Category: writing

Counting Waves

You know the words. You can write the cliches for me.

Talking about another, you note or say, “Oh, he/she is in one of those moods today.” Curl a little snark into your tone. We joke about women and their cycles, because that’s how many of us were socialized and conditioned. “Women’s cycles” are visible. They’re “emotional and irrational” when it’s “that time of month” or “they’re going through the change.”

Men’s cycles are more often ignored. But we talk about male bosses and spouses and how they seem angrier, more irritated, or conversely, they’re in a great mood. “Maybe now is the time to ask them for ____.” Fill in the blank of what’s been considered and rejected because of their mood, but now, it’s a possibility, because they’re cheerful today.

Or you notice it about yourself, but you don’t know why. You don’t know why you’re sad. You don’t know why you’re happy. You rationalize reasons, develop a logical explanation for why you must feel this way. We think we know ourselves best, but I know myself better. I have large, dark windows that I can’t see in. Monsters are back there….

Everything seems like it’s on a spectrum for me: energy, optimism, dreaming….

I dreamed many times and vividly last night.

I wrote with speed and intensity yesterday. And what I wrote? Honestly, I’m amazed that I’m so talented. What an imagination! I am fucking brilliant.

I’m optimistic, hopeful and cheerful. I look forward to visiting with friends. My body feels great.

I feel like I’m enjoying life more. Food and drinks taste better, and that sunlight, golden on those scattered soft gray and white clouds above the verdant tree filled mountains against an azure sky late yesterday afternoon, wasn’t that the most magnificent, inspiring sight? Did you see that soaring hawk?

But as I dreamed and awoke last night, considered the dreams and returned to sleep, I thought of how alike it was to being on beach at the ocean. Like waves, there’s a pattern to the dreams and the ocean’s movement, and there are high tides and low tides of dreaming. It’s not the first time I’ve thought this and written about it. Even now, it seems like deja vu. I dream; the dreams increase with strength, vividness, and impact as my cycle progresses through its spectrum. I wake up and write about it. Then the dreams peak and begin diminishing.

Ah, yes, you see that, how my mental acuity increases as well? I’m able to observe more clearly and understand myself better. I wonder, are Jeopardy contestants aware of this? Do their personal cycles affect their winning and losing? I really would like to study that, because, you see, I’m almost at the top.

During the rising mental, spiritual and physical energy cycles, I write, and the words come faster, clearer, more quickly and easily, and then I peak. I begin back down. Writing becomes a greater and greater challenge, until, down in the trough, it’s a slog to get to the coffee shop, sit in the chair and focus on the stories being told. My rituals and routines, and the tricks I’ve learned to encourage and engage my inner writer help them. But the stuff I write. Oh, God, help me, please. How could I ever believe I had any skills? I’m worthless, less than zero, with the creativity and talent of a gnat’s ass.

I know this week’s optimism and cheerfulness will crest. I will begin a slow descent into gloom. I will crave isolation. Small irritations are imagined to be major insults. I become a more aggressive driver, and a more bitter person. I’ll hunger for and reward myself with the junk foods, desserts and fried foods that I deny myself when I’m ‘up.’ Then I’ll bottom out, silent, weary, angry, self-loathing, and begin to arise back from the depths. I drink coffee but derive little energy from it. Even reading sucks. My needs and responses are wildest at the bottom. I’m more emotional, needier. I want to shop and buy new things, as a salve for how terribly I’m suffering, but I want to do it without others bothering me.

I know, too, how my cycles affect my world perceptions. When I’m rising, I’m more open. I post and comment more. More cheerful, I have greater self-confidence. When I’m in the pit, I disappear. I don’t check Facebook and don’t post, because it’s all the same jokes, I tell myself, the same crap, the same garbage from the same people, and the news? When I finally bottom out, I have a sense that the world is a terrible place of killing and brutality, our leaders are shits, and we, the common, the less than 1%, have no chance. I am resentful and hostile.

Being in the depths is miserable. I feel lifeless, a sawdust man, without purpose, direction or hope. Down in the trough, it’s hard to see my way through an hour. Food tastes terrible, and taxes are way too high. Everything costs too much then, and it’s all junk.

I wonder, how many people kill one another or themselves because they’ve descended into their pit. How many cops are more fearful and frightened, more ready to kill because of their state? How many others are more willing to take up a knife or gun and seek vengeance and make others pay because of where they are in their cycles and spectrums?

Now, climbing toward the peak, I’m on top of the world. The view is magnificent, and I believe that we can work together, change the world, and solve all the problems.

We just need to hurry, before I start down again.

 

 

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Writing’s Adrenalin

Lethargy rolls a slow fog over my mind . Do I hafta write today, a plaintive voice demands. I don’t wanna. 

Last night’s sleep won’t go into the book of the best. Mimosas with friends this morning contributes something to the singular sense that I don’t want to write, and put it off, playing games, reading a book, reading blogs. Timing is off, energy off.

Oh, push, damn it, push. Push. Just think of a word that you want to write, the beginning of a chapter, a scene, a sentence. With explosive suddenness, words pour into me from three scenes, two books. Hurry, hurry, my laggard mind is suddenly urging. Write like crazy and get it down now. Okay, okay, okay, let’s get these things down. Which to start with…? Pick one.

One is picked, pursued. Words are collected, ordered, re-arranged, deleted, added, ordered again. More scene arrives. Moments expand, expand, expand.

Writing’s adrenalin kicks in. I can’t write fast enough, head down, fingers dancing with ballerina lightness, going until I’m drained. The quad shot mocha remains, waiting to be drunk, now iced with a fine skim from being cold.

I drink, suddenly weary again, but satisfied. Started with nothing. Found a word and managed twenty-eight hundred. Feels good but I feel tired.

I’d really like

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New Fav Expression

I came in to order my coffee. It wasn’t necessary, as all the baristas know my drink. Meghan had been serving me over a year. “You give me deja vu everyday,” she said, laughing. “You know that, don’t you? You give me deja vu everyday.”

“What a cool statement,” I said. “You give me deja vu everyday.” It’s my new favorite statement. I think there’s a story in it, but then, I see and hear stories everywhere. Somewhere, maybe in another dimension, or a dream world (or is this the dream world?), or a future past or past future, I’m writing those other stories. If you want to get Far Out, maybe I’m writing your story. I am the writing god, writing the stories of our existence, unaware that it’s going on, because someone else is writing my story.

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Just Write

Just write, I told myself. The aliens hadn’t yet arrived in my head, but I can’t wait for the aliens. I need to write. If you’re not writing, you’re standing still, (with the caveats, naturally, that if you’re editing, polishing, rewriting, etc., you are still engaged in the writing process, so you’re technically still writing).

These aren’t things I say out loud. Friends and relatives probably don’t know that my increased quiet is because I’m dreaming about aliens, trying to entice them out of the air and into my head (kind of like the old Billy Ocean song, “Get out of my dreams, and into my car.” I had asked my wife and others what aliens they like in books, films and games, or who were their favorite aliens. Great conversation fodder. The baristas, twenty year old women, were into it, and the barista today created an alien on my mocha. She then brought the alien topic up for her co-worker, who didn’t work yesterday when I asked, re-invigorating the conversation.

I derived beautiful thoughts from all these words. Yet the aliens remained nebulous, refusing to get into my car. Just write, I told myself, and they will come. Okay, so what will I write? I was picking up the scenes already created. They’re wonderful stepping stones, and although I wasn’t quite to the scene that arose to be written today, I shrugged. Okay, that’s what I’ll write, and then I’ll write the bridge to it from where I’m at later. No Big Deal. I write like this all the time, seeing what is to be and writing it because I want to, and then returning to bridge the pieces together.

So what happens in the novel today? This happens, and then that happens, and then, boom, there it is, writing stuff about aliens and plot exploding into me, firing off flares and tracers that illuminated what is to be.

Beautiful. Yeah, here I go, just write like crazy, one more time. Let the rest worry itself.

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Figuring Out Aliens

A novel in progress features aliens, but I can’t see them. I know who they are, why they’re there and what they want, but beyond that, they’re not coming into my head.

I thought about all the aliens I know from movies and books. Superman is an alien but that’s not the sort of alien wanted. Didn’t want ET, and the creatures from Alien and Predator didn’t work. Nor did the man and robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. MIB , the Star Trek franchise, Doctor Who, and Babylon 5 have many varieties of aliens but nothing that fits my requirements. Larry Niven’s aliens are interesting and intriguing but didn’t turn me toward what I think my book needs. Independence Day, Mars Attacks, The Body Snatchers, Dark City (I’m not really sure the strangers are aliens) were considered and rejected, as were the War of the Worlds invaders, and the creatures from Species and V. So was The Thing. I always liked Orson Scott Card’s alien in The Speaker for the Dead and Ender’s Game but they don’t work for my application.

The closest thing to my thoughts were from Clark’s The Puppet Masters. They don’t quite work, neither.

Gotta walk and think about it more. It’ll come to me.

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Beyond 3D

Ghostbusters 3D is in our local cinemas tomorrow, and we’re hitting it.

3D movies are normal and expected, so much of it being put into 3D. My first experience with it was Hugo. When the snow fell in the film’s beginning, I was astounded by how the snow flakes seem fall toward me from the scene. Beautiful and amazing, and now, like jets, cars, microwaves, computers, the Internet and a million more modern technologies, processes, and services, so common, it’s the new normal.

Virtual Reality movies may be the next iteration. Imagine, instead, of attending a movie, and while sitting in the theater, you experience the movie from within. With tiered ticketing, the opportunities to watch can be inter-active, so in one side, you can reside within one character, watching, hearing and generally experiencing the movie through them. In another scene, you can be a fly on the wall, turning your attention to whatever attracts you.

Such scenarios drive ideas about what can go wrong. Trapped in a movie, trapped as a character, launched into a new dimension through a movie, time traveling through movies, accidently becoming someone else during the movie – or reversals of these things. Discovering you thought you were born here when actually, you came through a movie. Now they’re hunting you.

Oh, the fun we can have with this.

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Dueling Novels

Hard writing day. When the Dallas sniper struck, it sapped my interest/desire for writing about murder.

But I had to write, so I began writing a sequel to “Returnee”, “The Long Summer”. Yet, the me that is a writer knew that other novel, “Personal Lessons with Savanna”, remained in progress, and he still had some writing to do.

So I end up doing a chapter of TLS, and then a chapter of PLwS. I’ll be writing one and realize a line or change for the other. Both story arcs are growing and stretching out before me, beckoning as a calm sea on a summer day, but exhausting as I jump from one to the other and strive to grab the evolving threads of each and order them. Neither can be shut down. Each generates their own aha excitement, stirring enthusiasm. Writing like crazy is driving me crazy.

I’m achieving progress, but man, oh, man, that excitement is a burning fire, consuming my patience and energy as its fuel, leaving me a short-tempered, barely functioning shell.

More coffee. Quick, damn it, quick. Ah, now the battery is low.

Time to stop. For now.

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Unprepared

I’ve been thinking about murder. It was fiction, based on news stories and historical accounts of true murders.

I’ve been crafting scenes and realizing characters, and defining arcs. I’ve been immersing myself in these fiction details. It was enjoyable. It was about the writing, the story telling, the characters, and the richness I felt in finding them all in that one beautiful little chapter.

But today it seems odd, even wrong, to write about violence after such a violent week. Besides America’s gun violence, besides Dallas, besides WaPo’s feature that shows 509 Americans killed by Police this year to date, besides the bombing in Iraq that killed 300, besides these and the anti-Semitic, anti-sanity, anti-progress utterings of Donald Trump, GOP candidate for POTUS, besides the ongoing refugee crises from the ongoing wars and fighting, and the animal abuses and murders….

Well, besides these things, and climate change and the hottest June on record and the smallest Arctic ice on record…besides these things….

I write to entertain myself. The entertainment comes from trying to understand events and people. In my murder mysteries, I attempt to understand how one person comes to decide to kill another and the course of thinking investigators follow to discover who did it and why. In my science fiction, I attempt to bridge technological advances with the impact on societies and individuals, and strive to understand how they cope with the challenges of change, of being on other worlds and traveling through space in another world, the one of the starship.

But the real world is intruding today. Dallas is intruding. I don’t want to write about murder.

This becomes a test. I have my coffee, my goals, and my intentions. I’m here to write. Writing is meditative, a chance to escape the world’s trials and errors and the personal frustrations of living. But the building momentum of what’s been going on, the world’s escalating violence and, sadly, what seems like rising selfishness and hatred, is crashing over me and taking me down.

Now I offer another but. Everything is a spectrum for me. This post is on a spectrum of personal and private thoughts and efforts to understand the world and myself. On the private scale, it gets close to the bone, probably a seven on a 1-10 scale. If I’m ever at ten, I’m emotionally and intellectually naked and truthful. There have been searing moments when I’ve been a ten with myself. It’s ugly and beautiful.

So now, the but, writing this post helps me understand my perspective and permits me to vent. It isn’t deep nor gravely insightful or profound, but still, it’s a release. That’s what’s happened by sitting and writing out my thoughts. Now I can take a deep breath, pivot myself, open a file, and write like crazy.

Just give me a few more minutes, and I’ll willing to try.

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OMG Moment

Striding along through sun and shadow, coping with and enjoying a summer breeze, my writing mind settles in. First comes a novel concept that opens up a grin. I’ll add it to the list but — well, it is interesting. But which ones aren’t? A lot to play with there. What POV should be used? Hmmm, the POV can really open it up. Oh, boy, that’s a dilemma because there’s so much more to already write — and edit, and publish.

But – to the novel at hand. Insert chapter 2 and write it, short one, then edit and revise chapter 3 and add this information/insights/events for her POV and then the same in chapter 4 for his POV and

OMG, now I see what’s going to happen. OMG, the whole direction deluged me, the hows and whys of what’s happening now, besides HIS ongoing issues about losing his sanity and trying to learn about his past, and HER ongoing issues as a killer on the run.

Excitement rolls a tide through me. I walk faster and faster, eager to get to the coffee shop, eager to write again. And here I am, quad shot mocha on the table, ready to write like crazy, one more time.

Isn’t it a beautiful day?

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Full Blown Writing Season

I live on spectrums. My moods and energies slide through seasons – or seasons slide along my spectrums. I’m not certain of their true relationship or the degree to which these things are fixed. I don’t know how to predict them. Don’t know what tilting, spinning, revolving, and rotating affects them. I can define specific, larger personal seasons. Lethargy, laziness, apathy, anger, blackness, joy, happiness, excitement, restlessness, I know these seasons among others. Some would call these moods. Moods, a temporary feeling, happens within the seasons, much like you can have a cold summer day or a warm winter day. I can experience a shift through a mood from my season but the season dominates. Moods are more temporary.

I’m in full blown writing season this week. Writing becomes effortless, but more, writing and thinking about writing, rises up. It seems like every thought, observation and experience triggers a desire to write about it. Words, sentences, scenes flow like runoff from a huge rain storm.

Seasons like this have taken me in other realms, too, so they’re not specific to writing. People in other professions and endeavors know what it’s like to be ‘in the zone.’ That’s how this feels. I know about being in the zone from sports and analysis. My vision, thinking and focus are all sharpened, my concentration is heightened. Time becomes more personal and slower. I can feel and sense micro-shifts that position me to be ready.

It’s a beautiful experience, no matter where and when it comes, from sports to math to art, performing, and writing. When it’s a good season, like this, it’s best to enjoy the time. The seasons do turn.

 

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