Category: Thinking, thinking

Winding Down…

It’s not really winding day, but a pause, isn’t it?

I speak for myself. Immersing myself in reading, researching, and writing, I often pay scant attention to days passing, preferring to think in terms of how much writing has progressed, and what’s left. I’m pausing for New Year’s Eve and Day, mostly because my wife wants to celebrate it, places are closed for this thing called a holiday, and stagnant air and freezing fog undermine my spirit. The net of those laborious sentences is that I’m pausing for a day.

You guys out there in blogger land give me fabulous support. Reading about your projects, ideas, lives, setbacks, hopes, frustrations, and takes on life — humorous and otherwise — is tremendously helpful for me. In our secret but public blogging world, we discover that we’re not as alone as we think, that many of us share the same despair and frustration, that dreams are sometimes achieved, that others are cheering for us, and that ordinary non-famous people are often pretty damn amazing and talented.

I always say that we live and exist on multiple spectrums. In a large sense, our spectrum of experiences helps us create our identity, explore our existence, and expand our knowledge. These blogs you all write and share help others expand their spectrums, if they choose to explore.

Thanks for opening up and sharing. Hope you all have a creative and successful year in 2019 and beyond.

Cheers

2

Rough Diamonds

I’d hoped to have finished editing An Undying Quest, the fifth novel in the Incomplete States series by yesterday. Only two chapters, forty pages remained three days ago.

Issues were encountered. The chapters suffered from being the last ones written. As the final chapters, they’d not been polished, edited, and revised as the others had. They were raw, beta chapters. They needed work.

Among the issues encountered were a brief POV change and a few matters of grammar and punctuation. Dialogue needed tidying, but most critically, details were needed.

I love reading details in novels. I think they often add immense value. That’s how I tend to write, then. Not in the beta draft, though.

In writing’s first rush, I capture scenes and action, coloring in broad, fast strokes. It’s an intense rush. They’re here, they’re there, they did this, and then that, which resulted in this, but unexpectedly —

The writing is bang, bang, bang, bang. Even when they’re action scenes, more is required after that first rush to help the scenes breath and flow together. Sometimes changes are required to adjust to the characters’ past, and sometimes continuity matters exist.

I instantly realized that I’d not polished the chapters. The difference was clear because the reading cadence was mildly askew. That realization tempered my approach. I read both chapters completely before doing anything except fixing the most basic errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar. Everything else was left untouched until I knew the entire picture. After reading them, I’d established strong ideas about what to addressed, and then began reading, revising, and editing the chapter again.

So, An Undying Quest isn’t fini yet. I’d hoped to complete it by Christmas, and then by the end of the year. That may still happen today. I won’t rush it. I don’t want to be hasty or lazy. Number one, I enjoy the process. Number two, I don’t want to sabotage myself for such a silly, random idea as a self-imposed deadline.

Time to edit and write like crazy, at least one more time in 2018.

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Weird

I don’t recall any dreams from last night. Even when I don’t post about my dreams, I usually remember multiple scenes, if not entire dreams. (Or, maybe I convince myself that I remember them, and the muses feed details to fill in the vacuum.) After days of often chaotic, stormy dreams that battered my psyche, experiencing this lack of dreams calms and relaxes me.

It’s weird, though. I’m accustomed to waking up and processing dreams. Not having them to process leaves me with a lot of free time. It’s like finishing a large project and then looking around and saying, now what?

 

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The Question

A man passed, and he thought with horror, that guy smells like he shit his pants.

She passed in a green skirt and bright, flowery sweater. The man grimaced as acrid body odor assaulted his nose, and then another went by — he didn’t see her — in the other direction, filling the air with stale cigarette smoke that could’ve been Pall Malls.

An anonymous person passed in a haze of sour milk. Another clumped past with big, heavy red boots and large, swinging red purse, leaving moth balls’ ammonia scents wafting behind her. Her smell battled a urine fragrance as a sagging-faced gray man passed, then the skunk of marijuana from a lithe and young dark-haired man drifted through in the opposite direction.

Then he trudged by with a dirty hair smell from his hooded green coat.

Standing to leave, the man wondered, what do people smell when I go by?

 

3

List of Grievances

I presented my Festivus list of grievances to my beer buddies the other night. Although the grievances are supposed to be personal and about the people present, I had a general list, and I took a humorous, provocative approach.

One of my items that generated much discussion was the hacked butt plug. I know that I’m not part of the demographics of people that use butt plugs, so I don’t know much about them. I also didn’t know that they could be hacked, or why others would want to do that. Still, it’s part of a larger world that I don’t get, not because I’m over sixty, but because the shit people do is alien to what I think of as fun. Besides hacking butt plugs and other smart sex toys, a term called screwdriving (hah!), I don’t get people doxxing others, or eating Tide pods, or catfishing. Yes, I understand the intellectual reasons behind people doing things, just like people doing weird shit when I was a kid, but those things didn’t appeal to me then, either. Being a writer, though, is about trying to understand, looking into people, thinking about their motivation and the impact of what they do has on them and their lives. So, I explore…

While mentioning the butt plugs the other night, over half present reacted, “Why would you want to know more about butt plugs?” But others were like me, saying, “How can you not want to know more?”

You see there the sprawl of human differences. Some invent butt plugs. Others use them. Another group hacks them. Someone else shies away from knowing about them. Someone else writes about them, and others read and talk about them.

It’s a wild, wild life that’s teeming with diversity. It makes it a much more interesting world.

At least, to me.

3

Power On

Hey writers, hope you’re all doing well as this calendar year slides to the final days. Hope you remember that no matter what happened this year, you can go on and on and on, even when the days drag you down, people bury you for dead, and the routines become too much to endure. Have a mug of coffee, a cup of tea, a sip of wine, a quaff of beer, a piece of chocolate, meditate, read, exercise, walk, take deep breaths, do whatever you’ve found that helps you pick your ass up and put it down in a chair or bed or wherever you write, so you can stare down the blank space one more time, and let the words out. However you do it, you must do it, you must find the way to keep going, to keep trying, to write like crazy at least one more day. But whatever you do, and however you do it, always remember, if you’re using a computer, ensure you back up your work.

4

Attention! Attention!

He’d dissolved his cloak of invisibility, and shredded his veils of anonymity.

He’d uninstalled his mute button, replacing it with an amplifier and speakers.

From now on, he’d seen and heard.

He just hoped he could stand the attention.

0

The Anxiety of Not Writing

TG Christmas has passed. 

I appreciate that so many enjoy and celebrate Christmas. I do, too, in my way. It’s not actually Christmas that dismays me, but those places closed for the holiday. I don’t begrudge people that, but with the closed coffee shops, I miss my writing. More critically, I get anxious about it.

My anxiety when I don’t write is that what I’ve written is crap. Panic rises like Yule log smoke. It reminds me of a friend.

He’d been a football player, a wide receiver in high school and college who tried out for the pros and didn’t cut it. As a wide receiver, he was expected to be fast and to be able to run and run and run. So that’s what he did. Every day, he ran five miles.

He continued his habit after he didn’t make it as a player. He’d become a high school assistant coach by then. He moved on from football when he was thirty, going into serious business to make serious money.

Still, he ran five miles every day. He told me that he runs every day because he’s afraid that if he stops running, he’ll lose the ability.

Yeah, that’s not me with my writing, but I understand his thinking.

I thought about writing at home on Christmas day. Alone in the office in front of my laptop, I thought, I can write now. I’ve tried it before.

Picture this.

The cats troop in to see what I’m doing because I’m typing. Typing attracts the cats. Click click, click, they hear. What’s that, a mouse? Curious to see, they crowd around me.

These cats, all male rescues, don’t get along. Within seconds, they begin complaining about the others’ presence, locations, or existence. “What’s he doing here? I want that space.”

“I was here first. You better leave while you can, hairball.”

“Who are you calling hairball, hairball?”

“You both would be well-advised to get the hell out of here before I turn you into a fur coat.”

“Oh, you think you can?”

My wife will typically come in then, jumping onto her laptop to surf the net and play games, and read the news.

The news must be shared. “Did you read what happened?” “Did you read what so and so said?” “Did you see this video? I think you’ll like it.”

I can tell her that I’m writing, and she tries to respect that, but as writers know, writing often involves sitting silently, staring at nothing or studying your fingernails or looking at something else on the net while the muses get their sierra together. So she’ll then say, “Are you writing? Or can I ask you something?”

Of course, nothing can be done about the cats. I can send them outside, yes, but I’d pay for that later.

So, no, I decided not to write.

This left a void. Into that void crept my imposter fears, my insecurities, doubts, uncertainties, fears, and anxieties. It’s amazing how fast, persistent, and subtle they are, how they move in with little noise. Then, suddenly, my head is filled with their sound. They’re like a destructive, pessimistic flash mob.

All this isn’t why I began the practice of daily writing. I started writing every day to finish stories and novels. I write everyday to learn and improve my writing skills. I write everyday because the muses deliver scenes, dialogue, and concepts. Their deliveries excite me, and I want to pursue them. I want to write to understand what I think, and I enjoy writing, conceiving and imagining, story-telling and resolving, visiting these places and events that mushroom in my thoughts.

It’s all complicated, isn’t it? Better to just write than to consider it all. Hold your breath and jump in, and see how far it goes.

The coffee shop is open. I have my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

Merry Christmas.

Ho, ho, ho.

 

 

6

Wednesday’s Theme Music

Today’s theme music is Live’s “Lightning Crashes” (1993).

I have several Live albums, but I find I must be in just the right mood to play them. It’s a very narrow space.

“Lightning Crashes”, though, came to me this week because one of my nieces gave birth to her third child. All this was shared on Facebook. Everyone is doting on the sweet newborn, including my mother, and there’s rich photographic evidence.  The newborn is Mom’s seventh great-grandchild. That juxtaposition of Mom holding this young new life invited “Lightning Crashes” into my stream and the circle of transference of life and existing. One dies, and one is born, and so it goes. There’s a lot of overlap as it happens.

 

2

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