Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Ah, sweet comfort. I’m back in the writing groove again.
Thinking about it as I made coffee this morning, I recognized how fiction writing every day helps me be more mindful. To understand characters’ motivation and behavior, I look to myself and other people that I know. I think about what I’ve done and what drives me, along with my inherent contradictions, and search for understanding of what I do, and why. And I do the same with other people, and the characters that I encounter in novels, short stories, movies, and television shows. All that is so that I can create richer characters and tell better stories.
Going through that thinking exercise as the darkness swept through me this week, I saw how my daily writing provides me structure and goals. Those structures and goals give my life meaning. So when I flail through the darkness and don’t want to write, my structure comes apart.
It isn’t just about feeding and satisfying the muses, telling stories, or pursuing goals of writing novels and becoming published. My writing is a tangible part of who I am. When I can’t write, I feel incomplete and adrift. I feel like I’m not me.
Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
It was another wild night of dreams, with this one making a deeper and more lasting impression.
I found myself in another land. After meeting a man and speaking with him, I realized I was in Australia. My wife was also present. No reason for being in Australia was given, but I was pleased. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, and have just missed several times. I still plan to go.
Anyway, in the dream, I was given some papers that turned out to actually be a little book. I didn’t know what to do with it or why I had it. Reading it didn’t help because it seemed incomplete, and my wife couldn’t figure it out, either. Finding another fellow, I asked him about it, and he showed me how it was a continuation of other documents. He said they were living documents, and took me to a huge wall of like documents. After he explained it, I was excited and explained it to my wife. She wasn’t interested.
I was then informed I had to get to another part of Australia. I hopped into a car and began driving, trying to figure out where I was going as I went. The roads were holed and shoddy. Most of them were like slick mud. As I complained about them to myself and merged onto a highway that was also like slick mud, I was overtaken by cars. They passed at shockingly high speeds. “I forgot they don’t have speed limits here,” I said to myself in the dream car, accelerating to match the pace while I looked for signs and directions.
I found myself out of the car and running. Everyone was running. Instead of driving, we were running everywhere. I was still on the highway and looking for where I was going. Somehow, running, I found it and arrived.
People were there, but it was no one that I recognized. They gave me more books. Where all the other books were white, these books were red. I immediately understood that these were new books, and that I had to take them back to the other location, which I did right away. That pleased the people on the other end. Understanding the books and system at a fast rate, I took on the role of explaining to others how these books continued the stories.
Everyone was told to line up to go somewhere else, part of some planned activities. I got in line and found that I was at the line’s beginning, with my wife beside me. As I started to go, I encountered the first man that had given me the books in the beginning. He and I exchanged some comments, and I told him that I knew how the books worked. That made him happy, and he let me go. As I walked through the gate with my wife into a green field bordered by a white picket fence, I realized that he’d been my teacher.
I’d been doing well, averaging nine miles a day of walking for the last three months through the end of January. I was able to walk ten miles on two to three days a week throughout January. Then, well, you know, we’re people. Shit happens. Plans get upended. People get sick.
I had to travel, and the travel from Oregon to Pennsylvania and West Virginia eroded my progress. There was an ill person and a death, and mourning, grief, and then a service. Very drily put. More travel to return home, and then, illness. Things didn’t work out. My average plummeted to six miles. Damn.
The Fitbit’s reports left me dubious about how valid it all was. For example, it showed that I walked seven miles and up eighteen flights the other day, but I had just twenty-four minutes of activity. The previous day, I walked six miles and twelve flights, but had over one hundred minutes of activity. That just seems out of kilter.
Anyway, now on the recovered side of the cold, and the weather is warming. Begin again.
I caught myself in a neat trap. I set it, and walked myself into it. I’d been trapped in it for a few weeks before I realized what had happened.
To step back, I bought a Fitbit last January. I like it. I enjoy walking. Walking, like writing, helps me think. The Fitbit tracked my walking and gave me quantified results. That was beautiful. I had goals, and could stretch myself against those goals. Great.
Similar to playing video games, walking and measuring my progress and activities sucked me in. I play video games every day. They’re small, online games; I don’t let myself buy or enroll in more, because I know I’ll get sucked into them. It happened a long time ago with a computer game called “Empire.” The game with its attendant strategies and tactics sucked me in. Huge swaths of time and energy were lost to playing that game. It was an ugly lesson learned.
It was also an insight into myself. Like many people, I hunt validation about who I am, and my relative merits. They’re hard to come by in the modern world, especially when you’re in the military or working for a corporation. They like to give you “Atta-boys.” That’s a reward where they beam at you, and say, “Thanks. Well done!” Yes, it worked for a while, but as I realized the emptiness of those rewards, and the challenges became easier and easier, the rewards became meaningless for me. Winning video games became more rewarding in my schema, thus validating me.
Coping with myself and my tendencies, I began seeking things that can be tangibly measured to reward me. In turning to writing, I discovered, hey, I can achieve the same sort of satisfaction by writing one to two thousand words a day. That made me feel good about myself. Finishing a story made me feel better. Selling one made me feel great.
In the cascading process, I then went after another prize: writing a novel. Each step in the process was again a tangible reward, an objective achieved. From finishing a chapter to finishing a novel was a wonderful experience.
Selling it, however, was not easy. Dejected with the publishing process, I went the Amazon publishing route. The rewards fall miles short of my hopes and dreams. So….
Writing became less rewarding. Well, writing remains rewarding. I find writing novels to be akin to solving logic problems. They hold an inherent challenge and reward. But writing doesn’t provide me the validation from outside myself that I know I need. Being thin-skinned and insecure, I need huge quantities of validation.
Enter the Fitbit.
Just like that, I started increasing my goals and exceeding them. I stretched goals from ten thousand steps to fourteen thousand steps, from five miles to six, to seven, to eight.
Naturally, these goals absorbed time and energy, especially in these summer months when it’s ninety degrees or more. Reluctantly, I realized, I needed to draw back from the Fitbit and the walking goals, because they were distracting me from my writing goals and activities. Why, of course, was obvious: the Fitbit goals were tangible and reachable. Writing goals of writing novels, publishing them, and selling novels were tangible, but not easy reached. Not reaching them despite the efforts made became a depressing effort. Mad sequences of Peggy Lee singing, “Is that all there is, my friends, then let’s keep dancing,” kept streaming into my head. “Let’s break out the booze, and have a ball. If that’s all. There is.”
So, seizing myself by my metaphysical scruff, I drag myself away from Fitbit goals and re-prioritized. Whereas I had been targeting six to ten thousand steps before writing, I now write first, and then hunt the steps and miles.
Someday, I believe, or hope, that I’ll find something more, something that will finally quiet the desperation and disillusionment in me. Meanwhile, I’m going to avoid boozing, except for a few beers and wine, reduce my Fitbit goals, and keep on writing.
We’ve reached day one hundred fifty-three. Hump day’s pregnant belly is becoming visible over the horizon, that day on which half of this glorious year commonly called twenty seventeen will be completed.
Completed. Done. In the rear-view mirror. Under the bridge. In the books. Finished.
Which will mean, writers, you will have half a year remaining to accomplish those tasks, goals, objectives, and plans you established for yourself somewhere back in the neighborhood of day one.
Think about what you’ve done.
Consider what you want to do for this year, and then put this year in the context of the other years of your life.
How does it look?
The promises.
Harvard and Yale are considered in her junior year of high school. Speaking five languages, a prodigy with several musical instruments, in advance placement classes, we’re pleased, proud and envious of who she is and her potential. But the boy has changed everything. We don’t see and feel what he brings to her but she’s modified her plans. A small local college is the goal, with a degree in international business.
Our pain of our lost dreams want us to urge her, think again, please, think ago. You wonder how this will work out. What will she be in ten years? Will they still be together? You try not to color her life with your experiences but you understand. You remember the warnings they gave you. You ignored them as she is ignoring them, because it was you, and things were different.
Life worked pretty well, you reassure yourself, but you remember the potential you tasted before the hormones struck.
Oh, the promises.
I’ve had my Fitbit for three and a half months. My daily average for steps is eleven thousand, seven hundred. My daily miles are five point five two. My personal best for daily steps was seventeen thousand, five hundred.
Until yesterday. Yesterday, I achieved almost twenty-two thousand steps and ten miles. I confess, if I’d known I was so close to doubling my average, I would have done it. That’s how I’m wired.
Now it’s the morning after.
I feel great but I question myself about what my Fitbit goal and expectations should be. I will work to reach and exceed my daily goals. I want to attempt another big walking and exercising day.
It’s the same way with writing. I typically write about eleven hundred words a day. I also edit, revise and polish. That’s part of my pantser organic writing process. My writing mind is like a loom weaving the story. I move back and forth through it.
Some days, I catch fire. The most I’ve ever written in one day was five thousand words, five thousand very intense words. Just like walking twenty-two thousand steps yesterday, it felt awesome. The next day, I wanted to do again. Why, if I could do five thousand words a day, every day, I’d become impressively prolific.
But the next day’s writing session was a struggle to achieve my standard output. I fought to achieve one thousand words and felt exhausted and disenchanted afterwards. It’s been like that with other writing days when I’ve doubled or tripled my average. Why, I tested myself to understand.
After thinking about this over the years, I’ve concluded that I do have a finite daily energy level. Exceeding that can happen but it takes it toll on the next day. I don’t know if science and medicine back me up on this, or if others have had the same experience. I know through my military experience of working twelve plus hours a day through illness and terrible conditions that I can draw deeper from the well. But doing so requires me to shut out absolutely everything else.
That was easy to do in a military environment. We had an established mission with a high priority. Other missions and units were depending on us. If we failed, a domino effect began. The stakes were high. So was the visibility.
Our expectations also set us up for success. Everyone outside of ours – family, friends and other unit members – understood our focus. They knew we didn’t have time or energy for anything else, and they gave us space.
But the writing experience is different from the military experience and the Fitbit experience. With Fitbit goals, it’s a personal goal. If I don’t make it, well, that sucks, but c’est la vie. The military commitment was well-established and understood.
Writing, however, is a terribly personal beast that has a hold on me. While the Fitbit goals require physical commitment with some smaller levels of intellectual and emotional commitments, I have all that in me, no problem. The military commitments were drawn at higher levels from those same veins.
The veins of energy and activity required for writing are much, much different. Physically, sitting in a chair, thinking, reading and typing, it doesn’t seem like it should be taxing. Yet, it becomes physically exhausting. Writing takes more out of me than walking all those steps.
Likewise, from intellectual and creative points of view, writing is more of a debilitating challenge. I worked for a decade for IBM as a planner and analyst. I was often presented with unique business cases to analyze and consider for my recommendations, observations and inputs. Those were interesting and challenging logic problems, and required intensely creative problem solving approaches, but still, they fell way short of what’s called for when fiction writing. Yes, my stories, characters, situations and worlds tend toward being complicated and involved. I remain constantly astounded by the levels of commitment I give my writing.
Returning to my Fitbit goals, I understand that twenty-two grand was a terrific result for me. I’ll enjoy it and move on because my goal is not to beat myself every day, but to maintain and achieve an average that will help me toward greater goals of being healtheir. In other words, the daily steps are not an end of themselves but part of a larger process.
So it is, too, with the writing. The word counts, editing, revising and polishing are not the end results. They’re part of a larger process of conceiving, writing, finishing and publishing a novel.
Time to write like crazy now, at least one more time.
I’m dissatisfied with where I’m at, and took some time to deconstruct how I came here.
All the choices and thoughts that delivered me to this point were mine or my partners. It wasn’t in a vacuum and outside influences were involved. Eventually I figured out that I’d had a vision. I created a path to achieving that vision, and I achieved the vision. The vision included several goals. All done.
My problem arose from not creating a new vision, new goals to support that vision, and new paths to those goals. I’d worked a long time to achieve my vision and forged solid paths to that end. But once I created a new vision, I didn’t create new paths. I stayed in the old paths. They were comfortable. They are comfortable.
The old paths became circular.
They became a tunnel.
And I couldn’t see my way out. I had a fresh vision and goals but I resisted changing my paths. No doubt, this was due to the solid, comfortable tunnel I’d built.
I knew and felt dissatisfaction on several levels but couldn’t comprehend how to proceed. After all, I was doing what I’d always done, and that had always worked. Yes, I understood that I was growing older. I understood my new vision.
The disenchantment grew. I resumed meditation. I knew I was frustrated and the frustration fed anger, resentment, impatience and hostility. I sought balance.
I achieved much better balance but the disenchantment remained. I resumed working on recording dreams. Meditation was done. Journals of thoughts and feelings were written. I’m a writer so I write. I realize now how much I write to understand what I’m thinking.
My understanding of myself expanded but I developed little insight into what else was needed. Extreme restlessness arose. Where do I go from here?
I began to see that I needed to break out. I tried small changes. I recently tried ‘opposite day’ and then attempted to so things differently to break up my routines. Walk different patterns on my walking routines. Play different music. Read different genres. In this, I addressed symptoms that were results of the issue but not the root causes.
Now I have a better idea of where I’m at and what I need.
Onward, one more time.
Michael Seidel, writer 