Month: July 2014

What Does a Writer Need?

Pavowski5 Comments

I am fascinated with stuff.  I love gadgets and gizmos and accessories and tools and programs, probably to the point where it’s unhealthy.  Case in point:  my wife and I were, just a few weeks ago, talking about how we should have a garage sale before school starts back up to clear out some junk and de-crapify the house (and especially the garage) a little bit.  While we were talking, part of me was quietly filing its nails in the back of my brain, yawning and saying to itself with the most bemused of eyerolls, “yeah, that will never happen.”  True to form, school starts back up in just over a week and yeah, that garage sale ain’t happening — it’s barely even been spoken of since.

My obsession with stuff is also at odds with a philosophy I’m trying to cultivate lately, which is one of minimalism: cutting out of my life the unnecessary, the redundant, the distracting.  It’s a problem.  One side of me can give you thirteen entirely acceptable reasons why that old crappy food processor should just be thrown on the heap, but the other side manages to forget to do it or find one reason to keep it or … well, maybe it goes without saying, but the thing is still in my kitchen cabinet despite the fact that we’ve not used it in (over) two years.

But I’m wandering.  I’ve struggled this summer — struggled mightily, like a T-Rex trying to wipe its butt — with my writing in a way that I just didn’t for the first several months of the Project.  That’s my capital “W” Writing on the novel as well as my blather here on the blarg.  That hoarder part of my brain, the part that thinks any problem can be solved if I only have just the right THING to help me solve it, wonders if there isn’t some missing piece to help me write more gooder.  The minimalist part of my brain, meanwhile, is trying hard to ponder the deeper meanings of whatever and wonders if I already have too much stuff as far as my writing goes.  One way or another, there are certain things that I think you absolutely, without a doubt, must have to write, and there are other things that maybe people in general think writers need even though they really don’t.  So I want to take a look at some things that writers need (and, by extension, some things that they don’t).  Incidentally, I also want to make sure I’m maintaining focus here at the blarg, and maybe having a weekly rotation is the way to do that.

The list will by no means be exhaustive, and it will definitely be biased and opinionated.  It ain’t like companies are sending me their brand new shiny toys to beta test, but maybe if you’re an aspiring writer (like me) you’ll find something here you can use on your own journey.  I know I’ve certainly gotten help from some other writers out there, and I believe in paying it forward, so if I can help even one person out there to find a little focus, inspiration, or motivation, then it will be worth it.

Also, and maybe it goes without saying, but I’m still fairly new to the path — more chronicling the experience than trying to teach — so I won’t be able to speak yet about things like agents and publishers and all that business yet — because I’m not there yet.

So!  As I get started, I’d love to hear from anybody out there who’s reading, on one or more of these questions:

What do writers need?

What do non-writers think writers need?

What tools do you use to help yourself as a writer?

First column tomorrow, and hopefully one every week until I can’t stand this idea any more — so stay tuned!

Nothing a Little Run Can’t Fix

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Once more onto the beach, or however that saying goes.

I dutifully took my two weeks(ish?) off from SERIOUS writing to let the mind decompress and drift back into its natural jellylike state after four months of grind, but today is the day I pick it up again and continue whipping my word-vomit into something approaching Prose Worth Reading.

As with virtually every writing or otherwise creative project I have ever undertaken, the choosing was the hardest part.  For better or worse, choose I have, and now I press on with the goal of expanding one of my recent Flash Fictions into a fuller, more developed short story.  I’m aiming for about ten thousand words, just as a ballpark sort of area I’d like to land in, but if it runs long or short that won’t upset me terribly.  I’m not sure what the real goal will be as far as what I’d like to do with this one when it’s written, but I want to try out a length in between these little lightning strikes I’m spitting out every week and another full-length heartstomper like the novel has been.  Ten thousand words seems a nice happy medium, and when I’m finished with that, it will perhaps be time to start back in on editing Accidentally Inspired.

If you’re curious (why wouldn’t you be?!) I’m going to be expanding my entry from a couple of weeks ago, Powdered Chaos.  I feel like I scratched the surface of something really interesting with that one and I think it’s worth the time to delve into that particular cave and see what squishy bits of sweetmeats I can deliver back to the colony.  What’s that?  “Sweetmeats” aren’t what I think they are?

Hold on.

Okay, a sweetmeat is, of all things, a pastry.  The word I was thinking of was “sweetbread”, which for some reason is the name for pancreas.  English is a whimsical old thing, innit?

Anyway, I’ll be delving that particular cave over the next several weeks, with a much more reasonable goal of 600 words daily.  900 was a great goal for the novel, and I may use that as a benchmark in future times of novel writing dementia, but there were more than a few days when I started wanting to chop down trees with my keyboard after word 600.  Keyboards not being a particularly effective cutting implement, that’s the kind of impulse I’d like to, y’know, steer away from.  So.  600 words, five days a week, that’s about four weeks to turn Powdered Chaos into something that’s… well, something.  This is all experimental; don’t look at me if a zombie goliath of stitched-together story bits and half-formed ideas begins roaming the countryside and devouring your livestock and KILL IT WITH FIRE.

First day (night actually) of working on this one went swimmingly.  I chalk it up to my run this morning.  No, seriously.

I decided this was the project I wanted on Thursday but I wasn’t sure how I wanted to go about expanding it.  Start farther out front?  Deal with multiple characters and their interaction with the thing?  Maybe continue on past the one outlined in the story?  It was a problem and I was blocked.

As I’ve mentioned before, Past Me would hit a roadblock when writing and park the car, slash the tires and hitchhike back to town, abandoning the vehicle to looters and hobos.  New Me has no truck with blocks; he drives right at them with the brights on and the horn sounding its dopplerized war cry, and if the block is still there when I get around to my writing that day, well then WE’RE BOTH GOING DOWN.  Writing tonight was a given.  The how and the what and the whatever would come to me.  So I laced up.  (Actually I strapped up because my Vibrams don’t have laces, but… yeah, “strapped up” sounds a little bit like… okay let’s just move on.)

It was a rainy morning, so I left the sprout at home.  Also because of the raininess of the morning I didn’t take my headphones with me (they are a bright shiny BIRTHDAY GIFT and I am not ready to ruin them yet even though they are life-altering and awesome and give me wings).  Imagine!  Running completely unfettered by forty pounds of toddler + stroller and undistracted by mindless thumping dubstep!  I’ve not had such a run in months and I desperately miss it.

Running without distractions is something I always say I’m going to do more often and never actually get around to doing much at all, but I maintain that the experience is peerless when it comes to solving problems personal and mental.  So I’m hoofing it and enjoying the quickest pace I’ve had on a run in a while and delighting in the mist on my face and now and then pondering the question of what I’m going to do when I come up against this roadblock in actually starting the thing and then I get this idea, like a midget was following right on my heels and hopped up on my back and whispered in my ear so softly I could barely hear it, “point of view.”

And I cocked my head and pondered on that, because it’s not a complete sentence after all, but when ideas drift into my head on a run they usually do it for some sort of reason and I always at least try poking at them to see if they bite back.  “Point of view?” I pondered.  No answer.  The various Me’s bouncing around in my head only answer when they feel like it, or when I’ve had a few adult beverages.  And I run and I ponder, run, ponder.  It hits me that the point of view in that story is wrong.  Not wrong like five is not the answer to two plus two, but wrong like whitewall tires on a tractor.  The thing still runs, but it ain’t optimal.

So, change it.  But to what?

Well, I won’t spoil it yet, but needless to say, the point of view has been changed, and in a way that I hope will be both surprising and satisfying.  And I got a cool 750 words in tonight without breaking a sweat, but of course that should be tempered immediately because the honeymoon is just getting started with this thing.

At any rate, lesson learned.  There has not yet been a day when I’ve had a run and not felt better about my writing at the end of it.  It’s a lesson I keep learning and somehow keep forgetting, so THIS POST should serve as a reminder to any and all Future Me’s: Next time you get blocked, or think you might get blocked, or even think you might think about the possibility that in some future eventuality you could possibly get blocked, just lace up.  (Or strap up.  No, just lace up and adjust for your needs.)  The road and your feet and the void will go to work on the problem and before you know it, you’re home and ready for a shower and a good write.

Prank Politics

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Chuck’s Challenge this week:  Superhero Genre Smash-Up.

Superhero is an idea that’s on a low boil in the back of my mind; I may be using it for a novel one of these days, and if so, I’ll definitely be using some of the characters I’m working with here.  My genre of choice to smash up with the Superhero tack: buddy comedy.  And maybe a bit of that college frat-party feel.  Is there a genre for that?  …Whatever.

Came in at 975 words for this one, and, if you can believe it, this one isn’t dark OR depressing.

 

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An aside on side pieces

Pavowski3 Comments

This post is part of SoCS:http://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/07/18/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-july-1914/

The prompt for a stream of consciousness piece this week is the word “side”, and when I read that, for whatever reason, the phrase “side piece” jumped into my brain and burrowed in like a tick.  A side piece, for those not in the know, is essentially “the other woman”, a woman that a man has an ongoing relationship with despite having a primary relationship with a long term girlfriend or even wife.

The concept is obviously nothing new, but what baffles me is the term itself (yeah, yeah, another one of those “I fixate on language” posts, I can’t help it, this is my brain).  “Side piece.”  “Side” is obvious, given the fact that the relationship that has been entered into is one on the side, and that’s fine.  The problem is the word “piece”.  It’s not a word you use for a person.  You have a piece of meat, or a piece of pie, or a piece of a puzzle, or if you’re the vulgar type, a piece of ass.  A person is not a piece!  And if you feel like defending the terminology to me, YES, of course I understand that it’s “just a figure of speech”.  That doesn’t make it okay.  Here’s just another example of objectifying women that has become culturally sanctioned and, as a result, accepted (see the video).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZOnrTVMmUc

To go further still, women are embracing the term.  This is what baffles me.  I mean, okay, you won’t see a classy woman embracing the term, but there are scads of women out there bragging and boasting about being somebody’s side piece or becoming a side piece.  In fact, just searching for that video above on youtube displayed a page full of GUIDES designed to HELP A WOMAN BECOME A SIDE PIECE.

Far be it from me to tell a woman how she should think.  I fully own and accept that any view I might have on the subject is colored if not tainted by the windows I look out through up here on White Male island.  Your sexuality and the relationships that you enter into are your choice.  Do what makes you happy. But accept and understand that in the culture you live in, being “the other woman” is a scarlet “A”; it will get you shunned and judged, doubly so if you brag about it.  And, seriously, despite all the gains they’ve made in the last century, women are still fighting a neverending tide of injustice and inequality in this country (and others).  The last thing they need is dissenters within their own ranks setting women back by embracing and making light of this vicious sexism.

I’m cutting this one short because even thinking about this topic is putting a sour taste in my mouth.  Our country needs to grow the fargo up and stop standing for crap like this, and I mean the men FAR more than I mean the women.

…My blarg has been way too preachy over the last couple of days.  I’ll have to remedy that.

Hot Car Summer

Pavowski2 Comments

Is there something in the water?

Does this kind of thing happen all the time and it just never got news play this big before?  Is it the fact that this schmuck who apparently murdered his toddler by locking him in the car that’s thrown the spotlight on other inadvertent cases?

It seems like every day there’s another news story of another kid locked in another car, and it just makes me wonder, what the fargo is going on?  Are people really forgetting about their kids?  Or, worse, are they really just not thinking about the fact that it’s summer and the temperature in your car can get up over 120 degrees in the space of a few minutes in the sun?  Or, worse worse worse, are people who hate their kids trying to murder their children without actually having to murder their children?

(Strap yourselves in, it’s about to get preachy in here.)

Whatever the case, this sharknado is happening too often.  I refuse to believe that a rational adult, functioning with all the years of development in a human spirit and parental instinct could at best forget about his kid, or at worst leave the kid in a hot car to suffer and die.  It’s torture in addition to neglect.  Does this not bespeak the need to step up the penalties for committing a crime like this against a helpless child?  I understand that not every parent wants to be a parent, and certainly not every parent is cut out to be a parent, but that doesn’t mean that the kid should suffer for that parent’s shortcomings, EVER.

I think it’s time to get a little bit medieval on this particular crime.  Throw it back to the old code of Hamurabi.  This is not facetiery.  I’m being very serious.  To commit a crime like this against a child is indicative of a fundamental lack of something human, whether the crime is intentional or accidental.  If your own parental instinct isn’t going to keep you from torturing and murdering your child, isn’t it the job of society to make sure you don’t, through deterrent and harsh punishment?  You do this — you lock your kid in the car, INTENTIONALLY OR ACCIDENTALLY, and part of your sentence is that you have to sit in the same car in the same heat for at least as long as you let the kid sit.  The kid died in the car?  Guess what, waste of skin?  You get to suffocate and burn just the same.

Say what you want about capital punishment for murderers; that’s a whole separate issue.  These are, in the unholy majority of cases, parents acting against their kids, and that means they’re unfit at best, and downright psychopathic and depraved at worst.

Let’s take the three cases: neglect (I forgot the kid was in the car), idiocy (I only left him for a few minutes), and outright murder.

Neglect.  You forgot your kid was in the car with you?  Really?  What were you so engrossed with, what was so important?  What, in short, demanded SO MUCH of your attention that you FORGOT about the life that you brought into the world?  You forgot that that life was in your care and depended on you for the basicest of basic needs (shelter from harm)?  “Sorry” doesn’t cut it.  “I wasn’t thinking” doesn’t cut it.  If you weren’t thinking, if you “just forgot” your kid was in the car, you need a reminder.  Enjoy your penance in the sun box.

Idiocy.  You knew what you were doing, but you were only going to leave the kid in the car for a few minutes.  Okay.  Some people are not the most empathetic or sympathetic; in fact some of us can barely see past the end of our own noses.  Look no further than viral videos of morons texting on their cell phones as they wander into traffic or into water fountains to see that some people aren’t concerned with ANYBODY outside of their own skin.  So you aren’t thinking about consequences another person might have to endure, that’s plain.  But that’s not good enough.  This is your child.  A life that you created, that counts on you to make the world a safe place to the best of your ability.  You’re going to knowingly leave that child in an enclosed space in the dead of summer for any length of time?  I feel bad closing the door on my kid and then loading groceries into the back for thirty seconds before I can get the A/C on.

Here’s the rub for this instance.  Would you sit in a car with the windows up for ANY length of time in the summer heat if you didn’t have to?  If you said anything other than “no,” you’re lying to yourself.  You wouldn’t sit in the car while your significant other ran into the grocery store.  While she got her nails done. While he went to have a beer.  And if somehow you DID find yourself sat in a car with the windows up and no A/C running, within twenty seconds you’d be looking for a way to break the windows out, because YOU’RE AN ADULT and you have that capability.  Kids don’t have that capability.  If you really thought it wouldn’t be so bad for your kid to wait in the car while you ran in at the post office or picked up eggs from the store, then you need a reminder.  Enjoy your penance in the sun box.

Murder.  What can be said?  If you intentionally leave your kid in a hot car knowing he’s likely to die, you don’t deserve your worthless hide, and you deserve to exit it smothering and suffering and suffocating, whether your kid died or not.

There’s no excuse for it.  There’s no reason a child should have to suffer for an adult’s idiocy or negligence.  A stronger message needs to be sent to protect these poor kids.