Sooooo… I’ve been on something of a junior crusade against sugar lately. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that my 4-year old had three cavities filled not to very long ago … meh. Reasons aren’t important. I’m giving labels a little more of a look than I used to.
So he asked for waffles this morning (just now, in fact), and, well, you can’t have waffles without syrup. That’d be like driving to Florida with the windows up and the radio off. But wait — syrup is basically JUST sugar, isn’t it? And because of the sugar junior crusade, I peeked at the label:
Problem is, food labels are largely meaningless. Right side: chemicals schmemicals, blah blah blah. High Fructose Corn Syrup is basically the devil’s own heartsblood, yada yada. Whatever. We all eat chemicals, that ain’t my concern (this week).
Sugar: 43 grams. Well, dammit, we’re in America, what’s a gram, anyway? They might as well have said 1/18th the volume of your ear canal. (Herein lies the problem for Americans especially when it comes to this sugar thing: we don’t know what the hell grams are. Turns out the maximum recommended amount of sugar for a grown dude like me is between 40-50 grams. THE MORE YOU KNOW.)
1/4 cup?? Seriously? Who, outside of legitimately handicapped people with no motor control or 4-year-olds out of their parents’ view uses 1/4 cup of syrup for anything?
Ugh. Serving sizes. Grams. Chemicals. This parenting gig … who has the time to look out for everything you’re supposed to look out for?
Books are the lifeblood of the writer. Not just because we traffic in them, But like water, we depend on them. We cannot function without them.
But while water in its purest form is a thing we can’t live without, not all water sustains us. Thirst may be a thing we can’t survive, but if you drink muddy water from a scummy pond, you may soon have worse problems than thirst to deal with. The man marooned on a desert island reaches for seawater to slake his thirst and only hastens his death.
I think part of the reason I’ve been in something of a creative funk lately is because I haven’t been reading as many books — or I’ve been reading the wrong kind of books.
A little while ago, I reached for a book that I thought I was going to love: Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn. Flynn is the author of Gone Girl, which I loved in all its twisted darkness, so I figured another book by the same writer would be a sure thing. So I jumped into the book one night, and I read about twenty pages, and I just wasn’t feeling it. No big deal. I was tired; try it again another night. Tried again a few nights on — still nothing. Thirty pages in, it wasn’t clicking with me.
I should point out that this isn’t a review or an indictment of the book. My wife loved it. But it just wasn’t working for me. Now, I’ve got a stack of books on my bedside table just waiting to be read, but I’m this weird creature. I don’t love reading multiple books at a time. I like to take on one thing, drill through it, and move on to the next. If I read too many things at a time, I get overwhelmed, distracted. Like in that old Missile Defense game, where you’ve got like thirty missiles aimed at your base, and you can only blow up so many of them? That game stresses me out.
My blood pressure is spiking just looking at this picture.
No, I prefer to keep to one book at a time. But I also don’t like to leave things unfinished. So here I was with this book that I wanted to like. But I didn’t like it, so I didn’t want to read it. But because I wasn’t reading it, I couldn’t move on to other books I might have liked more. I had sipped from a scum-covered pond, and I was, as a result, not only thirsty for proper, refreshing water, but convulsing with dysentery in the meantime.
The bad book was clogging my system, and it was making me feel unmotivated and gross and even, stupidly, bad about myself. (Why don’t I like this book? What’s wrong with me?)
It sat there on my bedside table for a month, and I never got past page sixty. Shameful! And at the same time, I was becoming creatively blocked, as well. Unmotivated. Uninspired. Unproductive.
I don’t know what caused the wake-up, but one day I finally decided to dump the bad water out the window. I moved Sharp Objects to the bottom of the pile and picked up Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King instead. (Yeah, I know, I should be pulling my reading material from lesser-knowns, since I’m hoping to become a lesser-known myself soon. What can I say. I suck.)
And what do you know? Within fifteen pages, I’m fascinated and repulsed by the antagonist, frustrated and sympathetic to the protagonist, and before I know it, I’m 45 pages in and my eyes are drooping because I’m up way too late.
And — wonder of wonders — all of a sudden, a day or two after I ditch the bad book and pick up the good book, comes the thunderbolt from the blue that starts me off on my newest jag. (3000 words in so far. Not exactly awesome progress, but as I mentioned yesterday, it’s summer, and my Getting-Things-Done-ometer wobbles like a weasel in a windstorm over the summer.)
So here’s a reminder to myself. Read more good books. Toss out the bad books. Stay inspired and keep fargoing writing.
Also: bookwise is not a word, I was disappointed to find out. But it should be.
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.
And my wife and I are teachers, so that means we’re doing nothing at all for the next two months! … Because that’s what people believe about teachers, right?
Actually, I try to live as close to that as possible. You see the arguments break out online (because the internet is made of stupid arguments) between people who think teachers just chill over the summer and teachers who retort that they work just as hard over the summer. You know. Professional development. Curriculum planning. Building and organizing.
Hogwash. Summer is for slacking. I’m not saying those teachers don’t exist, but I did not catch that particular brain parasite that compels them to slave through the summer months in preparation for another long slog through another school year. Summer is the time for doing daddy things, like taking kids to playgrounds, to the pool, to the beach, and … maybe some day there will be time for doing some actual daddy things, too.
Problem is, it’s summer, and regardless of whether we’re working or not, we’re not going to work. Which is great, but it sort of screws with the concept of time. We build our schedule around a few set points: This is Monday, this is the working week, this is Friday, this is the weekend. And the workday is likewise punctuated: Here is when you have to get up, here is when you have to leave the house, here is when you need to gird yourself because that class is coming in with that child in it, here is when you go home, here is when you need to be in bed to do it again tomorrow. The routine is regular, necessary, and natural.
And in the summer it disappears entirely. You wake up everyday (or, more correctly, the kids wake you up) and it’s like, “what are we going to do today?” (The answer, of course, is: “The same thing we do every day. Try to take over the world.”) And you sloth around a little, or maybe you even wake up and exercise, and you rustle up some breakfast, and then what? Naptime is a long way off, and these kids aren’t going to entertain themselves, so you cobble something together — a trip to the playground or the pool or, and let’s not get all high and mighty or anything because we all do it, a movie day at the house. Then they sleep, and while they sleep, you try to restore some semblance of order to the house (because the kids have somehow managed to trash it, even if you went out to do something specifically to keep them from trashing the house). Then they’re up again and you have to figure out the afternoon and then dinner, and then you’ve got an hour or so with the wife before, holy crap, it’s bedtime again, and where did the day go?
I feel like I write this post or something very much like it every year, but that’s only because after six years of teaching and four years of daddying I still don’t have it figured out. Getting Sharknado Done over the summer should be easy. With no J.O.B. taking up eight hours of your day, theoretically there should be more than enough time to do anything that needs doing during the day, and a few things that you didn’t even know needed doing. Yet somehow, it feels harder than ever to find time for things like writing, or exercising, or playing fix-it around the house.
Why is that?
Is it just the kids? They expand and spread out like humanoid black holes and engulf time and space and your entire life over the summer?
Is it the lack of routine? The absence of the workday and the order it imposes on your time?
Is it the relative position of the earth and sun? The longer daylight hours tricking you into thinking there’s plenty of time left when in reality there is no more or less time than ever?
Is it the heat? Maybe it’s the heat.
All I know is, it’s hard to get stuff done over the summer. Maybe doubly so for teachers.
We start off summer like this:
And after a week, and for the rest of the summer, it’s like this:
I’m talking to you… the people who have no issue with sharing a bathroom with LGBT people. I’m talking to those of you who are speaking out about this bathroom policy, expressing concern over the women and children who you fear will be in danger because of this policy.
You’re reasonable people. You aren’t expressing hate or bigotry. You just worry. You worry about your kids, your wives, your sisters. I worry too.
I probably worry too much. I have always accompanied my younger kids to the bathroom in public places. When my son was too old to go into the women’s room, I…
Often, I rail against the mortal writing sin of “waiting for inspiration.” The fact is, you can’t count on inspiration. The muses are busy little bees, and if they only turn their divinely inspiring faces your way even every few months, well, you should consider yourself lucky. But you don’t get things done by sitting around, waiting for that to happen. Novels are not written with a muse perched over your shoulder, hmming and ahhing as you get to the good bits, putting whiskey into your hand just when you need it, and yanking you out of your stuffy crapsack apartment every now and then for the fresh air you so desperately need to keep the creative juices flowing. The muses have better things to do, and you should have better things to do than to sit around waiting for them.
Still, though, on some days the car just won’t start. Some days, you’re in between projects, and your routine is shattered, and you’re unsure what to do, and even the thought of opening up that blank document and screwing it up with your words is enough to send you into an existential spiral of doubt and dread and you go binge-watch Orphan Black instead. Some days, it’s hard to believe that you ever thought of yourself as a writer at all. Who does that, anyway? Who has the time or the creativity to turn out stories day after day, to think up new characters and conflicts, to flesh out entire worlds? It can’t be done. The authors who’ve done it are either fake people — computer-simulated AI programs that analyze market trends and tailor the storylines to what people really want to read. Or maybe they’re just independently wealthy people who don’t have to hold down jobs or families or any other inconveniences of living in modern society. That must be it.
These are the days that break a lot of folks down. They’re the days that broke me down in the past. “I just don’t feel like writing today, so I’ll start the new project tomorrow.” “I’m not sure what to do with this scene; I’ll just ponder on it until I figure it out.” “The story’s kind of up a tree. Maybe I just need to let it be for a while.” The problem is, momentum matters. “Tomorrow” turns into the next day, then a week, and so on until the novel you are writing turns into the novel you were writing, once upon a time. “Until I figure it out” becomes “until I feel like it,” which becomes the trash fire of “maybe I’ll get back to it one day.” “Letting it be for a while” likewise becomes “dust on the shelf.” You’re writing, you’re writing, you’re writing, and then poof, you lose the spark, and all of a sudden, you’re not writing anymore. You’re waiting.
For what? For the magic to happen?
Keep waiting. There is no magic in this world outside of the magic we create, so if you want inspiration, you have to seize it where it comes and drive it in front of you like a herd of goats when it doesn’t.
It shames me to admit (though I must) that I’ve been waiting for a while. Sitting back, letting my tomorrows turn into one days, letting my until I figure it outs turn into until I feel like its. I’ve had excuses. Good excuses, even! It was the end of the year; I was focused on wrapping up at school. I had just finished the AI edit, I needed some time to decompress before the next project. I wasn’t even certain what the next project wanted to be; how could I just start working on something with no guidance, no map?
Well, valid excuses turn into crap ones the longer you stretch them out, and I’ve stretched mine for about a month. And I wish I could say that I have seized gumption by the scruffy nethers and started shaping my creative expression like a sculptor with a particularly pliable bit of clay. That I hoisted myself by the bootstraps and threw myself back into the habit and started crotchpunching the sharks out of my way.
But the sad fact is, it took a visit from the muse to kickstart me into motion again.
Somewhere between trolling the internet, not thinking about writing too much, and mowing the lawn, lightning struck, and all of a sudden my brain is like a pack of jackals scrabbling against the inside of my skull. All of a sudden, the story demands to be written.
I’m not saying I wouldn’t have gotten started up again, but there’s no telling how long it might have taken. That scares me. More than a little bit. It’s humbling, this thought that for all I preach about the virtues of sticktoitiveness, of writing through every day even when the writing sucks, I got mired in the morass myself.
But you know what?
I’m writing again. And you know that thing they say about gift horses.
Welcome. This is my page for sharing projects associated with my coursework in Media and Technology at the University of West Georgia. Assignments will be posted here as they are completed.
Accidentally Inspired 