Category: Ramble

Just writing stuff about things, and things about stuff.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Right Place, Right Time

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Yesterday was a rough day for a run. Long week at work, the spectre of even more long days next week (auditions are going to start up, so that’s after-school hours, HOORAY), and the general fatigue that the summer months and the summer heat have left me with — all of them took their toll. The alarm went off, and I’m not too proud to say it. I fell asleep again.

But something woke me up again, and I don’t know if it’s just the fact that I had set a goal to run four times this week or if something unremembered was tickling my subconscious, but there I was. I knew I had to get up. No cashing in my slacker tokens for a Friday sleep-in. It was time to lace up. (Okay, so I don’t “lace up” anymore since I’ve basically given up on running shoes, but it sounds cooler than saying “time to pull on my goofy-ass foot-gloves.)

And it wasn’t a miraculous run or anything. Pretty much as rough and unfun as any run for the past month has been. I almost don’t remember what comfortable running weather feels like — in my nightmares, it’s always 76 degrees with the relative humidity making it feel like 90. And then I wake up, and that’s the actual temperature. But at least the sky was clear.

And as I entered the first leg of my loop, I remembered — that’s why I wanted to run today. The Perseid meteor shower. I’m a little bit fascinated with the universe and with space in general, so celestial events like this hold a special obsession for me … even if I rarely get to see them. Living just outside Atlanta — one of the most light-polluted areas on the east coast — kinda puts a damper on any of those majestic sights. It would take a near supernova-level blast of light to penetrate the haze of ambient light that hangs in our night sky.

Still, every time a meteor shower rolls through, I cast my eyes skyward in hopes of seeing something, anything — a bit of first-hand evidence that there are bigger things out there, that the cosmos is still pushing and pulling at us. I’ve been disappointed every time. But this time, I saw it. A tiny flicker drew my attention up toward the southeast, and then, while I was trying to figure out if it might have been a meteorite or just a passing plane, it happened.

A shooting star. There one second, gone the next. Streaking across the sky like lightning late for a date. Blazing a glowing white scar in the black sky. Impossibly fast and impossibly bright, and then, just as impossibly gone. It was over so fast, I’m almost not sure I didn’t imagine it.

It was the only meteor that I saw, and if something hadn’t drawn my eye up at just that moment, I would have missed it.

I always get mixed up at things like this. The quiet, ineffable majesty of the cosmos works on me in ways I don’t properly understand. It’s easy to see how people mistake this sort of thing for the divine, how they read the machinations of a deity into these things that seem too awesome, too powerful, too magical for beings such as we to understand. And I could certainly fall into that trap myself, too; intimating meaning where there is none, insisting upon significance in the meaningless collision of a couple specks of galactic dust.

But things don’t always mean things. The universe doesn’t rearrange itself in order to inspire us or shock us or overwhelm us into epiphanies about the meaning of life. I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, looking up at the right part of the sky.

But just because the beauty isn’t designed, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Just because the falling star wasn’t set in motion for my benefit, doesn’t mean that I can’t benefit from it.

I finally managed to see a meteor — and a doozy, at that — not because it was my time to see one. I managed to see it because I’ve wanted to see one for years, and I keep doing the best I can to try and make it happen. This time, it worked out. Maybe next time the Perseids roll around, it will, too.

And that’s life, innit?

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Trees and Shrooms and the World is Awesome

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I listened to a brilliant podcast the other day. This one: the most recent offering from RadioLab, a podcast I don’t always listen to, but which never fails to fascinate when I do.

In short, it’s about trees, and you read that and you think, wow, trees? Really? Instant snore, and you’d be right, except the podcast isn’t really about trees, it’s about the magic behind trees. About how we (meaning you and me and the rest of the undereducated public) don’t actually know sharknado about trees.

So, with trees, there’s literal magic going on at the microscopic level, which should come as no surprise at all but it surprised the hell out of me. Turns out that trees are only able to become trees because they get a crazy amount of help. In fact, a tree on its own would never grow into a tree at all — it would only grow about knee high. But there’s this fungus that isn’t really what you think of when you think of fungus at all, and that fungus lives basically in all the dirt everywhere, and that fungus synthesizes and assimilates itself into the roots of a tree and turn it into a fargoing superhero.

But that’s not all: this fungus is not content just to piggyback on one tree like a remora swimming beneath a shark for a bit of mutual fin-scratching. This fungus is a hive-mind governmental distribution system. It can literally take excess nutrients from one tree and transfer them to another malnourished tree. It can detect distress signals from one tree and divert resources to other trees in the area. In some cases, it can even decide which trees get to live or die when resources become scarce.

And hearing about that, of course my brain kicked into overdrive a little bit, because the world is one big metaphor, right? Everything is connected, things always mean things. And if trees can only become trees by standing on the figurative shoulders of a literal fungus, then maybe there’s something in that about how everything in my life feeds my writing one way or another, or about how running is the glue that somehow drains me and energizes me all at once.

And those connections could be drawn, probably.

But sometimes it’s better to just let a thing be what it is.

I learned about a nearly miraculous situation which is happening literally underneath everybody’s feet, every second of every day. And I think today, that will be enough.

Are you listening to RadioLab? You should be!

Sometimes I write Good

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The new novel is at the 1/3 mark — just the spot for a turn, a twist, a change that will color the story to come. And much like my two previous novels, the 1/3 point was an important landmark: a point of no return. The edge of the aircraft carrier, where the jet must either take wing or splash into the ocean, a multi-million dollar failure to fly.

And just like in my first two novels, there’s that horrible moment, right before that turn. That slow sensation, that creeping dread, that the story is a dead man walking, that the legs I thought it had are shot through with story-cancer and the whole thing is going to collapse before it ever has a chance to get going. The jet drifts toward the edge. The vast, indifferent ocean looms large. The wheels clear the edge of the carrier, and the craft does what heavy things do — it drops.

But then.

Like the very breath of God, the wind catches its wings. It defies all logic and it ascends into the sky — not like a bird on the wing, but like a shot from a cannon. And within the space of a heartbeat, from one moment to the next — from the terrible, awful, I-don’t-even-think-this-idea-is-viable-anymore words on one page to the next — the thing is flying not just under its own power, but on its own momentum. The very fact that it’s in motion keeps it in motion. The air rushing across its wings is working to keep the thing aloft just as much as the thing itself is fighting to fly.

And, well. That’s enough to keep you coming back for at least one more day of writing, innit?

It’s time once again for an old staple — my favorite thing I wrote today.

For a moment, Linc thinks about arguing the point — that he doesn’t hate these things, not really — but he realizes before he can form the thoughts that Michaels is right. He does hate them. Not in an overt, fiery way that smashes down walls and crumbles buildings, but in the quietly smoldering way of a not-quite extinguished campfire, smoking and hissing and spitting and waiting for a stray breeze to kick it up into a raging, all-consuming blaze.

Whee!

The Weekly Re-Motivator: No Exit

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Linda’s prompt this week is “ex”, and it’s hard to read that and not think about the ways I’m coming up short of late. For the past couple of weeks, I’m an ex-every-day-writer, an ex-dedicated-to-working-out-workout-doer, and an ex-regular-blogger.

It’s hard to lay all the blame on one thing, but I’m gonna go ahead and lay much of it on the new job. I anticipated it would be stressful; I didn’t anticipate that it would leave me totally drained at the end of every day, with very little semblance of my old work/workout/write routine.

And the sad fact is, it’s going to get worse before it gets better, because starting very soon, I’ll be pulling some serious after-school hours, which is only going to exacerbate the problem. There is, in short, no exit.

Not to fear. You’re not off the hook so easily, dear reader. Only a matter of time until I figure out how to make it all work, and I’ve already mostly figured out how to get my daily novel writing in (3000+ words this week — good ones, too).

In the meantime, here are some things that might have merited full blog posts, were I not struggling to move myself from the couch when I’m not at work this week:

Rio crowds heckling Hope Solo by booing her every time she touches the ball, and shouting “ZIKA” on every one of her kickoffs. Solo is hardly the most likable personality on the team, and she’s obviously got some off-the-field issues, but she’s not the kind of player that’s going to buckle to, or even be impressed by, a little bit of hate. The whole thing just kind of makes me laugh — and I imagine that she pictures a deadly cloud of mosquitoes ferrying the ball to midfield every time she hears the odd cry.

Speaking of the Olympics, I hardly watched the opening ceremonies at all — the only thing we caught was a demonstration with a Brazilian prototype airplane that was … I dunno … it started in reality on the field and then turned into this weird greenscreen thing on the broadcast? Between that and the strange box-stacking thing that started it all off, I just couldn’t get into it — and things weren’t helped by the fact that NBC was cutting to commercial every five minutes. I should hardly be pooping on the presentation designed to highlight the spirit of the host country and the camaraderie of the games, but the opening ceremonies are always so odd.

Still, the scenery is absolutely breathtaking — the shots of the mountains overlooking the bay are just staggeringly beautiful, if you can forget about the fact that the water would fail a breathalyzer test if breathalyzers could test for poop.

Then again, it’s hard to forget about all the poop in that water, or the fact that those swimming in the bay were advised “not to open their mouths” while swimming.

And on one final, unrelated note, the new job gives me a somewhat longer commute, which is giving me the time to catch up on some podcasts that I neglected over the summer. I’ve caught up on all kinds of fascinating minutiae. Granny-style free-throw shooting. Supreme Court justice shenanigans. Black hole collisions and gravitational waves (not “gravity waves,” there’s a difference, it turns out). And the ins and outs of shooting a Youtube show as a woman (never read the comments, apparently).

Oh, and Donald Trump is crazier every day; cracking like an overripe egg under the heat lamp of the election spotlight.

I can’t wait for self-driving cars to become a thing, so that I can actually get some work done when I’m driving back and forth to work.

More blargs this week. The universe depends on it.

This weekly remotivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every weekend, I use Linda G. Hill’s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

Suddenly Supercharged

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There comes that moment when you’re writing a story and it just gets stuck.

Maybe it’s in a rut and not a lot is happening, or maybe the characters have backed themselves into a corner, or maybe it’s you the author who is blocked and unsure where to go next.

I’ve been in that place for the last couple of weeks with my project, probably owing in no small part to the fact that summer is over and I’m back to work. New employer, new commute, new routine, new stress. Hard to dedicate the grey matter that I’d like to the book, and it’s suffered for it. I’ve been writing by rote, pushing the story forward like it’s a stalled Ford Fiesta miles from the nearest gas station. (To say nothing of my scanty posts around here.)

Luckily, though, characters have a life of their own, and every once in a while, if you keep at it, the muse will flutter down and blow some glitter up your butt. My main character — perhaps as frustrated as me at the aimless wandering going on at this point in the draft — took the wheel and steered us right off the road during my morning session. Jumped ahead to a conflict I wasn’t planning until very late in the book indeed, if at all. Exposed the raw nerve floating right beneath the skin and vented some spleen all over the gooey sludge of this story.

It’s a turn I wasn’t expecting — wasn’t even thinking about when I sat down to write — but it fits perfectly with the character and the story. Of course it does. I told myself when I sat down to write not to force anything but just to let a conversation happen, and before I knew it, I was over quota for the day and my protagonist and antagonist have increased the boiler pressure well past the safe range.

Which serves as a good reminder of something I forget often: sometimes you just have to get the fargo out of the story’s way.