Author: Pavowski

I am a teacher, runner, father, and husband. I am an author-in-progress. I'm bad at jiu-jitsu. I know just enough about a lot of things to get me into a lot of trouble.

I Wish I Had The Words

Pavowski17 Comments

Usually I use Saturday to post a reflection about writing and its process, hoping through that rumination to unlock some secrets about my own work or to unblock the filters that periodically need cleaning out.

But I’m not in the mood to ruminate, or to make light, or to ponder the mysteries of life and the blank page.

This morning I’ve got an indescribable rage in my heart over the events in Paris.

I could say it’s a white-hot point of light in my chest, but that doesn’t explain the cold detachment I feel. Maybe it’s more like a stabbing lance of pain in my gut, but that doesn’t jive with the dull numbness all over.

One way or another, over one hundred people are dead this morning in yet another terrorist attack, and I’m just dumbstruck. My heart is breaking.

How long can we allow this to continue?

How many more sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters have to die in the name of a twisted religion before the rest of us agree that it’s time for that religion to go?

I try not to traffic in hatred and despair, because I don’t think there’s much to be gained there. But on a day like this, with over a hundred dead and the savages responsible celebrating in the streets, it’s hard. It’s really hard.

If I were the praying kind, I’d pray for Paris.

As it is, all I can do is hope that maybe our world leaders will decide that this is the line, that this is the time to drop the hammer on these stone-age degenerates once and for all.

The Seeker of Approval

Pavowski1 Comment

“Are you proud of me today?”

My son was sitting on the toilet, pants around his ankles, hands bracing the sides — the classic pooping toddler pose. I was leaning against the sink, thinking about whatever it is parents think about when they are trying not to think about the fact that they have to be present while their kids are pooping. Probably penguins. (It’s usually penguins.) You can’t look straight at the kid, that makes him nervous. You can’t wander out of the room, he gets upset. You just have to be present and sort of stare into the bathtub for a few minutes.

“What’s that, buddy?”

“Daddy, are you proud of me today?”

I’ll confess that I don’t put a whole lot of planning into the words I use around my kids, outside of course of trying to stay away from the Sharknados and Mother Truckers that inadvertently bubble to the surface when they, for example, dump entire boxes of cereal on the floor, or throw freshly laundered running shoes into toilets. I mentally replay the conversations I’ve had with the boy in recent months. Surely I’ve told him I was proud of him a few times, but never made a big deal out of it. Oh, you counted to ten. I’m so proud of you!

But here he is, mid-deuce, asking me if I’m proud of him.

“I’m proud of you every day, sprout.”

“Well, are you proud of me TODAY?”

He has this funny way of asking a question where he sort of smiles but forgets to turn his mouth up at the corners. Just bares his teeth at me. It’s adorable but unsettling. He leans his head to the side a little when he does it, sort of like a Cheshire Cat that fails to vanish.

“Sprout, I’m always proud of you.”

“Today, daddy?”

“Yes, of course, I’m proud of you today.”

“Okay.”

That seemed to satisfy him. He focused on the task at hand for a moment, a tiny vein popping out in his tiny forehead as he strained.

“I can’t go poop, daddy.”

“That’s okay, sprout. Sometimes you just can’t. We’ll try again later.”

“Okay. Daddy?”

He thinks, I think, that if he doesn’t address me every time he speaks to me, I’ll forget he’s speaking to me. I’d be willing to wager that he says “daddy” over five hundred times a day. Easily 50% or better of his daily lexicon.

“Yeah?”

“Are you still proud of me?”

“Buddy, I will always be proud of you, all the time. No matter what.”

I held up my hand for a high-five and he gleefully obliged, and we went downstairs. He wanted to complete a puzzle for the fifth time of the evening. Sure, kid. No problem.

If only we could all ask so guilelessly for approval for such small accomplishments.

The Actor’s Nightmare

Pavowski2 Comments

Why, nearly ten years removed from the stage, do I still get the Actor’s Nightmare?

If you’re not familiar, the Actor’s Nightmare is a simple but prevalent one among denizens of the stage, in which a performer finds himself thrust into a performance for which he is woefully unprepared.

Common tropes of the dream:

  • You learned all your lines, but have forgotten them and everybody stares dumbly at you as you “um” and “uh” your way through.
  • You never learned all your lines, but somehow made it to performance night anyway, and everybody stares dumbly at you.
  • You know your lines, but are unable to speak, and everybody stares dumbly at you.
  • Your costume is ridiculous or unfinished or ludicrously fails to fit you, and you must go onstage in street clothes, naked, or in the idiotic costume anyway.
  • The set is unfinished or worse, still in active construction, and your performance takes you through a minefield of sharply upturned tools, unsteady platforms, and other threats to life and limb.
  • Your performance is brilliant, but the audience is completely empty.
  • Your performance is an utter travesty, and the audience is completely full.
  • Your performance doesn’t matter, because the audience is full of T-Rexes who fall upon you and your fellow actors in a bloodbath of Shakespearean epithets.

Every actor in every performance ever has played out all the ways a show could go wrong in his mind multiple times throughout rehearsal for said show, and in the Actor’s Nightmare they all parade across the screen of our minds with the saucy abandon of a dog rolling in roadkill.

I’ve had the Nightmare ever since I started with theater. I will probably have the Nightmare my whole life, seeing as the theater was such an enormous formative element of my salad days. It’s just too much a part of who I am, I think, for me to ever be rid of it.

Still, why does it persist?

I don’t buy very much into dream interpretation, except in the broadest sense. If somebody tells you that because you dreamed you were falling from the 37th floor of an office building into a dumpster full of unicycles, you will soon find a new job at the office of Forestry under a supervisor named Shwampa or something… that’s garbage.

But the Nightmare, I think, is just another manifestation of doubt, of anxiety, of the rampant feelings of inadequacy that so many of us have. Notice in the list that a common thread is “everybody stares dumbly at you,” as if you’re out of place or you’ve wasted their time. Well, that’s a very real and present fear in the life of this particular writer. Also recurrent is that idea of things being “unfinished” or “unprepared,” which, well, yeah. I never feel particularly ready even to get out of bed in the morning, let alone to ply my trade as a wordslinger (though I did optimistically and automatically call what I do a “trade”, so maybe there’s something there).

Point is, there’s an undercurrent of doubt behind everything I do, no matter how brashly or confidently I brag about it. I don’t know, for all that I love my kids and my wife, how good I am at being a father or husband. I’m maybe a decent teacher, though I am regularly in class thrust up against the reminder that I don’t really know what I’m doing up there. I fancy myself a decent recreational runner, but I’m definitely not winning any trophies these days, and I’m always afraid I’m going to injure or re-injure myself. And as for my writing, well, I talk a good game, but no matter how many words I write, the Howler Monkey of Doubt is right there, with his empty eyes and his judgmental grin.

wpid-scragz.jpg

Of course, the upshot is that the Nightmare fills me not with the abject howling terror of being devoured by an audience of T-Rexes (okay, sometimes). Rather, I wake with the slightly bemused SOMETHING of watching a couple of cats wrestle for a moment and then lick each other’s butts. For a moment, it was scary, but now it’s just a weird thing that happened. The Nightmare is a reminder that, while that doubt can be crippling in the moment, it’s one hundred percent a creation of the mind.

The truth is, I’ve never gone on stage unprepared.

Or naked.

Or in front of a bunch of T-Rexes.

But maybe the thought that I may one day have to will help keep me sharp.

Operation Turtle Rescue Is A Go

Pavowski3 Comments

It’s not that I’m trying to find these guys, really it’s not. But I keep doing it. Amidst all this rainy, lousy, unrelentingly gray weather here in Atlanta, I came across another turtle wandering far from home.

This one, lost in the parking lot at my school.

OH MY GOD IT'S SO ADORABLE.
OH MY GOD IT’S SO ADORABLE.

We’ll say nothing of the fact that I was caught out by the football stadium in a downpour that I could literally see coming as it rushed down the highway, shooting the valley in between the trees. We won’t even talk about the subsequent fact that I had to spend the rest of the day in damp shirt and tie, explaining to my colleagues and students that yes, in fact, I was outside during that cloudburst and no, there really wasn’t anywhere for me to wait it out; I just had to hightail it for the school building, a mere 400 yards away.

But more to the point, JUST LOOK AT THAT THING. It was about the size of a quarter, and so small that there was no way for me to photograph it sitting on my hand without my hand looking freakishly huge and misshapen by contrast. The moment after I snapped that picture, it peed all over me (though to be fair, the release of turtle urine could have filled maybe a quarter of a thimble).

Needless to say, I scooped him up out of the parking lot where he sat fifty yards from anything green and spirited him off to the edge of the woods, where I can only hope his chances of surviving in nature are a little bit better.

This is the second turtle I’ve rescued in a month.

I am starting to wonder if they are starting to find me.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Categories Are Crap

Pavowski6 Comments

I’m not NaNoWriMo-ing, as I’ve said before, but I do have a thick skull full of dubious writing tidbits for those of you out there scrambling to make your 50k. (What are you, at 10k today, pushing for 12? Maybe a bit further along to buy yourself a breathless, red-eyed day off over the weekend? You poor souls.)

Today’s rumination: categories are crap.

Let’s be clear: your work is going to be categorized, and it should be categorized. Eventually. Categories matter: without them, we’re never going to be able to get our works into the hands of as many readers as we’d like to. But (and here’s where my novice chops are going to show, maybe) I don’t think categories matter until it’s almost time to publish. Because categories are for readers and editors and publishers, so they know where to put and where to find and how to push your book.

But for you? The author neck-deep in a 50k slog that needs to be completed in three weeks? (Or in the midst of a 100k slog that you’d like to complete this year, more conservatively.) You can give a big middle finger to categories.

“Oh, I’m writing an urban sci-fi horror YA cyberpunk thriller.”

No, you’re not. You’re writing a story about some kids with computers that spawn monsters who drag their souls into the dark web and sell them for Bitcoins. (Copyrighted!)

“Me? I’m writing an alternate-historical period piece romance / spy novel.”

Negative. You’re writing a love story between secret agents in a made-up setting where you can make up any rules you want.

But what’s the difference? I hear you cry. Why not pick my category now, so I know how to write it the piece as it grows?

In this humble writer’s opinion, putting a category on your work is like putting up a fence in your yard. On the one hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. On the other hand, it makes it real easy to see where your property ends, or where you need to put on shoes lest you step in a pile of dogsharknado. Putting a category on your work means that you’re saying, this stuff belongs in my story, and this other stuff does not. It means, these sorts of things can happen in my story. It means, I’m going for this specific feel in my story.

Which, again, is great … for later drafts. Later drafts are the time to think about audience, about marketing, about where your story fits. But to think about this stuff during the first draft, or even the first round of edits, is suicide. To use the fence metaphor, you’re marking out clearly defined areas where your story can and cannot go.

But why would you do that during the first draft?

The first draft is hard enough without arbitrary lines criss-crossing the landscape telling you you can’t go here. The first draft is a brutal hike through overgrown jungle with a machete, it’s a solitary sojourn through unforgiving desert.  Boundaries are a great way to bog down, and if you’re NaNo-ing, you can ill afford to get bogged down. (To be fair, even if you’re not NaNo-ing, getting bogged down in your work sucks — lose your momentum and you lose your motivation to continue.)

The first draft is a baby bird learning to fly — it needs all the clear space it can get to figure itself out. Your story needs the space — you need the space — to breathe, to try new things, to make a hard left and run the story into a ditch, to cut back right and drive it through a building. You make that harder on yourself if you’re locked into categories, into preconceived notions of what your story can and can’t be before you’ve even written it.

Stories are living things that change as they grow. I started my just-finished draft of a novel thinking I wanted to write a YA sci-fi coming-of-age piece, and I ended up writing something a lot more like a survivalist cyber-horror fate-vs.-free-will story, if any of those things are actually things. One way or another, I’m a lot happier with the story I wrote than the story I was trying to write. Further, I noticed that every time I got stuck in the novel, it’s because I was trying to force the story or the characters to do something out of character. I can’t have this happen in a YA novel, I thought, but when I let go of that constraint and just let it happen anyway, the story moved along just fine.

Don’t get me wrong. That first draft is a mess. It needs tons of work, and the time will come when I will refine it down and decide what neat little boxes it fits into. But if I’d gotten hung up on the categories, I don’t know if I could even have finished it.

Your story wants to be something.

You have to accept the fact that maybe you don’t entirely know what that is yet.

But, just like a teenage daughter, if you try to force it to be something it isn’t, it’s going to rebel and bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Don’t let your story bring home a guy with a mohawk.

Let your story be the guy with the mohawk.

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.