Goals and Sub-Goals

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I sat down to write a blarg post tonight, and all I wanted to do was work on my capital “W” Writing projects.

So I did.

And it got me to thinking, for all the time I’ve spent working on those projects, it’s about time I did something with them. Publication is the sort of over-arching goal for the foreseeable future — of my novel, of course, but really of anything — so I need to start finding out whether anything I’ve written is worth, you know, actual money to somebody. Which means it’s time to get over my big fear and start sending some work out.

And if I’m going to send work out, it damn sure needs to be my best, or at least my best for right now. But as I know from oh, the past 34 years of my life, if I don’t have a deadline, it won’t get done.

So, some new goals:

Existing already: first draft of second novel completed by September.

Nebulous at present: get some more feedback on edited version of Accidentally Inspired over the summer.

New goal: Brush up and extend at least 3 short stories to about 3k words in length in preparation for submission by the end of June. That’s about 1 per week, which should be easy, given the number of old flash fiction ditties I have kicking around the cellar here.

Tonight I added about 500 words and spruced up the wording a bit in one of my favorites. Not a bad job on my day off from working on the novel.

So: for anybody reading, are any of you published, including novels or short fiction? What advice do you have for a guy taking his tentative first steps? What works, what doesn’t? How should I focus my time? What steps should I be taking?

Solo Shot

Pavowski4 Comments

Chuck’s challenge this week: Interestingness. In short, find a photo, write a story. I found my photo here. Something about it immediately haunted me, though I guess there’s nothing overtly creepy about it.

This one went in an unusual direction for me. Sometimes you just have to ride where the story takes you.

Solo Shot

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Elise has been gone for four months now.

Every day or two I’ll go combing through her old facebook account, looking at her pictures, reading the stupid little things she wrote, choking back sobs at the tearful farewells of friends and families. Her pillow still smells of her shampoo, and sometimes if I go to sleep hugging it, I’ll have dreams where Elise is alive, warm. Feel her arms wrapping around my neck and her hair like angel’s breath brushing my cheek. But it never lasts. I wake up and it’s worse than ever; I feel her absence like a rash under my skin, like I want to claw at my insides to make the pain stop.

My sister asked me for a picture of myself last week. I told her I was fine, but she wanted proof, so I sent her a selfie, and I guess I didn’t convince her. The deep-set, drooping eyes, the hair plastered ridiculously straight up by pressing my face into her pillow, the week’s worth of scraggle under my chin, the t-shirt stained with Monday’s Taco Bell salsa, Tuesday’s McDonald’s ketchup, and maybe Wednesday’s bowl of tomato soup. (I may have been wearing this shirt for longer, but I only have proof of those three days.) The moment I snapped the picture, I nearly deleted it, but that was when I saw Elise for the first time.

It was the strand of hair just over my shoulder. At first I thought it was a trick of the light, just an overexposure, or an artifact on the lens causing the sublime glow over my shoulder, but the chill on my spine, the tingle on my neck, the cold sweat on my forehead told me it was her. My sister didn’t see what I was talking about, but it was as plain as a message etched in fire to me.

Was she with me, still? Watching me, waiting for me, looking over my shoulder? I snapped another picture, and again, that trick of the light, but this time there was still more — the ghostly blur of an outline just behind my ear. I know the curve of her face like I know the feel of her touch, the touch that I felt on my shoulders, the ghostly warmth of her embrace from beyond, as I was certain it was by now. It was as if in her first picture, I had merely sighted her like a distant ship on the horizon, and now, she was striving to be seen, being etched more clearly despite the shimmering veil she had to peer through.

I began to take pictures at every opportunity — with the rays of the morning sun streaming through the window, on the front porch in her favorite rocking chair in the hazy afternoon heat, by the window as the evening chill sets in — and with each one, I saw her more clearly. Like the slow advance of a glacier, Elise took shape over my shoulder: first that lock of hair, then her cheek, then one gleaming, eternal eye, then the other. Her face snapped more and more into focus, becoming more and more visible, the phases of the moon recreated in her too-pale flesh, peering over my shoulder with that smile like she knows what I’m thinking even now, long after she’s gone. My sister can’t see Elise at all in these pictures, or so she says. She says I’m trying too hard to hold onto her, that I need to let her go. More likely, she’s afraid; afraid that I’ve found a way to connect with her, to be with her, even though she’s gone. Even though she’s only a faded echo of herself, forever behind me, gossamer and translucent and present only through the lens of the cell phone camera.

Last night, on a whim, rather than taking my selfie as usual, I caught sight of my grandfather’s antique Nikon on the shelf. He was an avid photographer, believing that the right picture could literally capture a person’s essence. I found some film in a box of his things in the attic, loaded the camera, and pointed it at a mirror. I drove to the Walgreen’s at what felt like 100 miles an hour and waited in agony for the shot to develop.

Maybe there’s some ancient artistry at work in the camera, maybe it was the mirror, or maybe the electronics of the modern age muddle whatever wavelength she’s appearing on. In the photo Elise appears as real and as lifelike as if she were truly there, her chin propped on my shoulder, her eyes dark and knowing, her lips parted as if she wants to tell me a secret. She’s there, frozen in that moment, waiting for me, calling out to me through the film and the clockwork of the camera.

My sister still doesn’t believe. She looks at the picture and insists that nothing is there. I think she’s afraid for me, but it’s I who fear for her. She’s determined to believe that Elise is gone, that all who leave us are gone, and my insistence that I can still see Elise, feel her, through these pictures upsets her. But that doesn’t matter. I’ve ordered dozens of mirrors to hang all around the house, and found a trove of old film on ebay. It’s all right that she’s gone. My life with Elise doesn’t have to stop. I plan to fill the house with pictures of us, as blissful and enamored as the day we met. I can live our vacations, our date nights, our quiet nights at home and our rambling road trips, as long as I can find a mirror and keep my camera loaded.

My sister says that’s creepy. But I don’t care if she can see Elise or not. I don’t mind that she’ll see a house full of pictures of me all alone. I’ll always see her.

Because she’ll always be with me.

Only Off By a Minute or Two (or 14.4)

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The topic for the week in Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday is “ke”.

Which is crap, innit? It’s not a word, certainly not a concept. But it’s more than just a letter. It’s a sound, sort of, though it depends on how you use it. It sounds like itself sometimes: KEy, KEep, KEen; but throw it at the end of a word and its sound disappears entirely: faKE, liKE, smoKE. It vacillates between setting the tone for the thing it’s a part of and being entirely subservient to the rest of the thing.

So I took to the Googles, typed in “ke” and I guess not surprisingly, the first thing to pop up was a wikipedia page, and that seemed promising.

KE is a postal code for Kildare, Ireland, which sounds lovely.

KE is the abbreviation for kinetic energy in physics. Now, I like the thrust of that, but we all know I do more than my share of nattering on about the importance of momentum and doing things and I already feel the gravity of more nattering on the topic, so I will do us all a favor and drive that train of thought into the ditch and move on.

Then you’ve got Ke, which has its own attributions: It’s a translation of a common surname in China, it’s the elimination rate constant (or the rate at which drugs are removed from the body, a topic I know nothing about), it’s also an electrical constant called Coulomb’s Law, which I would have loved to tie in here in clever fashion but ye gods, I had a partial stroke just trying to read the formula:\oiint\mathbf{E} \cdot {\rm d}\mathbf{A} = |\mathbf{E}|\mathbf{\hat{e}}_r\int_{S} dA = |\mathbf{E}|\mathbf{\hat{e}}_r \times 4\pi r^{2}

And I apologize for whatever ill effects it might have had on your system. Finally, a Ke is also a Chinese unit of decimal time measuring either 14.4 minutes or 15 minutes.

Wait a minute.

It’s a unit of measure — those things that we use to determine how much of things there exist in a given system, or the distance between things, or the purity or contamination of things, or in fact any of the myriad of methods we have for making meaning out of the world around us — but we don’t know exactly how much of the thing it sets out to measure that it actually measures.

I thought more about this, and it only made my brain hurt even more, and it was already reeling after trying to read that formula up there. (HALF OF IT IS JUST WAVY LINES.) Think about it. The difference between 14.4 of something and 15 of something is 4%. 4% doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you start doing math of any consequence, 4% becomes enormous. 4% of the world’s population, for example, is 284,000,000 (that’s 284 million) people. 4% of the distance from the earth to the moon is almost ten thousand miles. It’s hard to imagine any measurement having a grey area you could sail the earth itself through.

But that’s the way of things, innit? The Ke is not a contemporary unit of measurement. It doesn’t get used anymore, except perhaps by Chinese authenticists (the measurement, it turns out, was based on the sundial), in large part because we’ve come up with new, better, more precise measuring sticks. So are we always redefining the rules, fine-tuning the specs on our tools, rejiggering the machinations that control and that build our lives. As our goals and, by extension, our accomplishments grow, so too must the means by which we measure them. An “A” in high school chemistry might have been the most important thing in the world to a past version of myself, but today it means precisely bupkis.

I got up for a drink just now, and on my way back to my seat, I had the thought that just about the only yardstick that has meaning in my life at the moment is money, and as I thought that thought, my blood started to simmer. My head filled with insane, tinfoil-hat kinds of ideas and notions that money isn’t real yet our lives and our livelihoods depend on it, that some people in the world can just invent all the money that they want while others live their lives in the shadow of its absence, and ultimately I decided that my blarg is a whole lot more lighthearted than that and the best thing to do was just to wrap this stream of consciousness up.

And to think, it only took me a couple of Ke’s to write all this.

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Search Term Bingo

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If you run a website, or even a modest blarg like this one, at some point you will ask yourself the question: “who is reading this?” and maybe, “why are they reading this?” and possibly, further, “shouldn’t they be doing something productive, like culling wombats from their backyards, instead?”

WordPress, in its wisdom, hides a lot of search results — apparently google searches automatically hide the search terms that leads its users to wordpress sites, so I’ve heard (correct me if I’m wrong) — so most of the searches that lead people to my blog are redacted. However, there are some gems in there, and reading through them never fails to make me laugh. In particular, I get a lot of enema-related searches, due in no small part I’m sure to the post I made last year about giving my son an enema. (It remains one of the most frequently visited on this site, despite also being one of the shortest, and contains, sadly for visitors no doubt, very little information about the actual giving of the actual enema.) But not all of the searches are tied up in poop. Here are some of the best ones this year, so far, and I have tried to theorize about what they mean.

“he hadn’t pooped in five days” — quotes were included, not by me. Okay, so searches about enemas notwithstanding, searches even tangentially tied to poop can still land you here. Maybe I need to examine my lifestyle.

how to write a charasmatic [sic] valedictorian speech — I don’t write about it much any more, but I am still a high school English teacher, and I did write some (I feel) helpful posts about speeches. I am pretty sure I spelled all my words correctly. Charasma seems like one of those things you don’t want to exude so much as perhaps see your doctor about.

my wife is an overachiever / homemade wife overachiever — I’ve written now and then about my wife and how she’s better than me in practically every way. I am not sure what a homemade wife is, but I can only assume that the searcher has built an artificial wife out of toaster parts, and is pretty proud of himself for doing so.

occams parenting — I am pretty sure this is not a thing, but if it is, I don’t know if I want to be associated with it. Razors and children don’t usually play well together, and I do not endorse this product.

arsenal never give up — In addition to being a high school teacher, I am also the coach of a high school soccer team, and mentions of that have crept in here from time to time. I can only assume that this is somehow related to the Arsenal football team (that’s proper football, not American football), although I must recognize that it may also be about maintaining and not relinquishing your own personal arsenal of automatic, lethal, and totally necessary weapons for “home defense”. Because America.

poopy toddler story — I won’t lie, I tag all my relevant posts with “toddler poop stories” so I guess this shouldn’t surprise me. Still, the fact that somebody is out there searching for such things is firmly in the neighborhood of troubling.

parental exhaustion — yup. You have come to the right place.

jenker what does in mean — Language are no meaning. Jenker in cat. Cat only cat.

freelance exorcist — the searcher, who I can only assume has a very real problem and is looking for a very real solution without all the red tape of dealing with procuring a legitimate (lol) exorcist from the legitimate Catholic church, was probably disappointed to be directed to my blog full of drivel about toddler poop and dubious writing advice. Still, that’s more views for me.

mum and daughter strengthen bonding by pooping together — *heavy sigh* I guess the family that poops together…

Maybe it’s time to accept reality and re-write my blarg’s tagline: “your internet destination for poop: figurative, literal, and copious.”

Kid Art: In which my 3-year-old teaches me a thing or two about creativity

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I’ve been sitting around for the past couple of days when I have a spare minute, watching my son playing with his new chalkboard table.

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Just a sidenote: if you have kids, and the kids are in any way artistically inclined, you owe it to yourself to make one of these. Just take any old crappy coffee table, go to Home Depot and buy a $15 can of chalkboard paint, lay down a couple of coats on top of the table, and let it dry overnight. Easiest and most rewarding DIY project I’ve ever undertaken.

Anyway, my boy has a dubious approach to the thing. He loves coloring but lacks any kind of… I don’t want to say the motor control, because he seems to be doing what he wants to do… what I’m trying to say is, the things he draws aren’t shapes I recognize from this universe. Everything looks like a sea urchin, or a squiggle, or maybe just one long shapeless line. He will draw these designs, over and over again, one on top of another, until the table literally looks like a bucket of chalk vomited all over it, then he will gleefully take a rag, wipe the table clean, and start anew.

The crazy thing is, he knows what he’s drawing. I can point to this squiggle, say “Sprout, what’s this?” And he will say, confidently, “apple.” Point to this two-foot-long wobbly line: “water fountain.” This wonky-looking unidentifiable polygon: “dinosaur.”

Which is, in itself, adorable and delightful; hours of fun just asking the boy what he’s drawn and trying to imagine how exactly he sees these things.

But it goes a level deeper.

Because sometimes, he’ll decide to draw something himself. “I going to draw a car.” Okay, sprout, go ahead. *scribble, scribble.* He works with such intensity sometimes that I find myself looking over his shoulder to see exactly how he’s going to describe the shape of a car. Of course he isn’t. It’s just a shapeless blob of color. But he will finish, stand back to admire his work, and say, “Oh, that’s not a car, that’s a banana.” And then go on drawing something else.

Or I’ll ask him to draw something. “Draw daddy,” I’ll say, and his eyes will light up with glee, and he’ll begin the painstaking, arduous work of outlining my bald head and bugging eyes and ha ha just kidding, he scribbles a little bug-splat of color, stands back and looks, and announces to me, “Oh, that’s not daddy, that’s blocks.”

This little game simultaneously cracks me up and creeps me out, because I know he knows his shapes from any of the myriad of little puffy books or kids’ youtube videos we’ve looked at together. He can identify a triangle without batting an eye, can tell the difference between a duck and a penguin, and knows his boats from his spaceships. He knows things. But he also has the ability to recognize his nonsensical artistic representations of these things as these things, despite the fact that the two bear no resemblance whatsoever to one another. And I know he’s not just making it up, because he can lay down five or six spaghetti-tangle pictures which he names as completely different things than he originally set out to draw, and then he can point to each one again and tell me what it is with 100% accuracy. And I’m sorry, if he’s just making this stuff up off the top of his head, I don’t think he has the wherewithal to piece together a fiction. I really think that to him, that squiggle somehow says, “dinosaur,” while this one says, “grocery store.”

It’s a nifty little parlor trick, I guess, for a three-year-old to be able to do, but I started thinking about the boy, and I started thinking about creativity and art in general, as is my wont, and then came the lightning strike moment. The moment where the mundane, not-at-all special and completely-by-accident whimsical actions of a toddler shake my preconceived notions of the world to the very roots.

How many times have I found myself banging my head against a moment in a story? A character who just doesn’t seem to behave the way I want him to? Or a fiddly bit of plot that just won’t jive with the pieces all around it? Or an element that I need for the story to move forward, but I can’t figure out how to work it into the story? Or, maybe, the problem is more intrinsic to the story: I’m trying to write a science fiction thriller but it detours into comedy, or I’m trying to write a lighthearted romantic-comedic bit, but suddenly things feel all melodramatic? I always talk about how stories have lives of their own, how the characters have drives and desires buried within them that are sometimes a surprise even to me, but I still find myself trying to force square pegs into round holes. No, the story is meant to be this way. No, I need to focus on this aspect of the plot now. No, I’m trying to send this thematic message.

But not my son. The art takes him in a new direction, he’s happy — even ecstatic — to detour and abandon the thing he thought he was working on. The story changes, he changes with it. He has no preconceived notions of what it should be, there is no consideration for creating the wrong thing. The thing he creates is fine by him, whether it’s what he set out to create or not.

And I think that’s pretty freakin’ awesome. Because when you don’t get hung up on the problems in your story, when you don’t wander off into the bog of unrealized expectations, you can process the project in front of you with the unbiased perception of… well, of a child. To a kid, things are what they are. And there’s nothing wrong with that.