meant to me. After 2010, which was a largely negative experience, I wanted to make a dedicated effort to living a better life. Also, it was the year of my "golden birthday" since I'd turned 24 on the 24 (and if you argue that 2010 was the year I turned 24 which makes that the Golden Year, eff off because that lasted for all of seven days.)

How do the years stack up in terms of personal achievement? Let's see:

In 2010, I:

Graduated from college.
That's it.

In 2012, I:

Learned how to ride a motorcycle and got my motorcycle license (and a motorcycle!)
Backpacked through Aravaipa Canyon, possibly the most beautiful place in Southern Arizona.
Finished a novel and sent it to an agent (and got rejected, but it's still progress in my book)
Promoted to a full time position as a Library Associate, which meant more responsibilities, projects, involvement and MONEY. That last one makes me especially happy. What? I work to get paid.
Completed my Open Water Diver certification to become a scuba diver, a goal that I've only had since I was about 13 or so. I only have a few hundred dollars left to pay before I'll have my own gear
I'm not sure how to mention the new girlfriend in a way that won't earn me a punch in the arm, so... yeah. New girlfriend. She's awesome. That's all I will say.

For 2012, I plan to:

Damn it, I don't know. Discover the Higgs boson or something. My BA in Creative Writing qualifies me to be around particle accelerators, I'm sure. They're just like rail guns, right?
Sky dive? That could be exciting.
I want to dive a shipwreck and see one (1) shark. More sharks are also acceptable.
Write another book probably. Publish the one I wrote. Finish the two that I've started.

My point is that overall, 2011 was a very good year. I'm proud of what I did and I'm excited about what 2012 will bring. I could close out here with something cliched about setting goals, taking aim, getting out there and doing things, but I don't deal in cliches (much). If I have a regret, it's that it took me until my mid-twenties to get out into the world and start living my life in a way that matters. If I have one thing I'm proud of, it's that it only took me until I was 24, which means I still have enough time and don't have enough personal responsibilities to keep me from realizing that diving in shark-infested waters may not be conducive to long term health.

For a closing though, I think Terry Pratchett said it better than I ever could (which is true of most things, actually, which is why he's Terry Pratchett and I'm... not): “Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.”

I'll never stop loving fantasy and games and stories. But at the same time, I'm glad that I'm glad that I'm doing more than just making things up and playing pretend with my life. That's a good feeling.

Happy New Year!

-Matthew

Short Story: The World Below

2011-11-06T18:32:00.002-07:00

Author's Note: As I blow off the dust that's gathered on my poorly neglected blog, it occurs to me that despite the fact that all I ever talk about is writing, you most likely haven't had the opportunity to see anything I've written. I feel like this is a mistake, one that I'm going to correct.

This was a short story that I wrote about a year ago for one of my final Creative Classes. It's one of the few short stories I'm particularly proud of, although I'm not a big fan of the ending these days. Perhaps I'll revisit it in the future. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

-MC

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"The World Below"
By Matthew Ciarvella

Nobody alive today remembers the old subway tunnel under the bridge on Broad Street. It used to be part of the Erie Canal, but that was an even longer time ago, or so our father told us, back during the lazy summer days of late July when the plant would close and we'd sit out in the backyard under a shady tree with beers that we weren't old enough to drink, but did anyway. First, it was a canal, he'd said, and then later, it was a subway, and then it was nothing at all, just a tunnel that ran under the entire city like an empty vein. Parts of it had collapsed over the years, and one time, it took out an entire section of Broad Street and killed an old lady who was walking her dog. Or maybe it killed a taxi driver who stopped to have a smoke, or a bike messenger, or a hundred other different people, or nobody, depending who was telling you the story.
We grew up hearing stories of that old tunnel, even though nobody knew how to get in, or how much of it was left. The section that collapsed was filled in after the accident, but you'd still hear stories about people finding old stairways in their basements that led down into the tunnel. But nobody really knew and so it was just this place that we all knew but never saw, had all heard about but only in stories. Kids ran away to live down there, winos carved out shitty little homes there, and some people (stupid fucking idiots, my father would say) would go down there to play at being explorers and were never seen again.

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm making soup, or maybe stew, I'm not really sure yet. I'm interacting with bits of beef and vegetables in what I imagine to be a stern and authoritative way. Kyle's in the den, which is also the living room, watching something on our shitty little TV, when I hear him say that Ricky Jankis told him the secret to getting into the old tunnel. It hits us both, simultaneously, that this is an opportunity to do something never done, something that you simply didn't do.

"So let's go do it," I say.

"We'll do it later this week," he says. But I know that's the same as not doing it.

"Why not now?" I say. "Look, it can't be that hard. We'll just need flashlights, our boots, and maybe some rope."

"What the hell would we need rope for?" he asks. "You don't even know how to climb with rope."

"Neither do you," I argue.

"Yeah, but I'm not the one suggest we need a fucking rope in the first place."

He's right, I don't actually know how to use a rope for climbing, so I drop the issue. But I still want to get the other things, the supplies for what I already know is going to be, "one goddamn awesome adventure."

"Damn right," Kyle agrees and then disappears upstairs for several minutes. I wait at the foot of the stairs impatiently, filling my backpack with a couple of flashlights, my old Boy Scout knife, and a few of water bottles.

Kyle returns a few minutes later. "Check it out," he says with a grin. He has Dad's old .44 revolver that he carried back when he was a cop.

"What the hell are you doing with that?" I ask.

"What?" he asks defensively, as he loops Dad's holster through his belt and tightens it. "You don't know what's going to be down there. If we're doing this, I'm want to make sure I'm ready for anything." He checks the magazine and then holsters the revolver. "Don't be jealous just because I'm packing heat and you're not."

"I'm not," I say. "I'm not jealous." But that's not true, and we both know it. It's just one more thing about today that's forbidden, one more taboo that we're going to break.

"Fine," I say as I shoulder my backpack. "But I'm driving."

"Fine with me," he says.

I pull into an empty gravel parking lot and park my truck. Despite the hot, humid summer air, my skin feels clammy as I climb out of my truck and grab my backpack out of the bed. Across from me, Kyle grins as he checks the gun on his hip, then grabs a flashlight.

"Follow me," he says.

I follow him across the gravel parking lot towards Broad Street. From here, I can see the churning brown water of the Genesee River as it rushes past us. From here, the Broad Street bridge looks like something out of a horror novel; a series of arches support the road as it spans the mighty Genesee.

"Okay, smart guy," I say to Kyle. "How do we get there from here?"

Kyle points to the series of arches. "You see how above the main arch, there's a row of smaller arches below the street?"

I nod.

"Ricky Jankis told me that's the subway, right there. All we need to do is climb up from the river bank and we can get into the tunnel from there."

I eye the distance from the riverbank to the bridge. "How the hell are we supposed to climb that?" I ask.

Kyle laughs. "You're right, maybe we should have brought some of your fucking rope." He points to the end of the bridge. "It shouldn't be too hard of a climb if we go at it from the road. We'll just climb down. It'll be easy."

Yeah, right. Easy. Just as long as nobody slips. As long as nobody sees a couple of idiot teenagers, one carrying a gun, climbing past the obvious "no trespassing signs" posted everywhere. As long as neither of us slip and get dropped into the river.

I look back at the churning brown water. For the first time that day, I really wish I hadn't let Kyle talk me out of bringing my goddamn rope.

We try to act as though we know what we're doing as we approach the bridge. It doesn't work, though, and I feel beads of sweat collect on my back that have nothing to do with the heat of the humid summer day. Kyle reaches the bridge and looks around.

"Let's do this," he says, and then swings his leg over the side and disappears.

"Oh shit," I hear him cry out, and I lunge forward, pressing my hands into the rusted metal to look over the side.

"What? What happened?"

He's fifteen feet down, on his ass on the narrow stone lip. He looked up at me with an angry expression. "I fucking slipped, what does it look like? Careful, that's crazy slippery."

I glance around one more time, but there's nobody else on the bridge. Nobody to talk me out of what I already know is going to be a bad idea. But nobody's ever accused me of listening to common sense, and I know if I take any more time, I'll have to put up with Kyle's crap.

Moving carefully, I swing my leg over the side of the bridge, and start my descent. The bridge is old and crumbly, with several empty hollows for me to dig my hands and feet into. It's not much help, though, because everything is covered in slick mud. Ten feet above the stone lip, my feet slide out from under me, and I nearly pitch backward into the river.

"Shit shit shit shit," I snarl as I claw at the bricks. I manage to keep myself from falling.

Barely.

"Almost there!" Kyle calls out. "If you let go, you'll get here even faster!"

"Keep talking, smartass," I growl. "That way I can make sure I'll land on you."

He laughs and I continue my slow climb, swearing each time I put my foot against a mud slick brick.

Finally, my harrowing, rope-less climb is over and Kyle and I are standing under the arch, with the bridge above us, the river below us, and a dank opening before us.

The first thing I notice is the smell. It's some strange mix of damp earth, wet leaves, and shit. My hands and jeans are already covered in mud from the climb down. Kyle doesn't look much better.

"Can't believe I thought this was a good idea," I say, but my brother doesn't hear me. Kyle's already climbing through the arch, descending the last few feet to the dirt of the subway tunnel. I follow him to the sound of a car passing over our heads.

Graffiti and garbage are everywhere. Light passes through the arches in front of us, creating a lattice of shadows that finally ends at the far end of the bridge. There, the open darkness of the old subway tunnel waits quietly to embrace us.

Kyle looks back at me, and despite all of my earlier anxieties, I can't help but grin at him. "This is going to be awesome," he says. I pull out a pair of flashlights and hand one to him.

"Let's get to it," I say.

If you're from the city like me, you don't know what dark really is. Sure, you think you know, you can define it, you can use it in a sentence. Dark is the opposite of light. Dark is what happens when the sun goes down. Dark is your closet at night or the open basement door before you grope for the light switch.

But that's not really dark. Not really.

We'd gone maybe a few hundred feet. At first, we were able to see without the flashlights thanks to the thin strands of light that leaked in through the arches of the aqueduct. There was a lot of graffiti on every surface. Mostly it just looks like one big messy blur, with each new splotch of spray-painted initials slopped over the previous. But every now and then, there is a really impressive job that somebody would have done, that the other graffitists didn't cover with scrawled initials or cuss words.

I wondered if there was some kind of code of conduct for people like that, people who spent their time writing "shit" and "fuck" and "south street Crips 4 LIFE" on the walls of an old subway.

One of the messages, just before it got dark, was actually pretty funny.

"Hey, look at this," Kyle said and pointed with his light. We were getting to the point where we really needed them.

He shined his light on a mournful message that was scrawled across the entire ceiling of the tunnel.

Sometimes, the graffitist wrote in stylish script, I'm just too tired to touch myself.

"Amen, brother," Kyle said.

I looked at my brother for a moment and shook my head in dismay, and we kept going.

That was about the point when the subway tunnel curved off to the side, following the contour of Broad Street back up in there in the world above. And that's when things got dark, as the curve swallowed up the tiny bits of light from the arches, and we found ourselves standing in a darkness deeper and more complete than anything I'd ever known, with only the thin, shaky beams of a couple of cheap flashlights to keep the encroaching blackness at bay.

Everything smells even more strongly here, the smells of garbage and dust and old concrete. I look back and forth with my light and see a world of broken walls, rusting pipes, broken train tracks. It is a different world than the one I know.

The city above felt like it's a million miles away, as far away as the moon. We might as well be on another planet.

"Turn your light off," I say.

"What?" Kyle's voice echoes slightly. He's gone down a side tunnel that I hadn't noticed before now, but I can still see the bouncing beam of his flashlight.

"Turn your light off," I say again and click mine off. "I want to try something."

"Fine, whatever," he says and then his light vanishes.

And that was the first time in my life I knew what dark really was. It's when you can't tell whether your eyes are opened or closed, it's when the difference between them being opened or closed doesn't even matter. It's when you can wave your hand in front of your face and not notice a thing.

It's when somebody could be standing right behind you and unless you heard them, you'd have no idea. You wouldn't know they were there, until it was too late, until a filthy hand shot out and clamped over your mouth, until a rusty knife pressed into your kidney, and you were dropped down onto the floor of a filthy tunnel, murdered for your shoes by a subterranean, sub-human nightmare that scuttled about blindly in the dark, feeding on trash and rats and--

A flashlight flicks on. Not mine. Kyle's.

"I can't keep doing that," he says. He doesn't sound quite as cocky as before. "It's too goddamn weird."

"Yeah," I say. "It's really weird."

I turn my own light on and point it in his direction. I don't think he realizes that his free hand is holding the butt of Dad's holstered revolver.

Somewhere off in the dark distance, a low, whistling sound echoes through the tunnel.

"What do you think that is?" Kyle asks.

"No idea," I say. "Maybe we'll find out when we keep going. Come on."

He looks at me for a long moment before he takes his hand away from his belt.

We keep going.

Ahead of us, the subway station rises into view. It's in pretty bad shape. The concrete is cracked and broken all across the platform, and there's a big chunk that looks like it fell right out of the ceiling above. A quick sweep of my flashlight confirms this suspicion.

"Jesus Christ," Kyle says. "You wouldn't want to be standing here when that shit comes down." He moves up to it and prods the chunk with the toe of his shoe. "That'd crush you flat."

"I guess that's why the road collapses sometimes," I say. "Everything down here's just crumbling to dust. The whole city block might cave in if they're not careful."

"It won't come to that," Kyle says. "Somebody will come down here and fill the whole thing in with concrete."

"How do you know that?" I argue. "Are you a city planner?"

He shines his flashlight in my eyes. "No," he says, "but that's what'll happen. Why wouldn't it?"

"It'd take too much concrete," I say.

"What are you, some kind of concrete expert?" he says and smirks.

"Shut up," I say.

There's an edge to our banter that I never noticed before. We're both anxious, both well aware that we've come further than we ever thought we would. How much further are we going to go? I don't know. I don't know how far this tunnel goes or what's waiting for us at the end. Maybe we'll find an opening and an escape back into daylight?

Or will it just be a dead end, a concrete barrier erected to keep idiot explorers like us from getting trapped down in the dark? I try to imagine what it will be like, to come up to that dead end and realize that the only way out is back the way we came.

I realize with a terrible jolt that I don't know how old the batteries are in my flashlight. How much time do we have left? The beam looks a little dimmer than I remember when we first got here.

Shit.

"Hey, maybe we should turn back," I say. "I think my light's running out."

No answer.

"Kyle?"

I sweep my light across the subway platform and spot my brother. He's approaching the far corner, where a section of wall caved in to reveal another tunnel beyond it.

"Kyle, what the hell?"

"That sound we heard," he says. "I think it's coming from over here. And, goddamn, it's hotter than hell over here. Come take a look."

I turn my head and look back down at the subway tracks and the old tunnel and the way back into the world above. I think about my fading flashlight. I think about how dark it is.

"Goddamnit. " I pick my way across the rubble on the platform and follow my brother.

He's shining his light on another graffiti message. It's scrawled next to the collapsed section of wall and it's so badly faded that it takes me a moment to decipher it.

"The Devil lives here," I read aloud. "Well, that sounds nice, doesn't it?" I look at my brother. "Now can we get the hell out of here?"

"In a sec," he says. "I just want to check this out. I think there's another room back here."

"Kyle," I say.

But he doesn't hear me or else doesn't care. My brother climbs over the remains of the broken wall and into the tunnel. After a moment, I follow him.

As I put my hands on the stone, I notice that it's a lot warmer here than the rest of the tunnel. Too warm, in fact; now I'm really sweating under my t-shirt. Everything feels hot and sticky and damp.

"Like climbing into Hell," I mutter to myself.

The tunnel beyond the collapsed wall is only about three feet high. If I want to go any further, it'll be on my hands and knees.

"Oh, hell no," I say, but I can see Kyle's light, twenty or thirty feet ahead. "Goddamnit," I say again.

I try not to think about I'm crawling through. I really, really hope it's just mud.

"There's a room up here," Kyle calls. His voice echoes from all around me.

I try not to think of how many feet of concrete and stone are above my head right now. I try not to think about how hot it is, how it grows hotter with each filthy step.

I reach the end of the tunnel. There's enough space for me to stand, which is a small relief, but one that goes mostly unnoticed compared to the overwhelming heat. Kyle doesn't seem to notice. The long, low, gusty whistle is louder than ever. This must be it.

"Check it out," he says and points again with his flashlight to reveal the source of the heat and the noise.

"A steam pipe," I say. "A broken steam pipe."

The object of our grand adventure is just a hunk of rusted metal sticking out of a concrete wall. Some of the bolts look like they've been blown off. Every few seconds, a long plume of steam jets out and fills the far corner of the room.

"That's really awesome," I say. "So this is where the devil lives. Can we go now?"

The flashlight in my hand has almost faded completely at this point.

"Shit," I say and shake it. Something rattles around inside but the light doesn't brighten.

"Kyle, how's your light?" I ask. "Mine's just about out."

No answer.

I turn to look at him, but with my dim light, I can barely make out his face. I can tell that he's looking at something in the corner of the room.

His mouth is pressed together in a tight, frightened line and his hand is on his belt.

I look towards the direction of his light.

A man is sitting against the wall. Sitting and staring back at us.

At least, I think it's a man. It's hard to tell, at first glance. The hair is wild and long and tangled, with a beard to match, and he's wearing a pile of clothing that resembles a rotting heap of shirts and jackets. His eyes are open and look too bright in the dark.

"Oh shit," Kyle says in a quiet voice.

"Oh shit," I agree.

Nobody moves. Not Kyle, not me, not the filthy man in the corner.

"Okay, okay," I say, "let's just get out of here. Let's just go, right now."

I put my hand on Kyle's arm, the one that's holding the flashlight. I glance back at the man. "Look, we're leaving. We're going. Sorry for disturbing you."

The man doesn't speak. Just continues to stare at us. Just remains right where he is, propped up against the wall.

"Kyle," I say. "Let's go."

He finally turns to look at me. His face is frightened. "Yeah, okay," he says. "We're going."

A scraping noise brings our attention back to the corner. Kyle's light jerks wildly for a moment before he regains control of it.

The man has climbed to his feet. Now he's standing there, arms dangling limply under the weight of his burly collection of dirty clothes.

"Jesus fucking Christ!" Kyle yells. He sounds almost hysterical.

"Let's go, let's go," I say, trying to find my way back into the tunnel behind me without taking my eyes off the man. But I realize with a sinking feeling that it's so narrow and cramped that if he's going to chase us, there's no way we can outrun him. Not until we get back to the subway platform.

I try not to think about what happens to people like us, down here in the dark.

Trapped down here in the world below with people like this.

The man takes an unsteady step towards us and that's when everything falls apart.

"Get the fuck down!" Kyle's voice is high and tight. "Get the fuck down right now!" I feel his arm move, not the arm holding the unsteady flashlight, but the other one, his right arm. The one that's right above Dad's holster and Dad's .44 caliber. I catch a glimpse of my brother's arm as he inexpertly draws the revolver and points both it and the flashlight at the dirty man.

"Get the fuck back down!" Kyle orders. "Sit your ass down on the ground right now!"

For some strange reason, I think of the pathetic little pocket knife I brought with me. I don't know why.

For a moment, nobody moves, except for another blast from the broken steam pipe. We look at the man. The man looks at us.

"Please just sit down," I say quietly.

He takes another wobbly step. The stench rising off him is overpowering, a mixture of spoiled food and booze and something sickly-sweet, something chemical. I don't know. Is he a junkie? Is he high? I don't know.

I look at my brother, scared and shaking and holding a gun that isn't his, not yet.

"Kyle," I start to say to him, my hand still on his arm, and then the man starts forward, faster than either of us could have ever expected, and Kyle's voice, shrill in the darkness is the only thing I hear for the briefest moment before the gun in his hand goes off and fills the world with a blinding flash and an even more deafening noise.

The second shot is even louder and brighter. By the third, my head is already throbbing.

I don't see or hear anything else for a long time.

An eternity later, my vision starts to clear a little bit, though my ears are still ringing. Distantly, I can hear the repeated click-click-click of the hammer striking an empty chamber as Kyle keeps pulling the trigger. But he's empty.

I don't look over at the corner of the room where the man was standing.

I don't look at anything, except the expression on my brother's face.

I gently pull the gun out of his shaking hand. The metal feels hot against my skin. With my other hand, I guide him back towards the tunnel behind us and pull him behind me.

lead the way back out to the platform, although my light finally dies out halfway through. Kyle's light works well enough, though it, too, begins to fade not long after we climb out of the cramped tunnel. It'll last us long enough, though.

It will. It has to.

We don't speak until either of us have made it back out to the aqueduct. We emerge from the darkness of the old subway tunnel, into the fading light of the late summer evening.

We don't laugh. We don't share in any of the stories of our adventure. We don't even look at one another until after we've made it all the way back to the safety of my truck, looking so lonely and forlorn in the empty parking lot.

Finally, once the door slams shut, we look at each other. My brother's eyes are red and haunted. His face is streaked with mud. He looks like the veteran of a war.

"Okay," I say. "It's okay."

"No," my brother says. "No, it's not."

Neither of us speak again the rest of the way home.

For The Sake Of August

2011-08-30T16:54:00.000-07:00

I couldn't let an entire month slip by without writing something. Well, actually, I could and indeed almost did. Which would be bad. But even worse than not writing anything for an entire month (well, actually longer than that, if you look at the last entry, but who's counting? Not me!) would be yet another "writing a post just to have a post." I've come to realize how pointlessly self-indulgent such things are, which is not to say that the entire act of blogging itself isn't self-indulgent. It's just that I think some things are higher on that particular scale than others.

I don't feel bad about taking a good part of the summer off; indeed, I told myself that I deserved, having finished a novel and all that. There's still that second book that I began last November, the prequel or first novel, or whatever, I don't know yet how it should all fit together. One of the reasons I made the push to finish "Unrepentant" was to clear my plate so I could devote all of my attention to finish this second project (working title subject to change at random). And then I finished one book and... proceeded to not write much of anything on the second.

And for once in my life, I feel like that's okay. I don't feel the pressure to get back to writing five days a week out of some fearful notion that if I don't start again, I never will and all of these thoughts will just linger on in my brain, unformed and unfinished. I feel like it's okay if I take a little time off because I know I'll come back to the story. Over this past summer, I didn't really feel like I had anything to say, either for the story or for the blog. It's probably a summer thing: the fact is that it's so damn hot here, it's tough to want to do much of anything other than crawl under the nearest rock and hide for a few months. It's like winter in reverse: as the summer finally begins to wane and the weather begins to cool, I find myself coming alive once again. More importantly, I find myself having things to say.

NaNoWriMo is looming in my thoughts. This will be the first year that I won't be going into it as a student, which may be a blessing or a curse, I'm not sure yet. I say blessing, because November is typically the most busy month of your life as a student, especially a Creative Writing student, because it seems like all of your big stories and projects and critiques are all due in the same three week span. So not having all of that on my plate will be nice.

On the other hand, there's the fear that without that pressure, the Law of Inverse Productivity will kick in and despite having more time, I'll get less done. Because that's the way of things with me and my brain. It doesn't make any sense, but I've long since given up trying to figure it all out.

So here's to the end of August and the end of not having anything to say and hopefully a return to productivity and progress on my stories. I'd really like to finish book two by the end of the year, if possible. And I'd like to be ready for NaNoWriMo, since I'd really like to extend my streak to three years in a row, if I can.

Dead Tree Books

2011-07-13T14:38:00.000-07:00

I want to have the option to own my book in dead tree form someday. Books printed on paper, in other words; you know, that thing we used to use back in grade school to write reports and sometimes print out in TPS reports (with cover sheets!) and other fun stuff like that. Currently, this is the format that books are made into. Format may not be the correct word. Let's call it a medium.

The problem is, I want to walk into a brick and mortar store and buy a dead tree book some day, and yet the world seems to think that both of these things are archaic and doomed to be as relevant as horseshoes and blacksmiths are in today's world. Everything is going to be e-books and blogs and whatever, which makes it somewhat amusing to me that I'm pondering the very subject on a blog.

It's possible that I'm more sensitive to this particular discussion since I work in a public library and it seems that not a week goes by that I don't read something somewhere talking about how libraries are fighting to stay relevant in today's modern cyber-times or that this, THIS is the year that e-books will obliviate all other books and make them explode, or else turn dead tree books into an instant relic that people remember with a fond passing nostalgia and a cantankerous old man style anecdote: "Back in my day, books came on paper! And we read them uphill, in the snow, both ways!"

And I just think that the world in which e-readers or Kindles or Nooks or iPads or whatever your platform of choice is manage to cause the complete and utter end of physical books is a fantasy world that will probably never exist.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love me some technology. I use technology all the time and I secretly hope that someday, I'll get to be some sort of cool cyborg, with synthetic robot-muscles so that I don't have to put in two hours a day lifting heavy things and then spend two days groaning and wincing every time I lift my arm to brush my teeth. I think that our ability to create newer and better technology is our single greatest strength and it will be through better technology that we solve the majority of the world's problems. Creativity, ingenuity and trial-and-error will make a better tomorrow. Or at least, it will make a tomorrow in which we solved all of today's problems and managed to create a bunch of new ones, like the robot uprising of 2080.

Anyway, going back to books. I've been told more than once to let go of the dream to have a physical copy of my own book, that e-publishing is the future, etc. etc. I've heard it often enough that it's begun to seriously annoy me and prompt a response to those who believe that we're going to see the death of physical reading mediums in the next ten years. Also, and this is important, I'm not talking about news media; frankly, digital does news better than physical print, since it's faster, and speed is everything in news. We're only talking about books here. Hell, I'll narrow it down even further: we're only talking about fiction books.

I believe that there is one milestone that e-books will need to reach in order to overtake physical books: e-books will need to become a single platform, with universal compatibility and functionality. The e-readers will need to become priced in such a way that it makes their purchase a no-brainer. The books will need to be priced in such a way that it wouldn't make sense to buy them any other way. There will need to be a form of DRM that manages to prevent piracy from devouring sales, without punishing law-abiding users who just want the loan the book to a friend or want to know that they actually own their copy of the book.

Does that sound like a lot to you? Does that sound unrealistic?

How many new technologies have we seen fail to take hold over the past decade? How much market share does blu-ray have? How many people are jumping into the 3D revolution for movies and televisions and phones and video game systems? It seems like for every "revolutionary" new thing, there's something else that promises to be revolutionary and fails to latch on. Maybe it's predecessor is too well established. Maybe it's not revolutionary enough to catch on. Maybe it's too expensive. Or maybe it's gimmicky. It doesn't matter.

The point is, people don't like to be hassled. They don't like to have to fight with their technology. We like things simple and functional and right now, the e-reader market is something of a nightmare, because as far as I'm aware, the devices don't all play nicely with one another. What works for one thing won't necessarily work for another.

PC gaming is a world that demonstrates the problems of ownership. I don't buy PC games too often any more because the draconian DRM policies that exist these days make the entire process a nightmare and you can't really be certain that you're actually getting your own copy of the game you just spent sixty bucks on. I bought StarCraft back in the early 2000s and I've lost track of the number of computers I installed that copy onto. Can you say the same for today's PC games, or is it more likely that you'll have a "five install limit" or something equally irritating?

Dead tree books are cheap. They're ease to replace. They're ease to use, to own, to loan. They're hard to pirate and duplicate. They've been around forever. Most importantly, they're simple.

We like simple as a species, as a general rule of thumb.

And that is why I just shrug whenever I hear about the e-reader revolution, because I remember all the other revolutions, all the other new formats. Newer doesn't always take root. For every newfangled iPod, which did change the way we listen to music, there's blu-ray, which is a technology that's had plenty of time to permeate the market and still hasn't managed to dethrone dvds.

I think that e-readers are a very neat toy. I think that they'll probably be around and hopefully create some very slick new functions and interactivity.

I think that they will never manage to drive physical books into oblivion. The dead tree book just has too much going for it on the consumer's side of things.

And that's why I continue to look forward to the day that I'll own my own book in convenient dead tree format.

Who Owns The Story?

2011-07-02T19:37:00.002-07:00

After yesterday's brief foray outside of my normal stomping grounds, I return to you with a post that is the bread and butter of this blog: more randomly formed, barely cogent thoughts about writing from somebody hardly qualified to be so opinionated. But that's what blogs are all about, baby; you don't need to know what you're talking about to feel strongly about a thing. You just need to be convincing. Or not even convincing; interesting would probably do just fine, in a pinch.

I was looking over the manuscript for "the book formerly known as the Fallen, except there's already like a hundred goddamn books with that title, so some good friends helped me come up with a much better title." No, that's not the new title; it's just a personal anecdote that's masquerading as the title, since this new title is so good and for some reason, I'm feeling strangely protective of it at the moment. I don't know. It's also why I haven't posted any chapters or excerpts yet. I just have this feeling, like that this thing is a fledgling and if I let too many people touch it, its mother won't take it back and it will starve to death or be eaten by a hawk.

Does that make sense? It doesn't? It doesn't and it sounds like I'm blogging drunk again? Well, I can assure you that the drunk thing is simply not true, I've actually been doing very well on the whole "not drinking" part of things, mostly because I started to read that rambling post about the desert and three paragraphs in, I wanted to kill myself. The only reason I don't delete it is because you can't delete evil. Not really. Also, it's a good badge of shame and a reminder to not do that again. So there's that.

Anyway, my point is that for whatever reason, I'm protective and secretive of the new book title right now. I'm sure I'll open up soon enough; just let me have this for a little while.

Last night, as I was going over some scenes towards the end of the book and discussing them with The Alpha Reader (who, despite the name, is not at all related to dominant male wolves in any fashion) and we were discussing the reactions to the end of the novel. I was presented with an analysis and interpretation of my own characters that I'd never even considered, stuff that hadn't even crossed my mind, but made a lot of sense when I heard it.

I think this is something that happens to writers eventually. At this point, confronted with an alternative character interpretation, you have two choices: you can tell the reader NO, YOU ARE WRONG, I WROTE THIS AND I AM THE AUTHORITY AND YOU ARE WRONG. I don't recommend that one, personally. Alternatively, you can feel a sort of weird modesty about the whole thing and wonder if maybe you're not really all that creative, and maybe this isn't really your story. Maybe you've tapped into another dimension or something and you're just recording the events of a world that exists independently of you. How does that sound for crazy? Maybe you didn't create anything in the whole book! Maybe this work of fiction really did happen in another universe and you were able to witness and record it thanks to the power of, shit, I dunno, psychic mind beams. Or something.

Do I have a point here? Yes. Yes, I do.

My point is that you don't own your characters. I mean, sure, in a legal sense, you can own them and make money off them and all kinds of shit like that. But when you craft a story, and this is key, when you show that story to another human being and say "here, read this thing that I wrote," at some level, you stop owning that story and those characters. Because now there are two versions of the story in existence. There's the version of the story that you wrote and there's the version of the story that the reader constructs through the act of reading and imagining the story on the page. And there's nothing about that version of the story that is any less real, any less important, any less valuable, than the version that you intended to write.

That doesn't give the reader the right to create their version of the story and sell it and make a million dollars off the idea that you gave them. But it also doesn't give you the right to tell the reader that their version of your story is wrong. It's real to them.

Frankly, if I were you, I'd be grateful that somebody gave enough of a damn to create their own version of a story that I wrote.

Maybe tomorrow, I'll talk about the weird experience of how it feels when the reader's version of the story is cooler and better than the version of the story you intended to write.

And people wonder why there's so much correlation between creativity and madness

Under Fire

2011-07-01T18:15:00.004-07:00

I'd like to talk about something different today. And don't worry, I'm totally sober right now, so it won't be a long, rambling, mostly pointless discussion about deserts, or whatever. Most of the time, I use this space to talk about writing and either the struggles of trying to succeed as a writer, or just general thoughts on the medium. Because, you know, the musings of an unpublished fiction writer are totally important and this isn't at all an exercise in my own narcissism. Nope.

Today at work, I had my first incident. By incident, I mean a situation in which I was required to take action that included calling an ambulance, relaying information to the dispatcher, keeping calm, etc. etc. I'm keeping the description vague, since I use my real name on this blog, it's conceivable that somebody could make the necessary leaps of logic and piece together the real story and I'd rather respect the privacy of others. Anyway, the details are not important. Sufficient to say, an individual needed help, I helped, and remained calm while doing so. Was it a life threatening situation? Not for me. For the other individual? Maybe. I'm not a doctor. Hard to say where the line is between actual emergency and imagined one; most of the time, you won't find out until it's all said and done, and God help you if you assumed incorrectly that it was all imagined.

It's not the first time I've been in a tough situation. There was the aftermath of the Loughner shooting, the house fire back in 2007, and a few other instances here and there that were moments where I was tested, in some form or fashion. I'm not trying to brag or say "look how freaking awesome I am." That isn't the point either.

The point is that I know people who, for whatever reason, do not like to be placed in charge of things. They do not desire to have the responsibility and the burden of making decisions. I am not criticizing those people, either; I understand the desire very well. I think everybody does, actually. It's always nice to not have to deal with the stress that comes with responsibility. It's nice not have to worry that at any moment, it could be "that time" when you need to step up and take charge.

However, what I do not understand is why there are people for whom the comfort of not having to step up is preferable to the security of knowing that you can if the situation calls for it. It's a point of pride for me, again, not to say look how goddamn awesome I am or that I'm stone cold under fire, nothing like that. But it's satisfying to not have to wonder: "would I freeze up? Will I be able to handle it?" To me, it's worth more to have the knowledge that yes, I can, rather than going through life always avoiding having to be tested.

There's value in that, I think, and I wonder if those individuals who prefer comfort to self-knowledge have adequately considered the consequences of that decision. Certainly, I did not reflect on this topic all that much prior to being thrust into such a situation. In fact, I didn't even think about it when a situation was unfolding; it wasn't until I was standing in the rain in the street watching the fire department move in to take charge that I actually stopped to think about what just happened and how I reacted. And then I freaked out and got the shakes and realized how close and how razor-thin the Edge is between surviving, and not.

At the time, though, there was no panic, there was no freaking out, there was no "I wonder if I can do this." There was only the moment and the reaction to it. And I think that I've carried that first moment with me ever since, and draw from it the knowledge that when things go wrong, I'm not going to be the bravest or the toughest or the most capable, but I know I'm not the guy who's going to freeze up and be completely useless to everybody around him.

That's worth something to me. My hope is that those who prefer to look the other way, who prefer the comfort of not getting involved, my hope is that they get a chance to see why it's better to know than not. It is my hope that nobody loses on that day when the test finally comes.

The Time Between

2011-06-29T14:21:00.000-07:00

The period of time between projects is a weird place to be. You've just come off the high of having achieved your goal and finished your novel (or whatever). You've tasted some delicious accomplishment and hopefully, the process of finishing a draft has the inspirational effect of making you feel as though you're ready to dive headfirst into your next project. But should you do that?

Yesterday felt very weird. I had already told myself that I was going to take the day off; I mean, hell, I deserve some time away from thinking about all of this stuff. In his memoir "On Writing," Stephen King advises taking a week or two off before you start the second draft, so that you can distance yourself from the whole thing and come at the work with fresh eyes. I think that this is a good idea and plan to give myself that week. But even though, for one small, brief moment, this period of "not-writing" is justifiable, even permissible, it still feels like I should be doing something. Somewhere in the back of my, ideas are already begining to faintly stir. "The Next Book" begins to loom on the horizon of my consciousness, tantalizing and ethereal. What will I do next? I can do anything!
Maybe the next book will have some dragons in it.

The weird thing is that, to be honest, I've already got "The Next Book" more than halfway completed. You may recall that I paused serious work on the last novel for around eight months or so while I did NaNoWriMo 2010. I wrote a story that fluctuated between being a prequel and a sequel, given the fact that its events take place in the same universe as my current novel, but before the timeline that the first book covers. If you're wondering why I'm not using proper names, it's because I've begun trying to distance myself from the title "the Fallen" which has always been a working title; I'm pretty sure there's about forty or fifty books out this year alone that are called "the Fallen" and star at least one fallen angel.

If you want to know why I think most of my ideas are bad ones, it's because of shit like this: a small, very, very small part of me would love to try and title the first book "Rise of the Fallen." So good, right? You can almost smell the pun there.

Yeah, I'm not going to call it that. I think.

Anyway, I wrote about half a book last year before things got bogged down and I found myself in this confusing knot of uncertainty and half-formed ideas, which explains part of the reason why my output for the first half of 2011 (also known as the six months I spent doing almost nothing of importance!) was so low. This effort over the past month to get something freaking finished was mostly in response to the fact that I was tired of being tangled in two bits of two unfinished novels of varying length. (For frame of reference, Book 1 was about 100,000 words in length, while book 2 was sitting about about 55,000 words.)

But now I'm free of part of the mess. One book is done and just needs to be subject to the icy scythe of the editing process, and then it's off to the superfun process of trying to attract an agent to represent it, in the hopes that I'll some day have a published book that I can throw at people when it's time for the high school reunion. "LOOK AT WHAT I WROTE! NYAAAAR!"

I've got until 2015. Better moving.

Being Done

2011-06-27T16:22:00.001-07:00

I finished the first draft of my second novel today. You may be wondering why I said "second novel." Well, that's because the first novel is an absolutely horrible swords-and-sorcery fantasy that I began writing when I was fourteen. I finished it and then began writing a sequel and somewhere along the way, I completely lost interest in it. Both works are sitting on my hard drive to this day and both are somewhere around 88,000 words or so. Maybe some day I'll revisit them; hopefully, that will be after I'm super famous and people will enjoy them just because I wrote them, not because either book is actually any good.

Or maybe they'll just sit there in digital space until the end of time. That's pretty good, too.

But I'm not here today to talk about those old novels. I'm not even here to talk about the new novel (which isn't really that new, I've been working on the goddamn thing off and on since November 2009.)

I feel it's important to note that, even though the title of this post is "Being Done," I'm not actually done with the working part. This is just a first draft. That means now I get to begin the fun and enjoyable process of editing the manuscript in order to produce a final draft. The only metaphor I can think of to describe this process is this: imagine a dentist drilling his own teeth. Yeah.

In the days to come, I'll be forced to confront my own writing and all those moments where I had to silence my inner critic by saying to myself, "Self, fuck it, I know this is bad, but we'll catch it on the next draft. Well, now those moments get to leap out at me. Self-editing is a little bit like prancing naked through the streets. Except you're surrounded by hypercritical clones of yourself, all of which are far more critical and nitpicky than normal people would be.

I wrote that? Oh my God, I should kill myself.

That's my idea of a good line? I'm a monster. There should be a prison for writers and I should be incarcerated there without possibility of parole for writing a line that bad.

Really? What the fuck? You don't deserve to be allowed near a keyboard.

You get the idea. If writing is a mostly enjoyable exercise in indulging your creativity, editing is a systematic process of hating yourself and wondering why the fuck you bothered spending the last year and a half on a project as shitty and terrible as this one.

As you may be able to infer, I have a sort of love-hate relationship with the whole thing. I love the way my prose sounds after a good self-edit, but damn if I don't hate myself during the entire process. In fact, I used to hate doing it so much that (even though I knew it would improve my grade by a full letter or more) I would routinely turn in papers that I didn't edit, just because I hated going through it all.

People always seem surprised by the fact that I've never read any of my own work. Well, that's not true, I've read through a few short stories that I wrote, mostly for the editing process, and always because I wanted a better grade. To this day, however, I don't actually know what my novels are about. I mean, yeah, I wrote them, so I can tell you the plot and all, but it's akin to the way somebody who read Spark Notes can tell you about the plot to "the Scarlet Letter" or "Moby Dick." They get the idea, but they haven't really had the experience of reading it.

Regardless of the fact that I'm lying when I say that I'm done, there is a feeling of satisfaction and completion that comes with bringing a complete story into the world. It would probably be hyperbolic to say that it's like giving birth, since, you know, as a guy, my perspective on that whole particular topic is going to be different. Birth is this thing that sort of happens, I guess, I don't know. I don't really think about it too much.

But with this story, this creation of mine that has invested a year and a half of my thought, time, energy, effort, and emotion, the feeling that it's done comes with a sense of relief ("Thank God that's over with!) and regret ("I don't want to say goodbye yet!") and hopeful anxiety ("Fuck, I hope somebody else likes this thing."). Now that the first draft is done, now that the story itself exists in some complete shape, now I begin to wonder what its future will be, much in the manner, I imagine, that a parent wonders what their child will be. Will it succeed? Will it fail? Will anybody like it? I'll do everything I can to prepare this little story of mine for its first steps into the world, but ultimately, its fate is out of my hands, and that's a wonderful and exciting thing.

Maybe Tomorrow

2011-05-18T01:18:00.002-07:00

I was thinking about wandering off into the desert this weekend. Now, this may sound strange to you, especially if you are not the kind of person that lives in a desert already or are not the kind of person who might wander into hostile terrain as a general course of action. Allow me to explain this desire to you, with the self-assurance and the cocky swagger of the truly intoxicated. But first, I have to change this song, because fuck, if you haven't listened to "Never Hear Surf Music Again" by Free Blood, the first two minute are amazing and the last four minutes fill me with a rage I would have not have thought possible, until this moment of my life. It's like having sex with the hottest woman in the world (I guess that's Jennifer Lopez, according to these guys?), only for her to turn into some sort of freakishly ugly shapeshifter two minutes into the act. Or something. I don't know. Look, the metaphor isn't perfect. Let's just fucking move on.

I had to step outside for a moment. I don't know if it's true in your part of the world, I mean, I imagine it would be, but I'm not a fucking astronomer, so who fucking knows. My point is that I stepped outside to enjoy a smooth Black & Mild, a Sierra Nevada Golden Boch, and most importantly, to revel in the glorious full moon on the perfection that was this May Seventeenth night, in the year of Our Lord, 2011.

I think I was talking about the desert before? Yes, yes I was.

The desert represents two things and those two things depend on whether or not you have ever lived in the desert. If you've lived in a desert, it's just a word that means things. It means that the primary color of your world is brown. It means that it'll rain three times a year. It means that you're a bad person if you lose track of how long your morning shower is. For the record, I like to take twenty minute showers. It only takes me five minutes to get my business down. The other fifteen minutes are spent appreciating how fucking good it feels to be doused in hot water at 6:15 in the morning.

If you don't live in the desert, that you know of deserts from the movies. Let me clear a few things up for you. Most deserts don't have sand dunes. Most deserts also don't have cacti (cactuses?), although mine does, so whatever. If you ever seen sand dunes and cacti in the same scene, you can be assured that the director thinks you are a fucking moron and won't know the difference. I don't know about you, but that would make me kind of mad, the kind of mad that would lead to some hilarious shenanigans (it took me five fucking minutes to spell that word, no joke) that would start with setting a car on fire and end with a night in jail. Look, just trust me on this; you won't find cacti and sand dunes in the same desert. I think. I've heard there are some sand dunes out in New Mexico. They might have cacti. Who knows. That's not the point I'm trying to make here.

My fucking point is that while I was engaging in the usual drudgery of the average job today, I felt a profound sense of disquiet and of panic. I felt the need to GET OUT, to run away, to escape the grim bonds of this static world. Basically, I had this thought: I said to myself, "Self, we've been doing this day in, day out bullshit, for weeks now. It's time for a change." I thought that sounded pretty smart, so here I am now, drunk out of my mind, thinking about deserts and why it's a good idea to disappear into them. Not forever, though, I mean, it would suck to die in the desert. I imagine coyotes would eat you, and that's not good, or no bueno, in the language of the region.

The desert, to me, represents nature in the only form we can really understand in today's technological society. There was a time, I think, when nature was embodied by the jungle or the tundra or the forest or the plain, or whatever. I think that era has come and gone, however. We've proven that we, as a species, are stronger than the forest and the jungle. Our machines can clearcut that shit in no time flat, for lumber, for farming, or just for the fuck of it. These days, we have to protect that shit. These days, the jungles of the world are a rare and precious thing, something to be cherished and savored before it's gone forever, which it probably will be, soon.

The desert, though. The desert doesn't give a fuck what you do. It doesn't care if you clear out the plants, if you send the coyotes and the snakes and the javelina running for cover. It doesn't care if you burn away the plants and reshape the land. The desert still is. If you drink all the (admittedly scarce) water or waste it on twenty minute showers, the desert doesn't care. In the end, the desert is like Hades. It's just waiting for you to die, because the presence of life in the desert is an enigma, an aberration, something that only happened by happy accident.

You can't kill the desert.

As I was working today, as I was serving the needs of people who do not care about me or my desire to help them better their lives, I felt the need to escape. In particular, I felt the need to escape into that desert which is so actively malevolent, that place that will, by its very nature, seek to kill me. Now, this is not a death wish, the desire to disappear into the desert. Quite frankly, if death was my wish, there are many easier and more convenient methods at my immediate disposal. I mean, for fuck's sake, I have a Beretta .40 caliber on my nightstand RIGHT NOW. If death was my wish, I can't think of a more efficient means.

No, it's not death that I seek, in my desire to retreat to the desert. The desert, to me, represents a cleansing of sorts, a primal fire that burns away the bullshit that accumulates over the course of living in our modern world. We all spend so much time worrying about shit, without ever thinking about the things that, in another time and place, would be necessary for life.

The desert represents purification from a world that has grown corrupt on its own excess. Now, don't get me wrong; I fucking love me some corruption. I'm typing this post while drunk off who knows how much fucking whiskey and I smoked a mighty fine Black & Mild first, and the music is cranked up to 11. I'm soft and decadent and in love with the power of our modern technology. I wouldn't trade this life for anything. The motherfucking Emperor of Rome didn't have it as good as I do now; Internet and cold beer and indoor plumbing and Xbox.

But goddamn, ours is a noisy world. There is so much happening, so much noise, so much LIFE, that eventually, it's too much. It's too loud and you can barely think, and that's when the trouble starts. It's when things start getting so loud that you can't hear yourself anymore that you begin to slip, that you begin to lose yourself in the detritus of today's world.

In that place of harsh life, in that place of death, the desert in a refuge. I don't want to go back to simpler times; I'm not fucking retarded. We're living in the best moment, ever, in the history of our species, and anybody that tells you otherwise is a fucking retard, sadly misinformed, or Republican. That's just facts, baby.

But we do live in a noisy time, in a moment in history when it's all too easy to lose the self in the singsong Karaoke copy bullshit of our world. It's too easy to lose the self in the excess, it's too easy to replace individual thought with the company byline, with the official story. In other words, we live in the best of times, even though the best of times are the greatest threat to our sense of self and our ability to think for ourselves.

And that's why the desert, my friend. The desert wants to kill you. The desert is honest like that. It fucking hates that you're alive and made out of mostly water. If the desert had its way, you would be nice, dry, dusty bones. Hence why the desert is like that girl that's a great lay, but not girlfriend material. Good for a nice row, but not exactly who you want to bring around for the family holidays.

The desert doesn't give a shit. It doesn't care about your bullshit, it doesn't care that the boss yelled at you, that the customers were dicks, that the objective wasn't met. In the desert, it's life or die. Find water, or don't. Find food, or don't. Live, or don't. Simple living. Simple dying.

There is a purity, in that simplicity, that does not exist in the urban world or the grasslands or the suburbs or where ever the fuck you live. In the place that you life, there are layers, there are secrets, there are all kinds of rules and etiquette and so much fucking bullshit that seems so fucking important, that isn't, really, at least according to the standards that the desert.

In the desert, the answer to life is water. Do you have it? If so, grats, you get to live for another die so you can find some more. It's simple living, but not in some motherfucking hillbilly way. Those guys thing they understand, but they're just as deluded as we are, just as hung up on the bullshit of being human. They don't really understand it any better than we city-slickers do, though they'll try to prove otherwise as a point of pride.

In the end, you go into the desert because you seek clarity and purity. You go into the desert because there's too much noise, there's too much going on for you to really know who you are in a world of likes and dislikes and favorites and advertisements. In a world where your image is some company's byline, the desert is the final bastion of true self, where you live and die according to your worth as a man (or woman, let's by fair here).

I love technology and I love the world that has spawned it. I love that I'm sitting here now, with all the music of the world exposed for my consumption, at the click of a mouse. I love that I'm sitting in a comfortable chair, ergonomically designed to contour to my spine, in a climate controlled environment. Whatever I want, I need only reach out and take.

But that does not mean that the desert is not outside my window, waiting. The desert cannot die. If we clear all the cacti, kill all the snakes, suck up all the water... the desert will still be there. She is a place of purity, a cruel mistress that is all too eager to strip away the imperfection and expose the raw weakness of humanity.

But it is that exposure that makes us powerful. It is that moment in which we know our weakness, that inspires us to strength. It is the knowledge of our failure that drives us to be more than we are, to become more than our fathers thought we could be.

The desert, in all her forms, is the source of our evolution and the fountain of our progress.

As I said (or didn't, I'm too drunk to remember now) I was thinking of taking a backpacking trip to her this weekend. It is is my hope that now, you will understand why.

-Matthew

It's Kind Of Like This

2011-05-15T19:44:00.000-07:00

I was on my way home from work when the thought came to me. I was flying along down Silverbell Road astride my bike, with the setting sun on my left and nary a car in sight in either direction. The road unwound in front of me like an asphalt ribbon and the desert around me was a brown-and-green blur of sharp rocks and sharper plants. It was a moment that makes you stop and think (not literally, of course, you and your bike keep doing your thing, together) but all the same, I thought about how to explain what it feels like, how I might describe the moment to somebody that's never had it.

I couldn't do it. Or maybe I could do it, but I think that there's somebody who already did, and better than I ever could. Regardless, I think there's too much of me in this blog (which is to say 100%) and so I wanted to take this time to share a little piece of writing that I found, that very much describes what it feels like to ride through such a moment.

The excerpt after the break.

So it was always at night, like a werewolf, that I would take the [motorcycle] out for an honest run down the coast. I would start in Golden Gate Park, thinking only to run a few long curves to clear my head . . . but in a matter of minutes I'd be out at the beach with the sound of the engine in my ears, the surf booming up on the sea wall and a fine empty road stretching all the way down to Santa Cruz . . . not even a gas station in the whole seventy miles; the only public light along the way is an all-night diner down around Rockaway Beach.

There was no helmet on those nights, no speed limit, and no cooling it down on the curves. The momentary freedom of the park was like the one unlucky drink that shoves a wavering alcoholic off the wagon. I would come out of the park near the soccer field and pause for a moment at the stop sign, wondering if I knew anyone parked out there on the midnight humping strip.

Then into first gear, forgetting the cars and letting the beast wind out . . . thirty-five, forty-five . . . then into second and wailing through the light at Lincoln Way, not worried about green or red signals, but only some other werewolf loony who might be pulling out, too slowly, to start his own run. Not many of these . . . and with three lanes on a wide curve, a bike coming has plenty of room to get around almost anything . . . then into third, the boomer gear, pushing seventy-five and the beginning of a windscream in the ears, a pressure on the eyeballs like diving into water off a high board.

Bent forward, far back on the seat, and a rigid grip on the handlebars as the bike starts jumping u and wavering in the wind. Taillights far up ahead coming closer, faster, and suddenly - zaaappp - going past and leaning down for a curve near the zoo, where the road swings out to sea.

The dunes are flatter here, and on windy days sand blows across the highway, piling up in thick drifts as deadly as any oilslick . . . instant loss of control, a crashing, cartwheeling slide and maybe one of those two-inch notices in the paper the next day; "An unidentified motorcyclist was killed last night when he failed to negotiate a turn on Highway I."

Indeed . . . but no sand this time, so the lever goes up into fourth, and now there's no sound except wind. Screw it all the way over, reach through the handlebars to raise the headlight beam, the needle leans down on a hundred, and wind-burned eyeballs strain to see down the centerline, trying to provide a margin for the reflexes.

But with the throttle screwed on there is only the barest margin, and no room at all for mistakes. It has to be done right . . . and that's when the strange music starts, when you stretch your luck so far that fear becomes exhilaration and vibrates along your arms. You can barely see at a hundred; the tears flow back so far that they vaporize before they get to your ears. The only sounds are wind and a dull roar floating back from the mufflers. You watch the white line and try to lean with it . . . howling through a turn to the ride, then the left and down the long hill to Pacifica . . . letting off now, watching for cops, but only until the next dark stretch and another few seconds on the edge . . . The Edge . . . There is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over. The others - the living - are those who pushed their control as far as they felt they could handle it, and then pulled back, or slowed down, or did whatever they had to when it came time to choose between Now and Later.

But the edge is still Out there. Or maybe it's In. The association of motorcycles with LSD is no accident of publicity. They are both means to an end, to the place of definitions.

-Hunter S. Thompson, "Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga"

Powerful stuff.

For the record, though, I always wear my helmet.

In Which Much Is Revealed

2011-05-15T00:46:00.001-07:00

Not for the first time, I'm rethinking my decision to purchase a desktop to replace my much beloved and sorely missed laptop. At the time, it seemed like a prudent decision and for the most part, I have been pleased with my choice. However, there are certain nights, nights such as this one whereupon I regret my decision. I regret that I cannot sit out on the porch of my apartment, illuminated only by the warm glow of a laptop monitor and the small cherry of a wood-tipped cigar and write in the proper form and fashion, the tradition, if you will, of Hemingway and Alger, a tradition and a mystique that has long since faded from the world. Simply put, we're all nerds now, without the style and sophistication of those who came before us. We play at profundity, but cannot hope to understand it, because we've had it good for so very, very long.

I don't know what it was that spoiled us, exactly. The obvious culprit is the march of technology; it just makes everything so fucking simple now, doesn't it? At least it does until the power goes out, as it did tonight, before I sat down to type this post. That was an amusing moment. The television blinked off first, with a strange pop that made me worry, for a fleeting moment, that something had exploded in an electrical fire, which I guess is like a normal fire, only worse because it can electrocute you while you burn to death, or something. Also, I guess you can't extinguish electrical fires? They sound like pretty bad ass motherfucking fires, is the point that I'm trying to make here.

So the power goes out, lights, television, Xbox, everything. Hmm, I think to myself. No problem. I'm a backpacker and a hiker. I've got flashlights like you wouldn't believe. I have all kinds of pocket knives and multi-tools and survival gear. I've got dried food and enough water on hand at this very moment to live for, fuck, I don't know, three weeks? Maybe more, if this power outage signals the collapse of society and my roommate doesn't make it back to further deplete my supplies.

When the power goes out, it's a man's job to find light. That's always the first step, at least, that's what I think the first step is, given my eduction of disaster movies and disaster novels and disaster entertainment. Do I actually know for certain that light is the most important thing? Well, I've never actually read an official document on the subject, if that's what you're asking. But it's pretty fucking hard to do anything of importance without being able to see, so I'll go find the flashlights. I've got, like, six of them and at least two of them aren't merely storing dead batters, as seems to be the tendency for most flashlights.

But how am I going to find the flashlight? It's fucking dark! There's no lights on. I know the flashlight is in a backpack and I know the rough location of said pack, somewhere under a pile of books near my desk. Thinking quickly, I whip out my cell phone and flip it open, because of course, it still works and provides a handy light source . . . and then I have my little moment of zen, my revelation about my entire generation.

We can't imagine a world without our toys and our lights and our gadgets and our gizmos. We can't imagine what it was like to write a fucking novel by hand, or on a typewriter, where every single time you misspell the word "typewriter" or "word" or whatever the fuck, it means starting over on that page, or getting out the white out or whatever. I mean, shit, I type pretty well, I think? But I still backspace like crazy, whether to correct the clumsiness of fingers moving too fast for my brain to keep up or to correct a half-formed thought that led to nothing but a blank end. How did they do it, before? I can't imagine, since I live in a world where I can't find my little survival kit without pulling out my cell phone to light my way.

Was I telling a story about laptops, before? I think I was.

The point is, before I sat down to type this long and mostly pointless thing, I had a very good thing going out on the porch. The night was warm, but not so warm as to be unpleasant; such a thing won't happen until the advent of June, whereupon the desert reminds us all that fuck yes, you live in one of the highest and driest regions on the face of the earth. Have you ever stood out under the silver glow of a full moon and sweated your ass off? Lied awake in bed and rolled around, trying to get cool, wondering how much shit you'd get in if you snuck off into the apartment center's pool and slept in the water, just because it's too goddamn hot at night to be comfortable? Those nights are coming, they're always coming, like a grim inversion of the looming winter that I suppose must plague the majority of the world.

But that was not this night. On this night, the air is warm and comfortable, so smooth that you don't even really feel it. It's still and calm and serene, and it's the closest any night can ever come to being perfect and when you have a night like that, the urge is very great to sit out and revel in it, and of course, such revelries bring with them the desire to capture the moment, in some small way, to remind yourself that these moments exist and you didn't just imagine it.

How very unfortunate for me, that I cannot sit out in the moment and capture it as it happens, that it must be as it is now, a memory even before it happened. I'm not saying I regret my decision or even that I wish I had a typewriter instead of a keyboard. I'm just saying I wonder why the writers of yesterday seemed like badassess compared to us. I'm asking what happens to the tools of the trade, the whiskey, the cigar, the masculinity that used to accompany this profession? Did we ruin it? Or was it one of those things that was a product of its time, unable to cope with the vagaries of a changing world?

I can't say for sure that it's my fault, but it sure feels like it is.

One Hundred

2011-02-17T15:28:00.001-07:00

This is the 100th post on ALKM.

It's hard coming back to it. It's hard when I try to remember what it felt like, before the long silence. For months now, I have had the desire to work, but not the motivation or the means. Perhaps the desire is not pure enough? Not honest enough? Or perhaps the desire to work is subservient to the will to do so and the fact is, the will is a magnificent machine so easily corrupted by fear or sloth or perfectionism.

Perhaps it is a mistake to consider these things as separate sins. Perhaps they are brethren, each one leading into the other, each one feeding the next, an ouroboros for our modern age.

As you might be able to tell, I am not in a good place right now or rather, my head is not a good place to be at the moment. I spend too much time in here, always have, but these days, it's lonelier. I don't have the familiar comforts of old friends and stories to keep me from distractions. Unless I seek out distractions to prevent facing my own failure to live up to my personal expectations.

The words don't come to me as easily as they used to; it feels like I trip over them when I speak now and where there was one a certain rhythm to it, now I am uncertain, jittery, choppy. I can't make it work like it used to work. The machine is breaking down, running on empty.

I hate this. I hate feeling empty inside. I hate having nothing worth saying, to myself or to anybody.

Happy one hundred posts.

Nox

2010-10-22T16:26:00.002-07:00

On Tuesday, concerned that my cat was ill, I took her to an emergency veterinarian around midnight. When we got there, though, she seemed okay and we ended up bringing her home.

Except that, over the next few days, she didn't seem to be getting better. So we scheduled an appointment with another vet, figured we'd get all the tests and such done, find out what was wrong, and everything would be okay. We made an appointment for early this morning, around 8 AM.

In three hours, I would learn that my beloved kitty was in dire condition. I would learn that her kidneys were failing her due to a blockage in her bladder. I would learn that the surgery that could have saved her would do nothing for the kidney damage. That things were already too far gone.

Three hours after I arrived, I held Nox in my arms and watched them inject the needle into her leg. I held her as she squirmed in protest. I held her as she tried to understand, tried to resist what was happening to her. I held her and hugged her and told her how much I loved her.

I held her as she died. I was the last thing she ever saw.

Today is October 22, 2010. It was exactly two years and two days ago, on October 20, 2008, that this strange little grey cat followed me home. Two years ago, I took her in, thinking I would find her and return her to her owners. Two years ago, since I learned the sad truth that she'd been abandoned and didn't have anybody.

But it didn't matter, because by the time I learned that, she had someone. She had me. And ever since then, she's always had me. We've moved from that apartment since then. I've had roommates come and go; some of them were fond of her, some not so much.

But it didn't matter, because she always had me.

I wrote once on my Twitter feed that I suspected my cat had abandonment issues, given that she'd been shuffled from place to place before she came to me.... she had at least two other owners, before me, that I'm aware of. She would do this thing where, when I would come home from a long day and lie down, she would leap onto my chest and curl up there. Or if I was moving around, she would demand to be held closely, tightly, as if to remind her that she was wanted. That she was loved.

I know that for some people, the idea of loving a cat this much is strange. Cats aren't like dogs. How can you love something that's so aloof? The joke is, after all, that dogs have masters and cats have staff.

My cat, for the few years I had her, was my most loyal and beloved companion. She was there for me every moment, every time life threw me another curve ball, every time I was disappointed, or hurt, or angry, or sad, she was there. Every time I held her closely and listened to her purr, she made my world that much better, that much more bearable.

She was as much mine as I was hers. She didn't really like to share me, and would become jealous when people came over and drew my attention away from her. That was a big thing to her, exactly where my attention was; if I was working at my desk, she made sure to sleep on the space between the monitor and my keyboard. If I was at the kitchen table, she'd be sprawled out in the middle. If I was watching a movie on my bed, well, she had her side of the bed and I had mine. If I had a bowl of cereal, we'd share it. Well, after first, she just lapped at it when I wasn't looking and I'd push her away, but eventually, I just came to accept the fact that it was our bowl, not mine.

There was an intelligence and understanding in her eyes whenever I looked at her, and her expressions would range from bored to amused to mistrustful, depending on whether she was watching my fingers fly across the keyboard or trying to approach her with the hated brush.

Losing a cat is different than losing a dog. When I lost my dogs, it felt like members of the family were gone, which is, of course, what they were. But with Nox, it feels like I've lost more than a friend. It feels like I've lost a piece of myself, an aspect of my life that came to define me in a hundred different small ways. She shaped my life as much as I shaped hers.

She was as much mine as I was hers.

And now I'm sitting here, having said my goodbyes and kissed my beloved cat one last time before she was taken away. I look around the room, and my eyes fill with tears when I look at the place where she made my papers into her bed. Or when I look at her toys, lying on the floor from the last time she played with them. I pick up the little orange mouse that I bought for her, and I remember watching her pounce on it as I dragged it across the floor. I remember playing "Catch the Pixie" as I shined a laser pointer on the wall and watched her leap at it.

A hundred different memories, a thousand; two years of my life, with her at my side. It seems strange, that it's only been two years; it feels like she's been part of me forever. I try to imagine what my life was like before her, and I can't, and now I'm faced with a future without her, and I.... I don't want to.

I don't want to wake up next morning and not feel her sandpaper tongue licking my face. I don't want to come home at night and not have her standing there by the door, eager to see me.

I don't want to be alone again.

Just as she didn't want to be alone when she came into my life, when she wandered through the door of my apartment, looking cautious but hopeful, as if to say, even then, "maybe this is my home now?"

My dear, dear cat, from the moment you ran through that open door, from the moment you brushed past my leg, you were home. Even though it would take weeks before it was all official, before I learned where you came from, I think at that moment, we both knew that you were mine. As I was yours.

I held you in my arms, my Nox, and loved you with all my heart to your very last breath. In your last moments, I was there, holding you, comforting you, and above all, reminding you that you were not alone.

My beloved Nox, my companion, my friend, my pet, my pretty kitty.

??? - October 22, 2010

I miss you so much.

Reading Blogs About Blogging Makes Me Want To Write

2010-09-23T00:30:00.001-07:00

Are you familiar, sir or madame, are you intimate with a certain fantasy series known as A Song of Ice and Fire? If not, you should probably stop reading, because I highly doubt you care, unless it's your thing to read drunken, poorly thought out rants from undergrads procrastinating on their philosophy essays. If you do like reading such things, well, by all means, please, stay a while.

Stay forever.

Where was I? Oh yes. So, there's this book series. A Song of Ice and Fire. Fun fact; for about five years, I thought it was "A Song of Fire and Ice." You know, like the Robert Frost poem? Five years, and nobody told me I was making an idiot of myself the entire time. Although now I'd argue that I managed to achieve that particular goal in far more entertaining and offensive ways than simply misreading the title of a fantasy book series.

Anyway, the next book in the ASOIAF series was supposed to be out, like, five years ago. This wouldn't be noteworthy, except that the author continues to promise again and again and again on his blog that it would be done in the next six months... and every six months, the promised date would come and go with nary a whisper of progress from said author.

Now, I'm not exactly a model of writerly discipline, or authorial focus, or whatever. I make and break promises about when I'll be done with my book all of the time. The only difference is, I'm an unpublished nobody that's taken far too long to finish his undegrad and drinks far too much to ever really be trusted with a keyboard. I don't have an international book deal that I'm reneging. Or an upcoming HBO series. Or several metric tons of merchandising crap to go along with the books I wrote.

You're probably wondering, do I have a point? I mean, I took the whole goddamn summer off, without any real substantial progress on my book. I certainly didn't blog, which is a shame, because I had a really good streak going for a while that slowly, but surely ground to a halt. Man, I hate the fact that my gmail account is linked to everything these days. I feel like I could have made a case for myself, said something like "oh shits, I totally forgot the password to the blog." But that's not true. Which is probably good, because if it was true, that would make me seem like even more of a drunken idiot than I already seem.

My point, anyway, is that this particular author's lack of progress with his books has spawned a number of highly amusing blogs urging him to, among other things, finish the damn book. Even if you don't have any interest in this author, or this book series, or anything I have to say, I suggest you click that link and take a read, particularly if you're an aspiring writer yourself. The aforementioned link leads to a very interesting argument on the merits of the various excuses an author might have for not finishing. In particular, there's a bit about the difference between a Freewriter (a writer who doesn't outline and has absolutely no idea where the story is going to go) and an Outliner (a writer who has the only thing planned out before he or she even starts.)

Honestly, both descriptions sound too generous to me. In my opinion, a Freewriter is one who has no fucking idea what they're doing and just makes shit up as they go, while an Outliner is a control freak who has to have every last little detail planned out, down to the very last goddamn thing.

If you haven't already pieced it together, I'm a Freewriter. And yes, I stand by my interpretation of what that means.

Anyway, reading this blog (Finish the Book, George, not the author's actual blog) has gotten me thinking about my own blog and my own book, and just reminded me of the single most important rule of being a writer.

If you want to be a writer, you have. To. Fucking. Write.

Every day.

There was an admittedly brief period in my life where I managed to do that. Even with a job, even with all of my classes, even with a profound and troubling addiction to a certain video game (Dragon Age: Origins), I still managed to write, every single day. I made it though 50,000 words in 30 days alone.

Fallen has, what, maybe two or three chapters left before I'm done? I had all summer to work on it. There's no excuse for that.

And here I am, blogging again, and do you know why? Because I firmly believe that even though this blog is just me ranting and whining and talking about nothing in particular to nobody at all, the fact is, when I post on this blog, it has me thinking about writing. It gets me writing, and by the time I'm done blathering on for whatever length I feel is sufficient, I feel the need to engage in something real and get back to work on my own damn book.

Let me put it another way. Posting on this blog may be one more way I weasel out of doing real work, but so far, it's the only weaselly thing I do that gets me back on track, gets me back to working on that novel. Video games don't do that. Browsing Wikipedia or Tvtropes for hours doesn't do that. Drinking (mostly) doesn't do that.

I highly doubt that this post was waiting an entire summer to read. I don't have any excuses for that, except that I am a horribly, horribly lazy person. And if anybody out there is still bothering to stop by now and then to look for updates, let me just say that I'm humbled that you've done so, and that I want you to know that, although I cannot say I'll ever become a better, more productive person, nothing will ever stop me from continuing my best to try.

I'm not sure if that's worth anything at all, but it's all I have to offer.

The Difference Between Writer's Block And Being Stuck

2010-05-28T01:05:00.000-07:00

I haven't been writing as much as I was several months ago, and the fact that I haven't been is simultaneously both a source of inspiration and consternation for me. On the one hand, any time I start to feel like I'm too busy to write, or life is too frustrating, or whatever, I can tell myself, "hey, asshole, you mowed through 50,000 words in thirty days. You wrote for a month and a half, EVERY SINGLE DAY, without stopping." It's kind of cool when you can be your own personal hero, since, shit, you already achieved it once, what's stopping you from doing it again?

On the other hand, it sometimes makes me feel like absolute shit that I made it through half of my book in thirty days, and then it's taken me almost seven months to make it through the second half. So there's a bit of give and take going back and forth there.

I've been trying to figure out why the writing has been so difficult lately, why it just hasn't been happening as much. The glib, superficial, and fucking annoying answer would be because I'm not trying, because I haven't been sitting in front of a blank word document and a blinking cursor. But I hate glib, superficial answers. Even if they're correct, they're not terribly interesting. So let's assume that there's an interesting reason and explore it. Together.

I think I have a problem with ending stories. I say this, because I'm on what is more or less my third manuscript now. I finished the first one. I made it to about 75,000 words or so on the second one before I finally lost all motivation to keep at it. And although I'm still plugging away at the third one, it's only gotten more and more difficult the closer I get to "being done." In both cases, I just had no idea how the story was supposed to end. With "Fallen," I'm still not entirely sure, although I haven't given up and I even have a good idea about where to go next. Hopefully, "next" will bring me closer to the end.

Why is it hard to finish stories? I have no idea. Maybe it says something about me. Maybe it means I have trouble letting go. Entirely possible, but I've had more than a little bit to drink tonight (I was writing, damn it!) and don't really feel like playing armchair psychologist on myself. I'd much rather jump right into a tangentially related topic.

I would certainly describe my situation lately as "being stuck." Typically, being stuck is what other people call writer's block, but the term writer's block annoys the shit out of me, so I don't use it. I don't know why the term bothers me so much; I suppose it might evoke images of pretentious, preening aspirants who make sure that they write in coffee shops on their laptops so people can see them. The kind of person that would say "artiste" instead of "artist." Even when I still had a working laptop, I can count the number of times I worked on my novel in a coffee shop on one hand... and that's including after you chopped off four of my fingers.

My usual solution to being stuck is to just think about the book a lot. I'll think about it in the shower. I'll think about it while I'm driving to work. I'll think about it while I'm working. And driving home. And eating. And brushing my teeth. And while I'm falling asleep. You get the idea. Basically, I spend all of my time thinking about it, and for some strange reason, that thinking about it justifies to me that I haven't written a word in days or weeks. "Well, it's not like I'm not working!" my lazy brain protests. "Look at all the time we've spent thinking about this!"

And yet, there are times, times like tonight, in fact, that I realize thinking about it like I do is somewhat pointless. It doesn't ever seem to solve my problem. It doesn't help me get "unstuck." Typically, trying to force myself to write through the frustration does the trick. And on some occasions, like tonight, talking out the problem with my constant reader (my mom; she's the only one who gets to see the raw, unedited work in progress) solves the problem. It's not even the fact that I was expecting her to tell me how to fix the problem. Rather, as I explain what the problem is and what I want to do, and what the "being stuck problem" is keeping me from, as I try to make her understand, I find that I know just what to do next. It's really quite uncanny. I spent about two hours tonight talking to her about writing, and when it was over... well, I don't have an ending for my story. But I did finish a chapter that I've been working on for like three weeks.

So... thanks Mom. I appreciate it.

Tomorrow, I'm going to this writing conference thing. Part of me is glad that I'm doing something that will (hopefully) advance my career as a writer. Maybe make some connections, maybe learn something new. The other part is fucking furious that several of my geek idols, including Wil Wheaton, Felicia Day, and John Scalzi, are going to be in Phoenix this weekend for the Comic Con, and I won't be attending.

Seriously. I have to choose between my art and my lifestyle. It's a cruel, cruel world that I live in. I expect you all to understand and bestow sympathy upon me accordingly. Preferably in the comments. And preferably without being sarcastic.

I know, I'm asking a lot.

Metaphors Are Like... Squirrels, Or Something To That Effect

2010-05-14T00:02:00.002-07:00

It's probably a mistake, the way I approach writing. I don't mean that I think the way I write is a mistake, necessarily, although I certainly do make quite a few mistakes. Everyone does, though... I read somewhere that in order to master something, I mean, in order to really consider yourself an expert at something, it takes around 10,000 hours of practice. That's something in the order of practicing two hours, every single day, for something like fourteen years, which means I'm probably a master at sleeping, and not much else.

Anyway, my point isn't about the mistakes that I make when I write, because even though I like to think I'm pretty good at it, I realize I'm not an expert... I mean, hell, I need spell check to catch me when I do things like misspell "yourself," which I've done twice so far in this post.

I think that maybe the reason I write is a mistake. Now, isn't that a funny thing to say? I mean, why does it matter, the reason that I'm doing this? Haven't I ranted somewhere in these pages that I just like to tell stories, that I think the whole psychoanalyzing of the creative mind is mostly just intellectual masturbation? Well, yes, I did say that, and I do stand by that, but therein likes the hypocrisy of my opinions. On the one hand, I believe that the reason for writing is to tell stories, that when it's all said and done, the story is what matters. Storytelling is the soul of humanity, despite what all of my writing classes have told me. I like to that that's because you can't really teach storytelling, and you shouldn't try, because storytelling is, in my opinion, a lot like magic; impossible to quantify, and capable of creating fireballs. Wait, that metaphor might have gotten away from me.

Seriously, though, my point is that classes can teach craft, and that's a good thing, because you need craft; craft makes you polished and honed and is the difference between a professional and an amateur (I'm still humble enough to consider myself the latter, of course.)

I've said time and again that stories are what matter: I read, because I like stories and I write because I like to create stories. Except that now we're getting to the hypocrisy I mentioned. When I sit down, when I tell myself that I should be working on my novel, it's not because I feel the need to say something. Honestly, most days, I don't want to even bother... writing is work the vast majority of the time, and anybody who thinks otherwise is either a genius or a liar (and quite possibly both at the same time.) Sure, it's easy sometimes... but then, sometimes, you bowl a 200 when normally, a great game for you might be 150 (true story, I bowled a 200 once).

When I sit at my computer, when I look at the cursor on the blank line, very rarely is my motivation for doing so to tell stories, to create something that I know other people will enjoy. No, sadly, my motivations are usually far more selfish than that, just as my motivations for blogging at this point are completely and entirely selfish. I write because it makes me feel better when I do. I find that writing keeps me from getting locked inside my own mind, from getting too caught up in the maelstrom of my own thoughts. Writing is a way to pour all that thought out, to purify my mind and find something resembling a mental release.

I'll say it again, I write to make myself better. I write, because it's the only way I know how to improve my mood in such a drastic and profound way that I become the kind of person that I want to be. It's like my drug, or something... not my cocaine drug, but my Zoloft or my Lexapro or whatever. When I'm writing, I feel awesome. When I don't... when the days slip away from me and I glance at my word document and realize that I haven't written a single word in almost a month... well, that's when I slip back into myself. That's when days start passing in a strange blur that doesn't seem entirely real. That's when I start living the byline of my blog: "What did I do yesterday?"

I'm not sure why I'm admitting all of this. I'm quite certain it paints me as a special kind of crazy, although (fingers crossed!) it makes me the cool, mysterious, brooding artist kind of crazy, rather than like, "smelly wino, No, honey, don't give him eye contact, okay, fine, give him a dollar so he'll go away" kind of crazy.

It may have something to do with the fact that I've been feeling a little weird lately and that my reason for not writing regularly, because I've been busy with finals, has been both unjustified (I did NaNoWriMo during the busiest month of the year AND during a raging Dragon Age addiction) and about to evaporate since tomorrow's the very last day. It may have something to do with the fact that lately, even though I've been happy, I've been feeling... a little weird.

It may be because I really, really want to finish this damn novel, and I noticed that the more that I blog, the more than I novel-write. It's weird, I've read in other places that blogging is a great way for writers to distract themselves, so that they can equate blogging with "real writing" and thus never get around to actually writing. I find that, for me, it's more like blogging is more like a bit of oil squirted into the gears in my brain, it gets everything working smoothly and efficiently.

Even if my process has always been to novel-write first and then blog. So, really, that metaphor doesn't make a bit of sense, which seems to be a bit of a theme tonight. Goddamn squirrelly metaphors. Hey! Squirrelly metaphors is a good title... and according to spell check, "squirrelly" is totally a real word. Score.

The Good Is The Enemy Of The Creative

2010-04-29T22:01:00.003-07:00

I had a thought that would ultimately lead to my return to my sadly neglected blog. Actually, there were two thoughts, although the first thought was substantially less interesting, something in the "wow, I didn't write a single post for the entire month of April." The second thought was about writing, which seems to more or less be my theme, and thus, the virtual text you now see before your eyes.

If you've glanced at my twitter (and I'm just arrogant enough to assume that maybe one or people do... the other 46 followers are probably spam bots, though) you'll notice that I have continued my habit of posting my word count on the novel. You may have noticed that lately, such posts have been coming few and far between, evidence of my inability to maintain my vow of "Write Every Day." I'm certainly humbled by the fact that my failure is so clearly illuminated, although at the same time, that was always kind of the point, you know, accountability and all. But I digress, and have yet to mention that elusive Second Thought, the one that I've indicated was worthy of writing about.

I was thinking about why lately, writing has seemed so very fucking hard again. The novel's been on my mind; I don't think I've gone a day without thinking about the story, or about writing in general. But all of a sudden, what once was this thing, this habit that I was doing every day and exulting in all the while, now it felt like a chore. I'd tell myself that I didn't feel like writing tonight. I'd say "maybe I'll write tomorrow." And of course, a series of tomorrows became weeks, just like that.

If you're wondering, I haven't had that same experience with my blog. I pretty much accepted the fact that there was going to be a dead month, as I just really didn't feel like blogging about anything. Maybe that was a mistake... there certainly seems to be a correlation between blogging and novel writing, at least in terms of total words written each week.

So this past Tuesday, I sit down to write, having now moved on to Part Three (Or Book Three, as I usually call it) and have once again shifted my Point Of View character... no, I won't tell you to whom; that would be spoilers. And as I said... it's hard. I managed about a thousand words, but they were slow in coming and it just didn't feel... well, if creative writing is all about finding the current and letting the flow guide you, this was swimming against the riptide.

I've been thinking for the past few days why it was so tough, why suddenly I don't want to keep going when I've come so very fucking far... and it finally occurred to me tonight as I sat here, thinking about things. I've said it before, in various times and various places, and this is by no means an original thought on my part: the desire to do well, the desire to be "good" at writing is the ultimate road block. It's the source of all writer's block. It's the reason it suddenly becomes hard, suddenly becomes a fight against the current rather than riding along with it.

Because when you want to be good at something, you analyze. You critique. You think long and hard at every little detail, and the floodgates that should be your creative surge are reduced to a tiny trickle, or may be blocked entirely. That's not to say that it's not important that you be good, or that the story needs to be good, but the "good" value needs to be assessed later. You iron out whether or not the story is good when you go back and edit. You don't think about that in the writing step.

In this case, after months of working on this thing and showing off some very rough drafts to a couple of people, well, let's just say that I've been getting some positive feedback. And I really like that. It makes me feel a little bit of reward at the end of each chapter, a bit of pleasure derived from what would otherwise be a very lonely process. I don't regret the decision I've made, because honestly, I don't think I would have come as far as I have if I didn't have my Designated Reader (Stephen King refers to the position as the Constant Reader, but I'm not him, so...). My reader was there to light a fire under my ass when I thought about quitting. Trust me, it becomes a lot harder to stop when you have somebody who wants to know how the story is going to end.

But after months of that good feedback, of hearing about how much this person has been enjoying the story? Well, now I feel like I'm required to maintain that streak of being good. I need to keep writing hits, need to keep up that intense pace, need to get it all right on the first try. Because I need to live up to the reputation that I've accrued over the past couple of months.

And that desire, that need to get it right on the first go... it's crippling. It's why I don't know where to go next. I remember in NaNoWriMo, where I didn't give two shits about being good or making sense, if I got stuck, I just did the first thing that came to mind. The plot was too dialog driven and introspective in the beginning? Something blows up. A new character appears to make trouble. Whatever it took to keep going. Even if those scenes turn out to be awful when I go back to edit the whole thing, at the time, they served their purpose of getting me out of the rut and back on the road.

When you're worried about being good, you don't feel the freedom to just have something blow up in the story. You worry about things like "well, I already used that technique" or "how does this fit with the rest of the story" or any of those other worries that keep you indecisive and ultimately, unable to progress.

I wrote all this out mostly for my own benefit, to remind myself and illustrate to myself why I'm stuck right now, why I need to ignore the desire to close this page and go play a video game or something. I need to open up Word and I need to sit there and I need to say "fuck being good" and I need to write.

Interesting side note: I took a glance at Google to find out the source of the quote. Turns out it was Voltaire, and the original quote was that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." So mine's a little bit different after all, but whatever. The thought is the same.

Male Writer, Female Character

2010-03-29T21:19:00.002-07:00

Two things occurred to me as I was walking back to my car today after class: I had a really good idea for a blog post and it had also been a shamefully long couple of weeks since I'd bothered to write a blog post. Ergo, my presence here tonight. Tonight's also a little bit unique in that usually, I novel-write before I blog, which means that this is all happening out of sequence. I think I'm okay with that, though; the sequence has been a little bit messed up, as of late.

So, anyway, as I was walking, I started thinking about male writers and female protagonists in stories, and in particular, my own story which centers around a female main character and is told from the first person perspective. When I first started thinking about the story several months back, it never occurred to me to ask why I always thought of my character as a "she," it just felt like part of my sense of the character's identity. And, indeed, as a character takes shape in the mind, there comes a point in which you really can't just arbitrarily change these things, because by then, the character feels like a real person in your mind, and you don't just... you don't just change that. Not without possibly losing whatever sense of personality you might have had.
My thoughts on my female character led me to wonder what it meant, that a heterosexual male like myself would choose to write in the persona of a female. Obviously, I have a great deal of affection for females and some of my very favorite characters are female (I might even venture to say that I could more readily name favorite female characters than I could male ones.) Originally, I thought that perhaps the female character is a way of making the character distinct from the male writer; that is to say, I cannot write myself into the story with a character who is fundamentally different from me, at least not without getting a creepy "she's me, but a chick."

It reminded me of when I still played online roleplaying games like World of WarCraft, and the female characters I created for that game. Most male gamers who play females will tell you their reason for doing so is some variation of "well, if I'm gonna stare at an ass for 80 levels, it might as well be a hot one." But that was never my reason for doing so.

Is it some kind of latent trans-gender thing? Do I choose to imagine myself in the mindset of a female character as I write out of some desire to explore my own feminine side? Possibly, especially considering how rare it is for males in our culture to be allowed to demonstrate any "feminine" traits, but that would imply that I feel some sort of oppression, which I don't really think is true. So it's not the imaginary experience of "being" female for a time, or at least, I don't think it is.

The conclusion that I came to, as I was walking, and that I come to now as I write out my thoughts, is that, at least for me, there is, indeed, a certain sense of intimacy when a male writer creates a female character. It's not some sort of twisted god complex, it's not some notion that I can make my imaginary female do whatever I now wish, especially since I don't really believe I can control the story once it starts to happen.

However, part of the appeal, if not part of the actual reason, is that yes, there is that level of intimacy between writer and character. As the story takes shape, as the character takes form, it all becomes real to a certain extent. The character becomes realized in a way that brings her out of my thoughts and places her in a space that can be shared with readers. Readers who may feel the affection that I feel for my character, or desire, or protectiveness, or whatever else a particular character evokes. Because, let's be honest, we've all felt something for our favorite characters, and I think there's a character in all of our minds that we wish was real, if only for a moment.

So there is at the core of it that level of intimacy, and being the writer means that I'm closer and more intimate with my female character than anybody else is or anybody else ever will be. I don't think of my character as myself nor do I think of her as something that I can control; rather, I think of her as an individual, separate from me and yet dependent by virtue of the fact that I'm the creator and the writer. It's that level of intimacy, I think, that drives me to write her not as some idealized vision of my own desires, but as the complete person that all good characters strive to be. There is the sense, even as I subject her to the story, even as I introduce her romantic interest, even as others read her and make a place for her in their own hearts and minds, that no one else will ever get to be her writer. No one else will ever get closer to her than I get to be.

I'm not sure what to make of that. Quite possibly, all of this is more telling about my own various little deep-seated emotional insecurities, fears, or whatever. It's entirely possible that I'm subconsciously projecting something, or maybe even blatantly declaring something about being a control freak. I don't know.

What I do know is that I freely admit to having a great deal of affection for my female protagonist; it might even be fair to say that I have a little bit of a crush on her.

I do not believe that this means that I some day hope to meet someone who has all of the characteristics of my character. This does not mean that I will wish, no matter who I meet, that they could be like my character. I do not hold her up as some ideal, some icon or standard of comparison. In fact, I don't know what it means, that I feel this affection at all. Maybe it means nothing.

And maybe it's why creating these characters is even worth doing in the first place.

The Importance of Good Cover Art

2010-03-14T20:16:00.005-07:00

Every so often, I find myself thinking about things like how the position of my desk influences my work ethic. Mostly because I don't want to think about other mundane things, like the fact that there are still unpacked boxes in my room from the move, even though we're well past the point of time where unpacked boxes are acceptable. It's one thing to have unpacked boxes a few days, or even a week after you move. But it's been, what, three weeks now?

Okay, so I just checked my calender and it's really only been two weeks. But still. I should finish unpacking them. Plus, I still have pictures to hang. It's one of my life's little neurotic quirks that I can't stand bare walls. There's just something about them that annoy me, which is why if there's a wall in my space that could fit a good picture of poster, well, damn it, there should be something there!

These are all thoughts of a mind that's spent a week feeling simultaneously inspired and crushed by the vagaries of life.

I really need to clean my desk off. And do laundry. And unpack those boxes.

I remember when I went to TusCon back in 2008 and won an award for a short story. It was a really exciting experience to be recognized by published (in other words, real) writers and not only get critique on my own little piece, but also talk with them extensively about writing and being a writer and all of that. The problem was at the time, I wasn't writing regularly, in fact, I wasn't writing at all. That short story was quite possibly the only thing I'd written over the course of the entire year and I can remember sitting there, feeling like I was some kind of fraud. I remember talking about a book I'd written when I was sixteen, and talking about the sequel that I stopped working on when I turned 18 or 19... can't really remember at this point.

I just remember wanting to feel so much like I belonged, like I deserved to be there. I remember not really having anything to say about writing, because what do you say at that point? You can't talk about your habits. You can't talk about feeling inspired. You can't talk about anything, because there's nothing there.

Why am I talking about this thing that happened two years ago?

I suppose it's because I went to the Tucson Festival of Books and met author John Gentile. I'd first heard about John through my mom, who read his work and really enjoyed them, and then ended up meeting him several times through some work connection (I don't precisely recall how that all played out.) Anyway, I'd heard a lot about him from my mom, so that when the opportunity presented itself to meet him yesterday, I was quite excited by the prospect.

And I was also rather nervous, because I remembered the TusCon thing. I remembered not knowing what to say. I remembered wanting to feel so much like I should belong, and feeling so awkward about it. I really didn't want that to happen again, and of course, it wasn't like that at all this time, because not only was John an amazingly approachable guy, I very much felt like the aspiring writer I've always tried to present myself as. Because, of course, I've been writing; because I have a story that I'm writing now, not something that was years in the past. I've come a long way in the four months since I first began working on "Fallen," and I'm really proud of that, and I'm proud of the fact that it's influenced my confidence as much as I have.

One other thing I wanted to note, in meeting John: he is very much the kind of writer that you hope you'll meet when you're an aspirant meeting a guy with his name on the cover. He was a pleasure to talk to and I remember consciously having to tell myself to step aside, because there was a line forming behind me of other people who wanted to meet him. One thing in particular that I remember was the fact that, unlike most people I've met, he didn't give me the bread-and-butter advice that I've heard and read a hundred times over: "just keep at it, just keep writing." I mean, yeah, that's great advice, quite possibly the single most important thing anybody's ever told me or ever will tell me, most likely, but at the same time, it's also the basic advice, the core, the foundation. It's something you hear when you're first starting out. We talked about pitching ideas and talking with agents and editors. In short, we talked, not about writing, but about the business of writing, the next step, in other words.

All of it made me feel very much like I belonged, like I was being treated like an actual fellow author (albeit unpublished) then just some kid with a dream of writing a book someday. And let me tell you, that made for a world of difference.

Also, he told me that it's important to have good cover art, which I completely agree with. So, really, the lesson I took away from the whole experience is find an artist who will do a great cover for me.

Important lessons, all around. Yesterday was a good day.

Putting It All Out There

2010-03-09T23:17:00.001-07:00

Something came up during my novel writing session tonight and I wanted to explore it a little more fully, outside of the context of the story writing itself. Specifically, I found myself working on a scene that really, really struck close to home after some personal events that took place this past weekend. And, well, I started thinking: should I let those feelings, those thoughts influence the scene? Should I write something different, due to the fact that I can't separate myself from the situation in question?

If all this sounds horribly vague, well, that's intentional; I don't really want to talk about the specifics due to one of those curious little blog quirks that I seem to have: privacy. I mean, on the one hand, I routinely bare my soul here and talk about all the fucked up shit that's going on in my convoluted and often chaotic brain, which is a picture far more honest and intimate (I think) than what you're likely to encounter if you were to, I dunno, talk to me directly.

On the other hand, when it comes to external things, things about people and places and events, well... then I get shy. Because I don't know how much I should talk about those things, how much of a right I have to talk about things to an unknown audience. Surely there's a line somewhere, between what should be placed in a public space and what is put in a public space. Granted, it's a line that not many people observe, but still... I think that it's there.

So, back to the original question at hand: how much do I try to preserve the "story" as its own separate entity and how much do I realize that everything that's on that page is because of me. Every character, every voice, every line, every word... it's all me. It sounds so horribly egotistical, but it's true; any writer that tells you otherwise is either speaking artistically or dishonestly. I mean, sure, I'll talk about my characters like they're separate people. Their motivations and goals are not the same as mine. They're not me; I'm not trying to write myself into my stories.

And yet, everything that they do, everything that they are, everything that their world is... it's all because of me. It wouldn't exist without me, it cannot be seperated from me. It's all me. Me, me, me, me.

In that context, why shouldn't I write something because that's how I'm feeling? Why shouldn't I express the thoughts that I want to express, even if they parallel something outside of the story? Is that somehow being dishonest? Is there some sort of artistic purity that means you can't write about what's on your mind during any given day?

I'm sure there's an artiste out there who would say yes, absolutely, your art is sacred and blah blah blah, don't blur the line between creator and work or it'll suck, or something to that extent. Man, eff that. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to write a Jack Chick tract here and convert my reader to my way of thinking, but the idea that you shouldn't put yourself into your works, shouldn't write what feels true to you... where the hell did that even come from? Why does it feel like that's the way it's supposed to be now?

Is it because somewhere along the line, we lost our nerve? We started getting afraid of what might happen if we shoved it all out into the open? It's already hard enough to face the specter of rejection; how much harder is it to be rejected or dismissed when the story is no longer just something you made, but something that's been made, in part, out of you?

I'd imagine that's a very scary thing to face. So, of course, that's what I'm doing.

Blocked

2010-03-06T15:09:00.000-07:00

I'm stuck on a story.

It's not my novel. It's a short story, for my writing class. You know, the thing that I do for my major, basically, the entirety of my academic focus. It's not that I didn't have an idea; I did have one. And I kicked it around in my head for a while, thought it had some legs, and finally sat down to try to write it...

Nothing. It's a horrible idea. Because it was just that. It was an idea. I didn't have a character for it. Didn't have a story to tell. Just had this weird thing that happened to me one day, that I thought might have been interesting. But there's nothing to say about it.

I'm kicking myself in the ass for volunteering to go first. Because this is my one shot, you know, my one chance to impress, to show that I've got the chops. I volunteered to go first because I was confident that I had this good idea, that I could nail this piece and everything would be awesome. What's driving me crazy right now, after my idea fell apart, is that I have to have something ready in two days, while my peers are going to have weeks... in some cases, even months to get their stories ready.

Why is it so hard right now? I've been sitting here for almost an hour, thinking, trying, focusing, unfocusing, all to no avail. Is it because I'm up against a deadline? Is it because I know that I have to get this thing right, and I need to have it in two days? Is it because I want it to be perfect so very, very badly, and the reality is that the perfect is the enemy of the good? That the fact that I want this so badly means I'm going to second guess myself and prevent my brain from ever taking the risks to make mistakes, even though those risks are necessary to tell any story?

Part of me wonders if some of my difficulty is because I allowed myself to slide on my writing schedule for the past... what, two weeks? I mean, sure, there was the PTQ two weeks ago, and then there was all the time that next week spent worrying about my grandmother and staying at her bedside, and then there was the move, and then there was that godawful paper I had to do, and now there's this... is that an adequate list to excuse myself from not living up to "Write Every Day?" It seemed to me, then, that it was, but now I'm not so sure. Maybe if I'd just chosen to power through the tough parts and written my goal anyway, I'd have the focus now to get through this tough spot. Maybe I made the wrong choice, after all.

And then I wonder if it's more to do with the fact that starting a new story is always the hardest part, at least for me. It's so much easier to continue writing a work that you've been doing for a few days, a few weeks, a few months... you may get stuck wondering where to go next, but you never have to deal with that first crippling uncertainty: what do I write? What story do I tell? Where do I begin?

Sometimes in the past, doing a blog entry like this when my thoughts are in chaos and my mind is swirling has helped me focus, helped me clear through some of the stuff that's driving me crazy. But I have to admit, right now, I don't feel refreshed, don't feel any more focused. All I feel is that I've got a deadline coming up in two days and I have no idea what I should be writing. All I feel is stress and frustration, both at myself and at my stupid decision to volunteer, to volunteer to go first. Why did I do that? I never do that.

Because if I hadn't have chosen to go first, you know, hadn't basically said that these past two weeks were going to be my specific crunch time, well, then I wouldn't be trying to write through a move, a family crisis, and one of the most frustrating and awful papers I've ever had to do. I could have actually sat and focused and tried to work through this story.

I wish an idea would come to me.

Cluttered Thoughts

2010-02-22T21:51:00.000-07:00

Work progresses on the novel, albeit slowly. More and more, I find my mind wandering, find myself thinking of other stories I'd like to tell. I'm not quite sure how to feel about this, to be honest. In one sense, I feel anxious because I would hate to burn out on this project, not now, not after 94,000 words. On the other hand, maybe that signals that I'm getting close to the end this time, that the initial writing phase is nearing completion and my mind is already moving head, wondering what the next project will be. I think I'd like that, actually, because it would mean I could start on the editing process for the current story, which would place me that much closer to sharing it with other people... and maybe even publishing it.

For a long time now, I've wanted to tell a story about dragons. At various times, I've made a few attempts. In particular, I can recall one ambitious epic I'd outlined and written the first chapter for, about this crazy world of magic and technology, and a zombie plague, and dragon hunters, and how a dragon would save the world. I can't remember what I was going to call it. All I know is that I thought and thought and thought about the story, but never got it going, never got it off the ground. In hindsight, I think that it was probably a good thing that I never tried to write that story, because dragons don't lend themselves well to being main characters in your typical fantasy epic (or even your atypical fantasy/sci-fi amalgam) since, you know, they can fly 'n stuff. Flight is one of those things that pretty much destroys any sort of "journey story" since you can just skip right over to the finale. Consider how much shorter the Lord of the Rings would have been if they'd just ridden an eagle to Mount Doom. (Yes, I know that there are story reasons for why they didn't do that but that's not my point here).

There are a lot of reasons why I want to tell a dragon story, and yet, there are reasons why I'm afraid to try. I think it means confronting and trying to explain why they matter to me, why I've taken something so prevalent and iconic in fantasy and mythology and made some sort of personal claim to it, adopted it as a symbol of sorts for myself. I worry that maybe I'm too close, maybe I'm too attached, that maybe the fact that I love dragons, the idea of them, all of that... maybe it means I won't be able to write the kind of story I want to write. Maybe I'm embarrassed to try, because it means opening up that part of myself to an audience that may embrace, dismiss, or worse, openly denigrate in response.

And yet, maybe that same attachment is why I know that I should try. Because this is something that's part of me, part of my mind, for better or for worse, and part of me needs to know if I can do it, if I can capture the experience as I know it and translate those feelings into language.

It's far too early to think about what the next story should be. For one thing, I need to devote a significant portion of my creative energy to coming up with my short story for my writing class, since, you know, it's due by March 8th and will be reviewed by all of my peers and my professor. Not that I'm nervous about that or anything. Okay, I lied. I'm totally nervous.

I do have the idea for that story in mind, and it's very likely that, even before I finish "Fallen" I'll pause my work on that to dedicate my nightly writing sessions to writing that story. So, honestly, all this talk about what comes next after "Fallen" is quite premature, and really, the only reason I'm blogging about it is because it's what's on my mind right now and the entire purpose of this space is for me to voice my thoughts, mostly so they don't remain all cluttered in my brain.

Anyway, there's a lot to do, and quite a few things that are dominating my very immediate future, including that short story and some essays and the fact that I'm moving this weekend and... yeah, so you might say I've still got a lot on my mind.

And Time Is Still Marching On

2010-02-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

It occurs to me, from time to time, that I do a lot of work that has no bearing on my academic career. This is typically a point that's driven home for me when I realize that having encroaching paper due dates will most likely cut into my blogging and possibly even my novel writing time. Which is a weird thing to think about, to be honest.

So, like an idiot, I volunteered to be the first person to present my short story for workshop in my fiction class in a few weeks. March 22nd is the date. No biggie, I thought smugly as I watched the professor write my name in the slot. That's plenty of time to write a fifteen page short story. Side note: it always amuses me how relaxed I am about longer assignments... it's just hard to get dismayed by fifteen pages when I'm working on something that's currently 163 pages, single spaced.

Wait. Something was off, something in the back of my mind told me I was missing an important calculation, something that would change the entire meaning of this equation. What was it, what was it, what...

I consulted my planner. Checked dates. Nope, nothing the week of the 22nd. I'm good there.

And just a reminder, the professor said, be sure to have copies of your story a week before your workshop date, so we have time to look over them. Still not a problem, March 15th is a long ways off, too. Not quite as long as the 22nd, but.... oh wait. Wait.

Oh.

March 15th is part of that magical time of the year known to college students as "Spring Break." Which meant no class before my presentation. Which meant... that I'd have to turn my story in the week before that. Which meant turning it in on the 8th.

Which meant I have to be ready in three weeks.

Well, shit.

The good news is that I have a pretty good idea for a story, I think. I mean, I hope I do; I guess I won't really know until I actually start working on it, which I really, really should do soon. Fortunately for me, the way I see it, I'm already in the habit of writing every day. So, really, it shouldn't be difficult to replace my novel writing time for short story writing time. I can start that tomorrow, and since I'm still writing, it completely fits in with my goal of Write Every Day. Hey, this won't be so bad!

So why do I feel like my writing class is interfering with my stated goal of being a writer?

How very, very odd.

Who Am I

2010-02-14T23:37:00.000-07:00

Who are we?

Who am I? Who are you?

It's one of the most important questions we can ever ask, right up there with "why" (which is the single most important question, I think) and "how do we know that we really know anything?" The question of who one is... it's a question that seeks to compress the entirety of an individual human experience into... what, exactly? Something that can be answered in a sentence? A page? A book? Something that can be translated into mere language, mere words?

How do you even try to answer that question? Where do you begin? Do you talk about what you do, what you've done, what you hope to do in the future? But then you've not really answered the question, have you? Not the question I'm asking, anyway. You've told me what you've done, what you do, what you will do. You haven't told me who you are.

I can ask the question of you, of myself, of anybody in the world. I can get a thousand answers, a million, a billion, and all of them will answer a variation of "what" instead of "who?"

For the record, I understand the difference between who and whom. I just don't care about it as much as I do other bad habits of speech; "who" just happens to sound better in most cases. So there. Moving on.

I'm a writer. I'm a gamer. I'm a cat owner, an apartment renter. A student, and not a great one at that. I'm a son. A friend. Maybe even a best friend. A brother. Maybe some day I'll be a father. All things that answer the question of what I am. Not who.

I like music and movies. I like books. I like the color purple. I don't like spiders. I like vanilla. I like to think that I'm a romantic. I like feeling witty and clever. I don't like stupid people.

All variations of what. What I am, what I like, what I do, what I want. What, what, what. I can never describe who. Even my name doesn't really answer the question; it might tell you who I am, in the sense of identity, in the sense that you can now distinguish me from the other 6.6 billion people in the world in some small way. But who is Matthew, exactly? My name is something that my parents gave me; it has a meaning, a meaning that might even describe me, if I'm lucky, but it wasn't created for me. There are other people who share the same name, other people who the name describes.

Don't we need to know this question? Don't we need to be able to know who we are? We walk around every day and see our fellow humans, our fellow men and woman, and we see the faces and the masks, and we're all aware, in some small sense, that no one is ever who they truly appear to be. We all have secrets. Thoughts we don't ever, ever share, however small and insignificant. We all have moments we're not proud of, we all have and do things that we think are "out of character" at times. We're not really like that, we say and think later. That's not who we are. Not who I am. That person, that other person, he's not me.

But how can I say that, how can I think that and believe that when I don't even know who I am?

Winterborn 77

2010-02-13T01:44:00.000-07:00

When was the last time I did this? Tuesday night? Is it possible that entire days have slipped by without my noticing? It would seem so.

And to think, you might have wondered why the tagline or the sub-title or whatever the fuck you call that line underneath the title was a poignant query: "What did I do yesterday?"

I can recall writing. And... other things.

It was entirely my intention to miss only a single day of the blog schedule. But I can't quite recall, now, which day that was supposed to be. Was it Wednesday? I think it was Wednesday, as, if memory serves, that was a night dominated first by a rousing game of Dungeons & Dragons, a game that ran well into the wee hours of the morning. I recall a certain feeling of trepidation as I said my immortal words, in the manner of who rightly calls himself The Master of Dungeons And All They Contain Therein: "And I think we'll call it there for the night. Good game, guys."

Long pause. Glance at clock. I think it was approaching 2 AM. Or maybe 3 AM. It was well past the midnight hour, I can assure you!

Then: "Oh, fuck me. I still have to do my writing for the night."

I did, indeed, do my writing for that night, as I have now done reliably for what is, by my count, a solid two weeks without missing a day. It's gotten to the point, as it did during NaNoWriMo that "doing my writing" is just this thing, this aspect of my life that I have to do, whether I want to or not. I'm proud of myself for that, even though I haven't wanted to write at all during this week. But I wrote anyway, and you know, it may not be all that good, it may be that when I go back and edit the work, I look back on this time with derision. "I really just should have stayed away from my keyboard that week," Future Me might say with a smirk.

But, Goddamnit, I wrote anyway. And I'm glad that I did. Because this is my life, bitches, this is a thing that I use to define myself as a person. It's not what I do, not the way I want to pay the bills. It's something that's a part of me, that's inseprable from the greater whole of my person. I cannot willingly diverge from the act, not now, not when I know that to do as such is to backslide into depression and a grim, joyless existence.

You may think I'm exaggerating. I challenge you to go browse the archives of my previous blog. Read a few entries. Note the tone and the subject. And then note the dates between entries.

I wrote two short stories in the past two years, prior to 2009.

I worked on my novel manuscript, the sequel to my very first novel, maybe twice in all of 2009. And prior to that, I don't think I'd even taken a crack at it since 2007. I wasn't a writer, then. I might have told myself, and others, that I was one, and very much wanted to be one. But I wasn't writing, and as such, you cannot be any certain title or thing unless you first engage in the behavior embodied by said title.

But now, here I am, writing every day even though I don't feel like it most days, blogging even though maybe ten people (at best) read this, and you know what? I feel fucking awesome as a result.

It's gotten to the point now where this novel of mine, this Write Every Day thing that I put to myself as a challenge has begun to matter more to me than being a university student? I'm not sure if that's a statement as to the level of immersion I have towards my studies, or an indication that my priorities are just that twisted.

I saw snow today at the mall on campus. It was fucking incredible.

I Really Don't Feel Like It

2010-02-09T22:33:00.000-07:00

Really didn't want to write tonight.

I just didn't, still don't really, feel like I have much to say. Some days are like that. Some days, it's not that you feel too tired, too overworked, too whatever. Some days, you just don't feel like anything. Some days, there's just nothing on your mind worth sharing.

And yet, those are the days that I feel it's absolutely the most important to make the effort to stick with the schedule, to focus on the goal of Write Every Day. Because it's not the bad days that break routines. It's days like this one. Days where you don't have any real good excuse other than "I don't feel like it." Because it's easy to say "I don't feel like it" every day, and that's how you fall into the Nirvana Fallacy that I wrote about a while back; where you get into the habit of waiting for that "perfect day" to dedicate to writing. You know the day I'm talking about, even if you're not a writer. That magical day "some day in the future," where you'll feel like doing all the things you keep putting off. You'll balance the check book, clean out the closet, get started on that novel you've been telling people about since you were sixteen. Just need to have that perfect day. Then everything will be great.

That day never comes. Ever.

Oh, sure, there might be a day here and there where you feel really inspired. Days where the motivation is kicking and you get a lot of things done. I know there were days where the feeling that "I really should write" led me to sit down at the computer, bang out a thousand words, declare myself satisfied with my effort... and then allow myself to lapse for another four weeks.

You can't live your life waiting for that perfect day, where you'll have the time, energy and initiative to do everything you know you need to do.

That's a powerful life lesson, I think, one that extends far beyond writing. So many excuses start with "as soon as." As a world class procrastinator, I know all too well the allure of "as soon as." I'll get started on my book again as soon as class is over, so I'll have more time. I'll start writing as soon as class begins, because class always makes me think about writing and that gets me to do it. I'll start as soon as I feel better. As soon as I have a day off. As soon as I'm done playing video games.

And on, and on, into infinity.

That's why I can't allow myself to slack off on these days where I don't feel like it, when there's a million other things I'd rather be doing. Because there won't be many of those days where I "do" like it, unless I make them. Most of the time, when I sit down to write, I'm wanting to do other stuff, and it's not until the page gets going and the voices come alive in my mind that the work becomes a joy (and sometimes, not even then.)

What can I say? Writing is hard.

That doesn't change the fact that I love it, or the fact that every day I can mark off as a success in the goal of "Write Every Day" means that I feel that much better about myself and my life. And to top it all off, eventually, I'll have a book to show for it! Score! As well as a consistently updated blog, which is something I've always dreamed of having, and so rarely managed to actually achieve.

Now, if I could only find the same motivation to attend class every day as I seem to have found for both blogging and my novel. Then I'd be all set.

Maybe I need to tell myself that tomorrow is Day One of "Go To Class Every Day." See how many days I can go without skipping, oversleeping or missing a class.

Actually, that's a pretty good idea. I think I'll do that. Starting now.

Guilty Pleasure

2010-02-08T22:23:00.003-07:00

I spent the day reading.

It really wasn't my intention, since I had things to do today; really needed to get my car down to the mechanic so he can hopefully fix the whole "my car doesn't start when it's cold, or when it rains, or when it doesn't feel like it" problem. And I've been having this really annoying pain in my jaw, which my ever-so-helpful brother insists means I need a root canal, so there was that whole "make an appointment with the dentist" thing. There was the class thing, which I didn't do because of the car thing, and the fact that I just... couldn't find the motivation to make myself go. That's a horrible reason for missing a class, but it's the truth, and frankly, if you feel the need to lie to your blog, well, I'm not judging you, I'm just saying... maybe you have issues, dude.

So I pretty much frittered away my time reading books.

I say frittered, because they weren't particularly important books.Omen and Abyss, by Christie Golden and Troy Denning, respectively. I say they're not important books, and that's because they're both Star Wars novels, which has for a long time now been a guilty pleasure of mine. Some of it (a lot of it, actually) has to do with the fact that, especially in my teenage years, Star Wars novels were basically all that I read for a while. You might say it had an impact on me, especially when The Last One Standing remains my favorite short story to this very day, or at least, it's the one I can quote almost line by line. And yeah, it's a Star Wars story, about perennial bad ass Boba Fett (at least as far as the EU material is concerned.)

As a little side note, I've read some of Christie Golden's work before, from the WarCraft universe, and I think that she really should write a book in an original setting. The first half of Arthas, where she's allowed to tell her own story instead of just following the preordained canon, was quite good, and I really liked her new character Vestara in the Omen novel.

Although I'm a Star Wars geek (and really, many other flavors of Geek, but I do have that purple lightsaber on display in my living room, so, you know) there's something about the Star Wars books that have always just been a source of consternation for me. I suppose it's because I can see them for what they are, and cringe appropriately at all the flaws that I would have cheerfully ignored at 13. For one thing, the galaxy, despite having a name and backstory for every single alien that appears in every single movie, is really quite small, focusing on a handful of individuals over pretty much every moment of their entire lives. The setting is larger than Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia, and so on, or at least, it could and should be.

Second, when you're working with such iconic characters, you get the feeling that the author isn't really free to use his or her own voice to tell the story, because we all know who Luke Skywalker is from the movies, and the comics, and the mountain of books that came before the one you're reading now. This is one of the main problems I have with "shared universe" fiction, or at least, a problem I have with characters written by more than one author. There's no chance to really feel that personal, intimate connection between author and character. You might "get" Luke Skywalker, you might understand who he is, what he sounds like, what he'd do in the scenario that you've presented to him. But you don't own him. You don't get to be him when you're writing him. You're just borrowing him.

All of those things, as well as several others, such as the fact that no serious, literate individual would admit to reading Star Wars books, and you have to wonder, why do I keep reading? And not just reading... but devouring. I remember reading through all nine books of the Legacy of the Force series in about two days. I started Omen last night, finished it this morning, promptly went into Abyss and finished that, too. There's just something about these books that draws me in and makes me want to stay there for a while. I get lost in the universe, the galaxy far, far away, for a while, and maybe it reminds me of simpler times, when I was a kid sitting on my bed, rereading my Han Solo novel for the zillionth time? Maybe it reminds me of how much the movies captivated me when I was younger?

Maybe it's because the novels don't have to be all that good, because they're trying to be something else: pure escapism, which isn't a bad thing. When I get into these books, I lose myself in them, to such an extent that when I get interrupted, I feel like I've been dragged back out into the real world. I remember driving down to the mechanic feeling disoriented and out of sorts, wishing I could just get back into my book as soon as possible. Not because I had to know how it ends, not because it was the most amazing thing I'd ever read, but simply because I liked being in that place.

I'm not sure, but I think that's a pretty cool thing for a book to do.

And so I'll continue with my guilty pleasure, even as my literary training tells me all the reasons I should be ashamed of myself and forces me to focus on all the flaws that have no place in my brain alongside the "great literary works." I'll continue, because more and more, I find myself not caring about certain things. I don't care any more about all those great literary works that I absolutely must read, or else be branded an ignorant troglodyte. I can't tell you how many classics I find boring, how many fail to captivate me, and yet I'm expected to regard them as holy relics, why? Because they're literature?

I say no. I can understand, in an academic sense, why the Mona Lisa is an amazing artistic accomplishment. I understand why Mozart is considered a master composer, why his symphonies are so highly respected. But that doesn't change the fact that my favorite piece of "art" is the poster I have of a dragon on my wall, and my favorite song wasn't written by Mozart, but by a guy singing about zombies, and why, although I get why I should love literature, the truth is, I really, really just like reading stories.

I like stories that make me happy, or make me sad, or make me anxious. I like stories that I can escape in, for a while, stories that make me turn the pages as quickly as I can get through them. I like stories and characters and adventures and yes, even silly, awesome things like lightsabers. I don't care that it's not academically impressive. I don't care that it's not cool.

It's what I like to read and I'm fucking sick of the fact that so many individuals in my academic world look down so disdainfully on the stories that enjoy. I'm sick of the fact that all we talk about in my class about novels is fucking bullshit about how "the novel represents the destruction of society and the freedom of the mind from an oppressive world." That doesn't mean jack shit to me. You know why I like novels? Why I like reading at all?

Because I love stories.

Because telling stories is what I do.

I don't care about anything else. I don't care about the beauty on the page, I don't care about the important contribution that this book or that book made to the world, I don't care. It's all just so much bullshit, so much posturing, so much an attempt to prove that storytelling doesn't matter unless it's literature.

But you know what? At the end of the day, in the final analysis, no matter how much you want to draw a distinction between literature and "genre trash," no matter how much you want to disparage popular fiction and bemoan for the glory days of "real writing," the truth is that all these ideas about what novels are, what literature is and what the rest of writing isn't don't fucking matter. Because, in the end, you know what?

We're all just doing a more sophisticated version of what our ancestors did thousands of years ago: making paintings on cave walls and telling each other tales by firelight.

Meaning And Intention

2010-02-07T01:54:00.001-07:00

So there's something that's been on my mind for the past couple of days, as the result of two different conversations with two different people. In the first instance, I was talking about the characters in my book and realized that, taken in a certain context, my characters really represent a pretty powerful metaphor for the issues of one's sexual identity and whether gender is something defined by a person's body, or by the mental image one has for one's self.

In the other conversation, we were talking about Avatar, and whether it was "too preachy."

Now, my thoughts on the matter (I'm building to a larger point, don't worry) is that for a movie to be "preachy," the message has to be the point. There are undeniably movies that have a message, that tell a certain story because the creator wants the audience to understand and hopefully come to accept his or her personal view. The message is the focus, it's the entire purpose for the movie. The story is entirely a device for conveying that message.

On the other hand, you have movies in which the message is entirely incidental to the message that one takes away from the film. Avatar, in my opinion, is a good example of this. While it certainly has all the tropes in place about overthrowing the evil capitalistic machine that seeks to despoil the pristine natural world, I don't think James Cameron really wants us to walk out of his movie and run off to the rainforest to fight logging or whatever. All of the tropes invoked, despite perhaps conveying that particular message, were largely inconsequential; they happened only because that's the particular story Cameron wanted to tell.

One might say that a writer or director or creative person should be cognizant of the message that invariably appears in their works. If it wasn't Cameron's intention to portray modernity as an evil force in Avatar, he shouldn't have made them all seem like such bastards. He should have told a different story, or been more careful about the story he was telling.

I don't think that's fair, though. Speaking entirely from the perspective of a creative type, you tell the story that you want to tell. You tell the story that's on your mind, in your heart, the one you feel passionately about. You make the story that you want to make. So, my little novel about a fallen angel turns out to have some powerful metaphors about transgendered individuals and perceptions of sexual identity. Okay. Awesome. That doesn't mean that's why I wrote it, and that doesn't mean that's what I'm trying to tell people who will read my story. It's just something that happened as a result of the particular story I chose to tell.

The reality is that when you make something, be it a movie or a novel, as soon as you release it into the world, it's no longer yours. As soon as it enters the mind of your reader, or your audience, it becomes theirs to do with as they will (violations of copyright notwithstanding, of course). They can read into it how they wish, take away from it whatever they wish to take away from it. You can tell them they are wrong, that such a message was not your intent, and you might well be right... but that won't stop them. It shouldn't stop them, because all too often, the work in question is larger than the creator. The work will have layers that the creator never even dreamed existed, because in so many ways, the creator is little more than a conduit for the story itself, the means by which the story is brought into the world.

If a movie specifically tells me to run out and save all the trees, and the director made said movie with that specific goal in mind, okay, fine. That's the message. But if a director makes a movie about a beautiful natural world and an invading force, and the point of the story is to become engaged with the characters and the world he or she has created, then the message is largely inconsequential. My inadvertent metaphor about sexual identity does not mean I have personal opinions on the matter, or that I want my readers to embrace my opinions. It's just something that happened, it's a sort of baggage that carries along as a result of invoking storytelling tropes and using a shared language in which volumes of meaning are often embodied in something as small as a single word choice.

Thoughts On Day One

2010-02-06T00:44:00.002-07:00

I'm going to go on record as saying that a good beer really can make or break the writing experience for me. I don't know how it works for you, but for me? Nothing beats having that bottle on the desk next to my monitor. I'm not sure if it's the ritual of it, or the fact that it's an image so deeply ingrained in the popular culture, or if I just really like beer, but it really helps.

No, really. When you get stuck on a scene, and you know you can nail it, if you can just get the words right, having that distraction really helps take my mind off the fact that, damn it, I'm stuck. Because realizing that you're stuck is the quickest way to get even more stuck... to get stucker... or whatever the fuck you call it.

If you're curious, tonight, I was drinking Drop Top Amber Ale. I'm told by people who know things about this sort of thing that this beer is brewed right here in Tucson. If it is, and you're in Tucson, you should look for some. If not, you have my condolences, as it's a very good beer.

I was at the supermarket today with my mom, doing some shopping as is the custom in such establishments. It's sort of become a ritual for us, to do our shopping together, because both of us absolutely hate shopping, me especially. So it's become equal parts act of necessity (everybody's gotta eat, after all) equal parts opportunity to spend some time together, since I find that it becomes all too easy to slip into my own little world if I don't work to remain connected to my family.

Anyway, the first time we did this little shopping trip together, I remember walking around in this, I don't know what you'd call it. This daze. This ennui. I didn't care about being there. I didn't have anything to say. I wasn't angry, wasn't sad, wasn't anything. My mom said she was worried about me, said I seemed like I was depressed. Said I should really go talk to a doctor, you know, just to get everything checked out. I can't say I disagree with her opinion, since I don't have anything against doctors even though I stubbornly refuse to visit them. Don't ask me why, I don't have a reason.

And yes, if you're wondering, this particular shopping trip took place before I'd rededicated myself to the personal goal of "Write Every Day."

So, tonight was our biweekly (wait, is biweekly every week, or twice a week? I can never remember) and while we're cruising the shelves, filling our respective carts, I asked my mom if I seemed better than the last time we were out. We'd talked a few times about how I'd been feeling, so she knows that I'd begun writing again. She said the change that writing has on my personality is amazing. I joked that I didn't know whether I should be grateful that I know how to manage my depression so effectively, or if I should be distressed that I depend on writing to maintain my mental health.

I still don't actually know which I should be.

If there's a point in this rambling little anecdote, it's that I like feeling this way. Even more than I like the feeling of writing, even more than I like seeing the story develop and the characters come to life, even more than I like the happy little fantasies about publishing and having people read my story, I like feeling good. I like feeling proud of myself, I like feeling positive. I like not being miserable.

I like being me. I like being the me that feels complete and fulfilled, the me that feels like he's doing what he should be doing with his life. That's a rare thing, I think, a comfortable assurance that some people may spend their entire lives looking for. I'm not saying that I've got it all figured out yet, or that this is the only thing I'm ever going to do, or the only thing that I was meant to do. I mean, for one thing, that makes it sound like I have a destiny, and I certainly don't believe in that.

And, Mom, I know that you read this from time to time, although it might be several days or weeks before you make it to this entry. When you do read it, I want you to remember what I told you tonight, about being my inspiration, not for my characters or for my story, but for inspiring me to make the commitment to Write Every Day. Like I told you before, you're the example I have for not stopping even though sometimes I really, really want to stop.

You're the one who keeps me from going back to Day One, and the posts in this blog are evidence of how much that means to me. And you know what? Even if I do falter, even if I do fail, even I do quit... you're also my inspiration for climbing back up and starting at Day One all over again.

The Mind Maelstrom

2010-02-05T00:32:00.000-07:00

Some days, I forget that I have a blog.

Actually, that's not true. Certainly, there are days where I wish I didn't have a blog. Just like there are days where I wish I didn't want so badly to write and publish a novel. But those are just some days, and usually, they're rare days. Ironically enough, the secret to making myself feel better about those days is to write in my blog and work on my novel, because then these two things are no longer a source of anxiety and personal consternation, but become achievements that I can take pride in.

Speaking of pride (which is a Mortal Sin, or so I'm told), I'm proud of myself for not yet breaking my goal of "Write Every Day." It was particular difficult last night, when the D&D game didn't break until about 12:30 and I didn't even sit down to write until about 1 AM. The fact that I did it even though I was tired, even though I really, really, really didn't want to do it has done a lot for my personal morale. The fact that I didn't reach the thousand work mark, which is sort of my informal daily milestone, doesn't even bother me that much.

I didn't reach the 1k goal tonight, either, although I rationalized it by saying that 800 or so words is pretty close to a thousand, and I had to write a scene for my fiction class, and at least I put in a pretty solid effort, so my stupid fucking neurotic voice can just shut its stupid mouth and go back to the dark corner of my mind. Yeah, I should that part of... myself. Awesome.

I have a pretty back toothache that seems to be getting steadily worse. Going to be paying a visit to the dentist tomorrow, even though I really don't like dentists. I especially didn't like my last one, with his whole "fuck painkillers, you'll barely even feel the drill" mentality when it came to drilling cavities. Uh, no fucking thank you, doc, in my book, there's a pretty big difference between "hardly" and "not." For example, I'd much rather be "not dead" or "not in pain" than "barely dead" or "barely in pain."

Got a good recommendation for a new place, though, so tomorrow, we'll go see what's what. I'm certain that there will be bad news. Like, not just the usual "you have cavities" bad news, but something along the lines of "the entire inside of your upper jaw is rotting from the inside out and will have to be surgically removed. Don't worry, you'll barely even notice it's gone."

Damn it, there's that word again.

Is it a bad sign that I really wished I had a beer to enjoy while I was working on my novel tonight? At the time, I tried to rationalize that a drink would have giving me something to occupy my mind during the pauses while I'd think about what the next line should be. Now, though, I'm not so sure the desire is quite that innocent.

I suppose it's a good sign that I didn't just go straight for the bottle of Crown Royal, yeah? That'd be the sign of a truly hardened, horribly cliched alcoholic writer.

Damn it, now I'm thinking about that bottle of Crown.

There's A Door And There's A Key

2010-02-03T00:32:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how good it feels, to be doing this again. To feel confident about myself and to have this sense of certainty, when I wonder if I'm living my life the way I'm supposed to be, if it's the "right" way. Rarely are we able to have any such assurances, I think, so I'm happy to take whatever I can get.

Lately, I've been thinking about whether or not I should try to release my current novel as two separate works, rather than the single massive volume it's shaping into. I originally decided to continue the manuscript because I felt that I wasn't yet ready to stop telling the story, and also because I felt the first work was just a little bit too short. But now as I get further and further into the new narrator and the new work, it's really begun to take on a life of its own. That's a good thing, I think, it shows a certain level of organic growth in the characters and my understanding of them. But does that mean that this is a new novel?

I wonder, when I do go back and do the editing process, will I find myself adding here and there so much that it increases my manuscript to an acceptable "novel length?" Or will I cut more than I add? Or should I even bother worrying about such things? The point, after all, is not to try to write towards some arbitrary number of pages or words, but to compose until the story is done. Done could be at 50,000 words or 100,000.

I'm not going to stop writing on what I've been referring to more and more as "Book II." But maybe it's time to embrace that it's really going to be its own book. Maybe it's time to do some editing even as I keep going with the writing. It's a thought that makes me both anxious and excited. Excited, because really, how cool would it be to have one manuscript done and be able to say I'm working on another one; that's like seriously heavy writer dedication there.

Anxious, because, let's face it, the creative part, the writing part... that's the best part. Editing is more work than anything, and the idea of trying to get published? Well, as much as I want to get this story out of my hands and into the world, the idea of publishing is pretty terrifying. Rejection will be there. You can bet your ass on that. Rejection is part of life, whether you are a writer or not. Writers just seem to get the dubious advantage of having their rejections occur in a codified and tangible letter that makes the whole thing seem more real.

So that's where my head is at tonight. I'm glad to be writing and I'm thinking about all of these different things about what to do with this story of mine, this baby that I've been... working on doesn't really sound like the right word. One doesn't "do work" on a baby. But the reality is that this is my baby, this thing has been in my mind and in my dreams and on my fingertips for a good few months now. When is it time to start the process of letting go, of preparing it to be sent off into the world?

I wonder if this is what parents go through. I wouldn't know, myself, not being one. But if it is, wow.

Stressful doesn't even begin to cover it.

On Gaming

2010-02-01T01:17:00.000-07:00

So it looks like seven posts per month is going to be the new standard? I'll be honest, I'm not sure if I should aim for seven for February so the archive will have a nice sort of symmetry, or focus on getting back on track, writin as much as I can as often as I can. The former would certainly feed my latent OCD tendencies, while the latter would produce better writing and a better me, since I'm happier when I'm writing (as we've discussed) and I've noticed that when I'm being prolific, it shows no matter what I'm working on. I get more polished, more crisp, more focused, when I'm writing every day. That's not just my own opinion either, but something that I've had people tell me. When I work every day, when I make the commitment to do this every day, it shows in the final product. And that's worthwhile.

I don't know if this happens to other people, but I find myself engaging in all kinds of mental gymnastics when it comes to my work. I spend far too much time thinking about what kind of music produces the best writing, whether what I ate that day has any effect on my creativity, whether I played any video games, and on and on and on. To some extent, I've noticed a few correlations, especially in the video game connection, although oddly, not quite in the way you'd expect.

It'd be entirely reasonable to assume that playing video games leads to a reduced work output as I struggle to balance the need to write with the desire to game. And yet, I've come to realize that it's not so much the time I spend gaming, but what I'm playing that really effects how I feel about writing and how much writing I'll manage to get done. In particular, single player games, especially those with strong stories, really serve to inspire me and motivate me to tell my own stories; Dragon Age, in particular served as a great resource when I'd get stuck on trying to make a character's voice sound distinctive.

On the other hand, multiplayer games (both of the MMO and competitive variety) absolutely murder my work ethic. I know that I definitely went on a bit of a spree with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and that for a few weeks there, I was playing it as often as I could and far more than I should have been. As I showed with the Dragon Age example, I don't think that games are necessarily damaging to my work... they can sometimes be a helpful resource for getting my mind thinking and coming up with my own characters and ideas. But multiplayer games... that's another story, if you'll pardon the lame ass pun.

In multiplayer games, I'm not thinking about characters, or voices, or story. I'm thinking about the game, about winning, about doing whatever it takes to play as hard as I can and do the best that I can. And that competitive drive, that desire to win shuts down the other parts of my brain. There's no voice when I'm playing to win, there's no pondering about what sort of epic narrative might be spawned from my struggle; there's only me, and my opponents, and my objective. Nothing else.

The other problem with the multiplayer games is that they're terrible time sinks in a way that Dragon Age and other single player games could never be. That seems a little bit odd, since it's the single player RPGs that get the reputation for being massive, 60 hours or more a playthrough. The problem, though, is that with Dragon Age, yeah, I'd play it for a long stretch at a time, but it was easier to pace myself, easier to say, "okay, I've played enough for tonight." This happened for a few reasons; within the context of the story being told, there were moments of rising action, climax, and falling action, as you moved from chapter to chapter in that particular narrative, and so there were natural stopping points where it was okay to sign off for the night. Also, although I was very, very excited to complete the game and find out "what happens," there's also the sobering knowledge that part of the thrill in a single player game is the feeling you get when everything's new, when you don't know how it's going to end or what's around the corner. When you find a game that you really, really love, and maybe if you're like me, you try to make that experience last for as long as you can.

Multiplayer, on the other hand... there's no balance, no ebb and flow. There's just the conflict, the victory, the defeat, and then the next game. And the urge to play "just one more game" is overwhelming. It's all-consuming. It's addicting. So many times over the past month would I find myself logging in to Modern Warfare to play for "a few games," only to realize that I'd been playing for hours on end. And even after realizing that it was getting late, that I should do some writing, the urge to play "just one more game" was hard to resist.

Don't get me wrong, I love the multiplayer aspect. I love playing games with my friends. I love the competition. But more and more, as I feel my World of WarCraft days fade further and further into my past, as I realize it's been more than half a year since I "seriously" played that game, which is the longest I've gone without it since I first began playing in 2005, I realize that there is a very dangerous "too much of a good thing" going on with our games today. I can recall, quite clearly, a younger version of me who squeezed every last drop of playability out of my games. I remember always trying to find more things to do in games, anything to make the game last longer. Maybe that was because games were shorter back in those days or maybe it was because I had way more free time as a kid. Maybe a little of both, I don't know.

What I do know is that somewhere along the way, the whole "all good things must come to an end" rule got broken. The multiplayer game where you could play for as long as you had someone to play with became the massively multiplayer game, which were also called persistent worlds in the either days, and were very much defined by the fact that they did not end. Ever. You played until you burnt out, or something new came along, or your life shattered and you were dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world.

I love Dragon Age; it's currently my favorite game to play and I'm sure will be for a while yet. But I know that no matter how much I love Dragon Age, there will come a time when I'm done with it, when it will be time to move on, because there's nothing left to do. It happened before, with Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It happened with Mass Effect. It happened with Oblivion. It happened with Morrowind. No matter how much I loved those games, eventually, it was time to go. That is not to say that I love them any less now; I have fond memories of all of those games, memories that I'll keep with me and cherish. But there came a natural end to my playing of those games. There was a point when I was done.

Multiplayer and massively multiplayer games don't have that natural, gentle break. They go on and on and on, into infinity, essentially, since the only thing that'll stop you from playing is you. There's no natural break. There's no sense, ever, that it's time to let go and move on. At one point, I thought that was kind of cool; after all, if you're having fun, you don't want the fun to end. The last page of a good book always makes you a little sad that it's over. It sucks when you realize the credits are about to roll on a great movie. You aren't ready to leave when those things happen.

And yet, I can't help but feel that's the difference between playing games as a child and playing them now as an adult. I shudder to think about what would have happened to be if there were MMOs when I was a kid, when I was utterly incapable of grasping the idea that too much of a good thing was even possible. If I could conceive of such a thing, it would be only in the very vaguest sense. Here, now, at this point in my life, I can understand and appreciate a finite limit to my enjoyment of any particular game. It means I don't have to worry about falling into addiction, about losing control entirely.

I like playing games. Love it, in fact. My collection is pretty extensive, and I very much doubt I'm going to grow out of it any time soon, or really, ever. And I like playing games with my friends. And I like the idea about being able to immerse myself in the fantasy worlds, the escapism, the release from normal life.

For brief periods of time.

There have to be limits. There has to be a time when you say, "okay, that's enough," and move on. That's healthy, that's responsible, that's mature.

But more and more, I realize that the MMO tries to break those limits. Not just tries, but succeeds. And that's dangerous. That's unsettling.

There have to be limits.

Stasis

2010-01-30T18:42:00.000-07:00

My toes are rather cold. I have slippers somewhere, but they never seem to be in a convenient location during these moments when I become aware of my discomfort. I imagine I'll attempt to rectify this, once my work here is done.

Hello. It's been a while, hasn't it; the longest break I've taken since I started this blog back in August, though not the longest break I've ever taken from blogging; you can go look at my original blog and see how I'd sometimes go inactive for months at a time. I'd always return eventually and write a post about how this time, I'm going to promise to keep a regular schedule again, not let the whole thing lapse. I've even done that here a few times, along with all the promising I did to not allow myself to lapse in the first place.

And yet, lapse I did. I suppose there are a few ways I could go about this. I could do the whole song and dance that I've done time and time again, and promise up and down that I won't allow it to happen again, that I'm back for reals this time. Or I could lament about how I knew it, all along, in all of that reflecting, that I couldn't keep up the pace of writing every day, that I couldn't really do it. I let myself skip one day, and then one day became a week, and then a week became two months punctuated with little more than token efforts to get back on track.

I could allow that to be a source of despair, that I failed, that all my fears were confirmed. Or..

Or, I could look at this as a chance to begin again. Another start. Day one.

I managed to blog regularly for a solid four months. I manage to work on my novel for over a month and a half without interruption or distraction. I did that during the busiest month of the year, through holidays and other distractions (Dragon Age: Origins, my most favoritest video game in the history of ever!). I could feel angry at myself for slipping, or I could realize that I did this once, and I can do it again, could realize that not living up to your goals is only truly harmful if you allow that failure to be the reason that you quit trying.

Because it will never, ever get easier. It'll never get to a point in life where there's this magical time where I have no distractions, where I'll wake up every single day and feel like today, today is the perfect day for writing. There will be days when it's good, when it flows and I'll stop not because I feel like it, but because I must, because there are other essays to write, other projects to complete, etc. And there will be days when it feels too hard, when I'd rather do nothing at all then write, because doing nothing is the very easiest thing in the world to do. It's worse by far than simply procrastinating with a video game or a movie, because even those things require some small measure of effort to get into.

There will be many such days in my future, I'd imagine.

People in my life that know me, that care about me, that are close to me often have told me, at certain times, that I've been depressed. And certainly if I look back on various periods, I can certainly see all the signs that would indicate that they were very accurate in that assessment. I may even be depressed now, I don't know.

I try to look at myself and look at those moments, and wonder what became different. Why do I seem so depressed sometimes to such an extent that everybody around me notices, and seem so very normal the rest of the time? Is it because I truly feel differently? At one time, I'd have said that was the case.

Now, though, now I think it's something else. Today, when I look back at the me of the past two months, and compare that to the me in November, I don't see myself as somehow being different. I had just as many things bothering me in December as I did in November. I have just as many problems then as I do now, as I did before and as I will tomorrow. The only difference, the only thing that's different is that when I seem depressed, it's because I've allowed myself to get into that state of "doing nothing."

It becomes a state of apathy and detachment and stasis, when I allow myself to do nothing. Compare it to when I keep myself immersed in my work, in my craft, in my books, in my blog; I feel all the same problems, all the same disappointments and tribulations, but I do not allow them to keep me from doing the writing and the work that pushes me forward. I keep myself busy and tell myself that I can't stop.

I think that's the way I'm just supposed to be. Maybe that's the way everybody is, maybe we're all just fighting off that emotional and mental inertia that would rather waste days than spend them, even though spending them isn't any harder than not spending them.

I've said many times before that I write because I must, because I cannot allow myself to not write. More and more, I realize the truth in those words, that writing keeps me from falling into stasis, and the depression that stasis breeds. I can tell myself that I feel bad because I'm stressed, because there's a hundred different things on my mind... or I can realize that I feel bad because I allowed myself to slow down and step.

I can realize that I should get back to work... because that's the key to feeling better.

You Really Don't Have To Read This One

2010-01-14T21:55:00.000-07:00

Didn't get any novel writing done tonight.

I suppose it's good that I tried, right? I mean, I made the effort, focused on the work, didn't just put it off. And I just couldn't detach myself from my current situation, my current thoughts and worries enough to lose myself in my fantasy world. The character voices are there, but none of us know where to go right now, where the road leads.

I guess you could say after the past couple of days, I just feel tired and really don't have anything to say. Wednesday was especially bad, and if you haven't heard the story, well, there was something of a running Twitter commentary from my phone as I stumbled around campus in an ever-increasing rage, looking for class rooms that did not exist as a result of being guided first by an outdated schedule, and then a schedule where I'd written down wrong buildings and incorrect numbers. Today was better, although I made some poor estimations of how long it would take me to get from work to class and back, so the commute was extremely nervewracking. Also, I lost my parking ticket and had to pay 9 dollars more for parking than I planned and... Jesus, is this really what I'm writing about tonight? The mundane shit that goes on in my life?

No wonder I don't have anything to give to the novel project tonight, there's nothing in this skull of mine that's worth talking about. I'm worrying about things like parking and commute times and the fact that I haven't settled into my classes, and my apartment situation is in all kinds of chaos. I suppose all of these are justifiable things to be distracted by, but, I don't know, I guess I don't like admitting that the shit that I deal with is mundane and normal and boring.

Part of me also worries that this is how the long, slow decline into the non-writing state begins. But then, part of me will always worry about that, I think. I felt it acutely every day I didn't write during the winter break and I'm feeling it now, even as I try to that that voice "fuck you, I tried to write and there's nothing in the tank." You know the voice I'm talking about, surely. It's the dark voice, from junior high, self-doubt, all that good stuff. Or maybe it began earlier than junior high, or middle school, or whatever the hell it was? Honestly, my memories are fuzzy about a lot of things, especially as they relate to myself.

So that's where I'm at, at this moment. I'm stressed about mundane crap and I'm blogging about it as a way to express my feelings, and I can't delude myself into thinking that this makes for compelling reading. In fact, I think I'll be including a warning in the title that you can skip this post, there's no keen insight to be gleaned here, move along, come back tomorrow.

It's weird that out of the past two days, the best thing that's happened to me is that I got what in my opinion is a really good haircut. I usually never get good haircuts, or at least, I never feel good about my hair after it's been cut. But I'm happy with this one, which means it's worth sharing, even if it's ultimately pointless.

So, yeah, there's that. Hopefully I have something more interesting for you all tomorrow. We can only hope, right?

Wherein The Author Relates Something Vaguely Interesting (Maybe) About Himself

2010-01-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

A thought occurred to me as I finished up my writing for the night. I glanced over at the clock and, upon noticing the time, thought about how weird it felt to be doing fiction writing at midnight. And it was weird to me, that that felt weird, because it used to be that late at night was the prime writing time, the very best time to do writing. In fact, I have that whole "night owl" persona built up primarily around the idea that I'm a nocturnal entity for the sake of creativity.

And to some extent, it's still true that I do a lot of my work late at night, but I've realized that these things are typically essays or papers, things that are only getting done this late because they're due very, very soon. I don't write late into the night any more. If you look over my twitter updates, it seems the early to late evenings are my writing times now.

If this shift in perspective means anything, I think that it shows how my attitude has changed towards my work. Once upon a time, writing was just something that I did because it was fun, because it felt good to do, because I thought it was cool. It wasn't really a job, it wasn't work, it was just this thing that I did whenever I felt like it, and especially in the beginning, it seemed like I often "felt like it" in the early hours of the morning, while the rest of the world was asleep.

Now, though, it feels like writing is something that's serious, that this isn't just a game any more, if you'll pardon the overly dramatic movie quote. And I think that's reflected in the new hours that I keep. To me, these late night hours have come to represent what is quintessentially "me time." Aside from a couple of exceptions, I'm almost always by myself at this point of the day. My phone doesn't ring. Nobody is going to send me email at this hour. It's one of the few times I can feel really alone.

This is the time when it's okay for me to be selfish. It's the time when I can play video games, or watch episodes of Lost on Netflix, or read a book without interruptions. I can do whatever I want, because the world of responsibility is protected by a comfortable nocturnal shroud that won't lift until the sun returns the next day.

I don't like having to spend this time on important things, "real" things. And now that writing is a "real thing" to me, not just something I do because I feel like it from time to time, but a real, concrete thing that represents a large investment of myself, it no longer feels like it truly belongs with the other nocturnal pursuits. It feels like it belongs to the Day, that time when I'm focused and responsible and dedicated to work, the time when I'm serious and in control.

I'm painting with a fairly broad brush here, to be perfectly honest. In truth, I waste plenty of time during the day just as I do write essays late into the night. But I like to think that my various tendencies and habits reflect some sort of predilection to order in my life, and the fact that I no longer feel like novel writing at one in the morning should reflect some sort of deep personal change.

It might also have something to do with the fact that, just as I noticed tonight, it's always much, much harder to get myself to do some work after I've relaxed for an hour than if I'd just sat down right after getting home and writing for an hour. So there's also that.

Class starts tomorrow. I can't decide if I'm thrilled or distressed by this fact.

These Moments

2010-01-09T19:36:00.000-07:00

I really, really like it when I have no idea what I'm going to sit down and write about until I actually sit down and start to write about it. Those moments of discovery, the feeling of being led by whatever creative force lurks within the depths of my mind... it's wonderful. It's the secret joy of the artist and the writer, the personal pleasure that we derive from our work that no reader can ever truly experience.

The reader has it good, don't get me wrong. The reader doesn't know how the story is going to end, doesn't know what will happen. The reader usually won't see all the mistakes that the writer imagines are there, won't think about all the things that "could have been," all the ways that the story could have been better. The reader can love the characters unconditionally and without reservation, and not have to worry about them, except in the context of what will happen to them in the story.

But readers don't get to enjoy the thrill and the mystique of the blank page. They don't get to feel what it's like to have the voices guide you, to realize at the end of a marathon session that you weren't really creating anything so much as recording an even that was playing out in your mind. I'm not the god of my little fantasy world; I'm just the fucking court recorder, the guy in the corner busy listening in and typing it all down.

When it works the way it's supposed to (and this is how it's supposed to work, I think), this whole writing enterprise, this whole damn thing is amazing and wonderful and worthwhile. These are moments that we can't share with anybody, because these intimate moments happen between the writer and the muse. It sounds sappy, it sounds trite, it sounds cliched, but it's true. And the fact that it's not easy, that it's a rare and special thing that only comes after many hours of hard work and self-doubt and worry and effort... well, that just makes it all the sweeter, doesn't it?

These are the moments when it's good to be writing. Not to be a writer, not to have written, but to be writing, to be in the throes of the act itself. These are the moments when it's good and it's thrilling and you can't wait to find out what happens next, and later on, when you try to explain that you have no idea how the story is going to end even though you're the god damn person writing the damn thing and people look at you like you're retarded, these moments are what you're trying to explain to them.

I'm not sure these moments are why I write. I think I've reflected on that many times before, and will many times to come, as my perception of myself and my craft changes with the passage of time. I think, at this current moment in time, that the reason I write is because I am unhappy and unable to not write, that the times in which I wasn't working, wasn't creating, wasn't doing anything to make my dreams happen were some of the darkest moments of my life. Certainly, the saddest and emptiest.

So I don't write for this moments of discovery, these times when it just flows naturally and easily and I can enjoy the process. These moments aren't what drive me to sit down at my desk. That would, to paraphrase one of my favorite movies, be like going out into the woods specifically to find the perfect blossom.

You have other reasons for going out into the forest, but damn if it isn't nice when that perfect blossom manages to come along and find you.

The Secret To Writing Is Time (But Not Quite The Way You Might Think)

2010-01-08T20:03:00.000-07:00

When I was a little bit younger than I am now, I used to think that the best career for an aspiring writer like myself was to become a teacher. Think about it; you'd be working with the subject that you really enjoyed most, and you'd have those long summers to devote entirely to your writing. In what other job, aside from actually being a full time writer, would you be able to have so much uninterrupted writing time?

The hilarious truth is that now, I think being a teacher is absolutely a terrible job for a writer, or at least, it would be a terrible job for this writer.

It's not that I don't think teaching is an awesome job. I can remember vividly all the teachers who made an impact on my life, going all the way back to the fourth grade and the first teacher, Mr. Dennis, whose idea of a "Writer's Workshop" project no doubt sparked the interest that would eventually morph into basically the cornerstone of my self-identity. I remember all the teachers who inspired me, who challenged me, who believed in me, and even those that pissed me off and made me work that much harder just to prove them wrong by succeeding, which means that technically, they won. To which I say simply: "well played."

But this isn't meant to be a reflection on teaching, since I'm not a teacher myself. And in fact, this idea of mine, that writing and teaching might not go hand-in-hand has nothing to do with teaching in the slightest. Hell, the job in question could be something like professional basket-weaving, assuming that basket weavers are able to take off months during the summer.

See, I've come to realize that one of the great lies of my life is the idea that I'll get work done "when there's more time." It's always been this belief that as soon as I'm not as busy, I'll have all the time I need to do all the things that I want to do. I remember complaining that it was a bad idea to have NaNoWriMo in November, because November is fucking busy. If you're a student, you've got all the big projects coming together at the same time, and you're typically busy at work, and you've got family obligations that all mean your free time is basically nil. How the hell could anybody find the time to write in that maelstrom of responsibilities and deadlines?

And yet, during those hectic, busy 30 days, I wrote 50,000 words. I wrote every day, never once skipping a day because I didn't feel like it. Even when I was busy. Especially when I was busy.

Compare that to December, which is a month that's characterized by weeks of free time. Even covering extra hours at my library job doesn't equal the workload I had trying to juggle everything I had going on in November, and yet, I didn't even write half as much in December as I did the previous month. Part of that was because I allowed myself to slow down, to back off from that breakneck pace. Part of it was the fact that I decided to take a week off from writing when I thought I was done, and then spent the next two weeks after that struggling to figure out how to get back on track.

Those are all part of it, but there's a deeper truth here, and that's this: for me, it is extremely hard to write when I have all the time in the world.

It's hard to write when I'm on a vacation, when I don't have class, when I'm off for six days from work. It's hard to find the energy, it's hard to muster the motivation, it's hard to do anything other than a rotating cycle of waking up late, playing video games, reading, and falling asleep again.

Now, don't get me wrong, those were very fun things and I feel better having done them, batteries refreshed, and all that. But every day that I wasted just lounging around, I thought to myself "I could, and should, be working. Writing. Doing stuff." And each of those days, even as I relaxed, I felt myself slipping back into the old habits of not writing, of feeling like I "should" write, instead of telling myself that I "will" write. I worried that maybe I'd backslid completely and I'd lost the spark that drove me through over 60,000 words of my current novel manuscript.

And then I went back to work, pretty much worked open to close the last two days, with another two coming up, and here I am, writing away again, and hopefully in good form. Considering how much I wrote on the novel tonight, how easily it came and how satisfying it was, I'd certainly say that I'm back, and thankfully, I was able to do it in two weeks rather than two years, like last time.

Why is this, I wonder? You could call it inertia, maybe, something about how a body at rest tends to stay at rest and a body in motion tends to stay in motion. Actually, the more I think about it, I realize that's incredibly apt. It's always so much easier to come home from a long, hard day and write for two hours than it is to wake up a Saturday when I have nothing to do and tell myself I'm going to write before I do anything else. The latter has never, ever happened, to the best of my knowledge. The former happened every day for a month and a half straight.

And that leads me back to my main point; if I want to succeed as a writer, if I want to live the dream of writing every day, the secret is not to find ways to cut out larger and larger chunks of my time so I'll have them to devote to writing. The secret, the trick, the true key is to find out how to fill my life, how to keep busy, how to keep my plate full, keep that calendar bustling, because when I'm faced with the prospect of not having time to write, it's then that I carve out those precious 40 minute blocks that powered me through NaNoWriMo, those precious hours that fueled my first novel attempt since I was sixteen.

Because now I realize, now I understand that if I have two whole weeks to do as much writing as I want... I'm going to waste it. I'm going to play video games, and watch movies, and do everything I can to waste as much time as possible. But if I only have a tiny bit of time, if I only have an hour... well, hell, I can't waste that! It's the only hour I have!

And it makes me glad to know that given that single hour, I'd much rather spend it writing rather than doing anything else.

Lost To The Cutting Room Floor

2010-01-02T23:51:00.000-07:00

So, a funny thing happened to me tonight.

I sat down to write, as I was doing every day, and told myself that I need to, once again, do every day. It's harder to get back into the swing of things than I would have thought, or would have cared to admit. To be totally honest, I wish like hell I hadn't taken that break, hadn't allowed myself to lapse. I suppose it's a good thing that I'm still thinking about the story, not letting it lapse, but man, I had a good thing there. Why did I break that streak?

Anyway, so I've been working for the past week or so since returning to the work after deciding that I wasn't done. And as I was sitting there, thinking about it, reading over what I'd done, well... I realized that it didn't fit. Any of it. The characters weren't acting in a way that made sense, in a way that worked. I introduced a new narrator and realized, after two chapters, that it was a character that better served in her previous role, because she knew far too much to be a narrator. Quite honestly, in a single chapter from her point of view, we'd probably have all the mysteries of the plot worked out. That's just not good.

So, I deleted everything I've done. I decided not to try and salvage any of it, because I didn't like what was happening, didn't like the direction I'd gone. Better to go back to the last point I was proud of, the last moment that I was really certain of, and try again. So, ultimately, that turns out to be a loss of, oh, I'd say 5,000 words or so, which given the fact that I've been going slower than my NaNoWriMo pace, means that I've lost a pretty good chunk of time.

But sometimes it has to be done. Sometimes, not everything is going to work. I'd rather cut whole chapters than dig myself into a hole. You can break a story that way, lose it entirely. I'd rather not have that happen.

So tonight meant moving backwards, moving further away from the finish line in order to find the trail again. But that's okay, because now I have new ideas about things to try. Maybe it'll be awesome and maybe it won't be; maybe the truth is that it's a mistake to try and draw this story out any longer. I'll face that bridge if I ever come to it, but for now, I have a world that I want to continue to play in, and I have characters with a lot of story left to tell.

Beginnings

2010-01-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

And so 2010 begins.

As we move into the next decade, I find myself wondering what it will be, to me and to the world in general. We do not often think about our time in decades, at least not in ways to relate to us personally. I do not look back on the past ten years and think that this was the decade in which I learned to drive, moved out on my own. That this was the decade that I first decided I wanted to become a writer. The decade in which I wrote my first book.

The decade in which I first fell in love. The decade in which I had my heart broken for the first time. And the decade when I moved past those feelings and resolved to carry on.

The 00's (I don't know what that would actually sound like if I said it out loud, but it works well enough on paper) was the second complete decade of my life, and yet it was the most meaningful one to me so far, given that so much of the person I am today was formed in the last ten years. My hopes and dreams, my fears, my desires.

What will the next ten years be? Who will I be, when this new decade draws to a close? What will I be?

I remember thinking, at the beginning of the last decade, where I would be in ten years' time. I was 13, trying to imagine what it would feel like to be 23. It seemed an impossible age, mythical and unattainable. And now here I am, wondering who and what I'll be when I'm 33, and that, too, seems impossible. It does not seem like it could be true, that I'll be 33 one day. That sounds like I'll be an adult, a mature (hopefully), responsible (hopefully) grown up individual. Maybe with a family? Maybe a career? Will I be a father? A husband?

I could never have imagined myself as I am now, at 13. I thought then of things and all that I could do, all that I could have. I could not and did not think of what it would be, how I would feel, what my mind would be.

Time is a strange and curious thing, isn't it?

Ever does it march on, and the only truly constant thing about it is how fluidly and easily it slips away from us, most of all when we least expect it.

Old Faces, New Voices, New Directions

2009-12-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

It makes me sad that, unless I decided to be crazy about it, there's no way I'll be able to continue my 21 posts a month streak that I've had going since September. I don't expect anybody else to really feel anything about that; it's not something that really matters, after all. It's just one of the little bits of symmetry that I appreciate when I notice it, and always makes me feel the tiniest bit crazy, when I do.

But December has not been a normal month, and so perhaps it's fitting that it won't be a normal count for December.

I should not expect to feel as I did during November. In November, this whole process was "NaNoWriMo," and it was a big, reckless, messy storm of thought and desire and a cavalier "damn-the-torpedoes" attitude. And when the goal, the only goal was 50,000 words in thirty days, it was enough. And it was fun. But now I'm approaching the second month of work on this thing, and it's no longer about reaching some word count. Now, it's about finishing a novel. In some ways, nothing has really changed, and yet, in others, it feels as though everything has. I want this story to be something now. I want the characters to take life, the plot to develop, I want it to succeed. I'm invested now, and that means, no matter how much I wish to go back to that carefree time I had in the beginning, I don't know that it's possible.

That's likely not a bad thing, though. The reckless time is fun, certainly, but it's not something that can be sustained forever, can it? At some point, we all have to grow up, mature a little, and realize that we can never go back, in writing or in life, or in anything, really. We can only move forward.

I did something different when I wrote today; took the story in a completely new direction, and I'm not talking about doing something weird with the characters, like I did yesterday. I mean, today, I took my story which has so far been a first-person narrative the entire 34 or so chapters and 70,000ish words, and introduced a completely new narrator. It's a character that's been in the story from the very beginning. And it's a character that I never even considered making into a narrator, until I found myself wondering more and more about her. What her story was. Who she was, not just in how she related herself to the protagonist.

When I looked at the place where I had originally written "the end," I wondered that, if the story wasn't over, if I shouldn't perhaps shift things a bit. Move the focus for a while, so that we can have the feeling of resolution even as I take things elsewhere for a time before I bring the focus back to my lead character.

I'm excited by the possibilities. I'm terrified, as well.

I don't know where the story will go, although to be honest, I don't think I ever did. I haven't really had a plan from the very beginning, it's just been about these characters and following them as they go off and do their things, and hope that I can record it all in a way that will make sense to other people. Does this new character have a story to tell? I believe that she does, and I think that, just as my protagonist has grown from her original inspiration as a single line (a line which has sort of become the synopsis for my story so far), this character, too, has evolved and grown and changed into something new and exciting. There's a story for this new character, and in some ways, it's the original protagonist's story told from the other side, from a new perspective... and it's also something entirely new.

It's a chance for me to zoom out, to show that there's a much larger world than the one that exists on the page so far. It's a chance to explore.

As I said yesterday, it could be dangerous.

It could also be very exciting and extremely rewarding, and I think it would be a terrible mistake if I did not at least try.

It also makes me very glad that I'm a writer and not a director. I'd imagine this sort of thing would be dangerous to do with your lead actor.

Trusting The Voices In My Head

2009-12-26T20:41:00.000-07:00

Well, hello there, my dear reader. It's been a few days, hasn't it, since last you and I spent any time together. I will not apologize for it, however; such is to be expected during the holidays. And for me, it has, indeed, been several holidays; my birthday, which is a day during which I have no shame about doing as little work as possible. And of course, Christmas, as well. I hope yours was good, if you're into that sort of thing.

Today, if you follow my Twitter feed, marks the first day that I've returned to work on my novel since originally declaring that it was "done" about two weeks ago, give or take a few days. Over the past week, I've contemplated and reflected and wondered and pondered, and all the while, the feeling grew; that I had made a mistake in deciding to write 'The End,' that the story was far from over. And after much deliberation, some of which was recorded here for your enjoyment, I decided to return to that work, to write until I was sure that the story was done. I don't know how far away the end is at this point. There's a lot left to tell, and maybe all that I have should be told in one book. Maybe not. For now, I'm just trusting the story to take me as far as it can.

Speaking of trust, that's the other thing I wanted to talk to you about tonight, well, really the main thing, to be honest. You see, after I wrote my chapter, I sat back in my chair and thought about the work I'd done. And to be honest, although I feel very glad that I've returned to the actual writing, part of me wondered if tonight's chapter was a mistake, if it perhaps represents a deviation in what the story is supposed to be.

See, writing is really a lot like juggling, or balancing on a tightrope, or some other tired trope about doing something that requires a lot of balancing and consideration. You want to tell the very best story that you can, but you also realize that the story is an organic thing; it's a thing that you may create, but you don't really own, because the story is its own thing, its own entity, with its own identity. You can choose to deny that identity, you can try to mold the story to your whims, but then you just get an abomination, an aborted "could-have-been" that represents only potential twisted into unkind shapes by an inflexible will. It's akin to treating marble like clay; you cannot mold your story into what you want it to be. It can only be what it is.

That means trusting the story when it goes to weird places. It means trusting the characters when they start to shift away from what you think they should be. It means sitting back and letting the organic process happen. It's a scary proposition, especially when you're a control freak, and most writers are, I think, at least, fiction writers are. We like to be God with our worlds, we like to think that everything happens according to our will. And when you suddenly find yourself writing something that, in retrospect, makes you stop and go "wait, what?" well, that's a bit scary.

Do you trust the characters and follow them down whatever road their voices lead you? Or do you decide that you know better, that you know sometimes emotions can lead to unsatisfying conclusions, that sometimes, creative chaos must be tempered and focused with discipline if it is to be forged into something meaningful. Do you let the character do something that might damage herself? Do you let her damage the story? Do you let her do something you don't agree with?

Do you even have a choice?

I don't know. I could always go back tomorrow and delete what I wrote tonight. I could decide tomorrow that what happened in tonight's session was the product not of my character voices, but of my own mood, my own tired state, or whatever other excuse. I could say that my characters don't know what "jumping the shark" means, that if I let them have their way, they could very well abort the story. After all, these are my characters, my children, in a sense. And a responsible parent doesn't let his children raise themselves, does he? Or she? No, you provide guidance, gently steering them down the "right path" even as you try to give them the freedom to develop into the beings that they are meant to be.

So what do I do?

No idea. I just wanted to share with you what's going through my head, and possibly glean some insight as I did. In this case, I think, the best course is ultimately to let the story grow in whatever direction the voices take me. It's quite honestly the most insane option, choosing to listen to the voices rather than my own sense of what is and what should be, but I've long believed that creativity and madness are really not so different. Being creative means taking risks that aren't sound, aren't sensible. Being creative means doing insane things like letting your children raise themselves, even though that has the potential to be dangerous.

After all, if it wasn't dangerous, it wouldn't really be worth doing. Not this way, at least.

Unwrapping "The End"

2009-12-21T20:56:00.000-07:00

I'm in a bit of a bind.

So, I have this novel that I've been working on for the past month and a half. I wrote every day since November 1st, through papers, sicknesses, video game addictions and holidays. I wrote on Thanksgiving. It's the most writing I've ever done in one consecutive stretch and I'm proud of myself for making this personal milestone. To top it all off, I even succeeded at the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words in thirty days. Not bad, you know?

And then, about a week ago, I hit a point where it felt like I'd reached "the end" for the current story. I'm not done with the characters, of course; there's still a lot left to tell with them. But I keep telling myself that it feels like a new book, that it won't work with the way the current plot is paced. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder if that's true, or if I'm not just trying to justify stopping when I did, breaking my streak. It has not escaped my notice that I've been extremely lax in getting any writing done this past week. Supposedly, it was because I was taking a break between the writing and editing process for the current manuscript. I told myself that I deserved some time off.

I guess what will determine whether I'm right about that or not is whether or not I can force myself to start again. This blog post is evidence of that desire; the fact that even though I don't know what to do about my novel situation, I'm still going to show up, as it were, I'm still going to write. I mean, hell, most of the writing I've been doing over the past three months has been this blog... if you look back at the archives, the novel is really only a recent addition to my life and my focus.

But back to the problem at hand: do I keep "the end" where it is right now on the current novel? On the one hand, it "feels" like a good ending to me, with a great line to leave off on, but on the other hand, where will I pick the story back up with these characters? I feel like that's a critical question to ask myself, because if I'm going to continue the conversation and the scene in the next book, does that not indicate that these really just are two pieces of the same story? There's also the fact that I feel it's not really long enough to be considered a true novel (most of the research I did indicates that 80,000 is considered the minimum length for a novel, although some place the number as high as 100,000 and others lower, around 70,000. Anything lower than 70,000, however, doesn't seem to get much attention by "novel" standards. Which would make this a novella, which, in my opinion, does not sound nearly as impressive or sexy. Because, of course, writing is all about what's sexy.

What was I saying?

Oh, right, my current problems. Whether to unwrap the work and press on, to take what was going to be "book two" material and keep it in "book one." The reasons against it? Worries that it won't fit with the current pacing, that the narrative structure will feel strange. On the other hand, do all stories have to fit into the standard arc of "rising action/climax/falling action?" Or can there be deviations, moments of excitement and escalation followed by more even sequences?

This is why I'm writing this particular post: because it's helping me to sort through these questions in my head (and also, I don't feel like quite a failure if I don't actually work on the novel tonight.) And to be honest, as I write out these problems and I think about what I would say if I started "Chapter 1 of Book 2" at this very moment, would I continue from the previous scene? Or would it be six months in the future? And even if it was six months in the future, why would that have to be a separate book entirely? More and more, it feels like my decision to stop when I did was a mistake. I start to wonder if I felt like I had a good scene to end on and I didn't know what else to say that night, so I just said, "okay, done!"

That would make sense to me, to be perfectly honest. I wrote before that it felt very anti-climactic, that it didn't really give me any sense of achievement or accomplishment that I thought I would have felt. I wonder now if that was because I stopped before I should have, that the fact that I still have "so many ideas" for the story does not mean I'm ready for a sequel, but that there is more to tell in the current tale.

I'm going to think on it for a little while longer, because while reflecting on these things has helped organize my thoughts a great deal, I don't think I should just jump right back into it. I want to be sure, before I make that decision. I want to do this thing right.

Most of all, I want to go back to that clean, wonderful experience of writing recklessly for an hour a day and feeling the sense of accomplishment and achievement that comes from living my dream.

Well, At Least I'm Here

2009-12-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

Well, this has certainly been a sad state of affairs, hasn't it? All that talk about how I wouldn't let the blog lapse, and here we are, eighteen days into December and I've posted, what, three times?

Shameful.

The truth is... well, I'm not sure what the truth is. I know that I've allowed myself to become terribly distracted by work and other, lesser pursuits than writing over the past couple of days. I've told myself not to stress about this brief lapse, that even the greats don't write every single day of the year and that a break is okay, particularly since it comes between the completion of the first draft and before the beginning of the editing process.

Although, that's something that's been on my mind a lot, as well. I want this to be my next novel. Hell, I very much want this to be my first published novel, and more and more, I find myself worrying as to the length. Is it long enough to be considered a novel? My first work was 88,000 words, but I wonder if I go back now how many of those chapters could very much be considered fluff that really should be cut from the final plot. I remember writing a scene where a character gets attacked by some kind of panther. I think its purpose was to show the lethality of the protagonist, or something. Who knows.

The concern is not that I don't have any more ideas. I do have ideas. I want to write another book about these characters. The problem is that right now, it feels like the pacing is such that this story is done and that if I keep going, it really should be a sequel instead of a continuation. Unless maybe I decided to break up the novel into two distinct "books" within the actual work? It's weird hard to explain; I keep feeling like I've told the story that needs to be told for the first book, but then I also feel like if this story isn't long enough to be a "novel," and I have more story to tell with these characters, it should be obvious, right? I don't know.

Then I wonder if perhaps I'm silly for fretting about this because when I go back and edit, I'm sure that, at least in the initial drafting phase, there will be all kinds of things to add and clarify and explain which will probably increase the length. I don't know. I'm sure that a lot of the reason why I feel antsy is because it's been a good, what, three days since I wrote much of anything and I haven't written any fiction since Monday, even then this is supposed to be a break.

And of course, I'm already thinking about other things, new projects, whether I decide to reopen work on the current novel and keep writing, or start in on a separate sequel, or revisit my old novel (probably not going to happen) or try to do something else entirely.

I don't know. What I do know is that I miss the simplicity and elegance of writing a story for an hour each night, every night. It was very nice to simply sit down, write for a while, marvel at my progress and then go about my business. Although I suppose I could just go do that again, I mean, it's not like there's anything stopping me except for the fact that I told myself it's a good idea to put some space between the writing and the editing parts.

I read that somewhere in a book, I think.

A Reflection Upon Reaching "The End"

2009-12-14T18:16:00.001-07:00

If you happen to keep up with my Twitter feed (and I'm arrogant enough to assume that everybody does), you know that for the past few days, I've been saying that I think my current novel is drawing to its conclusion. I've noticed the past few nights that I've had less and less story to tell, haven't been able to really just throw myself into the work and write with abandon the way that I did before.

At first, I thought this was because I had begun to realize that NaNoWriMo is over and that now, I have a sense of the amount of work behind me, I was less willing to just let myself fall into the work, let myself write without fear of failure. But more and more, I think that it's not because NaNoWriMo has come and gone, but because I've been approaching the end of the story not with elation, but with trepidation.

It seems weird, that I actually finished the story last night, and there wasn't this sense of satisfaction or completion, only a vague sense of emptiness, a feeling that I had lost something. At first, I thought it just meant that I wasn't quite done with the story, that maybe there was more to the epilogue than I had written. But when I sat down to write tonight, I realized that I had nothing to add, nothing more to say at this point. The story felt done.

Well, not done, because this is only a first draft and I know that there's still a great deal of work ahead of me. And of course, I've got a lot of ideas for a sequel that I didn't include, because then the pacing would have been totally thrown off. So it's not like this is the end, or even that this is the only story I'm ever going to write. NaNoWriMo showed me how to make the effort to right a lot, to write every day. It's up to me, now, to take that knowledge and apply it, to not allow myself to slip back into the lax and easy life of "oh, I don't feel like writing tonight, I'll do it tomorrow." That's one thing that I cannot allow to happen, even if this story is done. Even if there's no novel writing for a while as I let the current project simmer for a bit before I begin the editting process, that can't be an excuse to skip out on what has become my daily ritual, my daily requirement from myself. Maybe that means going back to blogging every day, which is something I told myself I would do anyway. Maybe it means working on some short stories for a while.

But going back to my original point, on being done and the feeling of completion. It's been a long, long time since I reached "the end" in novel writing; I wrote my first novel when I was sixteen and the sequel to that has been an ongoing thing that's still incomplete. I've tried to think back to how I felt as I wrote the last line on that first work; did I know it was the end as I wrote it? Or did I feel then as I do now, that I feel empty instead of complete? That I feel like although I have this story, this work that I can be proud of, that I can soon show the world, part of me will never be able to recover that earlier time of wonder and joy as I wrote with reckless abandon?

I actually asked my mom about this, before I sat down to write this blog post, to reflect on how I feel. She told me that she understands, because she said it's a lot like being a parent. You put in all this work, you make sure you've done all that you can, and... then it's over. Your job is done and it's up to your child (or your book, in my case) to go on to have his or her or its own experiences.

It's a very poignant moment. I mean, I've always hated reaching the last page in a favorite story, because it means my time with the characters that I know and love has come to an end. But I guess for some reason I never imagined that the same would be true for the writer as well; I guess I imagined that the fact that those characters live on in his or her head means that the writer is never truly removed from the creations. But I've begun to realize that this is false, and that the writer feels just as much disconnect and detachment when he or she reaches the end.

I mentioned before that I tried to think about what I experienced the first time I reached the end, if I felt fulfilled, if I felt something wonderful and life affirming. I think that perhaps maybe I did, because I was younger then (although I do not pretend to be an old veteran at 22) and more inexperienced, and I did not know then all of the things that I know now. I think perhaps I wrote then because I wanted the reward for the effort, the gold star that is being able to say truthfully "that I've written a book."

That hasn't been my motivation for this work. I write now not for want of reward or recognition or praise, but because it is in my nature to do this thing, because the years I stayed away from my craft were some of the darkest moments of my life and I can only truly feel at peace with myself when I am creating.

I think that, perhaps, though I do not have the urge to bust out a bottle of wine or smoke a cigar in celebration, I nevertheless do feel pleased with myself and with my achievement. Because for the last month and a half, I've written every single day, through sickness, intoxication, sleep deprivation, being overworked. I've forced myself to find time to write in the early hours of the morning, in brief slivers of time between here and there, and even on days when I really, really didn't want to make the effort, when it was easier to just be lazy.

I did what I aspired to do, and I have a new novel to show for it. And that makes me very, very happy.

Things You Only Think About When Your House is on Fire

2009-12-09T22:26:00.005-07:00

A few notes. First of all, I do feel very badly that I haven't had any time to write in my blog over the past few weeks, especially when I promised that I would. Ultimately, however, it came down to the fact that I had a ton of things that I needed to be working on, and I was already spending about an hour a night writing my novel, which, of course, meant an hour spent writing things that were not my various essays.

But now those essays are done, finals are upon us, which means that for a Creative Writing major like me, the semester is nearly over. Which means more time to write things that are not essays, and hopefully more time to blog about the things that I'm thinking about. Because I don't know about you, but I like doing this. I was going back though the archive a few nights ago, trying to figure out which blog entries to include for my portfolio, and for a while, I just sat there and read my own stuff. It's probably horribly narcissistic to do that, read your own work, but I found myself greatly inspired as I read my thoughts at the beginning of November, when NaNoWriMo was still just one great big source of ambition and anxiety. Or the thoughts of me in mid-October, still getting over a breakup and wondering why the hell it would be a good idea to try to write a novel in thirty days, in the busiest month of the year.

We lose those thoughts if we don't take steps to preserve them. We lose the day to day details, the minutia, the things we thought about last week. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes, I find myself wondering what was going through my head when I sat down to write three months ago. I feel like I've come a long way in a short time, and at times, it seems to be happening too fast for me to even catch my breath. And that's why I'm glad that I have this record, why I will continue to work on keeping this blog updated. Because it's nice to look back and see my own personal little narrative, written not as some epic tale or idealized chronicle, but as the day to day experiences of the real me.

Now, there's one other thing I wanted to do with tonight's entry. While I was at the Essay Reading Night (congratulations to all the winners, by the way), I was asked if I would share my own essay here on my blog. So I've decided to do that, because I was asked, and I always like to be accommodating, but also because I'm actually rather proud of this piece and I think it deserves to be shared. So if you're interested in hearing about what happened during the Great House Fire of 2007, keep reading after the jump. If not, well, um... I guess I'll see you tomorrow.

Often times, there are moments that are so inconsequential upon their happening that we fail to notice them, fail to appreciate their importance until years have passed. With the focused clarity of time, we look back and are given pause within reflection. Other times, these moments are brilliant, explosively singular events that shake you the moment they occur and will continue to dominate your thoughts long after the fact; moments that leave you wide awake at night, perhaps shaking, as you ponder all that could have been, and all that wasn’t.

I almost died in a fire once. I like to phrase it like that, to give the entire event an aura of melodrama, of mystery, of excitement and adventure before I’ve even been asked the first question. It’s the kind of statement that invites a response; clearly, there must be some story associated with such a declaration, since, had I not survived the experience, I wouldn't be here to write about it now.

People will tell you that when you’re about to die, time slows down. The adrenaline starts pumping and everything becomes liquid-like slow motion moving around you. This is a lie. When you’re about to die, everything happens very quickly, far more quickly than real life should sensibly allow. The only thing that changes is you, because within that moment of perfect fear, you are faster than you should be, faster than you are capable of being. The world has not changed; you have become the change, able to think and feel and perceive, for a brief instant, a hundred different thoughts simultaneously. You can reflect on your entire life in the time before this heartbeat and the next. You can wonder about the fact that you should be terrified right now. During these moments, it will not seem strange to you that your mind is racing, that you shouldn't be able to think this many things at once and remain calm. You shouldn't be able to have so many thoughts, and yet you do, and that's perfectly fine.

You will reflect that it smells like campfire smoke, your burning house, which is a good smell, one that you associate with childhood memories and camping trips, and it will also occur to you that this is your house that smells of campfire smoke, a thought that is somehow comforting in its familiarity and terrifying in its implication. All of this goes through your mind in that single instant.
It is only in the retelling, the remembering, many moments after this one, that the realization sets in, of what you yourself are capable of attaining when pressed. The realization leaves you breathless, leaves you convinced that you have violated some fundamental law of the world and that although you have escaped your ordeal, you are criminal for doing so. It is a thought that will hold you tightly and keep with you, presumably, until the end of your life as you find yourself envisioning a today in which you do not exist, had you not been quite as fast as you were.

My story began, as many good stories do, when I awoke in a bed that was familiar, but was not mine, to the shrill sound of a smoke alarm going off. It was my parents’ house. It was Saturday. Almost noon. I don't know about you, but for the first few minutes after I awaken, I'm essentially worthless, my brain still hazy with sleep and half-remembered dreams. I did not equate the sound of a smoke detector with thoughts of danger. I imagined my father was most likely find new and exciting ways to burn food in the kitchen, because he does that, sometimes. No danger. Go back to sleep. I got up anyway and went to take a look. I do not know why and I wish that I did, because it saved my life.

Beyond the kitchen, in the living room, there was the most terrific blaze I have ever seen, a true bonfire that someone had thoughtlessly constructed on the family coffee table. I had enough time to reason that this was incorrect, that fires should not be where the coffee table was, that, in fact, we didn’t even have a fireplace, and thus, the entire enterprise of indoor fire was clearly out of sorts.

And then comes the realization that starts with one screaming “Holy shit” as you make with the running and the acting, when survival instinct, primitive and reptilian, joins with long forgotten childhood memories of “what to do when something’s on fire.” I tried to find a fire extinguisher, first. In my own home, I kept one in the kitchen, because one time, I caught my own stove on fire and it made for a few very exciting moments as I tried to figure out how a fire extinguisher actually works. That fire was my own fault, as one is told never to leave a pot of water boiling alone on the stove, because one may forget about it until the acrid stench of burnt metal and a small conflagration where one's pot was reminds, rudely, that it doesn't take two hours to boil water, you idiot. But that was a much smaller incident, more like a campfire, really, than the bonfire now facing me.

This fire was far more exciting, its menace far more palpable in the form of the black smoke that, in the mere seconds it had taken for me to perceive the danger had already begun to fill the air and smelled strangely of camping and the great outdoors. The family dog, in his kennel, was panicking. The cat was nowhere to be seen, although cats are masters of self-preservation, so if anybody was going to live through this, it would be her. What was I doing? Oh, right, the fire extinguisher. Yeah, I never found it.

I heard my own voice in my head tell me in a bored, know-it-all tone: “You know, it only takes a few seconds before the carbon monoxide will knock you out, and if you go down, that would be really bad.” Jesus, do I really sound like that? I hope not, but I’m coughing now, so I decide that I might be right, regardless of how much of an asshole I sound and maybe it’s time to abandon the fire extinguisher and make with the fleeing.

They tell you not to waste time looking for your pets. You’re a child when they tell you this and they understand that children are stupid enough to get themselves killed to save a dog. Adults, it follows, clearly know better, that animals can be replaced. I was halfway to freedom and safety when it occurred to me that, if the dog died, my brother would hate me forever, because it was his dog. And, I will admit, I like the dog, too. So I went back and saved the dog, risking a fiery grave so I could have the pleasure of dragging one hundred pounds of terrified Rottweiler along with me out the door.

I also noticed a basket of laundry near the encroaching blaze and I was reminded of my childhood fear that of having to flee a burning house in my underwear. There are few things more terrifying to a child than standing outside practically naked in front of all the police and fire fighters and ambulance people and neighbors, and hell, the news crew will probably be there, just to compound your embarrassing five-year old misery.

I grabbed the basket of laundry and kept going. The living room was pretty much engulfed, so it's out the front door, into the street. It's a cold December morning and it's raining lightly, and I wonder if the rain will put the fire out. The rain is icy beneath my bare feet and makes my toes go numb and I reflect on the fact that the rain won't really become a factor unless the entire house is doomed.

I have enough time to imagine the homeowner's association giving me a fake citation for having an unleashed dog and not wearing pants in public, as though the compound of infractions made the entire offense infinitely more egregious.

So now we’re outside, in the cold safety of the rain, and I’m barefoot, in my underwear, dragging the dog with one arm and a basket of clothes in the other. This strikes me as a perfectly ludicrous situation worthy of a punch-line and I begin to laugh, perhaps a little hysterical, as I realize that I’m carrying something else in one clenched fist: my cell phone. Had it been with me the whole time? I dialed 911 and voiced my distress in a calm, reasonable tone: "My fucking house is on fire!" And then, having never said that, I giggle to myself, very likely due to oncoming hysteria.

As I stood there, shivering in the street, waiting for help to arrive, I inspected my basket of laundry in the hopes of prevent my childhood nightmare from coming to life. No pants in this basket, God damn it. There were only shirts, but at least I had been lucky enough to grab one of my favorites. I put it on and waited, because, really, what else was I going to do at that point?

And that’s why, when the first truck rolled up, they were greeted by the strange spectacle of a young man without pants standing in the rain watching his house burn as he held a dog by the collar in one hand and a basket of laundry in the other.

My involvement in the story ends here. Somebody gave me some pants to wear. My parents showed up. I sat in the fire truck and wondered what it would be like to be dead. For some reason, I found myself wondering if it would be weird. It seemed weird to me, that I might not be immortal, that I might not live forever.

Even now, years later, when I reflect on that moment, it makes me shiver, to imagine a world in which I had not been quite as fast as I had been, that one time.

Project Procastination

2009-12-05T20:51:00.002-07:00

Despite all my promises to not leave this space unattended, the Mirror has been silent and still for almost a week now. Um. Whoops?

The truth is that this has been the last week, the final push before all the cards have to be laid down, all bets have to been, the dice are thrown, and all those other tired gambling metaphors. Ultimately, it became a question of which projects matter and which ones are just interesting, and I decided that the little time I did have for "none-essay writing" writing would be better spent getting that novel finished. It's still not done, by the way, that project I've been working on and talking about for the last month. But it's getting close, I think and I'm eager to reach the conclusion and... well, maybe eager isn't quite the proper word. I would like very much to be done, yes, but part of me is also terrified that I won't be able to ignore all the mistakes I made with the first draft once it's time to revise. Right now, I'm forcing myself to keep plunging forward, ignoring what I'm sure are a host of errors that are to be expected as I discover more about my world and my characters.

The weird thing, however? Despite the fact that I've really only been working on the novel, in order to give myself as much time as possible to get my projects done, the truth is I haven't made much progress on any of them. I've had this entire week and I've whittled it away worrying and stressing and not working, and, rather ironically I might add, delaying work on those projects by distracting myself with other things like the novel. I'm honestly surprised that I didn't use this blog as an excuse to spend more time not writing my essays.

It feels like a physical pressure on my chest. I know that, one way or another, for better or worse, this feeling won't persist. I know that I'll knuckle down and just freaking do the work that needs to get done. But I guess for some strange reason, part of me is looking ahead and would rather feel intimidated than motivated. I don't know why that is. Burn out, maybe. Perhaps just a little bit of laziness, some good old procrastination.

Writing out my thoughts about it all has helped somewhat, though I'm sure this is not making for particularly interesting reading. My apologies. I will endeavor to return to a more engaging style of posting, perhaps after my massive "to-do" list has been whittled down appropriately.

I'm pretty sure that means another few days without posting in the blog. Unless I feel the need to stall, in which case, um, see you tomorrow, I guess?

The Day After

2009-11-30T22:02:00.004-07:00

After an interesting deviation on Saturday from my usual subject, we're back to the usual reflecting that you've all come to know and love, or at the very least, expect from me in my self-serving little slice of the Internet.

A lot of my posts over the past few weeks dealt with my anxiety that it would be hard to will myself to write once the blog requirement and NaNoWriMo had both passed. Now, I don't really feel like I have anything further to add on those subjects, since I talked about them at length, perhaps even longer than I really needed. If that's the case, well, that's unfortunate, because tonight I want to talk a bit about what it's like writing in my post NaNoWriMo, post-required blog world.

It's definitely harder. Not to write so much, because the difficult of writing is a laughably complex thing to considers. Some days, the writing is easy. Some days, it isn't, and there are a whole slew of reasons why that may be, all of which may be different, related to each other or not, justified or insane, in whatever absurd combination life decides is the most amusing. What was I saying?

Oh, right, forcing myself to sit down and write. You've already seen this a little bit with the blog, that I fell off my usual schedule a little bit after the requirement had passed. I wouldn't say I've failed to remain consistent, however, after all, I'm here now, aren't I, and if you look back at the archives, 21 posts a month seems to be the target goal. Not sure why it turned out to be twenty-one for both September and October. One would assume that since the goal was five posts a week, and those months have different numbers of days, then... you know what, never mind. Post count isn't the point here.

Tonight was the first night post-NaNoWriMo, although, yes, I realize that since today is still November, it won't actually end until tomorrow. But tonight was the first night for me after reaching that goal of 50,000 words, so tonight was really the first night where I didn't "have" to write any longer. The crunch time is over, right? The story may not be done, but that's okay, now I can go at whatever pace I want, right? I can relax, and all that.

Sounds reasonable, except that I know that I really, really can't. Because if I relax, I'll backslide. I haven't missed a day of writing yet, and it makes me feel great, it makes me feel like the genuine article, a writer plying his trade as opposed to a pirate who doesn't do anything. That's a metaphor, by the way, well, technically a trope; I'm not actually trying to suggest that I was in danger of being a digital pirate or anything.

I think that the biggest reason why today was so much harder than yesterday is because now my goal has changed. I reached that 50k milestone, that 50k in 30 days, and just like that, suddenly all the pressure is off, all the constraints that forced me to work even when I was sick, that made me sit here and do work when I wanted to slack off and play Dragon Age on my Xbox, that's all gone. When I had the 50k looming over me, I knew if I was behind or not, if I was getting as much work done as I needed to be doing on any given day. I always knew that I had a target number to shoot for, roughly 1670 words per day, which meant that I knew when I was under for the daily requirement, and what days I surpassed it.

I don't think I can exist under this new deadline; instead of "write 50,000 words in thirty days," it seems to be now that I have to "okay, now write words until the story is finished." But that's an empty goal, it's unfocused, it's a race where I don't really know where the finish line is. How do I know if I'm getting close? How do I know if I'm doing well? I'm not going to allow myself to read back over what I've done, because then I start to self-edit and the project dies. I need those milestones to strive towards, I need those bulls-eyes to aim at. It can't just be "write till the story is done."

The problem is, I don't really know what the new goal should be. Do I try for another 50k in 30 days? I don't know if "Fallen" has enough story left to be told in another 50,000 words, I mean, it's entirely possible, but I don't know if it'll mesh with the story arc if this point that was supposed to be near the climax instead just becomes the half-way point. On the other hand, I do still have a lot of ideas, some of which I haven't even begun to explore in this current work. On the other other hand (because I totally have three hands) those ideas might be better served in, say, a sequel to the current story, rather than just adding it on to this one.

It's annoying to be in this strange little place, because it's at once both complicated and simple. I'll be the first to say that it shouldn't matter whether I'm trying to write 1670 words a day or just reach 50,000 in thirty days, because it still produces the same result. The problem, however, is that my mind is a very, very weird thing and it needs all kinds of cajoling and elaborate mental games in order to be as productive as it has been. Clearly, the 50k in 30 days was a good idea, because it worked. Will telling myself that I have a daily goal of 1670 words work as well? I don't know. I've tried it before, and I always gave up after a few days. But that was also before I began this blog and this novel. Maybe now, I'm different enough that it won't make a difference?

This post has already run on for longer than I intended, but that's the problem when I write about a problem that I don't yet have an answer for. At the moment, I think a weekly goal is a good medium, since I don't quite know whether or not Fallen will make it to 100,000 words (God, can you even imagine? My first book, which remains the single largest thing I've ever done clocked in at about 88,000 words and the sequel was somewhere around 76,000 words, the latter of which remains unfinished at the moment.) So perhaps a modest goal of 10,000 words per week, which is a little bit less than the NaNoWriMo pace will suffice. I do think I need the target number, since for some reason, over this past month, I found it very helpful for getting my ass into gear when I'd look at a calendar and be able to tell myself "okay, by November 24th, I should have this many words written for the story."

I don't know why my brain forces me to do this. And on an unrelated, I actually had no idea that I'd reached 76k in the sequel to my first novel. I thought it was like 50 or 60k. Man, I should really go back and try to finish that, at some point. Or maybe not, I don't know... I'm not sure whether it would be better to let that old relic remain in my past, or whether it'd be worth it to try and finish it.

We'll see what happens. For the immediate future, however, I know what my current priority is: finishing my current novel!

It feels really, really good to say that again.

Holiday Reflection

2009-11-28T20:25:00.002-07:00

There's something on than writing on my mind tonight. Just thought I'd throw that out there, so that you won't be disappointed later. I don't really know why you're reading this, to be honest, but I like to think it's because you either care about what I have to say, or you think that I know what I'm talking about, and that what I'm saying is useful. Those may or may not be the same things, I'm not really sure.

Let me rephrase: there will be no keen observations about the craft tonight. But wait, before you skip on to the next blog in your RSS feed or bookmark list (because I'm arrogant enough to assume that I warrant either of those things, totally true) I do have something else that I think is worth dwelling on, for a time. Are you still here? Wonderful. Let's get to it.

So, it was Thanksgiving this past week. Thanksgiving is a holiday that I've always had mixed emotions about. As a younger individual, I was mostly just ambivalent. When I became a vegetarian, the first few Thanksgivings were a source of trepidation, albeit unnecessarily so; my mom and dad made sure I wouldn't be left out in the cold when it came to food options. This past dinner was especially wonderful, although I'm not really one to talk about what I eat so I won't go into details, but it involved banana squash, cheese, something that was kind of like spinach but wasn't spinach... look, I don't know, all I know is that it was wonderful. Where was I? Oh yes.

So aside from food, Thanksgiving is about family. More specifically, it's about seeing your family. Now, don't get me wrong, I like my family well enough; you might even say I love them. I'd say that myself. I never really considered myself to be a moody teenager growing up, never felt I really went through any sort of "rebellion" period where I was all "omg, my family's so lame and I hate them, blargh." But I guess I must have, because all of my memories of Thanksgiving in years past were associated with a sort of "tolerance" rather than me actually enjoying myself. So I guess I must have gone through some sort of teenage angst thing, right?

This year, however, I felt different. I played with my cousin's kids (they're four and two, I believe. So, you know, little.) I didn't look for a way to make a snide political comment. I had a good time even though I knew it wasn't really about me, that the attention would go to the little ones because when you're four and two, everything you do is either adorable, or if not adorable, certainly attention-grabbing.

It's weird: I felt like an adult, which isn't something I'm used to feeling when I'm with my family. I don't know what it is, what changed about me, why I'm suddenly this different person who had a great time, who enjoyed doing "uncle" stuff (even though I'm technically a second cousin). All I know is that two years ago, I couldn't stand being around kids, didn't know how to talk to them, and now it's just... so very different.

I guess the reason why I felt compelled to write about is because I think it's a rare thing, that we see in any tangible way how our attitudes, thoughts and opinions shift as we grow older, as we mature and move further and further away from childish things. I know that I'm not the same person I was five years ago, not really, and that I'm even a different person now compared to who I was a year ago, but even when that change happens quickly, even when it happens overnight, I don't think we often have a chance to realize it the way I did on Thursday.

Thursday was a Thanksgiving dinner very much like the one last year, and the one the year before that, but for some reason, this year I felt like I really was received by my family and really felt as though I had come into my own as an adult in their eyes, and maybe even my own.

Something To Say To The World

2009-11-27T19:31:00.005-07:00

Here I am once again, because I want to be.

I've been thinking a lot about publishing lately, and I think it's something of a personal failure that I haven't allowed myself to blog about it before. Part of it... all of it, actually, comes from this strange anxiety I have towards the subject, something that is equal parts hope, fear, love and loathing.

Publishing has always been for me the one big milestone. I've told people that my dream is not to be a best selling author and on the New York Times list, but simply to go into Barnes & Nobles (or any book store, really), walk into the fiction section, grab a copy of my own book, take it up to the counter and buy it. I don't care if the clerk recognizes me, don't care if he or she sees that the name on the cover and the name on the debit card are the same. I just want to buy my own book. That's been the dream.

Because of that dream, there's always been the feeling that publishing equals success, and thus, the fact that I've never been published means that I haven't been successful as a writer. This has been something that I've grappled with for a while. On the one hand, part of the reason I haven't been published is because I've never really tried... I only ever sent a novel manuscript off to one publisher, and only ever submitted two of my short stories. So I can't say that I've given it a fair shake and was rejected every time.

I think the fear is that I'm not sure what to do if I go through all that hard work and I fail anyway. What happens then? Do I start rationalizing that publishing isn't a milestone of success, even though I've told myself over and over again that it is? I recognize, of course, that success means different things to different people, that many great writers were completely ignored during their entire lives, and that ultimately, it's not even supposed to be about something as silly as my little vanity dream. Writing isn't about getting your name on a book. It's not even about being a writer, which sounds strange, but let me explain. There was an article I read once that was completely unrelated to what I'm talking about now but contained this amusing little story I'd like to share with you:

According to his own site, when Dylan Avery was 18, he was doing construction work on a bar owned by James "Tony Soprano" Gandolfini. No, I didn't make that up. Anyway, Avery wanted to be a movie director. At a party he seized the opportunity to buttonhole Gandolfini, and the two had this conversation:

Avery: Mr. Soprano! I'm a huge fan!

Soprano: That's great, kid.

Avery: You know, I want to be a director...

Soprano: Like I give a shit. The deformed kid who cleans my fuckin' gutters wants to be a director. You got an idea for a movie?

Avery: Well, no...

Soprano: Then what the fuck are you comin' up to me talkin' about bein' a director? Let me tell you the problem with kids like you. You don't wanna direct. You don't wanna tell stories. You wanna be a director. You wanna walk down red carpets with a fuckin' starlet on your arm. You ain't got nothin' to say to the world. For you, the movies, the work, it's just a means to an end. The people who make it, the people who deserve to make it, the ones who get respect... they're the ones who got something to say to the world.

That's the point that I'm trying to make here; that it's not even supposed to be about being a writer, but about telling stories, about having something to say to the world. And believe me, if that's what it means to be successful, well, no wonder I'm anxious, no wonder I'm just this little ball of insecurity when it comes to my dream. It's not easy to have something to say to the world, to come up with this story that you feel needs to be told, not because you want the book deal, but because it's something worth telling.

And yet, that's what it really means, to be successful. It's not about having your name on a cover, or getting paid, or even getting to tell people "oh, yeah, I'm a writer and yeah, I've been published."

It's about having something to say to the world, and getting the opportunity to say it. The same is true of every creative person, every writer, every artist, every director.

No matter what anybody else might think, I do know one thing; I want to be the kind of writer who has something to say, not just one who wants all the acclaim that comes with "making it."

After The End

2009-11-26T21:59:00.002-07:00

And so here we are. The requirement has passed and yet, as I said, I remain here in this digital space, to write and reflect and perhaps rant, all depending on what thoughts are in my head. It's not about grades now or meeting the quota, although to be honest, it's not like I wrote every previous entry thinking "hmmm, how can I get an A with this?" From the very beginning, I've written what I wanted to write, written what's been in my mind. That it meets the requirements has actually been, to be perfectly honest, rather incidental. I don't know that I'd change anything that I've done even if I'd been told I was doing it wrong.

I must admit, the urge to not work is stronger now than I would have anticipated. Several times, while I've sat here and wondered what to say, my mind has had the damnably tempting idea of "why bother saying anything? It's not like you need to, now." That's exactly why I can't stop doing this, of course, because I know that once the impetus of requirement is lifted, there is nothing to force the writing discipline that I've cultivated over these past few months. That's the tricky thing about discipline, I've noticed: if you manage to learn it while you're being told to, the real struggle comes from adhering to it when there's nobody else around to tell you want to do.

So I have to blog now. I have to blog as much as I have been, because if I don't, I'll lose the discipline. I have to blog just like I have to tell me to not stop writing just because NaNoWriMo is almost over. I have to do these things, and I have to force myself, because pretty soon, all the lights will turn off, the music will play, show will be over and everybody gets to go home, except for me, because I won't let myself.

Going home means not coming into work tomorrow. Skipping a day means falling back into old habits.

You know one other thing I've noticed? I wrote yesterday about how all of us who wish to be novelists are secretly terrified of being one of those people who walks around for forty years talking about that idea for a novel we have, but never actually doing it. There's even a Family Guy skit about that, between Brian and Stewie, the whole "how's that novel you're working on? Been, uh, been working on that for about three years now?"

Well, one thing I noticed is that forcing myself to write every day means inevitably telling people "oh, I can't do that tonight, I have to go home and write first." It was a little annoying, actually, when sticking to my goal meant interrupting or not committing to other plans. But now, I take a certain measure of pleasure in it, actually; I feel more like the genuine article, when I say I can't do something because I'm dedicated to my work.

It could just be some sort of ego stroking on my part, some little pride thing gleaned from getting that whole "oh, I'm a serious writer" vibe out there for people to appreciate, since, let's face it, it won't come up very often unless you tell people what it is that you like to do. If that's true, I'm completely fine with that. Because aside from ego stroking, there's also the sense, in my own mind, that this is me proving to myself that I'm serious about this thing. Because it's really easy to say, oh, I'm a writer and I have nothing else to do, so I guess I'll do that writing thing. It's something else, something considerably more meaningful, in my opinion, when you make the decision to write when you could be doing something else.

I'm not saying that it makes me a better person. I am saying, however, that it makes me feel like I'm more dedicated to my craft than ever before.

Life Is A Mirror

2009-11-25T21:45:00.003-07:00

According to the requirements of the class that spawned this blog, this will be my last entry. That's it, all done, time to pack it up and go home. Good game, and all that. You're done! You made the grade!

So why don't I feel done? Why do I feel like the fact that the requirement is over is the worst thing that could happen, instead of the best? After all, we spend our entire academic lives looking ahead to those moments when we can be done, when we can be finished and get our grade and move on. I know that I'm looking forward to the last day of the semester from the very first time I step into the classroom at the beginning of the term. And it's not because I don't like being a student, that I don't like this class or any class (well, there's some classes I haven't liked, but those are another story.) It's simply because I like the feeling of being done, I like not having to worry about this paper or that essay or these tests.

So why do I hate the fact that it feels like the blog is supposed to be done?

That's a rhetorical question, of course, because I know why. I don't want to be done because I've come to look forward to this time that I spend reflecting. I'm proud of the consistency I've learned and the progress I've made. Most of all, I like the fact that I feel like a real writer again. I like being able to look back at my archive and see the road that brought me to this moment.

I've talked about NaNoWriMo and how it's affected me. I can honestly say that if I hadn't done this blog, hadn't learned to force myself to sit here each night even when I really, really didn't want to, there is absolutely no way I could have come as far on that novel as I have. I know this, because I tried NaNoWriMo last year. Got to about 10,000 words or so before I missed a day, and then another, and just like that, my whole drive was torpedoed and I gave up.

In working on this blog, however, I've learned how to deal with missing a day. Falling behind on the requirement, having to work harder just to get caught up. With last year's NaNoWriMo, once I fell behind, I just said "fuck it," and gave up. This blog didn't allow for that; well, technically, I suppose I could have, but I know I wouldn't have been a happy camper. I don't know about you, but I'm sort of depending on these points for my final grade, since not all of my essay work has been stellar.

I've put a lot of thought into what makes a good writer, or hell, what makes a decent writer: really, what makes any kind of writer. At different points during my life, I've had different ideas: talent, certainly, that some people just have this special little sense in their heads for feeling out the flow of a sentence the way musicians feel their music. I don't think that's it, though, not any more: certainly it's useful if you have some sort of natural talent, but it's not going to take you all the way.

That was my biggest problem, for such a long time: I believed that I was talented and I thought that sooner or later, the rest would just sort of happen to me. That a book would just, I don't know, write and publish itself so I could go on with living my dream. Funny how we don't ever say "go out and work your dream." You're always told to just live it.

Okay, so it's not talent. Luck, maybe? Some people are just lucky and get to be writers. They know publishers or agents or people who know people who know publishers or agents, and some how, that little chain of connection produces work. It's interesting to me that at various times, I've equated being a writer with being published. I don't feel that way any more, although I did, for a long time, and in moments of weakness, still do and still will.

So maybe it's not talent and not luck, what about time? I just don't have the time to write. Well, that one was a bullshit idea. Because I did have time. I do. I might not have wanted to cut out chunks of my leisure time, not when I could be playing a video game or watching another episode of Lost, but the truth is, I had the time. I have too much time, in fact. And really, I've found that it only takes me about an hour a night now, working on this novel. Surely I can find an hour during each day to do this! Well, I mean, I guess I can, because I have been.

At different points in my life, I've had different ideas about what makes a writer. I have a new idea today, and hopefully a better one than those of my past self, though I know it won't always be the best one, and that in a year from now, I'll have new ideas, different ideas, hopefully better ones.

But for today, I think what makes a writer is discipline. It's about showing up, it's about working for it and wanting it and telling yourself that you'll do it, because it's never, ever, ever going to just happen to you. I wrote a book when I was sixteen (or was I fifteen?) and for a long time after that, I wondered about how I managed to do it. I told myself that I didn't know, that it had just sort of "happened," and so I spent the next six (or maybe seven) years of my life thinking that writing will just happen. That it happened to me once and it'll happen to me again.

Of course, it didn't happen to me again, at least not in the same spurt it had that first time.

I wish like hell I could have learned this important lesson five years ago. And I'm grateful even more than I learned it now, and not in ten years, or worse, never. Because we all know somebody who "has an idea for a novel, someday." And all of us in these English and Creative Writing majors, all of us aspiring novelists, at least, are secretly terrified that we'll be that person some day, only we'll be that person who also has an unused college degree to go along with that unwritten masterpiece.

So, is the blog done? No. I've told you about what this project has taught me and how it's shaped new ideas and new attitudes. It would be wrong to stop now, however, just because the class no longer requires it. Because if this is what I can learn about myself and my craft from writing for five days a week in three months, can I even imagine what I'll learn after six months? Or a year?

I don't want to imagine it. I'd rather find out for myself.

See you all tomorrow. And the next day. And the next. Because there's more to this mirror than just the requirements of the class that began it. It goes deeper than that, even if it's not always kind, or easy.

Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it. ~Ernest Holmes

Winning at Irony

2009-11-23T22:03:00.003-07:00

It's the last full week in November, isn't it? Wow.

I can't believe it's gone by so quickly, and I can't believe how much this past month has changed me. I've written about it here, my various concerns and meditations and anxieties, and lately, it seems like I've been spending too much time worrying about what December will be like, if I'll be able to continue once the mandatory blog is over, once the NaNoWriMo is completed. There have been a lot of great comments, too, things that people have said that made me think, words of encouragement that made me smile.

You want to know the main reason why I don't see myself stopping just because the "deadline" has passed?

It's because now I feel like I have a story to tell. I feel like I have something to say. I don't think I'll be at the end in my little tale by 50,000 words and I very much want to finish this journey, so that I can share it. Many, many times, when I sat down to write, I worry that I didn't have anything to say. And a lot of times, I still feel that way, especially when I'm just getting started, when the page before me is blank and I'm trying to think about how to begin.

But I have something to say now. I have a story to tell, and I know that there will be another one after that, and one after that, and so on. I know that it won't be easy, but hasn't that been the entire point of November? Hasn't that been the number one lesson that we've learned together? That talent is a nice thing to have, a great little incentive to get you started, but hard work is what writes books, fills blogs, gets you away from that point in your life where you tell people "oh, I want to be a writer, it's totally my dream," even as you both wonder about the fact that you haven't written anything in six months. Hard work gets you to this point, and not to sound like a smug, arrogant jerk, but I'm pretty happy at this point right now. I feel good. I feel, well... I feel right.

You know, on a totally unrelated, it strikes me as amusing that I'm talking about how good I feel about my fiction writing and how I've got this great sense of purpose now and the whole world is just out there, and yet, I'm completely dreading the rhetoric project that's due tomorrow in the class that I'm doing this blog for. It'll be done, of course, it'll be ready, but I have this intense feeling of anxiety since I missed an entire week due to my on-again, off-again sickness, and I just don't feel good about the work, and... I don't really know where I'm going with that, I just wanted to mention it. Especially since it's truly ironic, and not just an amusing coincidence. Which means I totally win at irony. And everything, forever!

You will absolutely not get that joke unless you know what Power Thirst is.

When It's Good

2009-11-21T19:48:00.002-07:00

After so many posts over the past week that focused on anxiety and how hard it's been, I thought it might be nice if tonight, I talked about the times when it's good. Because it is good, sometimes, even when it's hard. By it, of course, I mean writing, but really, unless this is the first post you've ever read of mine, you probably already knew that.

In keeping with the NaNoWriMo suggestion, I haven't gone back to read or edit anything in my story. I know why it's a rule; when the goal is speed and output, thinking about the little details slows you down. And when you hit those speed bumps, the enthusiasm drops and everything stalls. It's been hard to obey that rule a couple of times, however, even though I know it's a very good one to follow: more and more, as I find myself building towards the big climax, I wonder, did I introduce that plot point already? Is what I'm writing now going to fit with what I said a few chapters ago?

One thing that became particularly apparent to me as this project has progressed is how to choose where to leave off for the night. At first, I thought it might be a good idea to end each night in mid-scene, if possible, so that the next day, I can jump right in without having to worry about "hmmm, chapter 9, now what do I do?" Sometimes that's worked for me, but more and more, I realize that it's actually somewhat frustrating when I'm in the middle of a conversation, because then I'm not quite sure exactly what things have already been said, and what things are just things that I think will be said.

But I didn't mean to talk about difficulties; there's been enough griping for a while.

I said before that sometimes it's good, and that's true. Tonight was a good time. You can call it inspiration if you want, although I don't, because I don't feel particularly inspired, I just feel like I'm doing what I need to be doing and things are flowing along. Maybe that is inspiration, but in the past, I always associated it with a feeling of "eureka!" That's what I should do type of revelation.

Regardless of inspiration, however, the good moments are where you feel really happy with what you're doing. The anxieties don't go away, of course, and you'll still feel that nagging worry that maybe this isn't as epic as you think it is, but more and more, I find that I'm ignoring that feeling, writing through it and trusting in the moment. It may come to pass later that yes, I was wrong, it wasn't nearly as good as I thought it was. But what happens tomorrow does not and should not affect the story I'm telling right now.

That said, after tonight, I'm very eager to finish this story, because I want to share it. I want people to read it. I don't want to get ahead of myself, because I'm not quite done yet: indeed, I don't even know if 50,000 is going to be enough time to reach the end or not. But I do know that unless I draw this thing out to be 100,000 words, that there's more story behind me than ahead of me.

And really, I think I have something special here. Something that I'm proud of, something that I want to share. It's an exciting feeling; my first novel has only been read by a few people, and I don't think anybody's seen the mostly written sequel.

This time, it's going to be different. I'm not going to write this thing and then bury it in my hard drive, to never allow human eyes to fall upon it. This one, I'm going to put out there, whether by publishing or by putting it on some website or what. I want this story to be read.

And I'm going to do everything I can to make sure that it will be.

With the End in Sight

2009-11-20T19:23:00.002-07:00

This has not been a good week for blogging.

Much of that has to do with the constant struggle between moments of sickness and coherency, which I've explained in posts below, along with Twitter updates. One thing that I'm glad about, even when I let my blog slip, is that I didn't forgo writing entirely during the past week; indeed, I still managed to make progress on the NaNoWriMo project, although such process came painfully, and with much struggle. But! That's not what I'd like to talk about tonight.

I must admit, with each day bringing us closer to the end of November, which also marks the end of mandatory composition blogging and NaNoWriMo, I find myself growing more anxious. Will I still manage to keep up the pace I've set for myself as a writer during this month? I haven't missed a day yet; can I hope to maintain this schedule of "writing every day?" What will I do if I miss a day?

It probably sounds strange, to fret so much about something so minor. Surely, one missed day will not eradicate all that I've accomplished over the past month, but I cannot help but worry that one missed day will eventually lead to the return of old, bad habits: "Oh, I don't feel like writing today." I hated being like that... what happens if I slide back into that mentality?

Of course, there is a very good chance that I won't, now that I have known the feeling of writing daily and experienced the pleasure of constant output. But I know that laziness is something I will need to battle constantly, that I will need to remember always that this is work and that if I ever want to really succeed at any of this, I need to show up to the job every day. I can't sit around and wait for inspiration.

I've mentioned that a couple of times, actually, my feelings towards inspiration. Don't get me wrong, I don't think that inspiration is a bad thing at all; in fact, I think it's a very, very good thing and I'm always grateful for those moments where it all seems to come together, because that is writing at its most pure, most primal and most pleasurable.

But inspiration is a siren's song, and one can too easily be lulled into waiting around for it to strike like a bolt of lightning, which means that the majority of one's time will be spent waiting and not spent writing. A better way, a more honest and productive way is to do it like I have been: showing up every day, writing as much as I can manage, without waiting for the inspiration to strike.

The advantage, of course, to this second method, is that when the inspiration does happen, it usually seems to happen when I'm already writing and so doesn't get wasted. That used to happen to me a lot, actually; I'd have this great idea in the shower or driving home, and it would evaporate in the brief time it would take me to make it to my computer or even to a notebook and pen.

Regardless of anxieties, however, time will march on and the end of these two mandatory projects is in sight. I know that I've worked hard and proven to myself that I can keep going even when I don't really want to, even when there are other things that would be easier and more fun to spend my time on.

I remain hopeful for the future, that the progress I have made towards the whole task of "being a writer" will not unravel in the coming days. But I do not imagine for a moment that it will be easy, that it will ever get easier. I know that it won't.

Interestingly, I don't think that it should, either.

Still Sick, Still Stressed, Still Writing

2009-11-17T21:24:00.003-07:00

I would just like to preface this post by mentioning the fact that I still feel absolutely horrible. Not sure why I have this wonderful lingering sickness, but I do. And it's awesome, and I'm sure that it's made me an awesome person to be around lately, if you're unlucky enough to have to be around me.

At the moment, I feel very stressed. At the moment, I don't know if I'm going to be able to manage all the things that I've told myself I need to do, and the fact that my lungs are trying to secede via fits of coughing do not ameliorate the situation. It's like, goddamn, you know, I feel like I could manage this awesome pile of tasks if I was feeling my A game, feeling good, but in this state? It's hard enough to even find the will or the focus to do any work.

I realize that I'm whining and for that, I'm sorry. I would use these feelings in a more constructive way, but I already wrote on Sunday about how being sick and having deadlines are an extremely tense situation. Don't really have anything new to say on the topic.

Is it comforting or alarming to think about the fact that I'm down to the wire, that there's just about a month left? I guess on the one hand, it's reassuring to know that this, too, shall pass, but it's interrupted by that terrible sense of anxiety that time is running out, that there's so much to do and I'm wasting time by blogging about it, writing my stupid novel project, and so on and so on.

This is the part where I make some sort of keen insight, so that it's all worthwhile; most of all, that it's worth something to you to continue reading. I, sadly, do not have any such insight tonight. What I do know, however, is that even though my skull feels like it's going to explode, even though I feel completely swamped with work, I don't feel like I've made the wrong choice here. It's weighing heavily on my mind, this NaNoWriMo project. Should I really keep going, when I have so much to do? Or at the very least, shouldn't I put it off until I've done the other projects first, the writing that's going to count towards my grade?

And yet, I can't bring myself to stop, not when I've come so far. I don't want to stop. And that's something that, even as I write it, strikes me as a profound and amazing thing. I don't know if I've ever really felt this way before about a project, about writing. For so long, it's been "oh, I really should be writing" or "I really should be writing more." I don't think I've ever felt like I should stop, that I'm doing too much, that I need to refocus.

I think I like that feeling, actually. Sure, it means I'm still stressed as hell, swamped with things to do, but it also feels like a measure of success; a sign that I've really made strides against my tendency to say "oh, I don't feel like writing today, maybe I'll start that story tomorrow."

I do believe I will do anything to prevent myself from sliding back into that habit. Even if it means stressing myself out in the process.

No idea whether or not that's a healthy attitude.

The Cruelty of Deadlines

2009-11-15T17:48:00.003-07:00

I've had two important observations I'd like to share with you tonight, gleaned from my experience as I lay in bed coughing and hacking and wondering if I was cursed, or just very unlucky.

Why do I think I'm cursed? Hexed? Bewitched? Well, because it was my brother's birthday a few weeks ago, on Halloween. It was my mother's birthday last Friday, on the 13th. Yeah, I know, totally weird. But both days, while I was spending time with my family, I came down with an excruciatingly unpleasant illness that left me bedridden for at least a day. I thought at first I was allergic to my family, but I see them lots of times, and it only seems to be on birthdays that I get sick.

Ergo, it's a curse.

My second observation came from my experience last night as I tried to muster up the will to keep on writing, so that I didn't fall behind on my deadline. I just have this tremendous fear that if I skip a day, it will start the chain reaction that leads to "oh, I don't feel like it tonight, maybe tomorrow." I don't want to go back to that; I want to be able to say that I wrote even when I was lying in bed coughing out my lungs. Even though the writing probably wasn't very good and even though I didn't get very far, the fact was that I still forced myself to do it.

But goddamn, it was hard. I had a lot of time to reflect, throughout the day, during moments of lucidity, on this whole "should I, shouldn't I" thought process. I came to realize, as I said somewhere in an earlier post, that when you make a deadline, when you really, finally, truly commit to one, it becomes the most cruel and unforgiving task master you can possibly imagine.

There was nothing forcing me to work yesterday, except for me. Me, and the fact that if I didn't work yesterday, I'd have to do twice as much writing today just to get caught up. How many days could I allow myself to skip before the deficit became too much and I gave up hope of the project? I don't know and I don't really think I want to know.

My point is that writing is not easy. It's not always fun and it's not something that just "happens." For all the moments where we feel divine inspiration, all the times where it just seems to "flow," there are a whole lot more times where it's working even though you have a wonderful migraine and the thought of staring at a computer screen is as appealing as eating hot shards of glass.

I will admit, fully aware of my own pride in saying so, that I consider myself to be at least a little bit talented. But more and more, I realize that talent is something that's nice to have, it's a good place to start, but it doesn't really mean anything if you just wait around for it to kick in and do its thing. It'll just sit there, inert.

It's only after you've forced yourself to your keyboard and fought for every measly word over the course of two hours that you realize you have to do the work all of your own; that there's no muse to carry you. The muse only shows up to take everything you'd done on your own, and made it into something special.

Disappointment and Rejection

2009-11-12T19:01:00.003-07:00

When I sat down to write for the evening, I had to decide whether to work on my blog first, or my novel project. Before today, it has always been the novel first, since that usually puts me in a really good mood and makes for more positive reflection, than if I had started with the blog first. That was true today as well, although I'm particularly glad that I stuck to my usual method, since if I had blogged initially, it would have been extremely dark, somber and depressing. As it stands, I'm still sad now, but less so.

The reason why I'm sad, well... that's not quite the word; a better term would be "disappointed." The reason I'm disappointed is because I entered this fiction contest about a month ago, not for any real prize or anything, but simply because I liked the idea of having my writing read and judged. This is the second year that I've done this particular contest and the story that I submitted was one that I wrote over the summer. It was a speculative fiction piece titled "the Immortal" about a man who discovers one day, for seemingly no reason, that he cannot die, and the implications that follow from that discovery.

I thought, and still do think, that it's one of the better things that I've written. In particular, it was that story that started a lot of my thinking on the nature of God and Christian mythology and other such topics, a line of thinking that led directly into my current novel project.

Well, anyway, the award presentation is tomorrow night and I had not heard whether or not I should make plans to attend. Now, perhaps this is merely my hubris, but I honestly believed that I hadn't heard anything because of a break in communication somewhere. Such things always seem to happen to me, to be honest, and I'm always getting bills and letters late, or not at all. So I wrote off an email to a friend who was associated with the contest and asked what had happened.

My friend, of course, was polite in her response, but she was also honest, and the truth was that I hadn't made the cut. I won't really explain why I didn't make it, mostly because I don't know myself. All I know is that I had "a wide variety of opinions," and that one judge gave me a perfect score, while another gave me a very low score, and it was that low score that knocked me out of the running.

Disappointing. And I admit, I'm more disappointed than I should be, because I had really thought I was going to make the finalists, if not outright win. I felt that way because this story was something that I was proud of, something that, to me, was unique and original and interesting, which is actually pretty rare in the genres of sci-fi and fantasy these days. People like the old tropes best, it seems.

It's disappointing because I feel that I've improved over what I was writing last year, that my storytelling has improved and yet, it seems like the "new thing" that I'm doing isn't as good, isn't as well received, and that's unfortunate, because it calls into question all the conceptions I have about how I'm doing as a writer and whether or not I'm getting better at this whole thing.

Part of me feels that this whole thing was a mistake, because for a while, I've had the experience of writing in a bubble, in this nice little vacuum where I don't have to worry about being "good," and now it's all I can think about. Is this any good? Am I good? Maybe I'm getting worse? I don't really like thinking that way; at the very least, it's taken some of the raw pleasure out of things.

On the other hand, I know that disappointment is to be expected, and that even some of my literary heroes knew rejection even in the height of their success. I know that not everything will appeal to everyone, and there's a very strong chance (although this sounds arrogant for me to say) that my story was too high concept, was beyond what some people might be able to grasp. I don't know if that's actually true or not. All I know is that last year, I wrote a story about a writer who believed in his own fiction, and this year, I wrote a story about the nature of life, death, immortality, God and the universe itself.

Both stories are mine. I'm proud of both stories. And regardless, I'm going to keep writing.

Also, I really, really want to move. As in, to another apartment. But that's a rant for another evening.

Thoughts on Dumb Genes (and the People that Have Them)

2009-11-11T20:09:00.005-07:00

Today is Veteran's Day, which I think is a very important holiday to celebrate. If you are wondering what prompted this assertion, I would direct you back to a post I made last month about holidays I don't think are really worth celebrating, like Columbus Day. Veteran's Day, on the other hand, is a very good holiday and I'm glad that we take the time to recognize the sacrifices made by those who have fought on our collective behalf.

Anyway, that's not what I'm really here to talk about tonight, but I thought it was something that was worth saying, because I don't think it's something that gets said often enough. The sad truth is, for all of the good holidays that are out there, how many of us are cognizant of their meaning? Well, when I say us, I don't me us, like you and me, because readers of ALKM (my blog title's acronym) are all thoughtful, learned folk who think about these things on a regular basis. But I think we can all agree that we're probably not really representative of the larger community, because let's face it: there are a lot, and I mean a lot of dumb people in the world.

I attribute the rise in dumb people to two things. First of all, natural selection has been weakened, meaning that less dumb people die off from doing dumb things, and survive the pass along dumb genes to dumb offspring. Thankfully, the truly dumb among us still manage to harm themselves in spectacular ways, thus provided at least some measure of genetic protection. If you disagree, you've never really taken a good, hard look at a lot of the videos on YouTube. That might be a good thing, actually; it means that your mind is still uncorrupted, still pure. I'd try to hold on to that for as long as possible, if I were you.

But now that I've said that, you'll probably be curious, probably start wondering just how dumb people really are. And then you'll go off and look and learn, and then that innocence will be shattered, and it will be all my fault for bringing it up in the first place. Way to go, thanks a fucking lot.

The other observation I'd like to make is not that there are more dumb people in the world, or that the average dumb person is getting dumber (both are true, though) but that we're more aware of them now thanks to the advent of media. I mean, previously, you had the village idiot, and maybe the drunken sots who passed out in the stable, and that was about all the dumb anybody had to put up with.

Now, though, you have videos and the Internet and... well, pretty much videos, the Internet, and videos on the Internet.

On the other hand, people who were considered smart thought that it made sense that sick people just had too much fucking blood, which sounds pretty dumb to me, and I'm not even a doctor. So maybe there's hope for us, after all.

At the very least, it gives the rest of us a reason to be sarcastic, secure in the knowledge that many of the people we belittle, despite their superior strength, lack the awareness to perceive our mockery. So, really, it's more of a predator/prey relationship, than anything. Just not one that ends will the prey being devoured.

Well, it doesn't usually end like that, anyway.

Anxieties, Old and New

2009-11-10T22:48:00.003-07:00

It made me very sad today, when I realized that there are now more mandatory blog posts behind me than there are ahead of me for the composition class that spawned this project. Of course, I plan to continue to write in this blog even after it's no longer required, because, after all, it's my personal slice of the Internet, damn it, and it's my awesome T-Rex picture up there.

Still, when I realized that the time is fast approaching that this will no longer be required portion of my day, it made me sad. I have very much come to look forward to the time that we spend together, you and I. I like to look through the archives and see how I've been, night after night. I enjoy the record that has begun to accumulate.

Again, this is not to say that I'm going to stop once the assignment has ended. What makes me said is knowing that the safety net will be gone. The deadline will be passed, in one sense, and I'll go back to the old way; where my updating only happens because I want it to happen. I will not lie; I'm very fond of the way things are right now. The fact that this matters for a grade is an excellent motivator to keep me on task, to keep me updating even when I don't feel like it... especially when I don't feel like it. Because that's how it starts, that's how this new, wonderful habit of writing every day starts to revert back to the old ways of "meh, I'll write when I feel like it."

We all know this by now: very, very rarely, does one every truly "feel like it." Oh, sure, there are the times where I have a great idea and I think, "that might make a cool story," and I'll sit down, and start writing. Or I'll think about how much I want to blog every day and I'll do a few entries. But always, the fire goes out after a few days, everything fades once the "new" feeling wears off. And by the time it's work, my interest has gone to other things.

I don't like that. I don't like being that way, and that's why this has all been so important to me. That's why this blog has become so important to me and why the NaNoWriMo project has become so important to me. Because these two things show me that I can be the kind of writer that I dream of being. That I can be the person who writes every day, like my heroes do.

These things have shown me that I might have what it takes to live my dream.

It's not about being good, any more. I used to worry about that, in all of my writing classes and with every single thing that I set out to do. I used to worry, is this good? Is this something that's worthy of a "real writer?" I know why I think, or rather, why I thought that way for so long, for several years, in fact. I had a friend when I was younger, who, despite being a well meaning and caring individual, made a comment on one of the first short stories I ever wrote, that stuck with me to this very day. She read one of my early works, before she really knew me, and a few years later, we were talking about those first attempts, and she remarked how silly it seemed to her, that I had been this callow kid who thought he could be a writer with storytelling skills that were that poor and unfocused.

I know, of course, that she meant it as a compliment to how far I had come since those early days, but I know that I took some of what she said in a negative context, which became an anxiety throughout my life whenever I would tell people "oh, I'm a writer." And it's very possibly all in my head, but there was the worry that, upon telling somebody you want to make this thing your life, that you feel that it is your life in a sense, that you have a certain standard to meet. You better be good if you tell people you want to be a writer.

It's an anxiety that I carried with me for too long, and that I admit, still gnaws at me from time to time. But more and more, as I write for the pleasure of it and because I find that I am unhappy when I don't do it, I realize that it doesn't matter. Anxiety is my greatest opponent, I have realized. It is the source of my procrastination and it's what has held me back every time I allowed myself to stop, when I told myself "oh, I don't feel like writing tonight."

I do not pretend to think that the battle is over and that I'm suddenly this paragon of confidence. New anxieties replace old ones, after all; for instance, I worry now that I use the word "suddenly" far more often than I should. But just like courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to act in spite of it, so too is my resolve not wrought of a lack of anxiety, but the freedom to push beyond it.

Creative Juices, Now In Stock At Your Local Juicery

2009-11-09T21:30:00.004-07:00

And we're back, from the first break I've had from blogging in about a week.

It was never my intention to go for such a streak, mind you. It was just one of those things where I was a few posts behind and I really wanted to be at a point where I was doing 5 a week, so that it would give the archive a nice, even number divisible by five each week. Fifty posts for last week, fifty-five for this one, and so on. I am quite certain that nobody will care about this, except for me, and the only reason that I care about it at all is because I'm crazy.

Would it be weird to say that I actually thought really hard about my decision not to blog last night? Part of me wanted to, even though I was all caught up. You can get a head start on the week, I told myself, in case you miss a day or something.

But the real reason I felt like blogging, and the reason that I've been feeling good about things as I blog now, all goes back to that NaNoWriMo project. Are you sick of hearing about it yet? Too goddamn bad, it's my blog; more importantly, it's my blog for a writing class and this particular novel writing project has done so much for my attitude and motivation as a writer that it would take a far longer and more self-serving post than this one to explain it all.

You can probably expect to read such a post by Thursday or so.

The first thing I do when I get home now, after I take off the usual things (shoes, pants, etc) is sit down at my computer and start work on the novel. I am an absolutely terrible procrastinator, and it's always been a struggle for me to write when I'm at my computer. Which is a weird thing to say, but whenever I sit down and especially when I have to write something that I don't want to write, I check the usual time wasters: Twitter, Facebook, my email, Twitter again, the news, a web comic, Facebook, and that's already forty-five minutes I could have spent working now down the drain.

I'm glad to say that with the novel, I haven't really been doing that, aside from a quick tweet to say that I'm going to start working. Mostly, that's just so I see how long my writing sessions are going, if my habits are changing at all the more I do this.

The novel writing has pretty much been a very positive experience so far; I haven't felt myself get frustrated or anxious, although I have gotten close many, many times, especially when I think about "where do I go next" or "is that going to make sense?" I ignore those thoughts, however, and so far, it's working out well. But inevitably, I feel I hit a point where I can leave off for the night and have a good place to continue tomorrow, and by then, I've been writing like crazy for 45 minutes to an hour, and now the creative juices are really flowing!

So then I come here and blog about it. Like right now. What I'm doing this very moment.

Come to think of it, I wonder if maybe I should blog first, and then work on the novel. Might produce better work that way... but I probably won't, since I have this thing right here and now, and it's working well for me.

I don't want to monkey with it, since if I did, I'm quite certain that I'd break something.

Oh yes, and between all of my classes, I only have like four massive projects that are coming up, and that's not stressing me out at all. Okay, that's a lie, and it is, but only because I'm worried that I might have too much work and it'd make me miss a day on the novel.

Which, if you're still reading along at home, strikes me as totally weird.

And lastly, as a personal aside, I'm pretty sure I made up at least one of the words in the title for today's post. I challenge you to guess which one it is!

Saints and Sinners

2009-11-07T18:29:00.002-07:00

I do believe I am going to rant this evening.

I've been talking a lot about writing over the past week, which I suppose is good since the purpose of this blog is primarily to reflect on my progress as a writer, but I like to think that it's important for me to focus, at times, on other matters aside from writing. Cultivate a wide variety of thoughts and experiences, you know; otherwise, all you'd ever see from me when I write fiction would be stories about writers who are writing things. How very meta that would be!

Work today was somewhat taxing, to say the least.

There is a particular patron who visits our branch every Saturday, almost without fail. She is somewhat handicapped, and you'll forgive me for describing her in tentative language, because I don't want this to sound like I hate her, or that I'm intolerant of the disabled, or whatever erroneous conclusion one might draw from my speech. I don't hate her. I don't hate many people, actually, although I'm sure I could think of a few names, if I tried, but the hate would be very well earned, I assure you.

This woman, however, pisses me off in ways that always seriously damage my calm.

She's rude in a very oblivious way. I know that it is not intentional, that it is not her intention to disrupt my calm, but that's the problem with rude people: they don't know that they are rude. Rude people who realize their rudeness stop being rude.

She isn't, however, talk on the cell phone in the library rude. She isn't "angry customer" rude. She's just... annoying. She'll chatter at me about things I don't care about when I have a line of people. She'll repeat the same thing, over and over again, whether I am actively responding or not.

Look, I am fully aware that the fact that I'm irritated by this makes me a selfish jerk. I know that she is most likely lonely, that she comes to us because there aren't many places where you can go to talk to people about things that they'll enjoy, and have them listen to you. I'm familiar with the idea of being important to somebody that I don't like. There was this kid when I was in high school that I thought was an absolute moron and the most annoying little twerp possible, especially since he would never leave me alone.

I found out after the fact, after he died, in fact, that he had something of a hero-worship thing going on. And believe me, for a long time, I regretted how I thought about him. Not about how I acted, specifically, because I always tried to be tolerant, but... no, I guess I regret that, too. I should have been more than tolerant. I should have been nice to him. It's important, I think, for your heroes to be what you think they are.

I do not mean to say that this woman hero-worships me, or any of my colleagues, but I know that we're probably the only place she really has, and that maybe for her, Saturday is the highlight of the week. And that all feeds back into my frustration. I can't help the fact that she annoys me, that I don't like to talk to her, or deal with her, or listen to her, and I feel that, or at least, part of me feels that I should. And part of me feels angry because I'm usually trapped by the fact that I have to man my post, that I can't just walk away from her or tell her to stop bothering me. Part of me feels angry that I'm the one who isn't heartless enough to tell her to leave me the fuck alone and I'm not saintly enough to see this as an opportunity to help somebody that maybe really needs it.

So what does that makes me? Aside from, you know, a jerk? Does that make me human? We're all saints and sinners, though some of us might lean further to one side than the other, but what about the rest of us? What are we?

Thinking Ahead, Looking Back

2009-11-06T14:24:00.003-07:00

It seems strange to me that the thing I'm dreading most is the fact that I have so many projects coming up in different classes, and I'm worried that any one of them might be so stressful that it kills off the awesome writing streak I've been having. How bizarre, that my academic career, which is entirely focused on honing my skills as a writer, might become an obstacle to what I feel is one of the most intense writing experiences that I've ever had!

I'm trying not to think about what I'm going to do with this story after I finish, because any time I think about its future, or even where it's going, I start to worry, and right now, the only goal remains to go, go, go, to write and write and not stop. I do know that I would like for people to read it, because I can tell that this is something special, this story, it's something new that I've never tried before, a type of story that I've never tried to write.

Also, I think that it's going to be epic. In scope, I mean, not in terms of genre; so far, there are no swords or sorcery of any kind.

I was going to blog earlier, between my classes this morning, but I found that I didn't feel comfortable with the idea. It was in that computer lab, in the cellar; any UA students will probably know what I'm talking about. It was strange to me that I felt that way, because while I was in a public setting, I just couldn't get relaxed enough to allow for the very raw sort of writing and reflecting that I've been doing lately. More and more, I find that I need closed doors, I need music, I need my space so that I can shut out the world and tune into whatever is inside of me.

Also, I think I've determined that I have the most comfortable keyboard in the entire world. The keys just click so very nicely as I dance over them, and I like that a lot, too. I don't know if I've ever mentioned it, but the sound of rapid typing is something that I really enjoy, especially when its my own. I don't know why, it probably just makes me feel cool or something.

I am going to make the effort to continue writing on my novel over the weekend. Originally, I was thinking about keeping it to a five day a week schedule, like this blog, but ultimately, given how much I need to do and how little time I have to do it, I think that I should push through. Also, I find that any time I take a break, even if it's just for a day of two, it becomes so much harder to get back into it when the weekend is over. I can tell you right now, I do not look forward to the first blog post of a week, especially if I'm behind.

Writing With Abandon

2009-11-05T18:34:00.003-07:00

If you've happened to glance at my Twitter feed over the past few days, you'll know that, so far, my NaNoWriMo is going quite well. I had a bit of a false start when I was sick on Sunday, but since Monday, I've managed a pretty solid pace, writing more than a thousand words every day. It's been very rewarding, most of all because I really feel like a writer again. That sounds a little bit weird, but prior to this project, and this blog, I wasn't doing much writing at all: over the summer, I only completed one short story.

Now, though, I have the feeling of writing every day, of taking the time to write and just really reconnecting with my craft and my identity. I know that I owe a very, very large debt to this blog assignment, because it's this blog that's taught me the discipline of writing even when I don't feel like it. There have been so many times over the past two months that I just really, really did not want to sit down in front of the computer and try to think of something to say so I could meet my requirement. But I did, and I'm glad that I did, because it's taught me a lot of how to focus and how to force myself to do the work even when I don't want to do so. I fully believe, evidenced by all the half-started projects and randomly updates blogs I've done in the past, that I wouldn't be here, in this state right now, if not for all of this.

You might say that makes me a little bit grateful. And also, oddly enough, a little bit nervous. What will happen when the semester ends and I know that I'm no longer being graded on this? Will my good habit revert back to my slothful, non-writing ways? I certainly hope not! I think, however, that I'm in a good position now, because even without the prospect of a grade, I've come to really look forward to this time spent writing and reflecting, and rambling, and trying to be funny.

Best of all, the combined projects of this blog and this NaNoWriMo thing have taught me how to keep writing through all the past fears and insecurities that would hamstring my story efforts. I can't even begin to count how many times I'd be working on a story, only to wonder "hmm, that doesn't sound as good" or "oh, I should go back and fix this one part." And then I'd never make any progress, because I'd be too busy worrying about how "good" something was, instead of how "done" it was getting.

Now, though? Now I'm just writing. I'm writing, knowing full well that there are some things I've written over the past week that are quite awful, that don't flow, or don't make sense, or repeat a word. And I don't care. Because I want to keep moving forward, I have to keep moving forward if I want to have any hope of finishing the story. It's a very exciting way to write, because it's a very gratifying way of writing. I'm not worried about being "good" or about living up to any expectations including and especially my own. I'm just exploring. I'm just doing. After so many years of writer's anxiety, it feels a lot like freedom.

I know that writers give each other all kinds of advice, and a lot of times, they give each other the same advice. And the problem with advice is that it's never as effective until you have that moment where you really grasp it on your own, the moment when you experience it and suddenly, everything clicks for you. So I know that by me telling you all to stop worrying and just write won't really amount to any real effect, because we've all been told that by the great writers who have answered when they were asked how they do it.

Even so, here's my advice: if you haven't tried it, write with abandon. Write without wearing any pants or shoes, write like crazy, write and absolutely do not care or stop or worry. Just go for it. Embrace it.

I don't know if this story will be any good. I don't even know if it will be readable. But what I do know is that I've never had this much fun in my life writing before, and that's not just something, in my opinion: it's everything.

It's Difficult to Write and Wear Pants at the Same Time

2009-11-04T14:35:00.004-07:00

It's really difficult to write in a place or while I'm in a mood that one could describe as "uneasy."

These past few days, I've been writing from home, on my own computer, which is set in my own little lair of creative chaos and other junk. I've talked about the writing space before, which you can find in the archives if you want to look (I'm not motivated to create a link on my own, sorry.) But I don't want to talk about the writing space today, rather, I want to talk more about how writing is affected in an interesting way by my mood.

On the surface, it seems pretty obvious; if I'm upset, I write something that's dark or angry or bitterly sarcastic... although, to be honest, I seem to do the last one even when I'm in a good mood, so who knows. It gets a little more complicated when you consider the question one of "am I comfortable?"

I don't mean like my chair is comfortable or that it's too hot or too cold, or that I have a drink with me (the drink, I've found, is very, very important.) Rather, I mean it as a question of whether or not I'm feeling comfortable in my surroundings, whether or not I'm in a place and state of mind where I can afford to be unguarded for a bit, where I can be a little more honest and raw as I work.

It's tough to do in places that aren't home. Right now, for example, I'm typing this from a terminal at my job, before I clock in. And while this is my place of work, a place where I've been for almost two years, I can't entirely relax here, because this is a professional environment. I have a certain persona, a certain level of responsibility and professionalism that I need to maintain, and it's very hard to separate myself from that to create the sort of honesty that I prefer to place within my writing.

The reason for this experience, I think, and maybe this only happens to me, but it feels like I'm not really able to separate myself from my thoughts and my surroundings, even though those things may not have any real connection to each other. It's like, because I'm trying to maintain my guise of being a good employee, I'm not able to really give free rein to the part of my mind that's all weird, and twisted, and thoroughly disorganized, because that part of my mind would probably get me fired if I allowed it to manifest here.

So instead I write from the more responsible persona, which I think you can see here.

It could also be that I don't like to write while I'm wearing pants and I'm always forced to wear pants at work.

No, I'm not joking about that. At the very least, I always prefer to take my shoes off before I write, which I don't think would be appreciated here either.

So maybe that's it. Disregard everything that I said above. The reason I can't write as freely as I would like is not because I have to maintain a facade of being a normal person, but because I know I can't sit here at my desk without pants or shoes.

Personal revelations are awesome.

Storyteller's Reflection

2009-11-03T20:40:00.004-07:00

So I just finished up a great session working on my NaNoWriMo project and now I'm hopping into this blog entry. One thing I promised myself that I was not going to do was cheat and post my novel progress as a blog entry. Yes, I know that technically I could since it's writing that I'm doing, but one promise I made to myself was that I would do my very best to write consistently, on both of this tasks, and devote myself to each of them separately.

Also, because I'm writing in an extremely fast and excruciatingly loose style, the work that I have is pretty messy. So it would be a little bit embarrassing to post it without at least a cursory proof, and proofreading is the opposite of the NaNoWriMo goal. The entire point of the exercise is to learn how to write fast, loose, and messy; to not allow the inner critic, who always hampers creativity by wondering "is this any good, does this make sense?" That's not to say that self-editing is not important, just that I need to hold off on looking back on what I've done. Because if I start to worry about those things, if the anxiety is allowed to take root in my mind, it will completely kill my momentum and my ability to charge forward in my story, which is what I want at the moment.

Even though I'm not going to be posting my story, however, I would very much like to talk to you about my experiences writing for this project so far.

So, I'm on my second day with this thing (having missed a start on Sunday due to how sick I felt) and I have to say, it feels extremely good to get back to fiction. I can't help but think that some of the mental noise in my head, and a lot of the emotional crap I was feeling was some sort of manifestation in response to the fact that I'm a storyteller at heart, and, well, I hadn't written any stories in a few months.

Having poured myself into this project for the past two days, however, I can say that it doesn't just feel good... it feels right. It feels like there's a hole that's filled once again, it feels like I'm balanced again within my mind, and all of it reminds me of how much fiction writing is part of who I am. I can't replace it with anything else. Even this blog, which I'm proud of, which I look forward to most days now, is just me talking about what's on my mind. A lot of times, it feels like I'm just having a conversation with myself, a conversation that people probably don't really care that much about.

It's different when I'm writing a story. When I'm writing a story, it's not that I'm just talking and rambling on about philosophy or how I feel or what I had for lunch. When I'm writing a story, I'm creating a world.

It's an intoxicating and potent joy, and I'm very glad that I've been given this opportunity to rediscover this aspect of myself that has been dormant for the past few months.

This is just part of who I am, you know? At the end of the day, sure, I might be putting out 500+ words every day, five days a week (usually) but that's not really who I am. That's what I'm doing. It's something that I do, because I was told to do it, and because I want to do it.

The real me, though? The real me writes about gods and demons and fallen angels and dragons and space aliens and grand adventures and epic battles and insane writers and speculative immortality, and everything in between. I write about monsters and elves and blades and treasure, about heroes and villains and the monomyth, the epic destiny, the hero's story, in all of its forms.

I'm a storyteller and that's a word that I apply proudly to myself. It's not a word that describes what I do.

It's a word that describes what I am.

Passion and Rationality (Passionality?)

2009-11-02T21:19:00.002-07:00

I exist in a continual state of flux between passion and logic.

That sounds wrong, when I say it like that, but there's something that I've noticed within myself, especially over the past few months, as I find myself thinking more and more about logic and rationality and what it means for the world, and for me.

I have a very deep fear within myself that reality is cruel, uncaring, and meaningless, a fear that every thought about souls and afterlives and gods is just humanity's attempt at wishing meaning into a world that has none. A fear that not only does the question "what is the meaning of life?" not have a satisfactory answer, but that it's foolish to even ask such a question, because life, and conscious life in particular, is an aberration, a happy accident.

It makes it very hard to feel passionate about things, when there is a sense that the idea of value and meaning exist inside my own head. Well, our own heads... humanity as a whole.

But then I wonder if it is not indicative of a bit of personal enlightenment, to recognize that a waterfall is beautiful even in the absence of a beholder. There may not be some grand story structure to our world, we may not have destinies foretold, but that does not mean that the world itself does not have meaning.

It has not escaped my notice that it depends entirely on what I'm reading, which side of this scenario I find myself in. And it's difficult for me to really reconcile, or even articulate this concern of mine, because it seems like I'm saying one is better than the other, or that both are impossible. I don't think that's true; I just wish I knew how to attain both at once.

I think that logic and rationality are great gifts, perhaps some of our very best tools for understanding ourselves and our reality. But no matter how much I'm excited by the question and by the attempts to answer the question, there is the worry that the logic is cold and uncaring. I don't know how much of that is merely media bias from too many years of watching robots and sci-fi aliens and whatever else.

People shouldn't have to choose; I don't even think it really should be a choice. But I feel like it's something that I have to choose for myself, being declaring myself a scientist (in outlook, not in profession) or a poet (outlook again, not in actuality.) I want to declare that I'm an artist, that the artistic view is the best lens to view the world, but I always feel, somewhere inside, that the scientist is right and I'm not.

It feels like choosing passion means embracing ignorance. "I might not know much, but goddamn, I'm passionate about it!" That can't be right, can it? Especially when I get so offended, so absolutely incensed by what I perceive to be ignorance all around me.

So, that's where I'm at tonight. It always feels weird to me, to wax on about these things without ever coming to some sort of resolution at the end. But part of that's the point, you know? If I knew the answers to these problems, I wouldn't have to ponder them in such a fashion.

Regardless, the portmanteau in the post title makes me smile every time I read it. So I guess there's that.

On Schedules and Being Sick

2009-11-01T21:05:00.002-07:00

Tonight, I write not out of any expressed desire to create or compose, but because it is my solemn duty to do so, by decree of this taskmistress known as the deadline. Or maybe it's more of a quota?

It was my intention to write something yesterday as well, but by the time I was in a position to do anything of the sort, this exceedingly miserable illness had already begun to deplete my every cell and fiber. In fact, rather than spend my Halloween evening going to a costume party (or any kind of party, really) I instead sprawled out on the couch with a movie and a nagging, on-going worry to the tune of "is it hot in here, or is it just me?" Except for real, not as some attempt to self-compliment my own rugged good looks.

Well, even though I'm feeling like trash, at least my ego is healthy. Ha ha.

Hard to believe that November is here already. NaNoWriMo starts today and it's a mark of these dark times that I can barely convince myself to update this blog, which will means my month-long writing project is off to a great start. I'll have to make sure I'm extra super productive this week to compensate. Shouldn't be too hard, it's not like I have two papers due this week.

Oh wait.

I can't decide what's more annoying. The fact that Daylight Savings Time exists at all, or the fact that Arizona ignores it, so our clocks remain the same but the rest of the world changes so it's always awkward when nobody knows exactly what time other people are on. Did Daylight Savings Time even happen yet?

It's amazing how unfocused I am at the moment. Not even 300 words yet and my mind is wandering, I'm trying to scrape at the bottom of the empty barrel that is my brain at this moment, and even though there's really a list of things that I should be doing with my time (getting those papers ready to turn in, for example) all I can think about is how much I want to collapse on my bed, flip on Netflix and just zone out.

You know, I don't think writers, the ones who make this thing their full-time job, anyway, often get credit for how much hard work it really is. There's this sense, I think, that being a writer means waking up whenever you want, working in your underwear, and just generally doing whatever you please, somewhat like a wild animal. And that's just not the case, which is not to say that I'm a full-time writer yet, but this blog (and projects like NaNoWriMo) have shown me how much it absolutely sucks at times to have a schedule that you need to follow.

At other jobs, if you're not feeling your A game, you call in sick. You say "not today," and your boss says, "sure, whatever," and then you carry on with the business of not feeling well. But when you're writing, the schedule doesn't give a shit that you have a temperature. The schedule only understands that you're behind, that you were supposed to have 45 posts by now and you only have 43. The schedule only sees the fact that you have a goal of 50,000 words in 30 days and so far, you have 0 words.

Of course, one might say that the schedule is set by the man (or woman, to be fair) and so should be subject to that man's (or woman's) will. But we're perfectionists, I think, we creative folk; at the very least, we're some kind of crazy and so the idea of changing the schedule is about as appealing as changing the rules to football in the second half because your team is down. Incoherent sports metaphor aside, you just feel like one shouldn't do that.

And with that poignant thought to leave you with, I'm going to sign off for the night and crawl into bed, in the hope that tomorrow is a better and more productive day.

Windows 7 and Thoughts on Brand Affinity

2009-10-30T18:55:00.002-07:00

Friday night and here I am in front of the computer screen yet again, in an attempt to get back on track with my blogging schedule. Unfortunately, I think that my brain recognizes that this is not a usual time that I depend on it for productivity and creativity, as my thoughts are constantly wandering away from anything that might resemble an interesting topic.

But! I shall endeavor to press on without the use of my brain. We'll see how this goes.

I decided to make the jump to Windows 7 today. I actually qualified for a free upgrade when I bought the new computer a month or so ago, but I was hesitant to actually make the decision to commit. I know, I know, Vista is a dark and wicked taskmaster, I agree completely, but I think in the back of my mind, there was this subconscious fear that, just as the transition from XP to Vista was a sharp downgrade, I worried that Windows 7 would somehow be even worse.

Which reminds me, I really still do need to get my laptop fixed. I miss having it.

But so far, the word on Windows 7 seems to be that it's good, although admittedly, anything would be better than Vista at this point. I kept telling myself that I'd grow to tolerate it, it being Vista, I mean, and even now, after a month, I find that it grates my nerves and just refuses to do things the way I would like.

It always bothers me that it's impossible for me to complain about something like this without somebody mentioning that "well, you could get a Mac and then you wouldn't have to deal with it." And it's like, you know... I understand that people like Macs and that they're good computers. And I'm sure they're useful when it comes to art design or video editing or something. But to be perfectly honest, I hate being told to get a Mac, because I don't like them. I don't get them, I don't get the feeling, I don't sync with the aesthetic. I used a Mac when I was in journalism, I've used them several times since then, and every single time, I just feel off. Out of place. Disconnected.

It's like looking at a painting that's in a style you don't care for by an artist you don't like. Yeah, it's still art, but there's no connection for me, no affinity.

So I stick with the PC, because that's what I know, that's what I like, it's what's comfortable for me. And I bristle every time I'm told to get a Mac. Because to me, people like Apple for the brand, which is fine, because there's a certain satisfaction in feeling affinity for a particular brand. But I don't know whether it's because I just being an outsider in the tech world (I have a Zune, after all) or what, but I just don't feel the allure of that brand name.

And speaking of the Zune, that's one product that I'm actually very happy with and I'm proud to say that I'm a fan of, not because I feel loyalty to the brand, but because I think it's a great device that's severely under-appreciated.

Topic for another day, perhaps.

Death, Graduation, and Lyrics

2009-10-29T17:37:00.004-07:00

It is always extremely difficult to think of something to write about when all you have in your head is song lyrics.

It's registration week for me. I say for me because I have no idea anymore how registration is supposed to go, or who goes when, or in what order. I mention to a friend that I'm having trouble getting a class I want and find out his registration was two weeks ago, or it's next month, or something. So who knows.

It's really hard to believe that I'm finally coming down to the end of my University career. I mean, I've known for a while that at some point, I would have more semesters behind me than ahead of me, but I was never really cognizant of the fact until I was looking at my SAPR and realized that "some day" has become "a year from now." Maybe even sooner, if I decided to do something crazily motivated like take a winter session.

I can't help but think about what life is going to be like when class is over. I have to admit, I'm pretty intimidated by the fact; it's like all the waiting I've done, all the preparation, all the build-up has reached its crescendo, and now it's like "Go! Get out into the world! Find your destiny!"

Of course, I realize that it's not exactly the way my thoughts imagine life after college to be. There won't be a referee firing off a shot or an announcer shouting "and they're off!" Maybe that would be the case if I had a different major, instead of Humanities. But it still feels like the time is coming to a close, that I'm going to need to soon start thinking, seriously, about what I want for life. Where I want to be, what I want to do. Which is not to say that I've never thought of those things in the past few years, but rather that I always thought of them only in the abstract, things that were hazy and obscured by the fog of "some day."

Maybe I'll travel first. That's something I really want to do.

Because I'm thinking about life and goals and time, I find myself drawn back to a comment my philosophy instructor made in class on Tuesday. I made a point about how the fact that the Earth is fated to die (which it is) seems like a great evil from which no good could possibly justify it, and he responded: "Is death so horrible that life is not worth living?"

It's stuck with me. Mortality is something that we, especially at this age, have a hard time really grasping. There is a difference between knowing something, after all, and knowing, in your heart and mind and believing it. We know we're going to all die, that every single person will die, and yet, I don't think we really know that about ourselves.

And it seems horribly wrong to think that life will end, which is why we cling to the hope of an afterlife, that somehow, our existence will continue on after our bodies have succumbed to the frailty of mortality. Is it greedy, to want more? To feel that no matter how much life is allotted to us, that it isn't enough? If you were given the choice of what age to live to, what would you pick? How many years would it be before you decide "that is enough. I have had enough of life now."

It's a strange paradox for me, given that I consider immortality to be the worst possible fate imaginable, the ultimate prison, to have one's soul or consciousness or whatever bound forever to flesh. And yet, I don't know at what point I can see myself saying "I'm ready. I've had enough."

And I know that there are people who do reach that stage, especially if death is a relief from suffering. Or at least, they think they reach that stage, a point where the quality of life is less than what good may come of a peaceful death.

I don't know what any of this means, but it's what's on my mind at the moment. Well, that and the lyrics to a Johnathan Coulton song. So there you go.

Devoid of Focus or Reason

2009-10-28T23:22:00.002-07:00

You'll have to forgive me if I sound a trifle... angry, this evening. Take a glance over at the twitter feed on the right side of the screen if you're curious to know why. In the meantime (while I'm waiting for the site I need to load!) I decided it was a good time to update the ol' blog.

I mean, Jesus, really? The site's been loading for 23 minutes? This isn't 1996! I'm not trying to access somebody's personal home page with a million pictures on a 56k dial-up. Technology has moved on.

For some reason, I'm thinking about my desk. It's really messy at the moment, although it's usually always messy. Currently, though, there are no less than 15 assorted bottles, all empty, one wallet (it's mine), four different documents for a class, an old electric bill, my Nintendo DS, a remote control, a USB headset, a plate, a book about climbing Mount Everest, a digital camera, and I think that's a Comcast bill. I'm not sure. It's under a stack of bottles.

It's always been interesting to me how creative people relate to their workspace. Some of us treat our desks as sacred temples and take great care to keep them pristine, organized, clean and efficient; the idea of working in a cluttered, chaotic environment is anathema. Unthinkable! I'm not one of those people (obviously), so I'm not really certain what makes a person feel that way. I'd imagine an OCD thing?

For the rest of us, though, we don't care about the fact that the desk is messy. If anything, the messy desk is the mark of a well-used desk. It's the kind of statement that says "I don't have time to worry about this mundane shit, I'm working!" That's a bold statement, friends! People should be impressed by our dedication to our craft, not repulsed!

It's probably wishful thinking, at best; I very much doubt that anybody would look at a desk like mine and be impressed. Disgusted, certainly, indifferent, most likely, but impressed?

Since tonight seems to be rambling, unfocused blog night, I'll just move on to the next thought in my head. Do you ever get nostalgic for the "old Internet?" I remember what it was like when I first started logging on, back in, oh, 1998 or so. Now, I'm sure there are nerds out there who would scoff at the idea of 98 being the "good old days of the Internet." They might mention things like Usenet or a BBS. Well, screw those people. 98 was the old days for me, it was my first experience with cyberspace.

I'm not saying it was better. It wasn't. MySpace didn't exist, true, but you had instead a thousand different Geocities, Angelfire and Fortune City websites that were even worse, if you can imagine such a thing. Broken HTML tags, scrolling text, animated GIFs: such things make today's abominable teenage MySpace page, with its irritating music and tiled background that obscures the text look almost palatable!

It was weird before things like Wikipedia, though. Everything felt different, and I'm sure a lot of that was an internal reaction, because I was the newbie, coming into this new realm for the first time. I can still remember the very first time I ever posted on a message board. Which, of course, means I can also remember the first time I was flamed, which would be my first introduction to the fact that the anonymity and audience inherent to the Internet means that most people will be dicks.

Ah well.

Oh, look, the website finished loading while I was typing. How quaint.

This May Hurt Your Brain

2009-10-27T20:07:00.002-07:00

Back once again into the breach. The, um, blog breach, I guess? I have no idea. What shall we talk about tonight, my dear readers? I know that there are a few out there, given that comments have shown up here and there (!) along with profile views, so clearly somebody is out there listening to me ramble. At the very least, there's a crawler robot that comb the nascent Interwebs for search engine, or something.

I think that tonight, we're going to return to some philosophy for a moment, because a question was posed to me today that really froze my thoughts for a while as I pondered it out.

Let me outline a scenario for you: Things exist. I'm a thing. I exist. I was caused by my parents; the "reason" I exist is because they created me (I'm not going to think about that too closely, though.) But do all things have to have a reason for existing? Could something exist for no reason at all?

If you give this question some thought, you'll find that it's both simple and also absolutely devilish in how tricky it is.

On the surface, it seems that the answer is yes, absolutely, things that exist have a reason for existing, even if we don't know what that reason is. And logically, it seems like an existing thing needs a reason for existing, because if it didn't have a reason to exist, why would it? We can imagine non-existence; it's not hard to imagine a reality in which nothing exists, because there was never a reason for existence to occur. That's just an inherent truth in the definition of non-existence, which you'll either accept or deny based on whether you think that "nothing" can occur in reality. Some people don't buy that, or so I've heard.

So, let's try to imagine a world in which things exist for no reason. What does that mean? A guy named Richard Taylor has a scenario in which you imagine finding, in a perfectly normal forest, a large sphere that's as tall as you, translucent; clearly not something that would occur naturally. Your immediate reaction is to ask yourself how such a ball could come to be here. Perhaps it was man-made? Space aliens, perhaps? Some new kind of crystalline formation, previously unknown to science?

You most likely wouldn't automatically assume that the ball has no reason for being there. Surely someone or something caused it to be there; to say that the ball has no reason for being in that forest causes one to ask why there would be such a ball at all? Why wouldn't there just be a normal forest instead? That just doesn't seem logical, and yet, it's very tough to explain exactly why that is the case.

What's become particularly troublesome for me is when I've tried to wrap my mind around the idea of something coming into existence for no reason. Let's say, for instance, that the singularity that existed prior to the Big Bang, since the Big Bang defined all the known laws of the Universe (so far as we can tell) just popped into reality for no reason. Although would there even be a reality at that point, since there was no time or space? Okay, bad example. Let's go back to the ball in the forest.

Let's say the ball just popped into existence one day. Immediately, I have to ask myself: how would that have occurred? The matter that composes it would have had to come from something; it's one of the laws of thermodynamics that matter cannot be created or destroyed (at least in a closed system, as far as I can tell.) Even if the ball spontaneously appeared, something would have had to cause that spontaneously event. The really crazy thing is that shit like this actually does happen all the way down at the quantum level.

The quantum level, if you're not a huge nerd like me who spends his time thinking about this stuff, is basically the closest science has ever come to proven that magic exists. Things at the quantum level do weird things like appear for what's apparently no reason at all, or else exist in two places at once, or become altered by the very fact that they're being observed (Schrodinger's Cat.) Can you imagine that? Imagine changing something not because you poked it, or pushed it, or even spoke to it, or interacted with it in any way other than by merely looking at it. Doesn't make sense.

Back to my point.

So, we've got the quantum level, where things seem to happen for what is (apparently) no reason, or at least, no reason that we can figure out yet. It's entirely possible that people do have theories for the behavior for quantum particles, but those theories probably involve a lot of math, and well, there's a reason I'm a goddamn Creative Writing major even though I think this science stuff is cool: I just do not freaking understand how any of it is calculated.

Maybe quantum existence proves that things can happen for no reason! But then why do they only happen at the quantum level? Why don't people just spontaneously pop into existence? Or it is possible that there is an explanation for the quantum state, we just haven't figured it out yet. And even without that being the case, how exactly does something start existing without having a reason to do so?

If you're still reading along at home at this point, you're either extremely interested in this type of philosophical pondering, or you skimmed all the way to the end. Either way, thank you, although I don't have any answers to offer. Only more questions.

But that's part of the fun, I think. Asking questions, wondering why things are. It's why this philosophy stuff fascinates me so much, especially since it fascinates me in a way that probably won't affect the outcome of my life. It's not wondering for the sake of a better job, or to make life better; it's wondering for its own sake. To me, that's awesome.

Anticipation

2009-10-25T22:32:00.002-07:00

I like how the weekend always completely kills my blog writing schedule. All during the week, I'm making sure that I'm posting every day, being on top of things, and then all of a sudden, Thursday rolls around and I'm like "sweet, tomorrow's Friday," and for some reason, that sends a signal to my brain that it's okay to turn off, even though it's really not, since I still should be doing work on Thursday and Friday. And inevitably, the "brain shutdown state" persists until Sunday night rolls around and I realize that I'm going to fall behind if I don't write something, so I make sure to get back on task and keep up with my consistency, while telling myself not to let it happen in the future, even though it's happened almost every week for the past month.

What can I say, it's a vicious cycle.

At the moment, I'm thinking about the fact that this is the last week in October, which means that it's very nearly November, which means that it's time, once again, for NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Basically, the goal is to write an entire novel, 60,000 words (or so, I can't quite remember what the exact number is) in 30 days. It sounds totally crazy, but the idea is that by having such a crazy pace, you can't stop to think about whether or not what you're writing is any good, you just have to keep writing, writing, writing! And at the end of it, you'll have learned a lot about making a good writing schedule and overcoming hangups and other cool things. And you'll have a manuscript completed, albeit of dubious quality.

I think that the entire concept is a really cool idea, but I guess the problem I've had in the past is that November really is a bad month for this kind of project, in my opinion. It's a really busy time for students, who are feeling the crunch as the semester draws ever closer to its conclusion. If you work retail, you're feeling the oncoming burn of holiday hours, as we begin the long crawl into the frenzy that is the holiday shopping season. No matter who you are, November is a busy month.

I really do think that something early or mid-summer would be better for this kind of endeavor, because really, who has things going on in June, unless you're taking a vacation?

Regardless, I'll give it a shot this year; as I said, I think it's a cool idea and I had a really good time with it last year. I actually got pretty far in the story, had something like two solid weeks of working on my project until, rather ironically, I went to a convention to receive an award for a short story I'd written, and spending the whole weekend at the con totally killed my writing schedule, so that by the time I thought about the work again, I was hopelessly behind.

I've got a few ideas kicking around in my head about what I want to write about, although nothing too solid. I found that if I tried to prepare some notes or outlines before I began, I ended up straying too far away from the goal about quantity over quality which slowed me down. So this time around, I'm going to think about what I went to do, ferment some ideas, and hopefully hit the ground running on November 1st. I don't quite know how this'll go since I still have my commitment to this blog; my hope is that by working on a novel again, I'll have more thoughts and insight about writing to reflect on in this space. But no matter how you look at it, this is going to be an ambitious undertaking.

I'm excited, though, if only that it's been a while since I worked on my fiction and I'm very interested to get back to that, given that it's what I'm particularly passionate about.

Why He Rhymes Remains Unclear

2009-10-21T14:24:00.002-07:00

One of the questions you'll sometimes ask yourself, as a writing prompt, is "where are you at?" It's sort of like Twitter, except that twitter is always "what are you doing" which somehow has morphed into "what are you thinking/feeling/eating/repeating?" Which is not to say that I don't like Twitter, just that I am aware that it is not technically be employed in the manner suggested by its prompt. Or something.

So, the question of "Where are you at?" And it's a question that, if you consider it with just the right amount of obfuscation in your mind (I'm pretty sure that's a word) can be strangely compelling for all its various possible answers.

I could go with the obvious (and sarcastic!) answer: "In a chair in front of a computer. Duh. You idiot."

But what if we consider the question from a metaphysical perspective? Do I even know where I am, really? I could describe all the things that I'm on, and in, but that won't tell me, really, where I am at, which is to imply that there exists an actual place in time and space and not an endless series of contingencies that merely create the illusion of being in in a single place.

Or I could describe where I'm at, except mentally, emotionally, etc. That could be interesting; at the moment, I'm fairly happy, although my skull still feels like it's being pounded on, but they make little orange pills for that! Mentally, on the other hand, I'm probably somewhere between hilariously unstable and depressingly average.

And, that's really everything I can think to squeeze out of that particular prompt. It's just like, boom, hit a wall, ramble over, river dammed up. Nothing more to see here. We should just move on to another topic and forget about the fact that I was supposed to be building towards a larger point, but didn't.

Moving on.

Haven't talked about writing in a few days (to the best of my recollection, anyway.) One of the things that I've been thinking about lately is how my attitudes towards fiction writing have been shaped so much by what I've read and what I like to read. I understand and agree with the idea that a writer should read, should read a lot and that anybody who says that they don't have the time or interest to be a reader probably doesn't have the time or interest to be a writer.

I guess the thing that's been on my mind lately is how there seems to be, in all of the published fiction that I read, this sort of general "style" that most novels share. Sure, you have your own characters, your storytelling techniques, your own sense of cadence and pace and all of the other elements that go into writing a fiction piece. But what if I tried to break that?

What if I wrote a story from the same perspective that I'm doing this reflection? What if I stopped trying to worry about sounding like a professional writer and just tried to see if I could tell a story while sounding like me, nonsensical ramblings and odd observations intact? I've always differentiated between this voice, the "blog voice," which is very much meant to give the illusion of off-the-cuff, a little bit random, somewhat unfocused, but hopefully amusing, and my actual "writing voice" which is meant to be serious, meant to convey the story.

I'm not saying that I want to write a story where I'm the main character, but what I wonder is, does it always have to be that serious voice? What if I had a character who had thought processes like these? Would it be interesting?

More importantly, would it even be readable?

On Heads and the Aches Therein

2009-10-20T20:19:00.004-07:00

What to talk about this fine evening? You'll have to forgive me if I'm not my usual chipper and witty self, although, admittedly, I don't think anybody would ever describe me in those terms ever, unless witty was being used as a euphemism for sarcastic. I happen to have the most terrific headache at the moment and I feel the need to share this fact with you all even though blogging about physical discomfort ranks only slightly more boring than blogging about food on the "stuff nobody cares about" scale.

Seriously, this headache is wicked bad. It was so bad, in fact, that I actually felt it before I even woke up this morning, which led to the curious experience of dreaming about being in pain and having this vague sense that, as bad as I felt in my dream, it was going to suck when I realized it wasn't actually a dream, after all.

The worst thing (for everybody who knows me, anyway) is that when I start to feel this way, I never know quite how to act. Do I recognize that I may, in fact, be getting sick and spend a few days holed up in my dwelling to prevent the outbreak of communicable diseases? That would certainly be the courteous thing to do.

On the other hand, that also feels a little bit wimpy. I'm tough, I tell myself, I can just deal with this with a grunt and a good old-fashioned elixir of whiskey and thumbtacks, and maybe a few reps of one of those hilariously large triangle weights. And then I'll go find the nearest bear and eat it, because that's how much of a man's man I am, even though I'm a vegetarian, and also afraid of bears. Anyway, my point is that surely no mere headache could slow me down.

Hilariously, though, my agony has only intensified as I write, as if in response to the ridiculous hyperbole of my sarcastic claim.

In non-cranial news, I was going to complain about the fact that my cat ran away this morning, but then she came back, which makes me very happy but now means I have nothing else to write about, which is why I'm whining about headaches.

Jesus Christ, this really puts that piece we read about the migraines into perspective. I mean, this doesn't even feel half as bad as what that author described; I was able to drive home without incident (I think) but man... if I had to deal with this chronically, I can't even imagine. It's one of those things, you know? I would never think to be grateful for being the kind of person who (usually) only gets headaches when I've had too much to drink the night before.

I think that will about wrap it up for tonight, although I feel bad about having nothing of substance to ramble on about. But the reality is that some days, you have something worth saying, some days you have something that's not worth saying but can be said in a humorous manner that will make a person laugh, and some days, you just want to turn off the lights, shut off the painfully bright computer monitor and wonder if maybe it's possible to think so many thoughts that your skull explodes like a pinata.

Beyond Being

2009-10-19T10:47:00.003-07:00

I really like to sleep, but I hate waking up.

That's not meant to be some metaphor about life and death, even though that's exactly the sort of overwrought self-analyzing that I've been doing lately. No, the problem I have is that lately, especially in the past few months, I've been going through this weird cycle of waking up two hours before I'm supposed to be. Usually, that's a good thing, right? Score an extra two hours of sleep! Sweet.

The problem is that in this period, my dreams always become unusually intense and extremely fragmented. And when I wake up again, I feel exhausted and extremely disoriented. I wake up not sure of where or who I am, or when, and it takes several minutes of lying awake in bed for my mind to pull itself back together before I'm able to exist as a functional entity once again.

I think you can imagine why this would be especially problematic when I manage to oversleep and end up waking up from some disorienting dreamscape, dazed and confused, when the immediate need to get the fuck up and get out the door, because I'm late, I'm late, I'm late. One of the reason's that I changed the blog's sub-title or tagline or whatever the hell it is to "What did I do yesterday?" is because that very much captures how I feel most mornings.

Makes me glad I'm not addicted to anything. I don't know how I'd manage to function if I had to deal with more than just the seeming instability of my own thoughts.

I should be going to my philosophy class right now, but I'm not. I really don't have a good reason for this, just... couldn't find the energy to get moving this morning. Not quite sure why, it's not like I had a particularly intense weekend. I even went to sleep early(ish) for me. Ah well.

So, we're past the halfway point through October, aren't we? It's insane to think about, how fast this month is moving, and it really does feel like the fastest month yet. I know the reason for that, for my perception of its haste, and it's because I don't have anything to look forward to anymore. All summer long, every moment of every day since June, I was looking forward towards the autumn, when some one special was supposed to come back into my life.

And then she did, and then she went away again, and now I'm just here, you know? Done with the waiting, unhappy with the conclusion and it's like, where do I go from here? What do I do now?

Times like this that I really miss the changing seasons and the possibility of a day other than "bright and clear and hot." Because sometimes it really fucks with my perceptions when I feel like time is skipping along, the days are flying by, and yet, everywhere around me, things seem static, frozen, unchanging. Today looks exactly like yesterday did, and precisely as tomorrow will. I wonder if I would feel such disorientation, such disconnection, if time seemed an actual, tangible thing, a physical thing reflected in the world around me.

We were brought out here into the desert to enjoy an eternal summer, more or less, and I guess it's poetic that I'm more afraid of an unchanging eternity than I am anything else.