Category: Dubious Advice

Excuses, excuses

Pavowski16 Comments

Sometimes I blarg about what’s going on in my life, sometimes I find a topic somewhere that I like, and oftentimes on Saturdays I take the topic from Linda G Hill’s site for a stream-of-consciousness post that I type without second-guessing myself.

Today’s topic honestly feels as if guest author Leigh Michaels slithered in through my earhole, squeezed the spongy matter of my brain, and slurped up the juicy bits of raw fear that came dripping out. Her prompt is the word “excuse,” and boy oh boy have I been making excuses lately.

The novel has slid right away from me over the past two weeks. I finally navigated the minefield of rewriting a particularly troublesome scene, and, flush with success, allowed myself to miss a couple of editing sessions owing to… well… a slew of excuses. I was really busy at work (I was). I was mentally tapped after fixing that one scene (it’s true). Kids were wearing me out (always true). And I allowed those excuses to be “good enough” to allow myself not to work on the novel without chipping away at my self-esteem.

However, that permissive slide is in direct violation of the mantra of my blarg, which is “momentum matters”. Actually, no, the mantra of my blarg is that “things don’t always have to mean things, except that things ALWAYS mean things.” And the permissive slide is actually not so much a direct violation of the “momentum matters” thing as it is a perfect example of it.

You say you’re going to get up at 5 AM and run three days a week, and you do it for two weeks, but in week 3 that snooze button is just too tempting, and then it’s all too easy to hit that snooze button every morning, and before you know it, those early morning runs are a thing of the past. You say you’re going to diet, and you do well for a while, but then you go out to dinner and, well, a couple bites of chips and queso won’t hurt, and next thing you’re at the drive-thru ordering a double cheeseburger because the diet is already screwed for the week, why stop the slide now?

So: I allowed myself out of a few days’ worth of novel work, and those few days turned into almost two weeks.

I had good excuses. Valid excuses. Excuses which are totally reasonable for getting me off the hook. But they’re establishing the sort of momentum that I don’t want gumming up the gears around here. Now, work has been busy, and the holidays do have me a bit more stressed than usual… but next week it’ll be something else, some new stressor, some new obstacle to getting the work done. And yes, it’d be perfectly reasonable to acknowledge those excuses and continue not to work on the novel. Believe me, I feel the gravity of that black hole.

But it’s not the time to embrace excuses. The edit is at about 70%. I may not finish it by the new year, as was my goal, but I will damn sure finish it, excuses or no.

So thanks for the prompt, Leigh… you’ve shone a bright light on my dark enabling of my own lame half-assery.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Step Back

Pavowski9 Comments

It’s so easy to get wrapped up in the work. It’s so easy to forget the forest for all the trees all around you. It’s so easy to get lost in the day-to-day sharknado that pops up right in front of you and forget about the big picture.

Is it a human shortcoming?

As a writer, it’s so easy for me to be blinded to my goals on a big scale when things are going wrong in the now. I’ve struggled for the last two weeks, writing and re-writing a handful of scenes in my novel, becoming more and more myopic and less and less able to think on the large scale. I felt as though this one scene was a wrecking ball smashing the novel as a whole to rubble, that this one hangup was one crashed biker causing a monumental pileup as all the other bikers come scorching around the curve. Feet stuck in a quagmire. The whole house on fire.

But the quagmire is not so much a bottomless pit of quicksand as a little mudhole. The house isn’t on fire, it’s just the spaghetti I was overcooking. (How I managed to set spaghetti on fire in this metaphor is hardly the point.) We’re talking about a mammoth manuscript of almost a hundred thousand words, and I was allowing myself to think the whole thing was scrap metal over a troublesome patch of three thousand. But one dubious passage can no more derail the work than an untied shoelace can stop a marathon runner. Sure, it’s annoying. Sure, it must be dealt with before it’s allowed to do further damage. But it’s fixable. It’s recoverable. All that’s needed is to step back and remember what’s at stake and what’s positive about the rest of the work.

But it’s not just true as a writer. I feel this myopia as a runner. I’ve been dealing with injuries a lot lately, and it’s so, so easy to get tunnel vision over the injuries and imagine that my routine and my ability as a runner has been and will continue to be stymied by these injuries. And, sure, I’ve had a loss of fitness and definitely a loss of confidence over the setbacks. But even after taking a month off to get my feet right, I’ve been able to bounce back and start pushing my distance up again pretty quickly. It would be easy to focus on the negative, and that’s what I’ve done in recent weeks: that I’m not able to go out as fast as before or nearly as far as before. But I take a step back and it quickly becomes apparent that despite the setback, I’m bouncing back quicker than I really had any hope of doing while I was laid up.

And, no surprise, I feel it as a dad. I get overwhelmed by the sprouts, and I feel like all I’m doing is putting out fires and telling them “no” and telling them what they shouldn’t do. Before you know it, I’m in a funk because I’m exhausted from all the screaming and reprimanding and the cleaning and the slaving. But a little step back — a little shift in perspective — reminds me that they’re growing up pretty good. They love to laugh and to show off what they know. They’re both incredibly smart. And, my shortcomings as a parent notwithstanding, they seem to be fairly well-adjusted. They’re gonna be fine.

I’m a bit of a literature and film geek, and The Hobbit is somewhat front-of-mind at the moment. There’s a salient moment toward the middle of the text where Bilbo and the dwarves are lost in an evil forest; have been for weeks, doggedly following a path, not knowing how long it is or where it leads or even if they’ve made a wrong turn and are losing all their progress. Their eyes are down and it’s darkness all around them. They’re frustrated. They’re snippy. They’re turning on each other, ready to call the whole adventure off and go home. Then they have the bright idea for Bilbo to climb a tree and get some perspective on where they really stand. So he does, and his head breaks through the impenetrable canopy — the film captures this moment really beautifully — and he sees daylight for the first time in weeks. Feels the sun on his face again. Breathes clean air again. And from his new vantage point, he can see, in the not-so-distant distance, the looming peak of the Lonely Mountain, their ultimate goal, which they’ve made surprising progress toward despite their squabbling and doubt.

Birds!
Birds!

Of course, when he descends, he finds that his comrades have been captured by and are about to become dinner for a gaggle of giant talking spiders, but I think it’s safe to say that’s beside the point.

Much gets said, in this country and, heck, on this blarg, about the intrinsic value of sticktoitiveness. The usefulness, the inevitable necessity of keeping your head down and getting the work done. And there is value in that. A lot of value, even. Because if we have our heads in the clouds too often, if we spend too much time dwelling on the lofty goals and the dreams, well, then… that’s time not spent getting the work done. But nose-to-the-grindstone can’t be the only posture we exercise. As in all things, balance is key.

Point is, the easy road is to become so lost in what you’re doing that you forget about the big picture. And if you lose sight of the big picture, then giving up doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. But giving up is a big deal. It’s the biggest of deals. Because when you give up, you essentially set fire to all the time and all the effort that you put into getting as far as you got. And if there’s one thing we don’t get back in this life, it’s time.

So whatever you’re working on — your novel, your schoolwork, your health, your parenting — remind yourself that, every now and then, it’s okay — necessary, even — to take that step back. Take that breath of fresh air. See and appreciate the forest despite all the freaking trees.

The work is important, but it’s no good if you don’t know where the winds are blowing the boat.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Holiday Creep

Pavowski1 Comment

I don’t often start my posts with a title, but today I did, and I immediately realized that it’s a misleading title. This is not a post about that guy who’s a creep around the holidays. You know him. He starts wearing the mistletoe hat around, oh, say mid-November and talks a little bit too loudly about the gifts he got for all the women at the holiday party.

As a sidebar, for the love of sandwiches, why do we still have to call this time of year “The Holidays?” Yes, I understand: multiple religions, multiple celebrations, the PC-fun-police basically have to wear diapers to keep from sharknadoing themselves to avoid stepping on anybody’s toes during this sacred time. Yeah, “sacred.” First of all, Christmas is king, anything else is an also-ran (and I’m not saying that as an ardent christian or anything, but look around. Christmas won. Game over). Second, and I’m seriously asking this because I have a hard time believing it–has anybody actually had their sensibilities damaged or their feelings hurt because a stranger in a store wished him a “merry Christmas?” I deplore calling this time of year “the Holidays”, because it feels like hiding under an awning to avoid getting rained on when a tiny wisp of cloud appears in the sky. It’s reactionary in the extreme. For my money, just go around wishing people a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hannukah or a Fantastic Festivus and let them sort it out.

And further sidebar, I know this is the time of year when the religious wingnuts and Fox News especially will start kvelling about the “war on Christmas”. If you’re in that crowd, and you believe a) that there’s a war on Christmas in any way, shape, or form OR b) that if there were a war on Christmas, that Christmas would be in any way diminished by some city hall getting rid of their nativity scene, you’re delusional. Christmas is the Juggernaut and from late October through all of December it goes plowing through the walls of every building in town. Because Christmas isn’t really Christmas anymore, not really. It’s a religious holiday originally, but now it’s a ritual in the only religion that matters in this country: capitalism. ‘Tis the season to run up some credit card debt and stimulate the economy. Just sayin’. I for one can’t wait for all the news reports on how well or how poorly the businesses have done this Black Friday.

Which brings me, circuitously, to the point. I heard a news story earlier this week about a guy who has been camped out at his local Best Buy for a week already in anticipation of the Black Friday deals, but you don’t have to look far to find other examples. It’s epidemic. Somehow, “camping out” in front of a store for hours or even days before it opens has become–not just acceptable (and that’s enough of a Bizarro World scenario to begin with)–but expected if you want to get the best deals, the most ridiculous savings. The guy in question has made a sign where he proudly proclaims his actions, and even invites passersby to take pictures. Presumably, he’s having “fun.”

Apparently this is some new definition of the word “fun” I was previously unaware of.

 

Far be it from me to decry what another person does for “fun.” But I really have to wonder about the state of your life if you engage in this particular pursuit of happiness. I mean, a simple cost/benefit analysis will tell you that no bargain you could snag by camping out is worth cashing in a vacation day for. Say you make $20 an hour and you want to buy a TV that’s $200 instead of $500. And you camp out for a day. Well, that’s a day of work lost to the tune of almost $200. Plus you have to supply your tent and feed yourself. This guy apparently has pizza delivered, so I’m going to be generous and say that your “camping” consumables are going to run you around $30. So, yeah, okay, you’ve really saved a net of almost $100, but then you also had to sleep outside in the cold. And if you camp out for multiple days, the math only gets worse. So don’t kid yourself about the insane “savings” you get.

Also, as anybody who has gone shopping on Black Friday without camping out knows, stores have limited quantities of their best deals, which means that if you’re not in the first wave of screaming charging mouthbreathers through the front door, you aren’t getting that Playstation 7 for only $300. You’ll arrive in the electronics section to find the empty shelving ripped from the drywall and return to pay full price a week later.

So what’s my point? My point is this. This is not the behavior of a healthy society. Camping out for deals, trampling store employees making minimum wage, breaking into fistfights over awful toys for your children… these are not the actions of well-adjusted individuals, yet they happen every year, and we are not surprised anymore. Think about that. Last year, my wife told me that there was a shooting at some store on Black Friday morning, and I almost yawned while asking, “just one?” And it gets worse every year. The arms race is neverending. Macy’s opens their doors at 7pm on Thanksgiving night, so Sears one-ups them and opens at 6:30. I’ve been seeing ads all week for pre-Thanksgiving “doorbuster” sales, all of which are appended with the admonition to “watch for our Black Friday ads!” So I’m supposed to go shop now, and then go back and shop again on the Superbowl of Shopping.

No.

On Black Friday, I will be safely and cozily snuggled in my bed, dreaming of penguins and safe in the knowledge that I am not part of the evil machine that twists the minds of otherwise rational people during “The Holidays”. In the meantime, I will ignore every ad for Black Friday sales, I will sneer every time I hear the word “doorbuster”, and I will laugh derisively at every picture, news story, or anecdote of some idiot camping outside of any retailer to be the first in line for the savings. Yes, I will pay a little more for my Christmas presents. But I will feel rich in the knowledge that I am not a part of this epidemic.

Because make no mistake. If you go out and shop on Black Friday, or–leftovers help you, Thanksgiving Day– then you are a part of the problem. Even if you just go to “see what the deals are”, you are encouraging these retail vampires to continue their lunatic behavior, to keep pushing the shopping season back earlier in the year. You are endorsing the behavior of the idiots who are out there in tents right now sipping horrible coffee and laughing and pretending they’re having fun. They’re not. And if you think you’re having fun camping outside a store to save money on a TV, you need to take a good hard look inward.

Take a stand. Fight the power. Enjoy your tryptophan coma and sleep in on Black Friday.

Everybody knows the best deals are on Cyber Monday, anyway, and you don’t even have to put on pants to get those.

#SleepInBlackFriday

Staying Motivated (or, how to keep writing on those days when the writing sucks)

Pavowski9 Comments

I’ve struggled with motivation mightily in the months since I started working on my novel.

Some days I feel buoyed by powerful waves of motivation, a deep, slow-burning desire to write and create and push this thing forward.  On those days, it’s all I can do to get myself in front of the computer before the ideas and the words start clawing their way out of my skull.  The plotlines and characters and conflicts dance around in my headspace subconsciously all day, sometimes resolving themselves in time to be written down in neat orderly arrays, other times becoming tangled and spilling out onto the page like intestines from a vicious gut wound.  Motivation isn’t a question on those days.  I’m going to write, regardless of what else I may have going on.

Other days I’m Sisyphus, and my novel is a big boulder the size of six or seven giant men and the hill I have to push it up is high indeed.  Even thinking about the task makes me feel weary and exhausted, and my mind starts thinking of all the other things in my life that need doing in this moment, and wouldn’t it be easier to focus on those things and then, maybe after I’ve done those things, I’ll feel like writing and I can get some work done.  Except, as anybody who’s ever put something off knows, you arrive at the end of the day and you still don’t feel like working on the novel, and what’s more you don’t have time to work properly on it anyway, and also you feel crappy about the fact that you haven’t gotten anything done with it today.  The simple act of even reading your own work to see where you’ve just come from and where you might go next seems like a slog through an endless swamp.  These days it feels impossible to write.

But the writing doesn’t change.  The book is just a book, just a story waiting to be told.  The characters, lively as they may be, are but lumps of clay looking for hands to shape them.  It’s only my perception of the work that seems to affect my motivation to work on it.  So how do you cultivate motivation?  Here are some humble ideas.

And I realize as I edit this post that while this dubious advice seems to fit for writing, I think it applies for staying motivated at just about anything, and if that’s the case, so be it.

  • Eyes on the Prize: On those days when I just don’t feel like writing, I have to remind myself that if it was easy, everybody would do it.  Anything worth doing is worth working hard for, and the book isn’t going to write itself; the words aren’t just going to arrange themselves on the page for me.  Yes, I may be a bit stuck on the story.  Yes, I might be a bit confounded by what this character is trying to do.  But these are Writer Problems, and it’s a writer’s job to solve those problems.  If I want to be a writer — to have that success, to have that recognition, to complete a Story Worth Telling — it’s no good hiding from the work.  When it gets hard, when it gets overwhelming, when it seems impossible, I start asking myself, “do you really want it?”  And almost always, I find that I can get some work done after all.
  • Plan of Attack:  If you were to ask me if I were an organized person, I would begin by laughing hysterically.  Then I might offer you a picture of my garage, or my desk, or my bedroom, and you’d quickly realize that not only am I not by any stretch organized, I might not even know what the word means.  But organization has been key to staying motivated and keeping the boulder rolling uphill.  But I don’t mean organization in the general sense of having a place for everything and everything in its place.  (I strive for that, but I often miss the target.)  I mean rather knowing what I want to accomplish within a given time frame, having a clear idea of what’s to be done on that day, seeing the obstacles and knowing perhaps not exactly how I will deal with them but at least that I am capable.  Notes to myself are invaluable for this.  Every day of drafting I’d finish with a little note to myself: “introduce this character tomorrow.”  “wrap up this scene tomorrow.”  “go back and establish that the main character carries a Taser in her purse so that she can zap this guy now.”  I need to know what needs to happen next more than I need to know what I’ll be doing in three weeks.
  • Window of Opportunity:  One of my favorite quotes of late says something along the lines of, “never put off a dream because of the time it will take to achieve it.  The time will pass anyway.”  And to say that time is a factor when it comes to motivation is a ridiculous understatement.  You need time to do the work.  You need time to do the other stuff in your life so that you can focus on the work.  And time doesn’t give a slippery sharknado about you or your work.  Time is going to roll on past you like a bus rolling past a pile of dog vomit.  If I’m sitting around waiting to find time to get the writing done, then the writing just isn’t going to get done that day.  I have to decide, early on during the day if not the day before, when I’m going to get the writing done.  Maybe tomorrow I can carve out time on my lunch break.  The day after, my wife has a class, so I can do some writing that evening.  However I do it, I have to seize the time, carve it from the still thrashing carcass of the beast, if I want to write that day.  I have to create the window of opportunity for myself to work in.
  • Achievable Goals: It’s too big to think “I need to work on the book today.”  What the balls does that even mean?  Character outlines?  Plot diagrams?  Word count?  No, if I’m going to be focused and motivated to do the writing, I need a goal to work toward that I can actually accomplish during a working session.  Write 900 words today.  Introduce this character into the scene.  End this scene.  All these little goals are part and parcel of the big goal — work on the book — but the difference is, they are things I can get done.  How do you eat an elephant?  One bite at a time.
  • Embrace the Suck: There are days wherein, despite the best of intentions, I’m going to write crap.  I’ll read back over a passage and wish that somebody else had written it, because surely, surely, I can’t be that bad, that uncreative, that uninspired.  And it’s all too easy to see that happening, to take stock of the growing puddle of sharknado on the page, and say NOPE, the work sucks, I suck, writing sucks.  I’m taking my ball and going home.  And I think that’s a normal reaction (correct me if I’m wrong).  But nobody works perfect the first time around, or for that matter, the second or the third.  There came a point where I realized that it was okay to write something terrible, as long as I was working toward the goal.  It’s easier to rewrite something, to clean it up and tweak it, than it is to start from scratch.  It’s easier to bust a thing apart and start over, even, because you still have all the pieces to work with when it’s time to put it back together.  If I can hold it together and write through the bad days and write when it’s awful, then it keeps the pipes clear for when the ideas want to flow on their own.

To put all this in perspective, here’s a turn that’s happened in the last few weeks.  A few weeks back, I lost the notebook I’ve been using to keep notes for my edit.  I keep notes in the draft as well, but big stuff that needs fixing in the work as a whole went into the notebook.  And it was just gone.  It’s still gone.  And with it went much of my motivation.  I’d lost a significant portion of work, lost a ton of time, and felt overwhelmed at the prospect of going back and doing much of the same work again.  And my work over the past few weeks has suffered.  I’ve been dragging my feet, doing the work at the last minute, doing the bare minimum, even skipping days.  I was dreading the writing.

Well, yesterday I accepted the fact that the notebook was gone and started a new one.  And yeah, it sucks looking at those blank pages that I have to refill.  And it’s painful writing down notes that I’ve already written and retreading ground that I’ve covered before.  But somehow, just accepting the loss and refocusing my effort has given me the best couple of days of editing that I’ve had in a month.  I’m not saying I’ve done the best work, I’m saying I feel better about the work.  Perception is everything.  I refocused from the lost notebook to getting the book done, I made a new plan around my new notebook, I got serious again about making my own time to work, and I accepted the lost work and moved on.  Suddenly, working on the book is that thing I can’t wait to do again.

Tomorrow, the pendulum may swing back the other way, but I’ll keep working anyway.  Motivation isn’t some magic elixir you can drink and suddenly be filled with purpose.  It’s just another thing to be worked at.

 

Five Things I Learned Serving Jury Duty

PavowskiLeave a comment

I’ve just finished serving jury duty, and I learned a few things from the experience.

First of all, it is stressful holding another person’s fate in your hands.  I know this a little bit from being a teacher, but it’s one thing to be the gatekeeper stopping a kid from passing on to the next grade and another thing entirely to be a juror sending a grown man to jail.

Second, it is humbling and empowering, fascinating and exhausting to become a cog in the justice system.  You see it on TV and you know in an abstract way that it’s been embellished, but to actually dip your toes in the water and see it all spinning up close… well, it’s something.  Yes, it’s a huge drain on your time, yes, it’s horribly inconvenient, but the judges and the lawyers really let rip with a bunch of speechifying about the system and how it breaks down without the service of “people like you” and it’s enough to make you feel almost important for a few days.

Third, don’t be a stalker.

Fourth, don’t encourage a stalker.

So the case I was on was a stalking case.  And they encourage you, when you first sit down and hear opening arguments, to keep an open mind and not jump to conclusions.  But you hear “stalker” and you think, okay, that’s a bad guy that needs to be stopped.  And I’m sure in many cases that turns out to be exactly the situation.  However, in this case — which sounded a lot more like real life — there was nothing so simple.  To simplify things to a point of ridiculousness, this couple dated for nine months, then broke up.  To be specific, she broke up with him, and he was still, to unironically use an over-cliched phrase, madly in love with her.

Now, breakups happen.  And one-sided breakups happen.  The problem here arose because she wanted to be cordial and nice.  So she sent him e-mails and text messages to the effect of: “I don’t want anything more to do with you, please don’t contact me again, I’ll talk to you later.”  Or, “Your last message was inappropriate, I don’t want you in my life, but I may speak to you if I see you around, and I may dial your number if I need to.”  I’m not one to victim-blame, but if you want a person to leave you alone, and you know that person is still determined to feel a certain way about you, you can’t leave the door open for contact.

Now, this guy stepped over the line.  He drove by her house unannounced, he sent some fairly ugly text messages her way when she started dating another guy, but he was not hiding in the bushes outside the house or parking across the street for hours on end or following her around in public.  It was an ugly, ugly situation.  No doubt about that.  But he wasn’t a stalker, so we acquitted him.

I’m not sure how much more detail would be useful and I’m not sure how much is really ethical to share, so I’m going to cut that portion of the program short.  However, there are some lessons to be learned from all this.

The first is this, and it goes for everybody: If you’re going to press charges against somebody, and the situation involves the dealings and behavior of both individuals in some way, you’d better be sure that your house is in order, because the lawyers and the investigators and everybody and their mother are going to go through your metaphorical house, drag all your metaphorical dirty laundry onto the lawn, smash it to pieces, burn the pieces, sort through the ashes, and then arrange the ashes into lovely grey mosaics for a jury of your peers to peruse ad nauseam. In other words, if you’re going to press charges, make sure the juice is worth the squeeze.

The second bit of advice is for the ladies.  If you want a man out of your life, and you feel it may eventually come to legal measures, slam the fargoing door.  None of this nicey-nicey, cordial-kitty crap.  I’m reminded of that moment in Dumb and Dumber where the girl tells one of the Dumbs that the odds of her getting together with him are a million-to-one, and he responds with vigor, “So you’re saying there’s a chance!”  Leave no chances.  Make yourself abundantly clear.

The third bit of advice is for the guys.  NO MEANS NO.  When she tells you she wants to be left alone, do yourself a favor and assume she’s serious.  The case I sat on was flimsy as hell and we still almost found him guilty.  And even though we acquitted him, he still had to give up tons of his time to stand trial, to have his personal business laid open for the world to see, to stand in humiliation at being accused of, let’s be honest, a crime that’s not going to win you the respect of your comrades.

The fourth bit of advice is for anybody hoping to avoid jury duty.  Wear pajamas to court.  Nothing shows the lawyers you’re an idiot incapable of using your critical brain to ponder the minutiae of a case which may send a person to jail for a long time like a refusal to put on proper pants.  Stupid me, I wore slacks and a collared shirt every day, and look where I ended up.

The fifth bit of advice is: Pajamas won’t save you.  In the jury pool room, waiting to be called to a courtroom, I was sitting next to a woman in hot pink pajamas and a hoodie, who did not look up from her cell phone the entire two hours we were waiting to be called to court.  Next day, I saw her again, standing in the waiting area outside another courtroom.  Still, of course, glued to her cell phone, and damned if she wasn’t still wearing pajamas.

Seriously.  Do your civic duty and put on some pants.