I’m almost obsessive about time, time-travel (and the apparent inherent paradoxes), and the concepts of reality (and ‘now’). (If you doubt that, read my novel, “Everything Not Known”, in which realists and creationists compete to master and control reality in battles which we do not know are taking place.) I’m really excited about Kip Thorne’s work, but I’m starting to take it all way, way further. While I have in no sense understanding of time from a physics point of view, I like speculating that humans misconstrue time and its impact. The is the primary drive behind the novel in progress, “Long Summer” (sequel to “Returnee). Fun thinking.
A Writing Cat’s Advice
Sometimes isolation and solitude is preferable to jostling, noisy crowds. Find your space, my pet.
Nevermind
When I was a teenage, I vowed not to be like my parents, and keep trying to open myself up to our younger generations’ trends. Music is easy enough, as is literature. Fashion isn’t bad, except for all the tattoos and piercings. I applaud their willingness to dismiss being concerned about body images even as I fret about them being overweight. I don’t get what they enjoy about some television viewing, movies and humor, but sometimes I manage to appreciate what they enjoy.
The classic Nirvana album, Nevermind, was released twenty-five years ago. Memory calls out details about borrowing it from a young friend, Tim, and listening to the CD at home. I was in my mid-thirties and enjoying the music from The Cranberries, Pearl Jam, STP, and Bush, along with Nirvana and others, but I had a number of friends who didn’t like it. They avoided hip-hop and rap, dismissed young country, and listened faithfully to AC/DC, Led Zep, Boston, ZZ Top, Ozzie, Aerosmith and the Grateful Dead. I laughed at them, chiding them for being like our parents, deriding music that wasn’t like the music of their younger days.
Now, twenty-five years later, the music, which was then the young people’s music, is older than the baristas and college students. Young music has moved on to Pit Bull, Adele, Twenty-One Pilots, DNCE, and a thousand other groups and artists. Listening to the music in the car and chatting to the baristas later, I think, it will be interesting for you in twenty-five years, when you’re forty-five to fifty years old, listening to young people’s music.
What will you remember as your own?
A Normal Special Day
Cold drizzle glistened on the asphalt, darkening the cement, and dismaying the cats. Quinn and Meep ran for the door when I opened it. Tucker and Boo were already back inside. Pepper curled as sentry by a potted plant on the porch’s corner. Safe from the moisture, her thick black and rust coat kept her warm.
Gathering in the morning as I shifted and shivered through the forty-four degree dampness, collected the paper and hunted the gray shroud for signs of blue, I thought, the weather forecast is off. We will not reach the mid seventies today. Returning to my office in the house, I checked the forecast for updates. They insisted that right now, it was partly cloudy, so my eyes were deceiving me, because I saw no blue sky. The Weather Underground site also held firm it would be in the sixties by ten AM, with a high in the mid seventies. I didn’t believe them.
The weather had otherwise little impact on my days’ plans, except I wouldn’t be able to paint more furniture in those conditions. Exercising, cleaning, dressing, I went to the coffee shop, had a QSM and wrote. Instead of shorts, I was in jeans, and wore a sweatshirt, along with my Tilly hat. The sunglasses seemed like an optimistic statement but I kept them on.
Afterward, sunshine had shyly approached through some flimsy openings. The air had gained a little heat, if I was fully exposed to the sun. Shadows introduced chills, and the wind had a wintry bite. While it was now sixty, I doubted seventy was possible, but I was beginning to believe.
Dressed for the chillier air, my wife and I went downtown. Holding hands, we strolled through Lithia Park where the shimmering maples displayed split coats of red and green leaves, and enjoyed coffee at a table huddling in partial sunshine. Window shopping books, shoes, clothing and real estate in Main Street stores’ displays followed, and then we attended the mid-afternoon showing of Snowden. Long, the movie held our attention, with the usual acting expected of Joseph Gordon Levitt and the remaining cast, and Oliver Stone’s production values.
More walking progressed afterward as we discussed what we recalled of Edward Snowden and the press coverage of his activities. By now, the clouds had fled. A rich sun ruled and the temperature was seventy-six. I felt warm and overdressed. We dined at an outdoor table at a Chinese restaurant we wanted to try, and I enjoyed a Worker Ale. A drop in to a store to pick up a small dessert was last, and then the short drive home.
A clear sunset was falling when we turned into the driveway. And we both said as we arrived home and the garage door closed behind us, “That was a very nice outing.” Yes, low key, well paced, relaxed, like walking through a comfortable book.
More days so normal should be so special.
A Writing Cat’s Advice
If the muse stays away, take a nap. Sleep well, my pet. Sleep well.
Fourteen Reasons Why Writing Sucks and You Shouldn’t Do It
A high percentage of people think there’s a book in them. Many think there’s a novel, or a memoir or autobiography. They think they can and should write a book, but they never do.
Then there are idiots like me. We write books. We gleefully leap forward with pens and paper, typewriters, laptops and keyboards, issuing a battle cry, “A novel in a month! Ten thousand words a day! I can do it. I shall do it. Give me a cup of coffee and stand back.”
There are reasons you shouldn’t.
- Writing is solitary. Writing is solitary. WRITING IS SOLITARY.
- Writing requires a soldier’s discipline and courage, but there’s no one coaxing you to go on. Few will do much to encourage you. Sometimes they’ll ask, “Oh, are you still writing that book? What’s it about again?”
- There’s not much reward in writing. Yes, sometimes a word, sentence, paragraph or chapter will launch you beyond the stratosphere with its sheer brilliance. You’re so far off the ground when you’re walking that you’re looking down on others’ balding crowns. You don’t need crosswalks because you’re above it all.
- But the next day, that brilliant diamond has become a turgid stool. Taking your head in your hands, you rub your chin, jaw, cheeks, temples, forehead, trying to erase it from your mind and thinking, “That sucks.” Nobody argues with you because YOU ARE ALONE.
- Money in writing? Yes, I received my royalty payments this week. Should I buy a cup of coffee or a candy bar?
- Writing is hard on your body. You need to stick your ass into a seat and hold it pressed there for hours as your buttocks slowly numb. Don’t think about what it’s doing to your circulation and muscle tone. Your hands cramp from clutching a pen and scribbling, or from moving a mouse and clicking as you copy and paste or highlight and delete. Or carpal tunnel syndrome inflames your hands, but you push on, writing, typing, whatever.
- The pursuit of writing can destroy your psyche and social life. Every spoken word heard, sights seen, glances exchanged, sulks, stumbles, confessions, cries and hugs trigger a sentence, scene, insight. The writer within you sucks you out of the moment and into their space. Others’ joys, triumphs, tragedies, deformities, abnormalities, accomplishment, history, hopes and betrayals burrow into your writing mind and festers with a new story arc, plot twist or character.
- Perhaps the worst aspect of writing is how addictive it is. Exploring lives, stories, tales, situations, and scenes infuse powerful highs. It’s mesmerizing to wonder who, what, how, why, when, and piece letters into words into sentences into paragraphs into moments into stories into novels.
- Writing requires unending segments of deep thought to consider all the things going into your work in progress. That thinking never ends, distracting you from life enveloping you. You awaken in surprise to discover the yard needs work, you need a haircut, it’s September, three fourths of the year gone, a new season upon us, the tsunami of the holiday season and year’s end climbing over you.
- It’s hard to quit.
These only apply to me, of course. Other writers don’t have these problems. Their thoughts are light as they type, and when they’re finished for the day, they stand and stretch, and go out hiking, dancing, singing, gardening, whatever. They have a solid, engaging life beyond the typing page.
I listed fourteen as the title because it sounded good, but I only have ten, the ten that count for me, the ten that really don’t matter at all. If you’re a writer, you can probably come up with four more. I would, but I need to go write.
A Writing Cat’s Advice
If you’re given something other than your desire, wait for what you want. Be patient, my pet. Be patient.
What’s Expected
So you’re back. What do you expect me to do? Smile, and pretend you weren’t away? It hurts my face to turn my lips into a smile.
You never told me you were leaving. Never told me good-bye. I had no idea of where you were. No idea when you’d return.
Again.
Your absence left me hurting. I sat at tables alone, sipping coffee, beer, or wine, whatever beverage answered the moment’s call. I hoped with each of them, you’d be back, and I waited, hopeful as a child waiting for a gift, but you didn’t come. You didn’t show. You know it tore me apart.
Again.
So you’re back. What do you expect now? How am I to trust you after what you’ve done?
You’ve made me afraid, and I don’t like it when someone does that to me. That reminds me of the person I swore I wouldn’t be, the person I fight not to be, after others did that to me. You made me afraid, lonely, desperate and bitter. You made me worry that you’d never come back, and then what would I do? What would happen to my plans and dreams? Was I expected to just let them go? What would I be, when you’re so integral to me? I worried so much, I was sick. Food was uncomfortable in my stomach, and hostile to me tongue. I hated you because you’d betrayed me. You’d left.
Again.
So you’re back. And here we are. And what am I to do? I know what you are to me, and that I’m nothing to you. You made that clear.
Again.
So what am I to do but welcome you back, my muse? I’m relieved you’ve come back – oh, God, relieved? I’m fucking joyous. Ecstatic. And for now, I’ll hide from the plague of what-if scenarios you forced me to confront when you were gone. They’re no longer true, and no longer matter. Although, for a time, I thought —
But you’re here now, aren’t you?
Again.
Yes, I hate you, and, yes, I love you.
Again.
I don’t know how long you’ll be here. You never say. But here you are, so we know what I’m expected to do, damn you. I don’t have a choice. You’re always in control.
Yeah, so here you are, and here I am, which means, time to fucking write like fucking crazy, at least one more fucking time.
Maybe that’ll appease you enough that you’ll stay a little longer. I have hope.
Again.
7 Tips for Making Time to Write
Besides these intelligent tips, my #1 difference was deciding that I needed to make writing a high priority. I began treating it as a very important part of my day, and I told others that I couldn’t do things because I needed to write. Then, they became supportive and helped me stick to my schedule.
Wonky Surface Tension
While surface tension chatter is usually about fluids or materials, thinking about personal surface tension emerged from my meditations today. I blame James Blish.
Blish was a terrific science fiction and fantasy writer. I admired his imagination. Flying cities, anti-aging drugs, he offered up so many neat and original ideas, but always managed to do so with solidly convincing style. He was one of those I put up on a pedestal with the hard science fiction Big Three of Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein.
I’m in one of those places where my writing ideas are generating natural highs. I’v been working on cosmological entanglements (which are a similar idea to quantum entanglements) and tachyon time travel telepathy, and their impacts on the story arcs – who goes where, how and why – constructing the final puzzle from the pieces, and making up the pieces on the fly. (For these ideas, please blame Timothy Ferris and his books, especially ‘The Whole Shebang’.) This, for me, naturally demands deep thinking, thinking that stills me with focus and concentration. Then, epiphanies burst free from of the morass of cogitation. Aha, and eureka!
Now I understand my pretend science and construct it with the flimsiest of physics. And now comes the story-telling. How do I weave all this into the novel without sounding like a science book? This is especially a challenge as several disparate threads are weaving around this central idea, creating a loose fabric that’s gradually becoming tauter.
To veer into other metaphors, scenes then explode in my head. I glimpse some shrapnel of what they’re about, but I become excited. The scenes spread faster and faster. Watching and focusing, I try hard to capture the gist of each, get it down, get it down, so I may build around these kernels (splintering into yet more metaphors), create the scenes and string them together.
Like surface tensions in fluids, I need the correct coherent forces to hold it all together. Frankly, this stage of writing always intimidates and frightens me. And I heed what those old masters like Blish did, creating a story that at least has sufficient scientific integrity that people will give me a grudging pass. Meanwhile, I admire certain writers outside of the science fiction realm and prefer their writing styles, people like Erdrich, Chabon, Frantzen, and Ferranti, and yes, Irving, Updike, and Roth, and even folks like Tana French and Kate Atkinson. My style continues to emerge into something like their styles, and that is very deliberate.
It all makes my surface tension wonky, caused by the differences in what I am, where I am, where I want to be, and who I dream of being. Perhaps contributing to the wonky surface tension, if I pause and squint into the far future’s dim tunnels, I can see this gem of a novel glittering and spinning, there for my taking. I fear my reach will fall short.
But rare exhilaration can be enjoyed even when reaching and failing. No need to remind myself of that (even though I did, didn’t I?), because that’s not the impelling force pushing my writing efforts. Writing, and attempting to visualize and capture these stories and their ideas, is just fun. The process also provides an escape. Writing is like an opiate that helps me cope with my life.
So here I am, once again, writing instrument at hand (a computer), along with a quad shot mocha, time, and solitude. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 