Month: February 2013

This is one of those nights where I don’t have a lot to say or even the psychological energy to scrape together a coherent and singular post. I don’t know that this is a real reflection as much as it is a ramble about semantics. I do want to say a few words about the portrayal of Chris Dorner in the media. Before I say how I feel about the portrayal, let me speak about the man:

I don’t know Dorner or hardly anything about him. I don’t condone his methods or actions. I don’t think he was innocent or a victim.

Here is what I do think. I think we have a consistent double standard in this country. The enemy that takes advantage of ambush and guerilla tactics is a coward. The ally that does the same is a hero. If we drop bombs from unmanned drones we are taking a tactical advantage. If we ambush a nest of terrorists we are again using tactical advantage. If a cop shoots a perp in the back before the perp can harm someone, they get to be called heroes. Dorner ambushed people and is called a coward.

Again, it isn’t about the man but about the double standard. We need to move away from this idea of exceptionalism before it gets us in all kind of social danger.

One of the things I wanted to do with this blog was to explore my process. It is important not only to recognize what your writing process is but to reflect on the process in hopes of understanding why you do things the way you do and if there are opportunities for improvement. I’m certain there are ways to improve my own process, so long as I am honest about how I work and don’t work at my craft.

The one issue I have discussed at length here is when I write. I get the majority of my work done after 10PM. My brain goes to sleep around 11, so there are hours of the night that I am operating way below capacity. I feel pretty fresh between 6-7 AM, so I do occasionally wake to throw down a few pages.

Another part of my process is the extremely long ramp up period to a project. If I were a car, I’d hit a comfortable cruising speed in about 6 weeks. This aspect of my process is baffling. When I finish one project it takes me a considerable amount of downtime to launch into the next. I am presently working to address that issue.

There are a couple of aspects to my process that are problematic and likely have contributed to a handful of failed novels and short stories. I need a stronger will to commit to the set time and schedule, because unless I can do just that, I’m going to completely flame out.

Approaching a three-day weekend I find myself in a conundrum. I planned to spend most of the weekend puzzling over a story, but I’m spending the pre-weekend trying to decide how to tell a story that has little action to an audience that craves such things. The trick, i suppose, will be in the telling. Specifically, I need to raise the stakes very high and tighten that tension throughout the piece without having to resort to bullets.

The fact is, there isn’t much to tell in the story so far as stuff happening. The whole piece is a cerebral thing, designed to show the movements of a person through a particular world as a way to move the world story along through the eyes of someone the readers would be marginally familiar with. In other words, a milieu piece. Sadly, that is difficult to accomplish in the amount of words I am tasked to work with.

And therein lies the fun.

Used to be that I took on these kind of challenges with a gleam in the eye. I didn’t think about consequences so much as opportunities. That way the telling was daring and genuine. It is a strange thing that the way you write ages with you. I recognize that there is no going back, but it would be nice to let go of some of these pretenses and write like I don’t have a care in the world.

After all, I’m doing this out of love.

Not a whole lot firing off in the mind tonight. My thoughts have been scattered as I watch many of my responsibilities come to a head. See, a lot of what I do needs to get done in  a specific time frame. That frame or window closes soon, and I am feeling the pinch. The other day one of my co-workers mentioned staging an intervention for me. He rightfully felt that I overwork myself to the point of madness and take on so many responsibilities that it seems like I don’t have time to give full attention to any one. That was certainly the case last semester. I’ve designed a fall semester that absolutely prevents that, but in the meanwhile I am out on a limb here trying to tie up every loose end in the city.

Then there’s this idea of down time. While I don’t get very much of it I do try to find an hour or two that I can veg out and absorb new media. Tonight’s hour was spent absorbing Chicago Fire. I don’t regret the time spent. Good drama most nights, though tonight there was less firefighter stuff than I am used to.

Look at me–rambling. Perhaps that is just the way it is when you have ten minutes to fill and not a whole lot going on in the mind to put down on paper. On the other hand, this is the discovery process. This is the path people take to find their voice in writing. I’ve been leading my students down this path as of late and trying to get them to understand the value of this creative process. That is not working with one class in particular. Maybe we’ll have a sit down tomorrow and work it out.

Yeah, just add that to the to-do list.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. At some point the numbering system is going to go away or merely start looking like star dates. 

This is a post about nothing. More specifically, this is a post about eating nothing. Breakfast is said to be the most important meal of the day, but try as I might, I cannot convince myself to eat the stuff with any consistency. As a result I wind up gorging myself on fast food later in the day, only hindering my weight loss efforts.

Science tells me that weight loss is about optimizing the level of food a person has in relation to how much energy they expend in a day. This is best served by having breakfast and five more meals/snacks throughout the day. Gorging is the wrong way to go, because the excess becomes fat. That is what i’ve been doing for years and it shows.

The downside of being human is getting old. Part of that is getting sick. I’m feeling the burn of that right now, especially in regards to a shoulder that is flaring up with odd and barely tolerable pain. I think the biggest slice of the problem is lack of sleep. I mean, here it is 11:35 AZ time and I’m writing this post (along with NDA material for a certain RPG). Worse still is the fact that being sick is going to force me to miss a number of responsibilities over the next few days. I should be able to drag myself and the others to the game tomorrow evening, but beyond that is a big ole question mark.

The other part of the fatigue is the increased mental exercise of writing on a consistent schedule. I like that I am producing, but it is difficult to break myself into the steady routine of writing after so many years of relying on talent over effort. The same can be said of my athleticism, but I haven’t evolved a routine there yet.

Emphasis on yet. Everything is progress. Each day we get stronger, smarter, and more aware of who we are at the core. This is unless we decide we don’t want to know who we are at all.

The question is a valid one only because of the talent level involved. Maybe I am wrong there. Maybe if my kid was terrible the other parents would still have a problem with me feeding the kid the ball. Maybe it is all built up in my head. The fact is, my son touches the ball 1-3 times a game. He should touch it more, because he is pretty freaking epic. This is the opinion of others as well as my own. This is also the reason I keep him away from the ball. I am afraid feeding the kid will lead to parents getting upset.

I’m hovering around the ‘screw it’ point. I know that I need to get him the ball in order to at least establish a run threat. The idea there is that once he breaks one (takes about 1-2 carries) they’re gonna be looking for that hand off and creeping up to the line of scrimmage where a play-action can really make things happen for some of the players who don’t have as much talent. This isn’t really ego talking here. This is knowledge and reality at work. For example, last game I had my boy run twice. After the second run we were able to run rollouts to the opposite side of the field for the rest of the game. A failure of our receivers to catch notwithstanding, this could have really broke down the defense.

I enjoy play calling and scheming up offenses. I like the defensive side as well, because it removes the worry of thinking the parents will blame me for their kid not getting the ball as often as possible. That worry is the only thing holding me back from opening the playbook up right now.

Sometimes I feel like I’m made of high hopes. The day started with several. We played the best 8-9 Flag team and were stomped. We played a decent 4-5 team and won at the end–only ‘cuz I gave my kid the ball for the last play. By baseball time the 5 yr old had such a fever that I considered frying an egg on his forehead. Thus dies the best laid plans of men. By nightfall my wife was gone, taking the youngest in tow. She went to see her sister run a Spartan race. They decided to make in an all-nighter, leaving me to deal with the other to boys. I cannot say that I blame her. I dip out on conferences every few months and I don’t take any kids with me.

Between that and a very expensive but spotty internet connection, I am left to wonder if the universe is trying to tell me something about the number of commitments in my life. I’m not sick yet, but if I do fall to illness, I can’t imagine what my students would do. There is not much room for a sub in my unscripted classes, and I don’t have time to script.

You have to write a lot. That’s the first thing everyone says. You have to take it upon yourself to write as much as possible, dragging yourself to the well of creativity and patience each day and scooping out everything you can in order to make your soul swell with the words. For a while there I thought that drinking from the cup would empty me out. I watched King and the others fall victim to this emptiness of story, a hollow canting of something already told. I felt they’d run dry and were no longer laden with words.

I was wrong of course. Consider it a misinterpretation of the situation by someone who, until that point, had lived outside the walls of the published. It wasn’t that the old greats had fallen silent, but that the old greats had so much to do outside of produce that producing anything of significant substance was a maddening and impossible challenge. When I found myself in that same place, battling stress in the slender moments before fatigue took me utterly, I did not understand how I’d arrived or what it even meant. I wrote for months about Writer’s block, the loss of the soul-story, even this idea of giving up the written word. Heck, I quit Shadowrun altogether. None of it made me a brighter spirit or even quelled that heavy desire to put finger to key and hack out story.

It turns out that I was struggling with life outside of the words, and instead of seeing that and diving headlong into the words for a chance to reflect and perhaps even escape, I blamed the words for my stress and my rough intention. I know now that the words are what keeps me going and it is only through keeping going that one can write well.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’ve had many thoughts of my grandmother lately. I don’t know what that means, except for maybe as a foreshadow to the loss of her last sister–my great aunt. In the Bayou they talk about blood as a spirit thing and you know sometimes when your blood has thinned. You can feel the soul of your lost loved one drifting away from you. I hope that isn’t the case, the way my family is so small and so nearly and terribly forgotten. 

I’m writing this while watching a very strange TruTV show called Jokers. More disappointingly, I am watching TruTV. This is one of those nights where the fatigue caught up with me and there is little I  can do productively. I thought about writing some more, but I can’t even bring myself to pull up the file. Too much energy needed and not enough available.

The upside is I’ve fallen into a solid routine of waking (not sleeping) at a set time and climbing right into the writing. A few months at this pace and I will reach a level of constant production I have never seen. In the meanwhile, I am totally drained and only marginally interested in remaining conscious much longer than these ten minutes..