Christmas has come and gone. Parents and friends visited, extended families seen. Tree acquired and decorated. I enjoyed both Christmas dinner with Girlfriend's family and post-Christmas brunch with my own. Christmas remains my favorite season. I know that doesn't make me particularly special, but I'll add my voice to the chorus.
I had the opportunity to observe some of the family's newer members, and I noticed more than I think I ever had before how simultaneously jading and heartwarming a child at Christmas can be. I witnessed true, unvarnished joy, elicited by the satisfaction of un-self-conscious greed. We grown ups know that there are right things and wrong things to be happy about, and that interpersonal duties require that we never become fully absorbed in our own pleasure. Contrast with a five-year-old, concerned with nothing beyond what else he gets, at the moment he gets it.
In terms of my own haul, this Christmas has given me cause to reconsider my original plan of getting a job. It looks like I'll actually be needing that time to give adequate attention to the things I got. The acquisitional highlights of the season include another year of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Ip Man, Ip Man 2, Batman: Arkham City, and freaking Skyrim. Preliminary assessments estimate these items to comprise approximately two zillion hours of media. Also, my parents gave me a Kindle, which contains a theoretically infinite amount of text. I started down that road by acquiring Alexander Pope's translation of The Odyssey for free, and The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for 95 cents. That strange little device has revived my likelihood of reading books that I had previously written off as just too big--not in terms of length but in terms of weight. I certainly would have re-read Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by now if my neck didn't cramp at the mere thought of carrying it to and from work every day.
But, since neither Skyrim nor indiscriminate reading comes with health insurance, I grudgingly retain employment as Plan A.
I spent some time this week watching the meteoric collapse of Ocean Marketing, but I think that affair actually merits a separate post, and it seemed appropriate to do the Christmas post first.
Two blog-related items of of minimal importance:
1) This blog is approaching its 1,000th page view, which is both neat and pathetic.
2) I've decided to experiment with labels. It sounds like fun, and what's the worst that can happen? It might even make the blog more organized to future readers.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Monday, December 19, 2011
On the verge of attempting something cool
Curses! Late again! This time I'm afraid I just forgot.
This week has involved some "adventures" with health insurance. Washington's extensive laws on the matter had made me complacent, it seems. Getting insured when you're beset with as many abbreviations as I am is much harder in Maryland. Perhaps it would be less frustrating if I could be indignant about it, but it just sort of underscores how preposterous... ah, never mind. My politicometer is beeping at me, and I'd rather talk about something else anyway.
Last night and today I all but finished an adventure pitch to send to Paizo. Writing for the Pathfinder Society would be pretty cool. The tale I have in mind is one of intrigue and tense adventure, but could also just be about four to five armed psychopaths cutting and scorching a swath through a succession of deadly obstacles. It's important to account for different play styles, I think. I hope to send the pitch tomorrow, after having another human being or two look it over.
If they don't pick it up, I'm considering publishing on my own. Preliminary research suggests that that can be done without litigious depantsing.
This week has involved some "adventures" with health insurance. Washington's extensive laws on the matter had made me complacent, it seems. Getting insured when you're beset with as many abbreviations as I am is much harder in Maryland. Perhaps it would be less frustrating if I could be indignant about it, but it just sort of underscores how preposterous... ah, never mind. My politicometer is beeping at me, and I'd rather talk about something else anyway.
Last night and today I all but finished an adventure pitch to send to Paizo. Writing for the Pathfinder Society would be pretty cool. The tale I have in mind is one of intrigue and tense adventure, but could also just be about four to five armed psychopaths cutting and scorching a swath through a succession of deadly obstacles. It's important to account for different play styles, I think. I hope to send the pitch tomorrow, after having another human being or two look it over.
If they don't pick it up, I'm considering publishing on my own. Preliminary research suggests that that can be done without litigious depantsing.
Monday, December 12, 2011
NaNoWriMo done; what's next?
I forgot to post this when I wrote it last night. Here it is. The Christmas song rant at the end is new, though.
I still am here, finding my feet in the outskirts of Washington D.C. It's the middle of December and yesterday we couldn't seem to get the air conditioning to turn off. It turned out that was actually the furnace, doing everything it was supposed to do except create heat. This will be remedied forthwith, our exceedingly kind landlord, assures us, but that is the adventure of the day: space heaters and exploratory wall surgery.
Back in Seattle, après moi, le déluge. This week the last of us will be moving out of the old house. To my not insubstantial surprise, the weirdness of this was alleviated by a music video slideshow that Katie put together of the various housemates from the past 5 (!) years.
Oh, I completed NaNoWriMo! I won't claim that I won this year, because I passed 50,000 words on December 8, one day after my self-extended deadline. That will be the first year I've fallen short since I started taking it seriously, which is disappointing, I think I may have moved to another level along the way. When I first embarked on that journey, I figured that this was something I had to do to prove to myself that I could be a writer. This year, as I found myself becoming frustrated with my prolonged novelling sprint cutting into time I could be spending on Hengist, or Nenle and Death, or one of several unnamed short stories, it occurred to me that November was no longer the battleground of my self-actualization.
I've been hanging around the writers' forum at Cracked.com for a while, biding my time. This is another thing that got put off for the duration of November. It's about time, for me to have some funny ideas now, and if any of them get picked up, you'll know. You'll so know.
Meanwhile, it's Christmas time. On Saturday Girlfriend and I rearranged furniture to make room for the tree that we will take in from the cold this month, in the spirit of holiday charity. (That, by the way, is a terrible image to follow to its logical conclusions. Don't.) There's a lot of enthusiastic decorating in this neighborhood, but so far I haven't seen any of those awful inflatables that started springing up like festive fungus back while I was in college. (Random scary note: I was going to write "a few years ago" but then I actually counted.)
Another way the times are a-changing, though not too fast: Christmas music. xkcd made an interesting point about our holiday radio play: our "classic" holiday songs (as opposed to our "traditional" ones, I might parse) overwhelmingly come out of the Baby Boom years. I'm tempted to speculate on how much of the cause and effect might be the opposite--did postwar prosperity spur interest in commercial Christmas and, consequently, Christmas songs, as much as Boomers' nostalgia for the songs of their childhood carried those songs forward? I guess the question is how many Christmas songs come out now, compared to then. Dare we speak of relative quality? I don't know where to begin to address this question rigorously, but a quick search and personal experience suggests that holiday songs written after 1970 are categorically insufferable. But then, I was thinking to myself on Saturday how tedious some of the upbeat Christmas novelty standards are, and we have the Boomers to blame for keeping them on the radio while the dross of my own childhood is allowed to mercifully vanish. Perhaps the most charitable thesis I can settle on is that I can hate almost anything.
These last two paragraphs were originally intended to be a brief segue into this question: When did "A Few of My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song? I heard at least two versions of it in the same mix over the course of dinner on Saturday. It kept bringing to mind images of Julie Andrews frolicking through verdant countryside. Has the song just been severed from its source at this point?
I still am here, finding my feet in the outskirts of Washington D.C. It's the middle of December and yesterday we couldn't seem to get the air conditioning to turn off. It turned out that was actually the furnace, doing everything it was supposed to do except create heat. This will be remedied forthwith, our exceedingly kind landlord, assures us, but that is the adventure of the day: space heaters and exploratory wall surgery.
Back in Seattle, après moi, le déluge. This week the last of us will be moving out of the old house. To my not insubstantial surprise, the weirdness of this was alleviated by a music video slideshow that Katie put together of the various housemates from the past 5 (!) years.
Oh, I completed NaNoWriMo! I won't claim that I won this year, because I passed 50,000 words on December 8, one day after my self-extended deadline. That will be the first year I've fallen short since I started taking it seriously, which is disappointing, I think I may have moved to another level along the way. When I first embarked on that journey, I figured that this was something I had to do to prove to myself that I could be a writer. This year, as I found myself becoming frustrated with my prolonged novelling sprint cutting into time I could be spending on Hengist, or Nenle and Death, or one of several unnamed short stories, it occurred to me that November was no longer the battleground of my self-actualization.
I've been hanging around the writers' forum at Cracked.com for a while, biding my time. This is another thing that got put off for the duration of November. It's about time, for me to have some funny ideas now, and if any of them get picked up, you'll know. You'll so know.
Meanwhile, it's Christmas time. On Saturday Girlfriend and I rearranged furniture to make room for the tree that we will take in from the cold this month, in the spirit of holiday charity. (That, by the way, is a terrible image to follow to its logical conclusions. Don't.) There's a lot of enthusiastic decorating in this neighborhood, but so far I haven't seen any of those awful inflatables that started springing up like festive fungus back while I was in college. (Random scary note: I was going to write "a few years ago" but then I actually counted.)
Another way the times are a-changing, though not too fast: Christmas music. xkcd made an interesting point about our holiday radio play: our "classic" holiday songs (as opposed to our "traditional" ones, I might parse) overwhelmingly come out of the Baby Boom years. I'm tempted to speculate on how much of the cause and effect might be the opposite--did postwar prosperity spur interest in commercial Christmas and, consequently, Christmas songs, as much as Boomers' nostalgia for the songs of their childhood carried those songs forward? I guess the question is how many Christmas songs come out now, compared to then. Dare we speak of relative quality? I don't know where to begin to address this question rigorously, but a quick search and personal experience suggests that holiday songs written after 1970 are categorically insufferable. But then, I was thinking to myself on Saturday how tedious some of the upbeat Christmas novelty standards are, and we have the Boomers to blame for keeping them on the radio while the dross of my own childhood is allowed to mercifully vanish. Perhaps the most charitable thesis I can settle on is that I can hate almost anything.
These last two paragraphs were originally intended to be a brief segue into this question: When did "A Few of My Favorite Things" become a Christmas song? I heard at least two versions of it in the same mix over the course of dinner on Saturday. It kept bringing to mind images of Julie Andrews frolicking through verdant countryside. Has the song just been severed from its source at this point?
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Now I'm here
So, here I am, on the outskirts of Washington D.C., in the house in which I live. I don't know how long it will take for this to stop feeling like a vacation, but I suppose Girlfriend going to work tomorrow morning will accelerate the process. I'm not really sure if I feel weird about moving anymore; I'm going with things for now, because they're actually going all right.
This past week has been a week of lasts: last visit to Pagliacci's, Toshi's, Oasis (for bubble tea loaded with an absurd amount of positive associations), Seattle Jujutsu and Sambo club, last day of work, last time in the Hedgehog House. It wasn't until I started counting those that it registered for me that I was moving, not just going somewhere.
I started packing on Thursday, and I really only started. I filled perhaps one or two boxes out of what would ultimately be about twenty (a rough estimate). On Friday I got up relatively early (or, if you consider that I had had a job as of Wednesday, relatively late) and started packing in earnest. Is it a universal experience that packing all one's belongings into boxes taxes an order of magnitude more time than you imagine it will? Looking over my relatively meager possessions (understanding that those of my possessions which would not be described as "meager" are few and at least box-shaped) I imagined it would take perhaps two hours to get it all packed up.
In the end, I was able to sleep on Friday night, and pack up my clothes last of all on Saturday, but I really considered pulling a packing all-nighter. It got done in the end.
My house filled up with friends in the afternoon who made surprisingly quick work of moving all of my things into my shipping pod. Many thanks to Abby, Alex, Anna, Bryan, Clayton, David, Jenn, and Katie for doing what I didn't realize until I saw them doing it would have been impossible to do on my own. We filled the rest of the evening divvying up unclaimed things and ultimately going to The Ram (another last until, as with most of the others, I visit), a decadent excursion paid for almost entirely with money found in the house. So that was cool.
So, as I said, here I am. I flew overnight without incident. I'm still a bit tired, so I'm blogging instead of NaNoing. The extension I allowed myself in my last post allows me three days after tonight to write 11,296 words. That's an ambitious number of words per day, but not undoable.
On a completely unrelated subject, JourneyQuest raised the $100k it needed to make a feature length second season, which redeems my faith the species homo sapiens internet. It also struck me as worth noting that they had just over 1,000 contributors, dovetailing nicely (if superficially) with the 1,000 true fans theory that my friend Clayton mentioned in a comment that I really should have responded to at the time. Anyway, it's nice to see a sufficient number of internet people come together and support something they want, not to mention that this particular project it meritorious in its own right.
I want to see that in a promotional blurb, front and center a the top of a film poster: "Meritorious!"
This past week has been a week of lasts: last visit to Pagliacci's, Toshi's, Oasis (for bubble tea loaded with an absurd amount of positive associations), Seattle Jujutsu and Sambo club, last day of work, last time in the Hedgehog House. It wasn't until I started counting those that it registered for me that I was moving, not just going somewhere.
I started packing on Thursday, and I really only started. I filled perhaps one or two boxes out of what would ultimately be about twenty (a rough estimate). On Friday I got up relatively early (or, if you consider that I had had a job as of Wednesday, relatively late) and started packing in earnest. Is it a universal experience that packing all one's belongings into boxes taxes an order of magnitude more time than you imagine it will? Looking over my relatively meager possessions (understanding that those of my possessions which would not be described as "meager" are few and at least box-shaped) I imagined it would take perhaps two hours to get it all packed up.
In the end, I was able to sleep on Friday night, and pack up my clothes last of all on Saturday, but I really considered pulling a packing all-nighter. It got done in the end.
My house filled up with friends in the afternoon who made surprisingly quick work of moving all of my things into my shipping pod. Many thanks to Abby, Alex, Anna, Bryan, Clayton, David, Jenn, and Katie for doing what I didn't realize until I saw them doing it would have been impossible to do on my own. We filled the rest of the evening divvying up unclaimed things and ultimately going to The Ram (another last until, as with most of the others, I visit), a decadent excursion paid for almost entirely with money found in the house. So that was cool.
So, as I said, here I am. I flew overnight without incident. I'm still a bit tired, so I'm blogging instead of NaNoing. The extension I allowed myself in my last post allows me three days after tonight to write 11,296 words. That's an ambitious number of words per day, but not undoable.
On a completely unrelated subject, JourneyQuest raised the $100k it needed to make a feature length second season, which redeems my faith the species homo sapiens internet. It also struck me as worth noting that they had just over 1,000 contributors, dovetailing nicely (if superficially) with the 1,000 true fans theory that my friend Clayton mentioned in a comment that I really should have responded to at the time. Anyway, it's nice to see a sufficient number of internet people come together and support something they want, not to mention that this particular project it meritorious in its own right.
I want to see that in a promotional blurb, front and center a the top of a film poster: "Meritorious!"
Monday, November 28, 2011
Strategic withdrawal
With 36,744 words written so far, it doesn't look like I'm going to make 50,000 by the end of Wednesday. I could, by blowing off any of the things I would normally blow off in November. I think I went into this last week.
I've set my time for leaving as Saturday night. That means, among other things, that it might be responsible not to make the writing push that would be necessary to win NaNoWriMo this year.
I'm not giving up, though. I am allowing myself an additional seven days. That will still require some pushing, since I don't expect to have much time to write Monday or Wednesday, and after that I'll be packing, but it's doable.
I've set my time for leaving as Saturday night. That means, among other things, that it might be responsible not to make the writing push that would be necessary to win NaNoWriMo this year.
I'm not giving up, though. I am allowing myself an additional seven days. That will still require some pushing, since I don't expect to have much time to write Monday or Wednesday, and after that I'll be packing, but it's doable.
Monday, November 21, 2011
I choose crazy
This is shaping up to be a crazy November, and I'm saying that as a person who has actively sought crazy Novembers since 2007. Normally it's crazy because of the writing. The rest gives. This year it's crazy because of the moving. And the writing. Because of the moving, anything that gives in November I will have already done for the last time in Seattle. That's why I tried out Pathfinder Society at The Dreaming this week. Normally that would have been a crazy thing to do in November. It's still a crazy thing to do in November, but it's also an impossible thing to do in December, so I chose crazy.
Likewise it would have been sane to let my jujutsu training lapse this month in light of NaNoWriMo, except I just started this year, and I'm just now feeling like I started to make progress. Also, I like it, and I like the people, and I don't want to blow them off. So I'm still doing that twice a week.
As consequence I'm about 7,000 words behind with this year's novel, which I think is the farthest behind I've ever been, barring the two years I started and gave up after a couple of days. Naturally, I don't want to fail. At anything, though. So I don't know if something is going to have to give.
Also, Girlfriend is coming back for Thanksgiving, and that's exciting. I wonder how much I'm going to want to write while she's here, though. Lately I've been spending whole weekends either writing or putting writing off. (Ironically, this counts as putting writing off, but I've promised you, faithful readers.)
I am as nervous as a [too nervous to come up with a metaphor] about the move. I'm going to be okay. I mean, more things will have to go wrong for me to have reason to actually worry. Even so, I'm moving across the country to be with my girlfriend. I have a job here, and not one there. I know here, and I don't know there. So it's a little crazy. But, among other things, do I want to die having never done anything even a little crazy for love?
Okay, I need to stop, because that was 369 words I just wrote that won't count toward my novel. NaNo-Ho!
That was awful. My apologies.
Likewise it would have been sane to let my jujutsu training lapse this month in light of NaNoWriMo, except I just started this year, and I'm just now feeling like I started to make progress. Also, I like it, and I like the people, and I don't want to blow them off. So I'm still doing that twice a week.
As consequence I'm about 7,000 words behind with this year's novel, which I think is the farthest behind I've ever been, barring the two years I started and gave up after a couple of days. Naturally, I don't want to fail. At anything, though. So I don't know if something is going to have to give.
Also, Girlfriend is coming back for Thanksgiving, and that's exciting. I wonder how much I'm going to want to write while she's here, though. Lately I've been spending whole weekends either writing or putting writing off. (Ironically, this counts as putting writing off, but I've promised you, faithful readers.)
I am as nervous as a [too nervous to come up with a metaphor] about the move. I'm going to be okay. I mean, more things will have to go wrong for me to have reason to actually worry. Even so, I'm moving across the country to be with my girlfriend. I have a job here, and not one there. I know here, and I don't know there. So it's a little crazy. But, among other things, do I want to die having never done anything even a little crazy for love?
Okay, I need to stop, because that was 369 words I just wrote that won't count toward my novel. NaNo-Ho!
That was awful. My apologies.
Sunday, November 13, 2011
I spent almost as much time thinking of a title for this post as I did writing the post itself
I had to stop reading Beowulf because it was making me want to write Hengist too much, and that's not what I'm writing now. The good news, I suppose, is that I have a source of excitement for that project waiting for me at the other end of November.
This is my obligatory post for the week. Today I pretty well have to write 2,000 or more words, and definitely more if possible. However, if that comes along, I may be back here, taking a break from writing by writing. At least blog posts don't need a plot.
15,340/21,667/50,000
This is my obligatory post for the week. Today I pretty well have to write 2,000 or more words, and definitely more if possible. However, if that comes along, I may be back here, taking a break from writing by writing. At least blog posts don't need a plot.
15,340/21,667/50,000
Sunday, November 6, 2011
B minus 3
It would probably be best to make my word count before bed, rather than make this a long post, so that's what I'm going to try to do.
Tuesday is my birthday. I'd rather not get any older but if my girlfriend is going to keep aging then it wouldn't be fair of me to hold out on her. I started opening birthday stuff, because she and my parents have super-obligingly sent me multiple packages. Girlfriend got me Howell Chickering's translation of Beowulf, and that is pretty cool. Hwaet.
This year's NaNoWriMo is five days old, and I hit the second week slump pretty early. Or perhaps it's too early to call that; let's just say I fell behind on day 2 and 3. I think things are picking up, though. Soon I'll be able to introduce some more characters (there are only two right now) and more things will happen.
I'm being shamelessly self-indulgent, as I think is appropriate. The real question is whether the sort of things I write when I'm indulging myself are the sort of things other people would want to read. Much like when I meet people in person, the salient question becomes whether I am being tiresome or entertaining. For now, I don't have to worry about it. I enjoy writing meandering sentences, or palindromic clauses like: "One year, in deep winter of the deepest winter in many years..."
It's nice to be back to Myrddin now, although once I get my brain going I seem to be beset on all sides with ideas for other projects which I can't work on this month. I invented a useful curseword for Hengist & Undine the other day at work, and then had some intriguing thoughts about the biology of planet-sized jellyfish. The story that that second thing fits into doesn't even belong to me anyway.
On a less cool note, I've gotten confirmation that "Burned at the Stake" will not be appearing in Machine of Death 2. Because the editors dangled the vague hope of picking from the same submission pool for possible subsequent volumes, I'm not sure I ought to post the whole thing here, but the gag order is off, anyway, and people who know how to ask can see the story if they want to.
I know one problem with the story as I submitted it (meaning one thing I would have work on if I had had more time). I found myself wondering if I would have been more or less disappointed if I didn't have a flaw in mind. If it had been perfect, so far as I could tell, would I have been shocked and disheartened to see it rejected? Or would I shrug it off, privately convinced of the story's merit.
Either way, this was my first big boy rejection and it's something I'll have to get used to. There will be more of them.
I do wish I had finished that one story before November started, so I could send it out. I would probably be looking it over again in December regardless, so it comes out to about the same thing, I guess.
6,401/8,333/50,000
Tuesday is my birthday. I'd rather not get any older but if my girlfriend is going to keep aging then it wouldn't be fair of me to hold out on her. I started opening birthday stuff, because she and my parents have super-obligingly sent me multiple packages. Girlfriend got me Howell Chickering's translation of Beowulf, and that is pretty cool. Hwaet.
This year's NaNoWriMo is five days old, and I hit the second week slump pretty early. Or perhaps it's too early to call that; let's just say I fell behind on day 2 and 3. I think things are picking up, though. Soon I'll be able to introduce some more characters (there are only two right now) and more things will happen.
I'm being shamelessly self-indulgent, as I think is appropriate. The real question is whether the sort of things I write when I'm indulging myself are the sort of things other people would want to read. Much like when I meet people in person, the salient question becomes whether I am being tiresome or entertaining. For now, I don't have to worry about it. I enjoy writing meandering sentences, or palindromic clauses like: "One year, in deep winter of the deepest winter in many years..."
It's nice to be back to Myrddin now, although once I get my brain going I seem to be beset on all sides with ideas for other projects which I can't work on this month. I invented a useful curseword for Hengist & Undine the other day at work, and then had some intriguing thoughts about the biology of planet-sized jellyfish. The story that that second thing fits into doesn't even belong to me anyway.
On a less cool note, I've gotten confirmation that "Burned at the Stake" will not be appearing in Machine of Death 2. Because the editors dangled the vague hope of picking from the same submission pool for possible subsequent volumes, I'm not sure I ought to post the whole thing here, but the gag order is off, anyway, and people who know how to ask can see the story if they want to.
I know one problem with the story as I submitted it (meaning one thing I would have work on if I had had more time). I found myself wondering if I would have been more or less disappointed if I didn't have a flaw in mind. If it had been perfect, so far as I could tell, would I have been shocked and disheartened to see it rejected? Or would I shrug it off, privately convinced of the story's merit.
Either way, this was my first big boy rejection and it's something I'll have to get used to. There will be more of them.
I do wish I had finished that one story before November started, so I could send it out. I would probably be looking it over again in December regardless, so it comes out to about the same thing, I guess.
6,401/8,333/50,000
Monday, October 31, 2011
A Halloween amendment
I spent today nervous about MoD2, and finally discovered that the selections won't be made today, but over the course of next week. You know what? I'm more than all right with that. I will wait patiently like writers do. Not knowing exactly when I'll find out actually takes a lot of pressure off, somehow.
NaNoWriMo is tomorrow. Arthuriana ho!
Overheard:
Child's voice: That's a pineapple.
Adult's voice: That's awesome!
Yeah, they got candy.
NaNoWriMo is tomorrow. Arthuriana ho!
Overheard:
Child's voice: That's a pineapple.
Adult's voice: That's awesome!
Yeah, they got candy.
Nerves
Tomorrow (for another 75 minutes it's tomorrow) is the day the Machine of Death 2 people will be announcing their selections, and I wish I wasn't nervous about it. That's how it is, though--I'm jittery about the probability of my first post-college writing rejection as if there were something I could do about it now. It's not much good to try to explain the odds to myself: positing for a moment that my story is in the top 10 percent of submissions, that makes it one of 200 stories. So, inasmuch as I am a logical being, I expect a rejection. But, inasmuch as I am a fantasist, I of course know that my story is destined for publication and glory. That part of me is setting itself up for disappointment and I don't know what to do about it.
I wish I were already used to this. I don't look forward to the process of getting used to it. So here I am talking to the internet.
I had hoped to finish a short story by tonight as a sort of ego armor, but I wasn't able to. (What a strange phrase, and really a lie. I know I was able to. I just didn't, and the fact is that now I can't have done it and I'm not able to do it by the time I should be in bed tonight, which is now.) I did make progress, though, and I should probably put more work into it Halloween night as a warmup for NaNoWriMo.
This year I have a lot of things I want to do in November, it being my last full month in Seattle. I want to keep going to jujutsu close to twice a week, and one or two evenings I want to stop by the Pathfinder Society at The Dreaming. This is something like my last semester of college, and I'm probably going to have too much on my plate. Of course the novel will take precedence.
I hope to keep posting here once a week as well, though I'm sure you'll forgive me if a few posts are very brief.
Do I want luck? I don't think I believe in it.
I wish I were already used to this. I don't look forward to the process of getting used to it. So here I am talking to the internet.
I had hoped to finish a short story by tonight as a sort of ego armor, but I wasn't able to. (What a strange phrase, and really a lie. I know I was able to. I just didn't, and the fact is that now I can't have done it and I'm not able to do it by the time I should be in bed tonight, which is now.) I did make progress, though, and I should probably put more work into it Halloween night as a warmup for NaNoWriMo.
This year I have a lot of things I want to do in November, it being my last full month in Seattle. I want to keep going to jujutsu close to twice a week, and one or two evenings I want to stop by the Pathfinder Society at The Dreaming. This is something like my last semester of college, and I'm probably going to have too much on my plate. Of course the novel will take precedence.
I hope to keep posting here once a week as well, though I'm sure you'll forgive me if a few posts are very brief.
Do I want luck? I don't think I believe in it.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
The Pineappolantern
Hey, I figured out how to put pictures on Blogger (like it was hard). This post is mostly about showing off this thing I have pictures of.
Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat. I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability). I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns. Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives. Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in. But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks. I think it started when I did this:
The problem is that I don't generally like pumpkins. I can enjoy a slice of pumpkin pie in a Thanksgiving setting, but I certainly could never approach the enthusiasm that some of my housemates evinced at the prospect of fresh squash innards. When I could, I got someone else to handle the scooping. I think whether or not you find something appetizing can have a lot to do with how you feel about plunging your hands into it.
This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing. The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.
But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.
An awful idea.
A wonderful, awful idea.
...
This probably isn't as big a reveal as it could have been, since it's right there in the post title, but check that out! I'm pretty pleased with it.
Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work. She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.
In the dark:
Halloween is a holiday I enjoy somewhat. I haven't enjoyed dressing up in many years, but I still approve of candy in small pieces (the real fun of "fun size" being the ability to eat a Snickers bar, a Reese's cup, a 3 Musketeers, and a bar of dark chocolate in one sitting without endangering one's digestive stability). I'm ambivalent about jack-o'-lanterns. Drawing has always been an amateur-level forte of mine, and it's not every day of the year you get carte blanche to draw on things with knives. Fire, also, is a medium I am seldom invited to work in. But at least since I've been in the Hedgehog House, there's been an expectation that I would handle the design and execution of the jacks. I think it started when I did this:
This year I didn't feel inspired with any clever pumpkin designs, and as usual I wasn't really feeling the pumpkin thing. The people who would most expect me to perform have moved out now, so I could probably have punted.
But at the supermarket a week or so ago, I saw something that I hadn't thought was in season, and I got an idea.
An awful idea.
A wonderful, awful idea.
...
Abby was doing some work at the dining room table and I didn't actually explain what I was doing--I just sat down with a knife and a tropical fruit and went to work. She approved of the idea, and took the pictures when it was finished.
In the dark:
That looks a lot better than I expected. I'm just sayin'. And you get this translucent effect all around the shell:
Here it is in its proper place, on the front stoop:
With a long exposure, the thing looks pretty demonic:
This is almost certainly my last Seattle jack-o'-lantern, and I think I went out on a good note. I just hope it holds together until Halloween proper.
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Steps forward
As frustrated as I can be with myself for repeatedly missing my self-imposed Saturday-night blog deadline, I’ve decided that moving the deadline proper to Sunday would be a mistake. As it is, you can probably count on posts happening at some point over the weekend.
I set some balls rolling this week. The first, almost certainly most important, is that I gave notice at my job. You may remember how I wrote a while back about how I would probably be moving to Washington DC to be with Girlfriend. I then promptly stopped referring to it against the outside chance that my bosses would find out I was planning to leave before I told them. But now I told them, and I can tell you too. My last day of work is tentatively set for November 30.
I’m willing to tell you that this has been a very scary thing. As America evolves into a despair-based economy, the prospect of giving up a good job, that pays all my bills, has moved from irksome to terrifying.
But what do I mean when I say I have a good job? Meaning no disrespect to my employer, to whom I am very grateful, I found no value in the work itself. Yes, I knew I was doing something that was of use to some people, maybe that was even important, and I could take a little pride in doing it well. But I didn’t enjoy it, or even engage it. Like every job I’ve had, actually, in the narrative of my life the time I’ve spent working has worked out to lost time, like sleeping.
It was money, and money is security, and I’m not so romantic as to imagine that I can get by without it. Over the past couple months, though, I’ve been realizing that the life I’ve been making secure is not the life I want. Not that I didn’t understand that before, but when Girlfriend was here there was something to be said for just living, and I imagined my steady job providing a safe platform for a cautious transition into an artistic livelihood. I don’t think I was wrong. But now I have roots here, and I want to be there.
What will I do in DC? I’ll definitely look for a steady job—I’ve read the advice of enough successful freelancers warning against jumping straight in to the artistic life without a net—but I’m starting a new phase of my life again, and it’s time to start working with a goal and a plan.
One step taken in the right direction: I signed up to the Cracked.com writer’s forum, which is the first step toward being able to pitch them article ideas and, hopefully, get published and paid. I'm not bragging about this. It’s not an award or anything; anyone can get in. But the fact remains that last week I had not done this, and now I have. When an article of mine is published, then you can be sure I will be bragging, right here.
I’m off to work now, despite it being Sunday. Seeing the end of my current job has suddenly made me care about money, which is something I haven’t done in a while. But I took four days of unpaid leave while my Grandma was dying, and while I’m not required to make that up, now it looks to me like an opportunity to squeeze four more days’ pay out of this job while I have it, if I can find the time.
November is coming. Are you ready?
Sunday, October 16, 2011
The future will be different from the past
I just finished watching Troll Hunter on Netflix, and that was fun. Bizarre, overblown, and understated in pretty decent proportions.
Recently I've had to do some Thinking about my Future, and while my Future as a Writer isn't the crux of my ruminations, I've had plenty on that subject to think about.
I checked back in on the Machine of Death people today. It looks like I will know the fate of "Burned at the Stake" at the end of the month. I'm bracing myself for a rejection, there being 1,958 submitted stories, and their declared intention being to reject between 1,923 and 1,928 of them. But they did come out with this neat word cloud poster of all the submitted titles, and I'll admit it's kind of exciting to see my title in the cloud, bottom center, the size of everything else that only one person tried.
Reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog has churned my expectations for publishing rather thoroughly. Even if everything she's said about the publishing industry turns out to be wrong (and that seems unlikely to me), it's still probably for the best. Until perhaps a month ago I was still basing all my assumptions on advice published 15 years ago, not really considering that 15 years ago... you know what? Computers. I was going to list quaint things that were true in 1996 but you can do that yourself. A ridiculous amount has changed.
The upshot of what I'm hearing is that self-publishing has become something you can start a career on. There's also indy publishing, which is something I will have to look into.
What will I do with my writing? I don't know, exactly. But I've begun thinking in terms of what I can do for myself, and what I have to hire other people to do for me. I've spent the past three years proofreading and working with text formatting software--I begin to suspect that I have the skill set to format a book. I minored in visual art in college, and I think I can handle the cartography that should go in the front of Hengist & Undine. I have had the support of smart and talented friends throughout the writing process.
What can't I do? I can't produce cover-quality artwork--at least not the quality I would like. And I don't know anything about marketing. Managing marketing will be tricky, to say the least.
On the one hand I'm excited by the possibilities offered by self-publishing, but on the other hand, after a few conversations about the venue with certain friends and family, I realized that it doesn't lower the identity hurdle by that much. Even after my book was available online, I would still feel the need to explain, "The industry has changed. You can be a serious writer and self-publish now." If I bagged a traditional publishing contract, I wouldn't need to defend my status as a serious writer to friends and family, even if I didn't sell. Without a publishing contract, the only argument will be success, if I can have any. But, whether I can sell an editor on my work or not, I'll need to sell books to prove to myself that I'm a writer.
Recently I've had to do some Thinking about my Future, and while my Future as a Writer isn't the crux of my ruminations, I've had plenty on that subject to think about.
I checked back in on the Machine of Death people today. It looks like I will know the fate of "Burned at the Stake" at the end of the month. I'm bracing myself for a rejection, there being 1,958 submitted stories, and their declared intention being to reject between 1,923 and 1,928 of them. But they did come out with this neat word cloud poster of all the submitted titles, and I'll admit it's kind of exciting to see my title in the cloud, bottom center, the size of everything else that only one person tried.
Reading Kristine Kathryn Rusch's blog has churned my expectations for publishing rather thoroughly. Even if everything she's said about the publishing industry turns out to be wrong (and that seems unlikely to me), it's still probably for the best. Until perhaps a month ago I was still basing all my assumptions on advice published 15 years ago, not really considering that 15 years ago... you know what? Computers. I was going to list quaint things that were true in 1996 but you can do that yourself. A ridiculous amount has changed.
The upshot of what I'm hearing is that self-publishing has become something you can start a career on. There's also indy publishing, which is something I will have to look into.
What will I do with my writing? I don't know, exactly. But I've begun thinking in terms of what I can do for myself, and what I have to hire other people to do for me. I've spent the past three years proofreading and working with text formatting software--I begin to suspect that I have the skill set to format a book. I minored in visual art in college, and I think I can handle the cartography that should go in the front of Hengist & Undine. I have had the support of smart and talented friends throughout the writing process.
What can't I do? I can't produce cover-quality artwork--at least not the quality I would like. And I don't know anything about marketing. Managing marketing will be tricky, to say the least.
On the one hand I'm excited by the possibilities offered by self-publishing, but on the other hand, after a few conversations about the venue with certain friends and family, I realized that it doesn't lower the identity hurdle by that much. Even after my book was available online, I would still feel the need to explain, "The industry has changed. You can be a serious writer and self-publish now." If I bagged a traditional publishing contract, I wouldn't need to defend my status as a serious writer to friends and family, even if I didn't sell. Without a publishing contract, the only argument will be success, if I can have any. But, whether I can sell an editor on my work or not, I'll need to sell books to prove to myself that I'm a writer.
Sunday, October 9, 2011
Step 1: Hygiene
Sorry to miss a week plus. That's something I was hoping not to do. There was traveling, and then there was traveling again, and a funeral. As these things go, I suppose it went pretty well.
I called Girlfriend the other day and said "apparently I'm depressed." I wanted her to know that this was the sort of boyfriend she has: one who doesn't say, "Honey, I'm depressed," but says "apparently I'm depressed." I cited evidence, most particularly the 12 hours I had slept the night before. I didn't feel like I felt depressed. Today, I have just felt like I was depressed.
But this isn't what I came here to talk about, and it's not what you came here to read either, and anyway it's getting better. I re-learned today that there are some things I just shouldn't do: sleep until noon, wait until the afternoon to shower, go more than three days without shaving, or let myself run out of clean clothes. That's a solid recipe for feeling pathetic, and having remedied the latter three of those issues, things are looking up.
Yesterday I did something I had been meaning to do for some time--maybe years; I don't remember. I went back to DeadJournal and looked up my college-era blog. I had really expected the site to have disappeared, taking three years of my maudlin navel-gazing off the internet forever. But no! The site is still there, and my blog is still there, not even as if encased in amber, but still waiting for me to post to it again.
Not trusting to the internet to preserve that indefinitely, I saved the pages to my computer. I don't know if there's anything I want to do with them, but I didn't want that volume of my writing to disappear if I could help it. Looking back cursorially over it my first impression is that I was more depressive in college than I remember. Perhaps that isn't true of all the posts. The most recent post is from the end of 2006, and that wasn't a good year for anyone I know.
If I find anything worth sharing, or mocking, I may put it up here.
On another note, if I had posted last week I would have made mention of the Kickstarter campaign for season 2 of JourneyQuest. Heck, I still will; it's still going on. If you haven't already, take an opportunity contribute money towards people I like being funny and awesome. A seven-episode season is guaranteed, but with another $40k they can make ten episodes, and with $200k they can make two seasons at once!
At any rate, as an aspiring artist, I support the payment of other artists, and the development of new ways to fund art. It's exciting to me when fans of something enthusiastically fund it, just like it scares me when I see people taking art for granted.
Then again, JourneyQuest episodes on YouTube all have upwards of 30,000 views, and the Kickstarter campaign has 501 backers as I write this. I don't want to imply that 29,500 people aren't pulling their weight, but I do wonder if we're moving back into a patronage model of the arts, and what that would mean. Off the top of my head I imagine it would lead to the tastes of a smaller portion of the population being catered to, which may not be a demonstrable evil, but which I think is far from an objective good.
I called Girlfriend the other day and said "apparently I'm depressed." I wanted her to know that this was the sort of boyfriend she has: one who doesn't say, "Honey, I'm depressed," but says "apparently I'm depressed." I cited evidence, most particularly the 12 hours I had slept the night before. I didn't feel like I felt depressed. Today, I have just felt like I was depressed.
But this isn't what I came here to talk about, and it's not what you came here to read either, and anyway it's getting better. I re-learned today that there are some things I just shouldn't do: sleep until noon, wait until the afternoon to shower, go more than three days without shaving, or let myself run out of clean clothes. That's a solid recipe for feeling pathetic, and having remedied the latter three of those issues, things are looking up.
Yesterday I did something I had been meaning to do for some time--maybe years; I don't remember. I went back to DeadJournal and looked up my college-era blog. I had really expected the site to have disappeared, taking three years of my maudlin navel-gazing off the internet forever. But no! The site is still there, and my blog is still there, not even as if encased in amber, but still waiting for me to post to it again.
Not trusting to the internet to preserve that indefinitely, I saved the pages to my computer. I don't know if there's anything I want to do with them, but I didn't want that volume of my writing to disappear if I could help it. Looking back cursorially over it my first impression is that I was more depressive in college than I remember. Perhaps that isn't true of all the posts. The most recent post is from the end of 2006, and that wasn't a good year for anyone I know.
If I find anything worth sharing, or mocking, I may put it up here.
On another note, if I had posted last week I would have made mention of the Kickstarter campaign for season 2 of JourneyQuest. Heck, I still will; it's still going on. If you haven't already, take an opportunity contribute money towards people I like being funny and awesome. A seven-episode season is guaranteed, but with another $40k they can make ten episodes, and with $200k they can make two seasons at once!
At any rate, as an aspiring artist, I support the payment of other artists, and the development of new ways to fund art. It's exciting to me when fans of something enthusiastically fund it, just like it scares me when I see people taking art for granted.
Then again, JourneyQuest episodes on YouTube all have upwards of 30,000 views, and the Kickstarter campaign has 501 backers as I write this. I don't want to imply that 29,500 people aren't pulling their weight, but I do wonder if we're moving back into a patronage model of the arts, and what that would mean. Off the top of my head I imagine it would lead to the tastes of a smaller portion of the population being catered to, which may not be a demonstrable evil, but which I think is far from an objective good.
Saturday, September 24, 2011
The main reason this is not a good week
I am leaving on a jet plane and I do not, in fact, know when I will be back again. Although the area of uncertainty in this case covers one or two days.
There are reasons I don't want to make this a long story. The short version is that my grandmother back on Long Island is entering hospice, and I've been told that now is the time to go see her. So that's what I'm doing--I'll fly overnight and be in New York tomorrow morning. I'll probably be coming back Wednesday but nothing's been purchased yet.
Is that all there is to say? Right now it feels like that's all.
There are reasons I don't want to make this a long story. The short version is that my grandmother back on Long Island is entering hospice, and I've been told that now is the time to go see her. So that's what I'm doing--I'll fly overnight and be in New York tomorrow morning. I'll probably be coming back Wednesday but nothing's been purchased yet.
Is that all there is to say? Right now it feels like that's all.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Netflix, stars, treks, observations thereon
Since Netflix came into my house I've become keenly aware that I had been living the life of a savage, eking media one serving at a time out of solid-form magnetic storage devices. I get the feeling that the next generation is going to think of bandwidth like we think of running water: so essential, pervasive, and reliable that it’s easy to forget how recently it became normal. (Not that my bandwidth is that reliable. I’m writing this post in Word while I wait for my webotubes to unclog. But I suspect that I will live to see the datastream made continuous.) Now, I hope never to live in a house without a bookshelf, and probably a DVD collection as well, but I wonder if the first generation to see indoor plumbing didn’t also have its holdouts who never learned to trust pipes enough to move somewhere without a well.
Thanks to Netflix, I have joined some of my friends in watching Star Trek: The Next Generation. I remember watching ST:TNG with my dad when it was on television originally, and never took to another Trek like I did that one. But being the tender age I was, I missed the first few seasons. The opportunity to go back and watch from “Encounter at Farpoint” has been… fascinating.
The episodes of the first season I’ve seen have not been the Trek I remember. Certainly if I didn’t know what it would become, I wouldn’t seek out more episodes. There’s a lot of bad. But, as with Q vis a vis the human race, the pilot shows just enough potential that we’re willing to withhold judgment for a season or two.
The geneses are there of what would become really cool by the end of the series. It lays out the cast of characters that, with a little tweaking (sorry, Tasha) provide a rich range of characters to play with, without resorting to the sort of incompetence and destructive behavior that fueled the drama in, say, Battlestar Galactica. (In some regards, ST:TNG is a procedural, like Law and Order or The West Wing; we come to it to see the crew of the Enterprise do their jobs well.)
All in all, it’s a sort of homo erectus to the original series’ Australopithecus. In time we’ll see the show develop intellectually, and learn to knap Worf’s head into a more functional shape.
But I must say, one thing that really struck me is that in Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the future, humans have apparently evolved into a race of insufferable space twits. Couldn’t we have learned anything about diplomacy? Tolerance? Instead, say, when an alien ambassador wants to show Commander William “Babyface” Riker his scrapbook, he just smiles and says, “Oh, scrapbooking. We humans gave up that barbaric practice long ago.”
One thing it really makes me want to do is read Wil Wheaton’s book, Memories of the Future, because looking back on this show can be so darn fun, and I’ve seen him do it with merciless, good-natured verve.
I come back to my newly frustrating internet connection, which has been spotty ever since I moved into Girlfriend's old room. As consequence, I’m not sure when this post will actually go up, but it’s too late for me to keep waiting for it tonight.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
September 11, 2011
The tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks is naturally producing a lot of commentary. I think that's good. While my general rule on this blog has been to avoid commenting on politics, I'm going to relax that today. It's not that I think what I have to say is especially important, but it is what it is, and I'd like to share it.
People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy. We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information. Then things happen, and people get old and die. I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II. Things that only he remembered are gone now. So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.
I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it. It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language. But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them. I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.
I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated. I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have. 3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number. As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands. I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them. In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died. But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not. It affected me.
Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school. I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other. My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.
And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion. It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later. But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.
September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack. Not until the end, anyway. First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.
We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office. She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.
I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room. Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city. This made sense at the time.
I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit. The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it. In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center. No other details. I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic. But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize. No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.
I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew. At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.
At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked. I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now. At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.
Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day. I respect the decision now (I might even have then). Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.
But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid. Bombs were being dropped. Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking. I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.
I realized then that this was a very important day. I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins." Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.
The rest of the day is a blur until the end. At some point I got set straight about the bombing. In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers. I had $20. I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting. He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself. I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.
Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.
I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home. Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.
The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000. In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.
I was mad. I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me. It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart. You do not f*ck with us. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fight someone. Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.
I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day. It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were. Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice. He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood. Looking back, it was a scary time. There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.
The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened. There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said. I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims." I think hearing that was good for us.
One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war. His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would. And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.
For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.
People like to say things about never forgetting this or that, but forgetting is too easy. We're bombarded with new information all the time, and new versions of old information. Then things happen, and people get old and die. I wish, for example, that I had asked my grandfather questions about World War II. Things that only he remembered are gone now. So I hope that a lot of people record what they remember while they can.
I've never much liked the term "9/11" but that's the one that stuck, perhaps for exactly the same reasons that I dislike it. It's just two numbers, perhaps the most banal and hollow name that could have been produced using the English language. But the event itself was huge and complicated, and I remember the time we spent groping for a name adequate to three separate suicide attacks and everything that happened around them. I think we'd recoil from a name worthy of the events it described, and so we chose the opposite.
I saw a blog argue the other day that the importance of 9/11 as an event is grossly overestimated. I disagree, though it's not really an argument you can have. 3,000 is a huge number and a tiny number. As a number of human lives it only barely defies our ability to conceptualize it, hardly worth mention against crimes and tragedies killing tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, thousands of thousands. I've met people now who don't feel very strongly about 9/11 and that's always strange for me but I think I'm beginning to understand them. In terms only of death and destruction it wasn't a national event, and I can't speak to the effects of that anyway--nobody I knew died. But 9/11 really was important as a psychic event, and it either affected you or not. It affected me.
Ten years ago I was sixteen years old, a senior in high school. I lived on Long Island, at the suburbs roughly midway across the gradient from New York's urban sprawl on one side to posh beach houses on the other. My best friend at the time's father commuted to the city and worked in the World Trade Center, and this was nothing special.
And while I'm setting the stage, I want to point out one thing that's too easily forgotten: confusion. It's so easy to forget what it was like not to know something that you learn later. But when people in the future look up 9/11, if they only read the true facts of what happened, they'll practically be reading lies.
September 11, 2001 wasn't the day Al Qaeda launched a terrorist attack. Not until the end, anyway. First, it was the day a plane crashed into one of the Twin Towers.
We found out about this first period, when our teacher got a phone call forwarded through the main office. She had a relative--I don't remember which--in the WTC, and she let us know, since any of us might have also.
I remember on my way to my next class, hearing the radio playing in the janitor's room. Two radio hosts were talking about the crash, and one of them pointed out that it was very foggy over the city. This made sense at the time.
I remember that distinctly but I have no memory of when the second plane hit. The school administration was trying not to say too much, and maybe they never announced it. In my next class there was an announcement made over the loudspeaker that there had been "an explosion" at the World Trade Center. No other details. I still don't understand why they called it an explosion, if they were withholding information to prevent panic. But like every decision made that day, it's easy to criticize. No one knew what to do--the school administration was figuring it out as they went along just like the rest of us.
I took the opportunity to tell the class what I knew. At this point, knowing there had been a plane involved, I had the advantage on everyone else.
At some point before the next class it made its way through the class that there had been a second plane, and there was no question that America was being attacked. I use that phrase unreservedly, even though people tend to look at it as hyperbole now. At that point, though, that was exactly the sense we had.
Next class was Spanish, and the teacher refused to postpone a test we had that day. I respect the decision now (I might even have then). Everyone just wanted to tell everyone else what they had heard, and she probably wanted to know too, which in all honesty I never thought of until just now.
But I did get some information before the test was handed out: New York City was experiencing a full-scale air raid. Bombs were being dropped. Whoever told me that didn't say what country the bombers had come from, and I don't recall asking. I think at that point I accepted that information was going to be incomplete, but I had no reason to doubt what I was hearing.
I realized then that this was a very important day. I took out my school-supplied day planner and wrote underneath that day's homework assignments, "Bombing of New York begins." Because I had no idea when what was starting would end, and I definitely had no idea how hard it would be to ever forget the date.
The rest of the day is a blur until the end. At some point I got set straight about the bombing. In the cafeteria after school someone was collecting money to buy bottled water for rescue workers. I had $20. I bought a pretzel and gave the rest to the guy collecting. He directed onlookers to my example, and I was very proud of myself. I don't remember if the pretzel was any good.
Before my mom came to pick me up someone explained what had really happened: two planes had hit the Twin Towers, and another had hit the Pentagon, the Air Force had shot down a fourth one headed to Washington D.C., and fighters were pursuing a fifth that was headed for Los Angeles.
I'm not sure I knew the towers had fallen until I got home. Once I talked to my parents, who had had access to the news and not the high school grapevine, I became acquainted with the facts, such as were known.
The first estimate of the death toll was over 6,000. In a few days it would shrink by more than half as redundancies were discovered between the different sources, but it took a long time for the real figure to replace that first one in my mind.
I was mad. I was swearing in my head, and that was not at all normal for me. It had been unthinkable--I mean really unthinkable--that someone could attack America on American soil, right in the heart. You do not f*ck with us. I wanted to do something. I wanted to fight someone. Carpet-bombing Afghanistan that very day seemed like a perfectly appropriate response.
I don't think I'm the only one who thought that, and I want to point out that we didn't attack Afghanistan that day. It was more than a month before the military response, and I remember how frustrated some people were. Whatever happened afterward, I have to respect what President Bush did in that month: he waited when the public wanted to attack now, and he projected a confidence that there would be justice. He made a humanitarian case for dismantling the Taliban regime to people who thought they already had good reason to want blood. Looking back, it was a scary time. There could have been rampant vigilantism, race riots, if the President had been more bloodthirsty or more reluctant.
The next couple days at school were devoted to processing what had happened. There was an assembly, but I don't remember much of what was said. I do remember one classroom discussion where one of our Muslim classmates shared that his first reaction to the news had been to think, "God, don't let it be Muslims." I think hearing that was good for us.
One thing I do remember from the assembly was a teacher recounting how he had told some student something my dad had mused to me once or twice: Every generation in history, basically, has had its major war. His had had Vietnam, then Korea and World War 2 before that, World War 1, and so on back... but our generation hadn't yet, and possibly never would. And the teacher admitted he had been wrong.
For almost twenty years, we thought we might make it, though.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
Geeks & Gatherings
It's late for a timely retrospective on PAX 2011, so I'll spare you. It was cool that the convention annexed the Paramount Theater this year, and very convenient, especially compared to Benaroya Hall last year. Otherwise, it was a PAX, and as such a great deal can be left unsaid.
I won't be the first person to notice an emerging "geek" counterculture. It's certainly on display at PAX. What I've noticed recently about people addressing large numbers of geeks is that a great deal of their humor consists of references to shared media experiences from the 80s and 90s. "Humor" might not be the right term. Anyway it seems odd to me. I mean, I don't imagine mainstream public speakers being cheered when they display an awareness of American Idol, or whatever. Or maybe they do. I'll confess to not knowing from first or secondhand experience.
If my writing seems even more off-the-cuff than usual tonight, it might be because I am also talking to Girlfriend in another tab, and chatting with Cleverbot in another. The latter encourages a breezy, somewhat whimsical style.
Anyway, regarding geeks, I have a theory. If geeks (as we currently use the word) have anything in common it is an affinity for obscure pursuits. And all of them (us?) (the relatively well-adjusted ones, anyway) have at one time or another been very happy to discover another person who shares their interests. If certain PAX speakers are to be believed, it can be an epiphanic experience, and one of profound self-validation. At any rate, my theory is that that is what geeks are largely trying to recreate.
I suppose that having an odd hobby isn't that different than being different in other ways. Obviously, realizing you like Magic: The Gathering isn't as hard on a thirteen-year-old as realizing you're gay, say. But I imagine the ritual of mass self-identification is common to subcultures that have been oppressed, to greater or lesser degrees. Geeks just use media as their totems.
And in three paragraphs (and one digression) I have reduced my theory to a fairly banal observation. Oh well.
I'm trying things out, seeing what I can keep up, before I sign a version of my personal contract, which I talked about last post. The good news for you (assuming you are a regular) is that one of the terms of the contract is that I post here at least once a week. But maybe I'll have more to say next time.
Oh, Bryan is in a thing on the internet. I suppose it will appeal primarily to fans of JourneyQuest. If you are not a fan of JourneyQuest, you should go become one, then come back and click that link.
I won't be the first person to notice an emerging "geek" counterculture. It's certainly on display at PAX. What I've noticed recently about people addressing large numbers of geeks is that a great deal of their humor consists of references to shared media experiences from the 80s and 90s. "Humor" might not be the right term. Anyway it seems odd to me. I mean, I don't imagine mainstream public speakers being cheered when they display an awareness of American Idol, or whatever. Or maybe they do. I'll confess to not knowing from first or secondhand experience.
If my writing seems even more off-the-cuff than usual tonight, it might be because I am also talking to Girlfriend in another tab, and chatting with Cleverbot in another. The latter encourages a breezy, somewhat whimsical style.
Anyway, regarding geeks, I have a theory. If geeks (as we currently use the word) have anything in common it is an affinity for obscure pursuits. And all of them (us?) (the relatively well-adjusted ones, anyway) have at one time or another been very happy to discover another person who shares their interests. If certain PAX speakers are to be believed, it can be an epiphanic experience, and one of profound self-validation. At any rate, my theory is that that is what geeks are largely trying to recreate.
I suppose that having an odd hobby isn't that different than being different in other ways. Obviously, realizing you like Magic: The Gathering isn't as hard on a thirteen-year-old as realizing you're gay, say. But I imagine the ritual of mass self-identification is common to subcultures that have been oppressed, to greater or lesser degrees. Geeks just use media as their totems.
And in three paragraphs (and one digression) I have reduced my theory to a fairly banal observation. Oh well.
I'm trying things out, seeing what I can keep up, before I sign a version of my personal contract, which I talked about last post. The good news for you (assuming you are a regular) is that one of the terms of the contract is that I post here at least once a week. But maybe I'll have more to say next time.
Oh, Bryan is in a thing on the internet. I suppose it will appeal primarily to fans of JourneyQuest. If you are not a fan of JourneyQuest, you should go become one, then come back and click that link.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
The dotted line
A Sunday can feel really long when you wake up before 9. That that is an observation I can make is probably a sign that I should go to church more often.
I have completely moved out of my old room, and into Girlfriend's (former, bigger) room. Because my mess has now turned inside-out, my new room is more crowded than my old room ever was. Even so, I imagine I will sort it out eventually, mostly. Maybe I should make a rule of some sort, such as: whenever I have to look for something, I clean up what I had to look through? Do I have time for that?
A few things have come together recently to get me thinking about personal contracts. One, most recently, was an article about "decision fatigue" claiming that studies are indicating that the ability to decide to do stuff is a finite resource, like the ability to lift heavy things or stay awake. It's certainly tempting to think that I, myself, am particularly susceptible to this, inasmuch as I keep finding myself lacking the mental energy to change what I'm doing. It's intensely frustrating that writing, while exciting, is an expenditure of mental energy. But maybe this is a bit of self indulgence. Ultimately, whether we call them character flaws or find new, fancier terms for them, these are things we need to get around or else not be the people we want to be.
Stumbling on The Freelancer's Survival Guide, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was another thing. For a few days this past week, reading that book free on her blog was my preferred form of procrastination. I'm not qualified to assess her advice (although she sounds authoritative, and I'd like to be able to recommend this book), and I'm still digesting what I've read, but it got me into the mindset of imagining myself writing for a living, and what kind of lifestyle it would take to actually make that work.
She also included a lot of cautionary tales about contracts which, along with my regular work, got me thinking about precise language and how to write good and bad contracts. Not that that is my area ofexpertise competence.
Then there's the likelihood of moving, and the possibility that I will do so without a job like the one I have. Let's be honest--I'm imagining myself moving after Girlfriend even without a job on the other side, even if I shouldn't be thinking like that at all. But if I were to write full-time, or even part-time, I'd need to get to a point where 1,000 words isn't very good for a Monday.
One thing Rusch asked is what gets you out of bed and to work in the morning? I'm not sure I'm answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked, but I thought about it: routine, expectations, inertia. It got me thinking that if I wrote myself a job description, perhaps I could hold myself to it. Could I import what's helpful in my real job to a self-employment situation? Those helpful things, as I see it, are: a commitment to work (not just be present) for a fixed amount of time, and a clear hierarchy of priorities. I don't spend much energy deciding what projects to work on, because that's hardly negotiable. I don't spend any energy deciding to go to work (and extremely rarely have the energy to decide not to go to work). These are the things I started working out language to describe, in hopes of setting up a useful status quo.
I might have drawn something up that day when I got home, if it didn't start to sound very self-indulgent of me, and like a distraction from actual writing I could do. So I didn't, and surprisingly enough, I don't think I got too much of anything else done instead. So the idea came back.
Maybe today is the day after all. More to the point, perhaps, maybe I was thinking about this wrong. I don't have to define my responsibilities when I don't have a job. (In fact, I should probably set the terms of what to do if I am unemployed while I am employed, and still remember what a workday feels like.) I could--and maybe need to--define my responsibilities concerning my free time.
When I started writing this post, I didn't think I would do that today, but at this point I'm considering it. When I stopped writing "Nenle and Death" for now, I thought I was done writing, but maybe I was just done with that. By the same token, I didn't expect to have the energy to write anything after this post, but now it doesn't sound so hard. Also, there's a lot of day left.
I have completely moved out of my old room, and into Girlfriend's (former, bigger) room. Because my mess has now turned inside-out, my new room is more crowded than my old room ever was. Even so, I imagine I will sort it out eventually, mostly. Maybe I should make a rule of some sort, such as: whenever I have to look for something, I clean up what I had to look through? Do I have time for that?
A few things have come together recently to get me thinking about personal contracts. One, most recently, was an article about "decision fatigue" claiming that studies are indicating that the ability to decide to do stuff is a finite resource, like the ability to lift heavy things or stay awake. It's certainly tempting to think that I, myself, am particularly susceptible to this, inasmuch as I keep finding myself lacking the mental energy to change what I'm doing. It's intensely frustrating that writing, while exciting, is an expenditure of mental energy. But maybe this is a bit of self indulgence. Ultimately, whether we call them character flaws or find new, fancier terms for them, these are things we need to get around or else not be the people we want to be.
Stumbling on The Freelancer's Survival Guide, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, was another thing. For a few days this past week, reading that book free on her blog was my preferred form of procrastination. I'm not qualified to assess her advice (although she sounds authoritative, and I'd like to be able to recommend this book), and I'm still digesting what I've read, but it got me into the mindset of imagining myself writing for a living, and what kind of lifestyle it would take to actually make that work.
She also included a lot of cautionary tales about contracts which, along with my regular work, got me thinking about precise language and how to write good and bad contracts. Not that that is my area of
Then there's the likelihood of moving, and the possibility that I will do so without a job like the one I have. Let's be honest--I'm imagining myself moving after Girlfriend even without a job on the other side, even if I shouldn't be thinking like that at all. But if I were to write full-time, or even part-time, I'd need to get to a point where 1,000 words isn't very good for a Monday.
One thing Rusch asked is what gets you out of bed and to work in the morning? I'm not sure I'm answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked, but I thought about it: routine, expectations, inertia. It got me thinking that if I wrote myself a job description, perhaps I could hold myself to it. Could I import what's helpful in my real job to a self-employment situation? Those helpful things, as I see it, are: a commitment to work (not just be present) for a fixed amount of time, and a clear hierarchy of priorities. I don't spend much energy deciding what projects to work on, because that's hardly negotiable. I don't spend any energy deciding to go to work (and extremely rarely have the energy to decide not to go to work). These are the things I started working out language to describe, in hopes of setting up a useful status quo.
I might have drawn something up that day when I got home, if it didn't start to sound very self-indulgent of me, and like a distraction from actual writing I could do. So I didn't, and surprisingly enough, I don't think I got too much of anything else done instead. So the idea came back.
Maybe today is the day after all. More to the point, perhaps, maybe I was thinking about this wrong. I don't have to define my responsibilities when I don't have a job. (In fact, I should probably set the terms of what to do if I am unemployed while I am employed, and still remember what a workday feels like.) I could--and maybe need to--define my responsibilities concerning my free time.
When I started writing this post, I didn't think I would do that today, but at this point I'm considering it. When I stopped writing "Nenle and Death" for now, I thought I was done writing, but maybe I was just done with that. By the same token, I didn't expect to have the energy to write anything after this post, but now it doesn't sound so hard. Also, there's a lot of day left.
Sunday, August 7, 2011
2,160 miles at the equator
Where to start? I'm not in the best of moods these past few days, and since I haven't been posting about things of major personal significance, I might have to start at the beginning, wherever that is.
Of secondary importance is this: the cold which I complained of in my last post is still here, though finally being subdued. A visit to the doctor last Monday and subsequent blood work revealed that this is, in fact, no mere cold, but the dreaded mononucleosis. I had gone to the doctor hoping to discover I had strep throat, as I have had many times in the past, and which can be killed with antibiotics. But there is nothing to do about mono except treat the sore throat (which is finally going away) and stick it out. Also, to my chagrin, I need to take still more time off from jujutsu, lest I risk rupturing my spleen. So I am told. It is a small risk of a big problem. But at any rate the mono itself has provided an interesting undertone to what's actually been going on.
What's actually been going on is that Girlfriend, who I love, has moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a teaching position. This happened relatively suddenly; the offer came about a month ago, and while we had both understood that she would move if that sort of opportunity came up, it still left only a month to actually get used to the idea. Really, I didn't get used to the idea, either--that's what I'm doing now. So as of Friday evening, my girlfriend and I are separated by a distance roughly equal to the diameter of the moon.
This is probably the beginning of the end of my time in Seattle. It is probably the homestretch before that future period that I have been thinking of as actual adulthood. At 26, I might be overdue.
The past few days have not been productive. I figured I'd give myself a couple of those. But now it's time to get things together, at least on some axes. Over the next few days I want to produce a final draft of another short story, tentatively titled "Nenle and Death," which should come in 50 to 100% longer than "Burned at the Stake." This story has actually been percolating as long as four years--I wrote the earliest draft on a plane in what I believe was 2007.
It's about loss and separation. I'll put that out there to preempt psychoanalysis when people actually see the story. So, no, it's not really a coincidence that I'm deciding to finish it now (in preference of a shorter story I am at a similar stage with, about dragonslaying).
Of secondary importance is this: the cold which I complained of in my last post is still here, though finally being subdued. A visit to the doctor last Monday and subsequent blood work revealed that this is, in fact, no mere cold, but the dreaded mononucleosis. I had gone to the doctor hoping to discover I had strep throat, as I have had many times in the past, and which can be killed with antibiotics. But there is nothing to do about mono except treat the sore throat (which is finally going away) and stick it out. Also, to my chagrin, I need to take still more time off from jujutsu, lest I risk rupturing my spleen. So I am told. It is a small risk of a big problem. But at any rate the mono itself has provided an interesting undertone to what's actually been going on.
What's actually been going on is that Girlfriend, who I love, has moved to Washington D.C. to pursue a teaching position. This happened relatively suddenly; the offer came about a month ago, and while we had both understood that she would move if that sort of opportunity came up, it still left only a month to actually get used to the idea. Really, I didn't get used to the idea, either--that's what I'm doing now. So as of Friday evening, my girlfriend and I are separated by a distance roughly equal to the diameter of the moon.
This is probably the beginning of the end of my time in Seattle. It is probably the homestretch before that future period that I have been thinking of as actual adulthood. At 26, I might be overdue.
The past few days have not been productive. I figured I'd give myself a couple of those. But now it's time to get things together, at least on some axes. Over the next few days I want to produce a final draft of another short story, tentatively titled "Nenle and Death," which should come in 50 to 100% longer than "Burned at the Stake." This story has actually been percolating as long as four years--I wrote the earliest draft on a plane in what I believe was 2007.
It's about loss and separation. I'll put that out there to preempt psychoanalysis when people actually see the story. So, no, it's not really a coincidence that I'm deciding to finish it now (in preference of a shorter story I am at a similar stage with, about dragonslaying).
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