Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

Some Stories You Should Read

Pavowski1 Comment

 

This post is a shameless plug for some fiction written by myself and other authors.

Chuck Wendig, over the past three weeks, organized a 3-part Collaboration Challenge over at his website.  I played each week, writing the first 500 words of my own story (There Are Things in the Well), writing a second 500 words for another story (Clank), and finally writing the conclusion of a third story (A Recipe for Disaster).

I’m happy to say that both of the stories I collaborated on aside from “A Recipe for Disaster” were picked up and concluded by other authors.  Yesterday I reposted the finished version of “There Are Things in the Well“, and today I saw that there have actually been two part 3’s written for “Clank.”  In no particular order, you can find them here (Clank 1) and here (Clank 2).

It’s been a fascinating exercise, first of all, to pick up and continue the work started by another author, and second, to see what strange new directions other authors take with material I’ve started.  In short, a really cool little idea.

Thanks to Angela Cavanaugh, George Kaltsios, Underastarlitsky, RoseRed, Matthew Gomez, and Clay Ashby for their unwitting collaborations.

There are Things in the Well (part 3)

Pavowski1 Comment

I’m happy to say that this story which I wrote the first 500 words of got picked up by some other writers and finished. Here’s the completed tale, finished in a very different (but no less interesting) manner than what I pictured when I set the thing in motion. Thanks to RoseRed and Underastarlitsky for running with it.

underastarlitsky's avatarUnder a Starlit Sky

This week’s Chuck Wendig challenge is to write the final 500 words of a story that 2 other people have already written the beginning and middle to.

So I chose Pavowski’s story, There Are Things In the Well, to continue, which Rose Red continued here. But i’ll post both parts before my ending so you get the full story.

There are Things in the Well
“Here she comes, Elvy.”

Elvert crunched on a handful of candy and shaded his eyes against the sun. “New girl?”

Trom kicked at a snail and nodded toward the twig of a girl walking down the dirt road about fifty yards distant. “Leza, I think.”

The stones of the well were cool against his back, and in the sweltering humidity he was reluctant to leave them behind. Still, she’d only be new in town for so long. He stood and stretched and spit his lime…

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Momentum

Pavowski4 Comments

Lately I’ve been having the hardest time finding the time to write.  This is problematic for me because as much as that’s true — there are a lot of demands on my time of late — I also feel pretty strongly that that excuse is bullsharknado.

The issue of time is coming to a head because this week, I missed two days of editing my novel.  It might not sound like a big deal, but it’s eating me up inside.  The deadline is purely arbitrary; I’m accountable to nobody but myself, yet I’m furious with myself over it.  Ashamed.  And I’m asking myself why it’s happening.  After all, I didn’t miss a day of writing when I was working on the first draft — not a single day outside of the week my daughter was born.

Back when I started this shindig in March and April, I was turning out ridiculous word count for the time I had.  I’d have days where I’d bang out 2500+ words, between the first draft of the novel and the blog.  I’d carve out swathes of time at work, sneak a few minutes here and there at home, hammer out a few sentences in the morning.  Lately it seems I just don’t have the energy for that.  I drag myself out of bed in the morning and it’s all I can do to make myself exercise.  I feel like the day is too full at work to write even a few sentences.  Then I’m home and into the daddy grind and before I can blink it’s 9:30, time to slog it off to bed.

I have every excuse.  On the one hand, life has never been busier.  My responsibilities at work have changed a little bit: I have more students, more papers to grade, and coming up in a few months, some after-school hours to put in as well, and all that adds up to a pretty significant pull on my time.  There’s a second sprout now, and that means more diapers, more tantrums, more feedings, more outings — and of course, the original sprout is only getting bigger and louder and more demanding.  I love them like crazy, but they are little time-eaters.  I’m trying to put in a solid six days of exercise a week (okay, it’s more like five days on a good week) at thirty minutes a day, and that’s closer to an hour on a run day… and then there’s quality time to be carved out for the wife… Where does one find the time to write amidst all this?

But then I second guess myself.  And this is where I’m frustrated (and yet very happy) with myself for reading the writings of Chuck Wendig and Steve Kamb, achievers whose teachings I am doing my best to absorb in this new chapter of my life.  There’s one nugget they’ve both shared that has stuck with me: You have the same 24 hours in your day as everybody else.  I can’t shake that.  Sure, I have every excuse not to get the writing done.  Sure, it’s hard to blame me for missing a workout now and then.  But I know that for every edit I miss, every workout I skip, there’s another guy out there with all the same demands on his time but he’s getting it done and I’m not.  Now, I’m not strictly competitive by nature, but this eats at my soul like a blood-swollen tick.

The other thing I can’t forget is a thing I’ve learned this year.  Somehow it hit home after 33 years of living on this earth, and now the truth of it is inescapable to me:  Momentum matters.  The things you’ve been doing are the things you will continue doing.  It’s all well and good to make changes in your life: you start exercising, you start dieting, you take up gardening, you begin knitting socks for the gnomes in your garden.  And in the beginning it’s easy to establish new momentum: going for that run or leaving the cookies untouched or pulling the weeds or socking a gnome feels so satisfying because it’s such a sharp departure from the norm.  But you have 34 years of slacker momentum built up, and over time, your old momentum begins to assert itself, and it’s easier to reach for the snooze button than your shoes at 5 AM, it’s easier to reach for the cookies than the celery, easier to just leave the garden unweeded for a few days and easier to let the gnomes go sockless.  Before you know it, you haven’t run in two weeks, and you’re eating cookies by the sleeve, and the garden is one thick knee-high bramble and the gnomes are revolting.

I established some hellagood momentum back in March and April, not allowing myself to miss a single day of writing outside of the week that my daughter was born.  And it carried me through until the first draft was finished in July.  But my old slacker momentum is reasserting itself, and it is casting into doubt everything I’ve accomplished in the meantime.  I sleep in instead of getting up for my 5AM run, and it doesn’t bother me as much as it did the last time it happened.  I miss a day of editing, and I don’t feel bad about it all night.  Momentum matters, and the sharknadoey momentum I’ve spent my life developing is sucking me in with its immense gravity, despite the positive momentum I’ve spent the last six months cultivating.

But the momentum is just the beginning, because soon the momentum changes form and becomes an insidious mental decay.  I start having thoughts like, “maybe the time just isn’t right for me to pursue this dream right now” or “if I slow down, that’ll be okay too,” and the lure of those thoughts is tempting.  Just like my excuses, they could be entirely valid.  But I also know that accepting those thoughts of slacker momentum are only a short hop away from “maybe I’m just not cut out for it at all.”

And then I’m back to the 24-hour problem again.  Because if I’m having doubts about how I’m spending my time, then maybe I’m not spending it in the right ways.  And if it’s hard for me to make the time, to chip it away from the great grey monoliths of my other obligations, then maybe the sad truth is that I just don’t want it badly enough to make it happen.  If I can’t make my 24 hours work toward making me a writer, then maybe the truth is I just don’t want it at all.

But I’m afraid I’m not ready to swallow that particular bitter pill just yet.  Which is why last night I was up until nearly midnight writing this post, and why when WordPress ate it just before midnight, I vowed that I would go through the turmoil, the harsh truth, the unpleasant task of facing my doughy, slacker-momentum riding Asgard in the mirror AGAIN to write it today.  Because it needs to be said.  And I need to be able to come back here and see it.  And I need to remind myself that writing is a thing that I want, and it is a thing worth making sacrifices for, and it is a thing which deserves to be done, even and especially when it’s difficult to do it.

In a movie that I loved, Grosse Pointe Blank, a hitman having a touch of existential angst over attending his high school reunion was advised by his psychiatrist to stop and take stock of his feelings.  Repeat the mantra, “this is me breathing,” and “I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.”  A simple idea, intended to ground one in the moment, focus on the little things, and not get swept away by the mad tide of life.  There’s wisdom in that, even if it’s not my goal to kill people with frying pans.

This is me breathing.  This is me writing.  I’m at home in the me that is on this adventure.

 

 

Excuses

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I spent the last forty minutes typing a great post.

A thoughtful post, a post where I took a good hard look at myself and my habits and my situation.  A post where I leveled with myself about some hard truths.  A cruel post where I questioned what I was really about with this whole blarg and my writing and my life.

And I went to post this post and WordPress ate it.  No auto-saved draft anywhere in my site that I can see it.  Nothing there when I scroll back through my history.

And it’s kind of funny that I’m sitting here now shouting into the void that tomorrow I’ll remake this post, because the post itself was all about not making excuses and getting the goldfingered work done even when life takes a steaming dump on your plate.

But it really is almost three hours past the time when I should have been in bed, and the kids will be up in oh, less than six hours, and I just don’t have it in me to go through that again tonight.  Maybe I’ll find it in the meantime.  Maybe it’ll be better if I rewrite it tomorrow.  In the meantime, it’ll just have to wait.

Sigh.

Parental Phone Tag (No Takesy-Backsies)

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I love my parents.  Let’s get that on the table before I start the griping.  Not really griping.  Good-natured ribbing.  I hope they won’t disown me for writing this.  Then again, they’re on vacation for a week, so they may not even read this.

Like many thirty-somethings, I’ve got that time in my past when I sort of fell out of touch with my parents for a while.  Never estranged or anything like that, but there were times in my twenties when I’d go a month or so without speaking to them.  Not even necessarily on purpose.  I was just too cool for school.  Well, having kids changes all that, and these days it’s rare for me to go more than a few days without speaking to my folks.

Partly it’s because I now sort of appreciate the biological need for a parent to have his nose one hundred percent lodged in the kid’s business, and that’s literal as well as figurative (see this post which is not about giving enemas to a toddler).  Partly because frankly my wife and I need a little bit of backup every now and then and the grandparents are the best source of free childcare currently in operation.  Partly because all my wife and I have to talk about anymore is the kids, and it takes a blood relative to listen to all that sharknado.  But calling my parents particularly has its own set of hassles associated with it.  For example, every time I call my parents, I have to call twice.

No, let’s get this right.  Every time I call my parents, six or more phone calls are involved.

First, I call my dad, who’s a retired schoolteacher and now works more-or-less full-time as a math tutor, making enough money to make me want to get certified to teach Math instead of English.  To put it bluntly, he stays busy and is always driving around, so the odds of picking him up the phone are about as likely as a tornado opening up in my kitchen, the toddler notwithstanding.  For some reason, I can never remember those odds before I ring him up, so the call goes through and rings and rings and rings and then I get his voicemail.  Well, I’m not leaving him a voicemail (what is it, 2003?), so I hang up and remember that the smart play is calling my mother.  (That was call #1, by the way.)

Call #2 is to my mom, who is also an employee in the school system (but not a teacher – she’s a middle school counselor, so, y’know, god help her).  There’s something really odd going on with her, though, because she seems to love her job and therefore stays late almost every day, and her phone gets worse service in her building than my phone gets in mine, which is to say, I’ve got a better chance of finding my cats cleaning the kitchen than of reaching my mom at work.  Again I connect to voicemail, and again I hang up without leaving a message.

Let’s detour and note that the leaving of a message or lack of the leaving of a message is entirely inconsequential.  I could leave a detailed message with cross references and a works cited page, and I’d still get called back to see what the message was about.

Call #3 is from my mom to me. She’s returning my call, but she invariably calls when I’ve got the sprout in the tub or I’m putting the sprout to bed or I’ve got my hands full of raw chicken from dinner preparations or the sprout has hidden my phone inside of a cat.  Half the time she leaves a message which I will not check and which therefore throws notifications at my phone for about a week and a half after.  Call #4 is me to my mom and this is usually when we finally connect to establish plans for the weekend or give her an update on the toddler’s bowel movements (true story) or whatever other riveting developments have developed at Casa de Pav in the couple of days since we last spoke.

Call #5 is from my dad, usually within the first hour after I’ve spoken to my mother, but sometimes as much as six hours after on the weekend.  Just like my mother, he’s unnaturally gifted at ringing me when I’m wrist-deep in infant poop or my fourth load of dishes that day, so I miss this call.  Calls #6-9 are exchanged between my dad being on the road from one tutoring gig to the next and me being embroiled in one toddler emergency or another (“Want chocolate milk!”  *pours chocolate milk*  “Don’t want chocolate milk!”  *puts chocolate milk away in the fridge for later* “WANT CHOCOLATE MILK!”) before we finally connect and cover the exact same ground I covered with my mother an hour or six before.

Under no circumstances do my parents communicate with one another in the meantime.  I wonder if after 30+ years of marriage they’ve discovered that the secret to success is to simply avoid one another as much as possible.  At any rate, I have to have the same conversation with them both, sometimes as quickly one to the next as fifteen minutes.

The latest iteration was not a few hours ago.  My parents are going on a cruise (at a ridiculously good price, damn them) and they wanted an update before they left on how the sprout’s doctor’s appointment today went before they shoved off at 5pm.  I had a faculty meeting keeping me at school until about that time.  Now, my wife had graciously contacted my dad (unbeknowst to me) to let him know that things went pretty much fine while I was at work.  Not knowing that, I frantically tried to call first my dad (call #1) and my mom (call #2).  Neither picked up, so I figured I missed them and they were well on their way to the Bahamas or whatever.  Fifteen minutes later, my dad calls.  He’s at some drawing on board trying to win a free cruise and we can barely hear one another, but I give him the highlights and wish him a good trip.  Five minutes after that, my mother calls.  She’s elsewhere on the same boat trying to win spa giveaways and can’t talk right now (why did you call me?) and can she call me back in ten minutes?

Look, you get the point.  And you know, for having the grandparents involved and a part of our kids’ lives, a few extra phone calls are a small price to pay.  Mom and dad, I love you.  But seriously.  Maybe a little communication on your end.