Month: July 2020

People are quick to believe anything that reinforces what they want to believe–want the world to look like. Often what they (we) believe flies in the face of truth. For example, I want to believe we can safely have a youth football season. The mounting evidence suggests that there is little chance of that happening. I’ve yet to accept this as reality, which is the same ‘entry point’ people use into conspiracy and the lunacy of cable news. In short, there is always somebody wiling to tell you what you want to hear.

As I plan my writing I am thinking of ways to incorporate this sort of thinking into prose. Minding the NDA I am writing a mystery/whodunnit in which there are many suspects and I need to layer the story in a way that lets the reader reach conclusions before the characters do and feel good about being right–until they are wrong. Such agitations are the joy of the story, and are exactly what I believe will help it last in the memory of the readers.

I also want to use what I am learning in the world about polarization to make the distinction between who the characters like and dislike and write to that divide in a way that amplifies it from the personalities of the various players in the story.

It all sounds like intense planning, but I intend to just write it with these thoughts in mind and see how it all turns out.

Some Thoughts:

1. Lately I have been aware of every pain and every twinge in my body as though tensing for some major malady. I do not think there is much wrong with me or that anything is about to happen. I have been lax on my pills and that is the sort of thing that makes those pains and twinges become a problem.

The world is crazy.

Or maybe not. Maybe we just feel more on edge because our President is making sure to dominate the news cycle with full blown crazy. He is full blown crazy–so far as megalomania can be described as crazy. I’m not a fan. I am also not a fan of his dude Roger Stone who was recently caught on a hot mike saying, “I don’t want to argue with this negro” and then moments later denied saying any of it. He did. Normally his saying it would be accepted as fact due to the fact of having it on tape, but in this world of alternative facts we are expected to believe whatever reinforces what we already believe or have been told to believe.

So, we are in the time of the science fiction I grew up with.

Beyond the psychosis of the political realm and how it applies to what we are dealing with on the ground, we are dealing with the Coronavirus. It is a real thing folks. California is shutting down the schools for face to face for the fall. Yet we are still going ahead with such things here in AZ.

What scares me most of all is that these are not informed decisions. I have been steadily tracking the news networks and Foxnews.com and OAN no longer cover the coronavirus. If they mention it at all it is usually to praise Trump’s response or take a dig at Fauci (which is gross). Contrast that with Reuters who has a steady tracker at the top of the page daily. So, because it isn’t in the news folks are starting to believe it isn’t a problem. It is. We don’t have a way to stop it.

That is where we are at. This is the reality we face. We have a lot of soul searching to do before we get out of this…

Some Thoughts:

1. I reversed the title number to 4.830 and it had me wondering about the future.

When I create stories it is important to me to get the facts right and to make sure the stories happen in a place where it matters. By the latter I mean that the place should be integral to the story. After all, if it happens here, it should be happening here for a reason. Now there are exceptions. There is always the conversation of universal constants. There are scenarios and events not bound to a specific place, even if they are bound to a type of place. For example, a rural vs. urban setting changes how a scenario unfolds.

I am thinking about this at present, because I am working on a novella that takes place in a particular city. I wrote half the thing without knowing anything about the city or about the profession of the protagonist. I got a lot wrong. It made me go back to the start and revise and consider what argument I am making with the piece. It humbled me. It brought me deeper in touch with the character. So, in the end it turned out to be okay. By okay I mean that I will probably do this same dumb thing again. As with this time around I will revise and ensure through that process that place and profession and space matter. I spend too much of my writing not honoring the things the characters do or places where they live. I do a good job of the deeper stuff–the stuff I draw from my experiences or from that otherwhere that stories sometimes arrive from. I just need to get the facts in shape.

Some Thoughts:

1. I really want my job at the Center for Creative Writing to be about creative writing and making that accessible to people. I feel like that has not been the case. It has largely been about politics and hand holding and listening to people’s complaints about the dysfunction in our office. All offices have disfunction. We just need to find a way to get past it and get back to the point–which is not providing experiences for a handful of friends and people we want to be our friends that we call a ‘local writing community’ and instead get out there into the streets and connect all types of communities through the power of the written word. I need to figure out how to accomplish that goal.
2. More and more it is starting to look like people are split on whether to take CV-19 serious or to go about their business by pretending not to take it as serious so they can actually go about their business. I’ve been sitting in the latter category more than I should. Especially when it comes to sports.

Yeah, it’s a thing now. Each Friday I am going to find a word and build a freewrite scene around that word. Creative Calisthenics are happened. Here we go…

Mein

Andy didn’t want to go to the party, but if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have met her. She moved through the room like a yacht, swift and regal with a sense of purpose that made him turn his head. Well, maybe it was the dress. Specifically maybe it was the way the dress showed her long legs that ended in blue heels that seem to glow in contrast to the black dress. He was smitten. He was also married, a fact his wife pointed out to him as she watched his head swivel hard to the left.

His head snapped back to center and he tried on a guilty smile–all scruff and attitude. He said, “No, baby it isn’t at all what you think. It’s her mein. You know?”

Saraya clearly did not know. Red was bubbling to the surface of her brown skin in a way that never ended well for him. Andy met her eyes. He said, “Your beauty is all I’ll ever need. What that woman has isn’t beauty. It’s a certain kind of attitude. she has this air of royalty about her. You know, like we should know her from somewhere.”

The red spread along Saraya’s cheeks until it touched the corners of her false smile. Andy frowned. He sighed and stole another glance at the leggy blonde and stuck it in the back of his mind. It would be something to think about later when he slept on the couch.

Progress report: I didn’t start the 10 day novel program. It is going to happen soon, because that is a format I want to explore. Most of what I learned about writing came from books like that I read growing up. I lived on books on writing. I gobbled up craft info in pursuit of getting better. What I found interesting is by the time I reached my masters program I was no longer gobbling up info. I went from wanting to know to convincing myself that I already knew. I fear that this is the effect of higher education. I’ve spent more time post edu trying to regain the ability to learn and reaching out to those sources of information that I began this journey with.

So that is the source of this reflection: What happens when we stop trying to be learners and become convinced of our own strength of knowledge. I had a curious incident with one of my kids the other night where we were talking about facts about the Novel Coronavirus and who was #1 in new cases. He thought he knew the answer and when we said it was something different he actually said, “let me get my phone” and came back with an answer that supported what he already believed. That answer was wrong. In truth our answer was wrong as well (CDC reported 61,000 new cases in Texas over the last 7 days). He wasn’t really interested in being wrong so much as he was interested in being right, which commonly takes root in the teenage years and never seems to let go for any of us.

That is what I have been trying to get better at: Being wrong and accepting that I don’t know and that I need to learn and that there is value in learning. As I learn I get better in my craft and I discover what works best for me.

The NFL is coming back. High School Football is coming back. Youth Football is coming back. College football…. Not so sure about that. We’ve already seen a number of teams talk about changing season plans. The Big 10 is going conference only. The PAC is talking about the same. Ivy shut it down. I think the conversation is being shaped by a loss in profit. We know games cannot be played with full stadiums and that revenue helps to keep the lights on in those stadiums. High schools like youth are funded by the students themselves and that guaranteed income creates a sense of necessity for those programs to play.

There is no absolutely safe way to play contact football. The new (soon to be mandated) face shields will take a important step forward, but there is of course a general risk.

I am in the mindset to wait and see what the schools do. So far what they are doing is playing–they are stalling the public announcement, but we all know what is what. My kids start back to practice on the 29th. The school still wants me to coach and I am still resisting. In truth, I will not do it because I have no desire to coach my kids past a certain point (fly on your own l’il bird) and I don’t want to devote my time in that manner.

At the very least we know NFL is happening in some form and that does mean fantasy. I’ll be starting that discussion next Wednesday.

One thing about pandemics: You are stuck inside your bubble. However, the amazing opportunity the internet presents is that to expand our bubbles infinitely through engaging with people online. As I type I am participating in a Creative Writing Symposium online where writers from across multiple states are communicating and discussing writing. Normally for this to happen we’d have to meet up. However, now we are doing these things online and creating through that a community of purpose vs. a community of place. Here is what that means to me: We are delving into the possibility of not being restricted by physical borders. We are allowing ourselves the space to consider collaboration and culture that is not geographically bound. This could work. This could be a transformative moment for our society as a whole and could strengthen cross-border and cross cultural relationships by creating and cultivating the sort of relationships of purpose that the sister cities program was aiming for at its inception.

I am excited by the possibilities.

I discovered that there certainly are things I cannot do. I used to operate on the Batman principle of ‘if you drop out of society and devote sufficient time to train for anything you can become it.’ Now I believe in the principle of, ‘ain’t nobody got time for that’

This new arrival of thought comes as I have been trying to fix the floor of the new office only to discover I made it so much worse. I cannot fix the floor. It is beyond ruined–a collection of barely linked and no longer interlocking floorboards that anger me on sight. I don’t have the ability to fix them nor the patience nor the materials. If I were to keep a floor like this in place I would have to buy entirely new flooring and then rely on the hope that I can get it right this time. No, I am going to just spend more money in a direction I know will work: I am going to pay someone who knows what they are doing to do something with these damn floors.

It is an important moment for me to realize I cannot do it all. I also recognize that I cannot afford it all and the result of that will be me falling back into a spot of debt–unless the tax situation is positive. One can only hope on that front.

Some Thoughts:

1. Falling behind on the words. Way behind. I need a few serious hours in front of a screen every day in order to get back on track. I cannot do that and all the other stuff I am attempting to juggle. I am failing hard at life.
2. I don’t have to keep failing, but I do need to kick into a higher gear and really get back to listing out things to complete each day and knocking them out.

I binged season 2 of Hanna, a show that had glimpses of good in season 1. The second effort had more good than bad, though the ending was flat and unimaginative. The glimpses that season did offer looked deep into the psychological positioning of purpose and belonging. In my pursuit of less garbage in, I am pleased that I was able to get some good out of this show. This look into the psychology of brain washing was very stirring. It, along with what I am observing in my mythology course, is reminding me of how far people are willing to go in order to create a mental safety bubble.

Without giving too much away, the show is based on the idea that the American government has been breeding orphan girls to become assassins. This is not a new concept. In fact, the show is based off of the movie concept of the same name and a genetic match of La Femme Nikita and the upcoming Black Widow film. However, what I found interesting was how open and blatant the psy-ops part of it became. At a point in the development of these girls they are told–straight up–that they will now be giving names and histories and families. They are told to communicate with their ‘families’ via computer message in spite of knowing they don’t exists and will only ever be able to reach out to them via internet. They know these families are not real and instead are control mechanisms but they eventually all fall into the names and false lives constructed for them. As insane as that sounds, it makes total sense.

Every semester I teach mythology I watch deeply religious students brutally insult and attack the myths of other cultures–deeming them as false and arguing that only a prehistorically dumb human could ever believe such things. In the sam sentence they will exclaim about how there could never be a pantheon of Gods because there is only one true God. They remain unwilling to see that their mythology bears any resemblance to that of other cultures. This willful ignorance–this unwillingness to actually see similarities or the truth or the purpose of their own stuff is at the root of what I found interesting about that Hanna show.

Long story short (because, you know, 10 minutes) people are willing to sink deeply into their own beliefs if those beliefs make them feel safe, help them belong, or create a sense of purpose. Once that purposeful contagion takes root, it is very hard for most to see anything beyond their own truth.

Ask Trump supporters about that.

At the start of a story it is all excitement. The energy pulses through you. The pages seem to appear as if by magic. The words pour from some unknown place. Then life intervenes. You leave the page for a day, maybe two. Other stuff takes up your mind and the story, once powerful, is now just another task left unfinished. Another loose thread. I am living with two loose threads and to pull too roughly on either threatens to unravel my entire psyche. I am not in a great writing headspace. My partner wants to chat about it, and I think that is a good idea. Talking about story puts me back in the mind for story, but I need the space to be able to talk and then write afterwards. I have built myself a prison of self-imposed deadlines that break apart my day. None of them give me the time or space to write with any clarity.

This is obviously a frustration blog. I feel it is one I share with many writers across the spectrum of fiction and non. Life does not pause for our drafts. Ten minutes does not give us the space to create what we must. The answer then is elusive. For me it is also incomplete. I find moments when I fall into story, but those moments are built upon blocks of time with no other responsibility–not checking my phone to see how long it will be till I need to drive to the next place. That is a momentum killer in itself. Presently, I do not live a life that allows for writing in the way I want to write.

The move will change things dramatically. I will be able to have production on any given day instead of worrying about when I need to leave to get somewhere or when I need to get back in order to handle the rest of the business. I will just be able to be home, go into the office, and work for a while without worrying about having to get done. I haven’t had that for half the week for years.