Category: Thinking, thinking

Mysterious Writing

Writing sometimes seems like such a mysterious process. It used to deeply mystify me as I would apply the questions, the who/what/why/how/when melange that flavors fiction and struggle forward.

Not so today, this week. I sit down, open up, read a bit of what’s written and resume. I guess I’ve trained and ordered my mind to ‘think like a writer’ and create fiction. But this book is coming along so seamlessly, I worry that perhaps it’ll be thin and bland. I wonder, if it’s easy writing, is it poor story telling? If it’s easy, is it too predictable, too simplistic? Yet, I enjoy it.

It might be that I’ve been reading wonderful fiction, having just finished The Signature of All Things and now progressed two thirds through My Brilliant Friend. I’ll often end up editing books because they’re written in passive voice, or they tell and then show, or the reverse, at any rate, displaying a need for editing. Not so with Gilbert and Ferrante’s books. Ferrante especially creates such a sense of people and place that I’m inspired.

So maybe this is just a zone contrived from writing the third book in a series (which gives me intimacy with the characters) and reading writers I enjoy. After thinking about the matter, I’ll not worry myself about it. Take it for what it is, a blessing, a luxury. Perhaps it’ll end in a day, an hour, a minute. Just write like crazy and see where I end up when I’m done.

2

A History of Writing

The Atlantic provides a perspective of writing software. It fascinates me because of my personal history. I began with WordStar on a CPM 86 machine with a small green screen, and two 5 1/4 inch floppy disk drives. WordStar worked well for me but bundled software forced me to a switch to WordPro. WordPro was set up on a Zenith 150 with a 20 meg hard drive and two 5 1/4 floppy drives and an EGA 16 color screen. The colors didn’t matter but the resolution still wasn’t great. Switching to a VGA screen with 256 colors enhanced the experience. I still wrote in tablets and notebooks with a pen and then typed it all up.

Having a natural bent toward being a geek, I used to be really proficient with those programs, learning formatting, editing and saving secrets on my own. Friends and co-workers would come by or call me, asking for help about setting margins, centering, pagination, headers and other matters. People then wrote these insights up and made money off them by publishing books about these secrets, which never entered my mind to do.

Eventually, Microsoft became the Godzilla that wiped everything out, leaving me with Word. I adjusted to Word well in the early years. But modern improvements have made it less friendly. Word offer a gazillion templates when I use two. It’s odd how selecting File versus clicking on Open takes you down different paths. Adopting from version to version as the operating system changed has been a major irritant. I also eventually switched from a tower to laptops and notebooks, discarding the notebooks. I was sad to let them go. They, along with pens, were friends and companions, pets of sorts, for a struggling writer.

I honestly thought shifting to writing directly onto a computer instead of paper would be challenging. Perhaps using email and filling out computer forms over the years helped, but the change was easier than I expected. I even came to recognize the many advantages of using an electronic media to create.

I still read books in paper formats, though. Although I read and edit my own online, almost everyone else’s is printed out or purchased in a hard format. Yes, I have devices to read them, but that change is surprisingly taking me longer. I’ve seen articles about fonts and colors and the impact on reading on a computer but to me, it seems to be that I like shifting the book around for different angles, and that still doesn’t work well with the electronic devices.

Of course, it really doesn’t matter to me whether I’m reading a book online or a hard copy, as long as I’m reading. I guess that was the lesson for the transition from paper to computer, from WordStar to Word, it doesn’t matter, as long as I’m writing.

0

Something Had Hold of Me

Affirmations, meditations,

nothing seemed to work

sleeping, eating, drinking,

nothing seemed to work

trying, hoping, begging,

nothing seemed to work

something had hold of me

something let me go

0

What Doesn’t Matter

Black lives matter.

All kids matter.

All children matter.

All men matter.

All women matter.

All peoples matter.

All actions matter.

All lives matter.

 

All pets matter.

All wolves matter.

All lions matter.

All animals matter.

All plants matter.

All fish matter.

All fowl matters.

All life matters.

 

All air matters.

All water matters.

All lands matter.

All energy matters.

All rights matter.

All freedoms matter.

 

All matters matter.

 

0

Thrive in the Mud

Hello.

I am the middle person.

The average dude.

Ah, to clarify, the white, late fifties middle income liberal average guy. Black guys, young guys, white guys, females, Libertarians, Conservatives, Jews, et cetera, are all also average guys, the middle person, a consumer, partner/spouse/atheist.

Whoever I am, I’m stuck in the middle of the mud. Facts are being sucked into a heavy, gluey, clinging muddiness that traps light and squeezes out air. For example, search for results about the recent Board of Trustees annual report about the state of Medicare and Social Security in the United States. Refine your search to determine how solvent the system is, and even what is meant by the system. It’s surprising how the report’s points are spun.

Muddiness exists around any subject where facts can be distorted, dis-proven or disregarded. Politics are catalysts to create hyper states of distortion and disregard. It’s a sweet place for writing because this is where creativity ferments. Too often, I try to logically explain a fictional situation, or characters’ positions and actions, trying to establish that they do this because of this, ergo, they will do this next. That’s essentially how I think. I keep trying to break out of that for myself; I over-analyze information. Vacuums are the worse, generating a need to create information that makes sense in the vacuum, and then over-analyzing that information that I created.

But I want characters who are different from me, and different from most, characters (and situations) with a WTF aura that entices readers to press on turning pages. Sometimes that means abandoning ‘my’ logic while establishing ‘their’ logic. To me, their logic is frequently mired in emotions, how they feel about matters, rather than what they think about it.

That doesn’t mean that I don’t have emotions about things, but that I temper, stifle and throttle those emotions (most times) so that I can react intelligently and rationally (all the while reminding myself not to over-intellectualize and compartmentalize). But yes, I have angry, frustrated and bitter WTF!? reactions to too, too many issues and items. Some of them, like other drivers, are enormously petty. I call this ‘drivism’, the tendency to look down upon other drivers because they don’t drive like me, which automatically means they’re not as good as drivers.

This is exactly where such logic lies. Brexit, Trumpism, even racism, sexism and about a dozen categories of other -isms are reminders that sometimes, to create a character’s narrative, I need to step out of my zone. First, think about what I would do. Next, think about what the normal person and the average person would do. These may all be the same, or not. Then decide to have the character do something perhaps by doing the opposite, and then explore those results. It can be head-spinning but it may also be liberating. After a time, I become sufficiently immersed in the character and situation that less and less of these exercises are required.

Okay, that was the fruit of my meditating and walking today. Time to write like crazy, one more time.

Let’s take it from the top.

0

Turbulence

Bounced around the spectrum yesterday and today, pissed off at the world, frustrated, tired. Buckle up, I’m in for a bumpy ride.

I’m not certain which spectrum I’m addressing. The spectrum of happiness, satisfaction, or self-actualization. This could just be a broader spectrum, the ‘life’ spectrum.

Reading others’ blogs and posts, I see many battling similar conditions and why not? How many billions of humans live on Earth right now?

The best way to describe it is that I feel out of sync, with rough energy that escapes my control. Feeling this, coping with it, I wonder about cause and effect. Maybe it’s boredom, or weariness with routines of food, people, drink, habits. Is it my diet, I ask, thinking through it, searching for the food or drink that may have poisoned my spirit, or perhaps I’m experiencing a nutritional deficit or chemical imbalance. Is it hormones from my time of life, month or year? Maybe the world is just too much with me of late, and I’m suffering news fatigue, or digital fatigue. Would I be this way, I query myself, were I richer or poorer? If I was richer, could I escape myself by booking travel to a island somewhere, or someplace ‘fun’, or use shopping therapy? If I was poorer, would more critical concerns distract me?

I don’t know. I can play those games and search for answers but this is an emotional condition, not logical, not a product of intelligent thinking, but a product of emotions. What triggers these emotional switches, and why is it so much deeper now? I ponder the birthday aspect, coming up on one, and whether the stars, moons and planets – or other energies we don’t know – afflict me, conjuring up Twilight Zone and Outer Limit scenes of aliens, ghosts or Gods toying with me. It’s all in bright, fuzzy black and white.

Meditation and affirmations help. Don’t know how dark I’d be without them. I’ll go walking. Walking, with its combination of distracting my thinking and emotions, but also stimulating me with the chemicals the physical activity produces, will help. It will give me time to be by myself, and that may just be the issue here.

I want to be alone.

For a while.

0

Sliding

I’m sliding along the spectrum of emotions today. The spectrum itself is on a fulcrum. The slightest shift tips it sliding one way or the other.

Some are wild slides. I slip from depression to elation to bitterness and frustration, zing zing zing. Exhausting, but I’m older, experienced in my mind and body’s ways, and have some sense this will pass. Last night and the early morning both had me sliding toward the spectrum’s darker end. Self-pity and regret stifled my breathing. Reading helped me out.

I’ve not been reading much, I thought, then corrected, I’ve been reading non-fiction and news, but not fiction. So I retreated into The Signature of All Things. I started reading it a month ago. I added new books to my tower of reading and realized I needed to finish Signature before permitting new reading. A book of a woman reaching understanding of herself and heartbreak, the novel enabled some quiet reflection and delivered new insights into me and my existence.

I believe this mood will pass, recognizing it for one of the more prolonged types of funks that sometimes shroud me. They’ve always passed before, prompting speculation about what sort of guarantees that provide (none), but it does give some expectations, and helps me stay upright as I slide along.

0

Sirens of Fear

9:30, sirens erupted. First thought: speeders. More sirens. Second thought: ambulance. Or firetrucks. Both. More sirens. Worries…something big is happening. A shooting? Not been a shooting in our town in the eleven years of my residency time…which means nothing.

Some places are so acclimated to wailing sirens that people exhibit minimal reactions. We react, and wonder. Didn’t help that I’d just been reading a post about mass shootings in America. The cycle between mass shootings is down to about 64 days. How long has it been since Orlando?

Sirens go on, so I worry about fire. Wildfires are our constant threat, unless it’s soaking wet in the winter. Friends are already out there battling blazes up north in Oregon and down in SoCal.

We’re a four mile walk from one end of town to the other. Our television and radio news is provided by the big city down the Interstate. The paper is local but doesn’t always report what prompted sirens. Sometimes all that we get are the police log entries and then depend upon the grapevine for explanations. The grapevine’s not dependable.

We went down to the Saturday Growers’ Market for produce. Nothing out there was burning. No bodies, no crashes, no smoke on the horizon, all good. Probably not for someone, and not for everyone. I can wish them the best, but sometimes that response seems so frail, empty and shallow.

Something was behind all those sirens.

 

0

Be Bad

The wave came over me as I got up and walked around. I’ll have gluten free pancakes with Omega 3 butter and organic maple syrup.

The wave struck.

Have a donut.

I didn’t even hear it coming.

No, not a donut, I told myself, not thinking about a Krispy Kreme maple log. I didn’t remember the times when I was young and I would dart out to a Dunkin’ Donuts for a dozen. Being a child and reading the comics while eating a donut wasn’t thought of. Nor did I recall wolfing down a cruller or cinnamon rich glazed sinker, or walking to the bakerie down the cobblestone street in Germany and gazing at the pastries and pointing out, “That one.” Fritters never crossed my mind or walking into the office on a casual Friday morning (we could wear jeans or shorts) and discovering a big pink box full of frosted cake donuts with sprinkles, glazed and filled donuts, and cinnamon twists.

Nope, never thought of them at all. I just ate my stupid healthy pancakes.

 

0

One Leg

One problem with growing older (which some like to call aging, a disgusting term, makes me feel like cheese), is that the manuals regarding this are so poorly written.

For example, I’ve learned through my years of training, practice, and experience, to put my shorts and pants on one leg at a time. Been doing it that way so long, I don’t remember when I started.

But in the last year, I realized that I always put the same leg on first, left leg, right leg, left leg, right leg. And that was causing my left leg problems because it trained a limitation into its motion and strength through this unchanging and repetitive motion. Drawing the garment over the first leg is easier because it begins lower, requiring less combo of bending and stepping.

Discovering this wasn’t an accident. A right hander, I began using my left hand to do routine things a few years ago. It surprised me how challenging it was to use the other hand to do things. Brushing my teeth with my left hand, my right hand stood ready to leap in and save the left hand. Conscious effort was required to lower my right hand and disengage it from the activity. In weird ways, the right hand, normally used, shadowed the left hand’s motions.

Wiping my derriere after my business was amazingly strenuous. My body was built to pivot, angle and balance in certain ways with that act and bucked against the mirroring process I was trying to follow.

These efforts and observations made me more mindful about all my activities and behaviors. I quit taking it for granted how things were done and forced myself to do the opposite with everything I did.

Some were more easily accomplished. In the past few months, as I painted trim and walls in the house, I came to tell my body and mind, treat your left side like it’s your right side. Surprisingly, that’s very effective. It’s like the mind heard the words and somehow rewired itself.

There are exceptions, and putting my clothing on with my right leg first is one of those areas. My left leg, in conjunction with the bending required to offer the pants and shorts to the leg, is troubled by the activity. I definitely have reduced mobility, flexibility and strength in that knee. Thinking about it, I’m not surprised, as I played sports, particularly racquetball, baseball and football for years. Everything was geared toward being right handed. But being aware and mindful about it, I’m addressing it and I’m confident I can make changes.

One leg at a time.

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑