Month: October 2015

Look, a Running Post!

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There are run days, and then there are good run days, and then further still, there are great run days.

I’m the hippy-dippy type that thinks that any run is a good one; any time you can break your inertia, lace up, and take to the pavement for a jaunt, an excursion, or a quick up-and-down the block, is better than a day when you can’t. Perhaps in keeping with my groundlessly optimistic viewpoint, weather has little to do with whether a run is good or great or simply a run: rain doesn’t bother me, cold doesn’t bother me, hell, I’ve even run in the snow (which northerners would scoff at as no big deal, but here in Atlanta, that’s a delightful treat akin to finding five dollars when you’re out for a run — which I’ve also done). Heat… well, we can talk about the miserable heat-and-humidity runs of the South another time, those provide a special misery all their own.

So even though weather can’t dampen my spirits about a run, exceptional weather can sometimes make a run exceptional. The temperatures are dipping pleasantly here this week (lows in the 40s), which benefits the runner tremendously. Skies have been clear, too, with hardly any humidity. What that added up to at 5 AM was a cool three-and-a-half miles in just over a half hour, under a blanket of stars that you don’t see too often ’round these parts.

Living in the suburbs has its advantages, sure, but I do long sometimes for the wide open spaces where the night sky presents you with a few thousand stars, rather than a few dozens.

But even the favorable gleam of light from the infinite doesn’t account for the uplift I’m feeling. To be honest, I should be feeling like twice-run-over garbage; every human in my house has been fighting flu-like symptoms for the better part of a month, and the condition recently surged to give my wife and I both a couple of sleepless nights. Sprout #2, in particular, has handled the settling plague with all the grace of a toddler getting knocked over by a tire swing.

So why did today’s run feel so good?

Maybe today, the stars aligned in a way that was beneficial for my mind and spirit.

Maybe it’s the draft I just finished — the one that’s been on my back like an angry monkey for the past 8 months.

Maybe it was the gallon of snot and phlegm my lungs expelled during the run.

Maybe the construction on the roads in the area has lined my lungs and brain with asphalt particulate and I’m hallucinating the good vibes.

Or maybe I just really needed the run.

One way or another, this morning’s miles were great miles. And it’s a second day with no looming deadlines, projects, or even, really, thoughts about writing.

So here I am. Not thinking about writing.

And … writing about it.

Antsy

Pavowski4 Comments

It’s strange, having completed a draft and floating in this weird in-between phase. After months of having a daily writing goal, to suddenly be without one feels alien, like suddenly sprouting a third arm I’ve no idea what to do with. The time freed up is significant, to be sure, but more than the time, I’m distracted by the very lack of guidance. My brain is doing laps like a caffeinated hamster fleeing for its life from imaginary cats.

So I had to write something.

And I ended up coming here and writing nothing. I feel incredibly off kilter and at sea, having finished this latest draft. Like my creative energies have waned past a point that they cannot regenerate. Like I don’t know if I can go through all that again, even for the sake of editing this latest work.

Deep breath.

I don’t currently have any deadlines, and that’s okay.

I am allowed to be idle for a little while in between project phases. This restless feeling is probably normal, and probably necessary.

The world will not tumble off its axis, nor my head off my shoulders, because I didn’t write anything substantial today.

My draft, and indeed my brain, need this time for the dust to settle so that I can see where things lie with clear eyes before I come back with the editorial sledgehammers and wrecking bars to tear it all to pieces again.

But in the meantime, man. What am I going to do? I hear good things about knitting. Maybe I should learn to knit.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Still Alive

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Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before ’round these parts, but I’m something of a video game nerd. One of my favorites is Portal, which is not your typical first person shooter; it’s a sciencey puzzle game. With a science gun. That you use to do science. And survive.

Ahh, got nostalgic for a moment there, pardon me.

Anyway, the game features a somewhat insane rogue AI computer that tries to kill the protagonist, but — SPOILER ALERT (And man do I feel dumb typing a spoiler alert on a game that’s eight years old, but such is the internet) — you end up killing the computer instead. With science. Kind of. Then, during the end credits, the computer (who is not really dead, but is in fact still alive) sings a song to you (yeah, it’s that kind of game) about how even though you’ve destroyed the testing facility and reduced the AI to a shell of its former self, the experiments it was conducting have been a complete success, and that’s awesome.

It’s weird and charming and strangely catchy, and also it was written by the very very funny Jonathan Coulton, so there’s that.

Linda’s prompt for the week is “still,” and when I heard it, that song was the first thing that I heard of. Because I just finished my second novel’s first draft, and I realized that I feel a lot like I did when I finished my first novel’s first draft. In fact, both of those feels feel strikingly similar (I imagine) to the way GLaDOS feels at the end of Portal.

Let me try to relate the feeling.

You’ve spent months hammering away at the draft, banging away with your wordhammer at the anvil of your blank slate, and suddenly, almost without warning, it’s time to end it. And you pen an ending which is, truly, just awful. If you were a gymnast trying to wrap up a routine, this ending is you falling off the balance beam, smacking your face against the beam on the way down, faceplanting when you hit the mat, and giving a thumbs-up to the crowd wacthing in horrified silence to show that you’re okay despite the terrible tumble you took. And then your thumb falls off.

And then all emotion flees from you, like the tide rushing out ahead of a tsunami. You’ve accomplished something, but you’re not exactly sure what it was, and the cost has been tremendous. You look behind you and behold the burned and twisted wreckage of your passage.

But you’re still alive.

Very little went to plan, you didn’t really get the result you expected, and you definitely don’t have any idea if the thing you’ve created is any good. You feel like you should be happy. You are — kind of — but it’s mitigated by this sense of emptiness, this impassable gulf of whatnextitude. The emotions come crashing back in, all of them at once. Crushing you under their weight. Happiness. Sadness. Accomplishment. Dread.

But you’re still alive.

The factory is in ruins. Everything you thought your story was, and everything you thought you were as a writer, has been blasted to pieces. Salvageable pieces, pieces that look like they might fit back together somehow, but certainly not in the configuration you had before, and certainly not in any way that makes sense right now. Inwardly, secretly, in a dark corner of yourself that you don’t visit too often, you wonder if you can do it again, if you can face the tremendous task of picking up the pieces, cleaning up the wreckage, and going to work on the story again to shape it, mold it, make it right. It all seems too much, like you’ve been asked to clean up a landfill with a push broom.

But you’re still alive.

The work behind wasn’t pretty, and for that matter, neither is the work ahead.

But you’re still alive.

Which means it isn’t time to stop working yet.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

You Are Not Perfect, But We Can Make You So

Pavowski6 Comments

Picture day came last week in my school, and with it, the students in their shirts and ties, fancy dresses, suit jackets.

…

BAHAHAHAHAHA, No, just kidding. They came in their t-shirts with rude slogans and their ripped jeans and their bed-heads.

Which is fine. I mean, it’s school. I certainly don’t need to look any further than my own high school yearbook to see kids in my own generation who couldn’t be bothered to class it up for a day for their pictures.

But my gripe today isn’t with the kids (for a change). My gripe is with the photographers. Or maybe with society. More correctly, with society by way of the photographers.

Specifically, this:

wpid-20150925_155833.jpg

For a low, low price, you can alter your stinky, horrible, eye-abrading face in the yearbook into something altogether prettier, normaler, and far less likely to shatter the camera lens. Remove blemishes! Lighten your teeth! Disguise and conceal your every imperfection!

Look. Memory is fragile enough to begin with, unless you’re one of those unfortunate souls shackled with an eidetic one. I can personally count on one hand the number of clear memories I have from before the age of 15; that’s specific memories of specific things with the faces of recognizable people and events which actually transpired. The rest is all cobbled together from secondhand accounts, like the time my dad tells me I locked myself into a high school locker while he and his buddies were playing pick-up basketball. I know it happened, but I have no memory of it. After 16 it gets better, but only just.

And it’s no great shock to learn that eyewitness testimony is some of the least reliable evidence that police have. People imagine things that weren’t there, or forget about things that were there. Ask two dozen witnesses of an event “what the bloody bollocks did you see here?” And you’ll likely get two dozen different answers. The big stuff is the same. But the details are all different.

All the same, though, our experiences make us who we are. Personally, I had acne in high school. Not soul-crushing face sores, but certainly a scattering of little eye-blisters dusting my face. You can see them in my yearbook pictures. It’s awful. But those pictures at least give an accurate representation of who I was.

But it’s 2015 now (and I guess this has been going on for a while, but I only saw this ad this year, so … once again, the party started without me), and the option is here to alter the fabric of reality for a few extra dollars. Sure, NOW, when everybody is looking at your yearbook picture from this year, they’re saying “where’d your swamp-creature face go?” But give it a few years, and instead of remembering you as you are, people will be saying “man, that guy/girl was pretty incredible-looking. I wonder why I didn’t try to jump his/her bones under the bleachers back then.”

Isn’t there a danger in screwing with our memories and our perceptions of ourselves, especially given that those things are already super screwed-up to begin with? And, furthermore, isn’t there enough of a problem with self-image and trying to live up to unattainable standards of beauty in our society in the first place, without feeling like I have to shell out extra dollars on picture day just to look normal next to my classmates?

But, Pav, you say, it’s just a little airbrushing. What’s the harm?

If we can reinvent the past, then it never really happened. If my face in my yearbook picture doesn’t look like a dog chewed on a piece of pizza, then for all intents and purposes, I never looked like that. A friend of mine swears up and down that once, his mother caught an injured squirrel and nursed it back to health, and that during that time, I came over to his house, tried to pick up the squirrel, and it ran amok, scrambled into my shirt, and I did a lunatic jig across his living room trying to get the critter off me. I don’t remember this at all. You would think an incident like that would, I dunno, leave indelible marks in your brain and your psyche like so many tiny rodent claw-marks in your torso, but nope. I’m not nervous around squirrels or chipmunks. I don’t wake up in cold sweats feeling critters scampering across my chest. For all the effect this incident has on my life, it may as well have never happened. I have re-invented my past.

Just like in Total Recall, where a mild-mannered guy gets the memories of an interstellar space adventure implanted in his grey matter; the truth gets re-written and spiced up a bit. And it’s been a while, but I don’t seem to recall things going so great for that guy.

Do I overthink? Probably. All today’s drivel is probably as likely the product of an exhausted brain trying to claw its way through the closing pages of my first draft and lashing out at anything even slightly untoward, like the boss blowing up and assigning extra paperwork and calling an hour-long arse-chewing meeting because the coffee was too cold.

But still. The implication that you could give your yearbook picture “Star Appeal.”

As if you didn’t already have it.

Or maybe it’s just that dorky kid’s smug grin and his stupid Adam’s apple. With its perfect soft complexion and ideal look.

8 Writer Excuses (That Are Total B.S.)

Pavowski6 Comments

As I get closer and closer to the end of my project, it gets harder and harder to write. Like a magnet that simultaneously pulls you in and repels you, the finish line of the first draft is a daunting milestone in the life of a novel, one that looks impossibly bigger and bigger the closer you get to it: an alien obelisk growing out of the horizon of an uncharted planet that never actually seems to get any closer.

As such, it becomes easier and easier to make up excuses not to write, and those excuses become more and more reasonable-sounding.

Here are a few of them (not that I’ve used any of these myself during this project or any other, OF COURSE.) Eight, to be precise. Why eight? I don’t know. Eight is musical. Eight is my lucky number. Eight is also how many I happened to think of before I realized I was using this blog post as an excuse not to write.

So.

  1. I don’t have time. This is probably the easiest to claim and the easiest to dispel. Unless you’re one of the rarefied few doing this writing thing for a living, this is probably true on some level. (Then again, those rarefied few are long past making this excuse.) But the fact is, we all get the same 24 hours in the day, and time can be stolen in bits and snatches from any number of sources: lunch breaks, wasted time in front of the TV, hell, I’ve been known to forego an hour or so of sleep to get it done. The fact is: if it matters to you, you will find time or you will create it from the raw fabric of the universe.
  2. I’m just not inspired to write today. We tend to think that writing is a sort of magic, and on some level, it is: Where else does the average person get to play god like a writer? And on some level, some sort of inspiration is required, but not in the way we think. You need a decent (not awesome) idea, and you need the willingness to work at it, to stick your hands into the clay time and again, shaping it and molding it and firing it and destroying it to start again. That’s it. And some days, the writing does feel like the gods themselves are pushing your cursor around the page, spilling their divine wordseed through your brain and onto the page. But far more often, writing is a little bit like playing nose tackle: it’s a whole lot like getting your brains smashed in, again and again, and crawling back to take another one on the chin. To reiterate: inspiration may strike now and then, but you’re a whole lot more likely to be struck if you drape yourself in tinfoil and wander out in the storm carrying the biggest TV antenna you can find.
  3. I can’t write when I have xxxxx going on. Again, anybody could claim this at any time, really. Life happens to us all, bringing with it a stew of relationship difficulties, livelihood uncertainties, existential doubts, or, well, just name it, really. There’s always something going on that we could use as an excuse. And sometimes, to be fair, it’s a valid excuse. When your house has burned down or you’ve just lost your job, it’s maybe a good time to take some time off the writing project, because that sharknado will bleed through into your work. The thing to be wary of is allowing yourself to continue making this excuse beyond the time when it is reasonable to do so. Momentum matters, and this excuse will destroy your momentum if you let it.
  4. I’m not any good at writing. Well, pardon me for saying so, but who the hell is? Writing is a skill like any other. No budding musician picks up a guitar and starts shredding like Steve Vai. No wannabe singer just spontaneously spouts the perfect lyrics and harmonies one day while driving to work. This thing takes time, and the beginning writer is allowed — if not expected — to suck. It’s a thing to be embraced and accepted and forgotten about. We’re all toddlers that have been chucked into the deep end, and we’ll either figure out how to keep our heads above the water, or we’ll half-drown and be terrified of water for the rest of our lives.
  5. My idea isn’t going anywhere. Ideas are as wonderful and varied as the fishes of the sea; some of them have huge, smoke-belching jet engines, while others are lost puppies trembling in the thunderstorm. Some slide along under their own power for a while (but, really, THE POWER IS YOU) while others have to be dragged along by the wrist, kicking and screaming and whining every step of the way. But the fact is, if you’re not working on it (and as tempting as it is to think that thinking about it or outlining it or in any other way laying the groundwork for it counts as working on it, none of those things actually increase the idea in any way, none of them move it closer to the goal), then at best, it’s a tricked-out Bugatti sitting abandoned in a ditch. At worst, it’s a busted-out, multicolored hoopty sitting abandoned in a ditch. The constant, of course, is the ditch. Your idea won’t get out without some pushing.
  6. It’ll never sell. I’m probably unqualified to be dispensing this sort of advice, but I’ll do it anyway: if your primary concern for a story is whether or not it will sell, then maybe, I dunno, you need a new idea. What sells your story is that it’s your story, told in a way that only you can tell it. Plus — frankly — it probably won’t sell anyway. The market is a bloated jellyfish floating around on unpredictable currents; maybe your story will get snared in the tentacles and carried off to the promised land, maybe it won’t. But if you don’t love your idea, if you’re not burning to write it whether it sells or not, then the story is going to languish in the unpublishable depths, whether the jellyfish scoops it up or not.
  7. My idea isn’t original. Yeah, sorry, but this one is absolutely true. I’m one of those pessimists that feels every story has been told before, every arc has been explored, every wrench in the gears has already been thrown there, multiple times, by multiple monkeys. (See tvtropes.org if you don’t believe me.) The upside to all this is that it doesn’t matter. As I mentioned above, what sells a story — what people love about a story — is not the nuts and bolts of the story itself. That stuff should be practically invisible. What sells it is all the you-juices oozing out of all the nooks and crannies you build into the story. And that stuff only gets in there if — again — you love what you’re writing.
  8. I just don’t feel like it. Here’s where the real harsh truth sets in. Again, outside of the rarefied few, writing isn’t a job. It’s not something that people are depending on you to do, it’s not like paying your taxes or fixing that loose board in the back porch or taking the car in for an oil change. The world will keep on spinning, and you won’t go to jail or into the doghouse if you don’t write. But if you really don’t want to write — and that’s true for, I dunno, a week? A month? — then maybe — just maybe — it’s not that important to you, and maybe — just maybe — you ought to just save all of us the trouble and stop beating your head against this particular wall.

Now, look. I’m hardly an expert, but I do have about 300,000 words in various stages of completion between my second-draft first novel, my nearly completed first-draft second novel, and almost two years’ worth of drivel here at the blarg. Whether any of it is any good is a question for people smarter than me, but I have all that while scores and scads of people out there are just dreaming of writing someday. That’s something. And I certainly didn’t get it by listening to my excuses.

Speaking of which, it’s about time I take my own advice and go work on my project.