Tag: pontificating

Tone it Down (Pun intended, but I regret it now)

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I’m struggling a lot with tone today.  No, not my shower- or car-singing (always pitch-perfect, thanks very much).  That is, the way I’m saying the things I’m trying to say.  Or maybe it’s a struggle with voice.  The two are interrelated but not interchangeable, which is irritating in practice and maddening to try to teach.  Point is, the howler monkey of doubt is all up in my business about the words I used today and I can’t shut him up.

Accidentally Inspired is a whimsical kind of story about a whimsical kind of guy in a whimsical kind of situation. (See, that sentence right there is the kind of thing I’m talking about.) The story itself is playful and fun, so it needs to be told (correction, it BEGS to be told) in a playful, at times ridiculous kind of way.  BUT (There is always a butt, and there is also always a but).  The rules of proper writing, and good writing, and especially of intelligent and, probably, consumable writing, dictate that playful, whimsical, overworded writing gets treated with an axe rather than a razor.  When I go through and edit, I’ll be cutting off limbs, not whiskers.

But I love my playful, too-verbose tone, the Id-Writer protests, it works for the story and it works for me and I LIKE It GOLDFINGER IT DON’T MAKE ME CHANGE IT.  And I’m at war with myself, because on a lot of levels, I agree with him.  However, the Id-Writer and the ego-writer will eventually have to sit down and share a conversation, and I’m afraid that when they do, I’ll need to hire a cleaning crew to get the blood off the walls.  The ego-writer wants the book to be read, and to be accessible to everybody, and for people to love the story and the way that I tell it, but the Id-Writer only wants to tell the best fargoing story in the best fargoing way I know how to tell it.  The Id-Writer swears a lot more, and is (probably) more likely to bludgeon the Ego-Writer with a keyboard or a hammer or in fact anything else that may be handy, including my own precious pseudoganglia.  Are there pseudoganglia in the brain?  I don’t know, I don’t do Science (see below).

The more I think about it, the more it dawns on me that this is probably a problem (a probable problem, whee) best left for Future Me to deal with, not that Past Me and Present Me aren’t adding to the steaming pile that is (will be) is inbox on the daily.  Nonetheless, it’s bothering me now, and if it’s bothering me now, it’s gonna end up on the blarg, and here it is.

So how do I deal with voice and tone in the here and now?  I have no fargoing idea.  I hate to cop out, least of all on myself, but I really am at a loss as to how to fix this problem.  The tone of a story isn’t just window dressing.  It’s an integral part, a functioning limb in the Rube-Goldberg machine that is story.  The story-bone’s connected to the tone-bone.  (ahuh, huh.  I said tone-bone.)  Change the tone and you change the story.  The Tell-Tale Heart, if told in a humorous fashion, could very well be a humorous story.  Take the rhyme and meter out of Doctor Seuss and you’re left with a sharknado-ey yarn about a couple of bored kids and an asgard-hole of a cat and his two asgard-hole pets.

I guess that for lack of a better idea I’m just going to have to do with this problem what I do with 98 percent of other problems that have cropped up while writing this thing, which is make a note of it (see this blog entry), chuck it in Future Me’s landfill of an inbox, and allow my Id-Writer to toss back another creative beverage, press on writing, then run screaming madly into the night, leaving a trail of ink-blood and rent pages in his wake.

Say what you will, but that guy knows how to party.

If you’re reading this, help (Future) Me out.  Any thoughts on how to clean up my tone and get all my overstatements under control without totally changing the feel of my piece?

(Sidenote).  On the topic of I don’t do Science:

This weekend, while sharing dinner with my family, my engineer sister related a question from a very difficult engineer’s exam that she has just taken (results pending, but considering her average level of achievement, I imagine they’ll not only pass her but ask her to write the next version of the test).  I’ll do my best.  Say you have to replace 100 light bulbs in an apartment building.  Each bulb has a 1 percent chance to be faulty before it’s plugged in.  Say you take a random sample of five bulbs.  What is the likelihood that the bulb you chose will be faulty?  (I fully own that I may be remembering the question wrongly in order to make my answer seem righter.  Sorry, sis.)

Easy, right?  1 percent means one in one hundred.  Five bulbs means five one-in-one-hundred shots, which is to say five-in-one-hundred, which is to say one in twenty, which is to say, FIVE PERCENT.  This math I did in my head quickly before announcing my findings to the table.

My dad, a math teacher, just shook his head.  My sister, the engineer, did the same, and then said, “That’s cute,” before sharing a laugh with my dear, loving wife.  (NOT THAT SHE KNOWS MATH EITHER.)  Hear me now, and believe me later.  You don’t tell a thirty-year-old man that he’s cute.  That’s a good way to get a dirty look and a sternly-worded blarg post written about you.  If said thirty-year-old man does or says something that is so oversimplified and ridiculous that it doesn’t make sense to explain to him how he’s wrong (I’m not saying this is ME, okay, I’m just SAYING), the way to handle it is by nodding politely at him and telling him yes, not only is that correct, but you’ve brought a new level of simplicity to what I wrongly assumed was a very complicated problem.

Take that, sis.  You may be smarter at every turn (including the turns I haven’t thought of yet, because you took Calculus in college while I took creative writing) but you’ve now been lambasted in the immortal turns of the internet.  LAMBASTED I SAY.

Good Day / Bad Day

Pavowski2 Comments

What the sharknado just happened?

I was sitting here, polishing off the last of my lunchtime Diet Coke, writing the last three hundred words of my session for today, when all of a sudden I run, full on, into a wall.  The throttle was wide open on my Formula One racecar and some inconsiderate dude has built a cinder-block wall in the middle of the track.  I was soaring through the sky looking for my next mouse to devour and some entity has clipped my wings.  I’m in the cafeteria pounding down some spaghetti and mashed potatoes and the school bully has slammed my face down into my tray.

This is me!
This is me!

This is a hard stop.  A dead-end stop.  A flat-out, no-way-around-it, you-are-fargoed stop.  One of my characters has just realized (much to my surprise) that she does not want to be there; nay, that she CANNOT stay there.  That it is not only a dereliction of duty for her to be there, but that it’s humiliating for her to do so.  She not only CAN’T stay in the story as I’m imagining it, she simply WON’T.

My Id-Writer is chewing on the walls because he saw this coming: he feels as she feels, and he knows that this is a decision that I have to let her make.  No, deeper than that, he knows that it’s not a decision at all, it’s already done.  SHE’S GONE.  She’s leaving the hero and his sham of a quest in the rearview and heading for greener pastures.  IT’S WHAT SHE NEEDS TO DO, AND IT’S WHAT SHE WILL DO.  It can’t be stopped.  There’s no way around the grand canyon which has just opened up at my feet.  I’ve got to rethink a lot of things.

I’ve hit little snags with the story along the way — little surprises, little deviations from the master plan — but this is off the map.  I don’t know how the story continues if one of the two main characters leaves the other in the lurch right now.  But it will have to somehow, because I can’t go back and rewrite the things that led up to this moment.  Not now.  THAT’S WHAT EDITING IS FOR, snarls my Id-Writer, PRESS ON THROUGH THE DARKNESS AND SEEK OUT THE LIGHT.  He who turns back is lost.

Tomorrow’s writing session will be an interesting one.  I don’t know how I’m going to get twelve hundred words in — or even nine hundred, for that matter — with this goldfinger MOUNTAIN thrown down across my path.  I really don’t think I can, and that’s deeply upsetting to me, as I’ve not yet failed to make my writing goal in almost six weeks (!) of writing.  Thank goodness the weekend is on the horizon; maybe a few days to ponder will help me to unstick this problem a little bit.

So that’s the bad day.

The good news is, my foot is feeling awesome.  For the first few days after the podiatrist it felt rock-solid, then the immediate numbness of the cortisone began to wear off and I had a bit of soreness gnawing at the edges.  Today, however, is a new day.  I had a nice three-mile run this morning (with the dumb dog in tow) during which I felt no tweaks or twinges, and continuing through the day, the only weirdness I feel in the foot is right after I ice it, and that’s gone within fifteen minutes.  So perhaps, perhaps, a return to normalcy is within sight on that front.  Goodness knows I could use a nice two-hour run to work on unsticking my story.

This is Why I Don’t Go Out

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Last night I enjoyed a rare opportunity to go see a baseball game.

I love going to Turner Field, driving through the slums and parking in the shadiest of places to watch our overpaid athletes smack a ball around.  No, really, I actually do enjoy watching the games, I just can’t help but be extremely cynical about the sport and the costs and the everything surrounding the game itself.

You might guess that there is more to the ball game than the ball game, if you’ve been reading the blarg here, and you’d guess right.

It’s not a thing that I’m specifically familiar with myself, because it’s not a thing I partake in all that much, but apparently, sometime in the last couple of years, Turner Field has started selling adult beverages with actual hard liquor in them.  Personally, I think this is fantastic, because given the choice between getting gouged for $8 on a lukewarm beer and getting gouged for $10 on a watered-down margarita, I know where my hard-earned money will be wasted — where it will do the most good.  This, naturally, seemed to be the inclination of a good many patrons at last night’s game.

Before I get into the story, let me make the appropriate disclaimers.  I don’t mind drinking in public.  BY ALL MEANS, GO OUT, HAVE A GOOD TIME.  I don’t even mind a bit of intoxication in public, as long as it’s done the right way.   The right way to drink in public includes some of, though not necessarily all, of the following:

1.  A clear, decided-on-beforehand designated driver.  If your group is big enough, you need more than one and you need to know who’s riding with whom so hat there is zero confusion about who is and who is not allowed to imbibe.

2. Cash.  This depends where on the scale you fall between Bill Gates and, oh I don’t know, ME.  And it applies more at venues like sporting events, where stuff is really overpriced, as opposed to restaurants and bars, where it’s only reasonably overpriced.  If you’re paying with cash, then you know when you’ve had all you’re allowed to have.  Credit cards and drunk people do not mix well, unless you are the proprietor of a credit card company, in which case, let me cue up the cash register noises.

3.  A brain.  More specifically, the brains of the operation.  The group needs a leader, and while it could be the DD, it doesn’t have to be — the job of the brain is to assess the situation and LOCK SHARKNADO DOWN when it starts to get out of control.  “Oh, Billy’s had a few too many, let me get him some onion rings and a coke instead of a beer on the next round.”  “Hey, Charlene just bought a round for the table, she doesn’t make that much money, let me steal her wallet so she can’t buy any more drinks.”  “Hey, Ted, help me get Eddie down from the drapes.”

Our companions for the Braves game last night had none of these.  Let me clarify.  I’m calling them companions only because I learned so much about them, not because they were our partners in enjoying this spectacle of athletic prowess.

They were an office group (!) composed of but not limited to, Jerry, the boss, Martez, the gay one, Jenny, the quiet one, and a handful of sundry others whose names I didn’t catch, largely because they were too far away.  Couple of the older members of the group had their kids along for a night at the ballpark.  Nice group.  Innocuous.  Perfectly ordinary.

And then there was Leah.

Leah showed up hammered.  We could tell because she arrived to the group with a shouted, “HEY Y’ALL!  ARE THESE OUR SEATS?” Back over her shoulder, she bellowed, “I FOUND OUR SEATS.”  Back to her group.  “ARE ALL THESE OUR SEATS?”  Back over her shoulder.  “THE SEATS ARE DOWN HERE, GUYS.”  The caps are necessary because she was speaking in them.  She began to step past the others in the row, stumbling and holding her (first) beer up over her head, sloshing it wantonly about.

As she slid down in front of us, my actual group exchanged glances which spoke of the unending weariness we would surely feel with her before the night was out.

I can’t relate everything she did that was offensive.  There simply isn’t time.  But I did take some notes.  No, really, I did, because I always have a little notepad with me (never know when the Id-Writer will grab the steering wheel), and why not get some material out of an otherwise irritating situation?

 

It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!
It took me two note cards to write down all the crazy stuff she did and said!

 

I’ll start with the selfies.

Stop foaming at the mouth and put aside your feelings on the subject for the moment.  I really don’t think there’s anything intrinsically wrong with trying to document your life, and a selfie is an immediate, if a bit artless, way to do that.

However.

Comes a point when you need to turn outward and enjoy the Braves game / the panoramic view / the street riot / your own marriage proposal the way you were meant to experience it, which is to say, through your OWN eyes and in your OWN mind, not through the lens of a camera (sorry, the screen of a phone) and for the benefit of your social media “friends”.  At some point, taking a few pictures of yourself and your friends turns the occasion from “look at this amazing thing we experienced” into “look at how amazing we are, also this thing was happening while we were amazing”.

It’s the Sorites paradox.  You have a single grain of sand, then you add another grain to it.  This is not a heap.  Add another grain, it is still not a heap.  No single addition of a single grain of sand marks the moment when your handful of grains of sand becomes a heap, but suddenly, there before you, sits a heap.  Likewise, no single selfie marks the moment of transition from “amazing thing” to “I’m amazing, and thing”.  But the moment is in there somewhere.  I don’t know what moment it was, but it happened well before the 54th picture Leah took of herself and her friends.  That’s 54 pictures documented; I didn’t count the ones she took during the first inning or, for obvious reasons, when she was away from her seat (which was often, after all, those beers won’t refill themselves).

Then, lewdness.

Let me come back around to what I said about alcohol: in essence, DO YOU, just do it smartly.  Whatever gets your rocks off is between you and whichever Big Daddy you pray to, but some (most?) of it is simply not the business of anybody who is not you, ergo, don’t make it their business.

She spent much of the game sexting.

I know this, not because we were reading her texts over her shoulder (though that happened, eventually, because frankly, the woman was a living, breathing train-wreck we could not look away from) but because this became a topic of much debate among her group.  Her work group, let me remind you.

So she’s hammering away on her phone for much of the game, and somewhere around the 5th inning, Jerry (the “boss” of this group — and presumably, the man she works for, or who at least supervises her in some capacity) gets curious and snatches her phone to see what she’s so engrossed in when there is a perfectly engrossing baseball game happening just a few hundred feet away (oh yeah, we had pretty swell seats).  His eyes and his mouth get wide and he passes the phone back.  Things get quiet for a while.  Then conversation picks up, slowly, the way grumpy siblings start communicating with one another only by saying “he started it,” “no I didn’t,” after the parents have separated the kids.  Leah’s complaining about being judged, about feeling massive judgment.  She’s still drunk, so she’s still loud.

Let’s pause and evaluate.  Jerry’s stone-sober.  He’s the boss, or at least a supervisor.  JERRY SHOULD BE THE BRAINS OF THE OPERATION.  Jerry should have Leah on lockdown.  Truth be told, he should have kept her from drinking anything since the 3rd inning, but by this point, it’s obvious to everybody in section 218 that she’s off her Asgard and needs no further alcohol.  Let’s not forget that in the immediate vicinity are five or six co-workers, a few of whom have children with them.

But instead of locking the sharknado down, he’s commending her on her correspondence with whatever champ is on the other end of her dirty little fingers (ew).  And he gets her another beer when he comes back from the restroom in the 6th.

In the 7th inning, said champ sends her a picture of his, uh, situation.  She passes it around.  We all see it, too.  It’s awesome, in that way of giving us all things to talk and rant about on the drive home.  It’s less awesome, in that I feel strongly that there is a fixed number of, uh, situations that I should look upon in my lifetime, and I just wasted one on this idiot.

There was other bad behavior.  She kept throwing her head back to laugh and smacking the knees of people in my group.  She raised her arms in triumph after “winning” an argument with Martez, only to spill beer backwards on our shoes.  She had to have two hands supporting her to walk down the stairs in the 8th inning.

I occasionally have the thought that I really do stay in too much.  It’s bad enough that I chose a solo activity for exercise (running), a solitary hobby (writing), and I have a kid at home who needs my supervision and my time every moment I can spare them.  It makes me feel like a hermit, a recluse, that guy whose house the kids wander past and say “that weird old guy lives there — I heard if you say his name three times in the dark, he’ll appear behind you in the mirror and tell you to get off his lawn.”

Then I go out and cross paths with a Leah, and suddenly all my decisions seem right.

Seriously.  Friends don’t let friends get drunk and act like a fool in public.  Certainly not at the age of 33.  That was the saddest part.  She is my age.

4 Questions & an update

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Two Blargs in one day?  Shenanigans.

Actually I wrote 90% of the one about my feet last night so I can’t really claim it as today’s work.

SO: today’s blarg.

It’s Day 2 of Spring Break (the weekend doesn’t count – that was a day off anyway!) and it’s been pretty productive so far.  I had feared that it would be difficult to maintain momentum with my daily routine getting bashed up (write for thirty minutes or so on my lunch break, finish it up and blarg in an hour or so at home), but it’s been okay.  I got my Project writing done last night thanks to a bit of time granted to me by my dear wife, and today’s words came out courtesy of the sprout’s solid 2-hour nap.  And I’ll get some more blarging in besides.

And!

A favorite passage from today’s writing!  I fell off the ball with these, partially because it’s hard fargoing work carving out time for all the writing I’m trying to fit in, and partially because a lot of what I’ve been pushing out lately hasn’t been particularly … what’s the word… artful?  It’s good but it needs polish.  Not done cooking.

This bit, I think, is fairly sound.

Accidentally Inspired was, when I wrote it as a stageplay, a bit autobiographical, and now expanding it as a novel, yeah, it’s still autobiographical.  I think this bit was me pulling right from the heart today.

     “Sooner or later, you dig deep enough, you’ll hit the Bottom.” The capital B was evident – again, the gods’ phones have no difficulty translating intricacies of inflection and emphasis. It just sounds like static or wind noise on human phones. “And when you hit the Bottom, one of two things will happen. One: he’ll figure out that he doesn’t really want to be in that hole — not really — and then you can start to climb out again. Or two: the Bottom will cave in, and you will find yourself somewhere else entirely.”
“What do we do if that happens?”
Exasperation crackled through the ethereal wireless connection. “You figure it out, Thalia. Gods, are you a grown woman or not?”

 

WordPress has me at almost 40 followers now.  Pretty cool.  Part of that is community, and thanks to the content of what I’m posting here, many of the people seeing my brain-droppings (RIP George Carlin) are a part of a pretty significant writer’s community.  Collaboration is always a good thing, so I thought I’d acknowledge that some of those writing blogs out there have helped me and inspired me and given me some ideas along the way when I’ve been stuck.  So thanks.

In poking around on the WordPress reader, I came across this little tidbit posted by one of the first members to check out my blog and give me a follow, Jodie Llewelyn.  It made me think for a minute, and what I think about I usually end up writing about, so here you are.  Four little questions to tickle a writer’s brain.

1. Why did you start writing?
2. What do you love the most about writing?
3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

Here, then, is how I answer.

1. Why did you start writing?
I wrote my first creative stuff, real genuine doing-this-for-my-own-dark-and-slimy-writer’s-heart after playing a video game, of all things. It had such a great (to me, at the time) story that I felt compelled to write a similar story without the video game construct. God, it was awful.  (The game, if you’re curious and go way back, was Final Fantasy 2.  I wish I could say it was the much better and much more widely acclaimed Final Fantasy 3, but that one wasn’t out yet.  I’m sure it played a role, too.)

So my little story (I think ultimately it came out to be 100 pages of chicken scratch, or maybe about twenty thousand words or so were I to really do anything serious with it, like type it out, which I never did, because what do you want from me, I was a teenager, and a dumb one at that) was crap, but it showed me that anybody — but anybody — even dumb ol’ me, could write a story.  It wouldn’t necessarily be good, but it could be done.  By that rationale, I mean, they’ll let anybody drive.  But I noticed, after I wrote it, that there were bits of it that I didn’t like.  That didn’t work.  So I edited it, by hand, in that crappy little spiral notebook, and continued to do nothing with it.  I just retooled it a little here and a little there, until I got tired of it and forgot about it.  I think of it fondly now, not because it was good or because I may return to it (not ever going to happen in this world or the next), but because it’s a pinpoint of cosmic get-your-head-on-straight guidance.  A beacon in the dark of doubt and misgivings that swallow up, I think, many a writer, not least of all me.  If a dumbANTZ (I really have to get some better gouda for the a- word) fourteen year old can punch out a twenty-thousand word little fantasy story, how can my thirty-something-year-old self, with his nearly infinitely grander life experience, measurelessly improved vocabulary, and unfathomably deeper ability to overstate and belabor a point FAIL at writing a complete novel?  It’d be an insult to that pimply-faced fourteen year old.  And I won’t do that to you, Past Me.  You had it rough, back then.

2. What do you love the most about writing?
The raw, maker-and-breaker-of-universes feeling. And the release of psychic tension. I said psychic when I meant to say intellectual, but I’m sticking to it, because I am the maker-and-breaker-of-universes and surely the maker-and-breaker-of-universes says what he means and means what he says.

But honestly, I’m not an Alpha guy.  I don’t know if Alpha guys (or gals) even have the inclination to be writers.  I could be wrong.  But there it is.  I’m not afraid of people – far from it.  I just prefer to let other folks take the lead most of the time.

But.

Give me some fake people?  Let me tell a story, let me decide the conflicts, the combats, the pitfalls and the possibilities?  Ooh, brother, it’s on like Donkey Kong.

So yeah, then there’s the intellectual tension.  In the last month, I’ve found that I feel clearer of mind, quicker of tongue, and in general a little happier.  Given the fact that my running is in the ditch and I have no other physiological cause to chalk all this up to, I can only imagine that the writing is playing the primary role.  I think the main project is great for focusing my mind and keeping me lasered in on what I’m trying to do, and my blarg is doing a bloody brilliant job of siphoning off the ancillary thoughts, clearing out the clogged mental pipes and generally just burning out the gunk that the average day’s crap pumps into my brainholes.

3. What goals are you working towards, right now?
Finishing — really finishing — like, for serious, really and truly nail-in-the-coffin finishing — my first novel. Also, developing some ideas for future novels so that I won’t have what happened last time I finished a creative project — I stood around for a while, thinking “what now”, couldn’t think of anything, and quit — happen again. The construction of that sentence is correct, and again, maker-and-breaker-I-do-what-I-want.

I’m not sure I ever felt better in my life about myself as a human than after I finished, really finished, the stage play of Accidentally Inspired and saw it to a full production.  Except maybe for the birth of my son.  Yeah, usually sappiness has no place here but I’m a relatively new dad and about to be one again, what can you do.  (Obligatory – my wedding day was pretty great, too, but heck, anybody can get married.)  It slipped away from me then because I lacked direction and didn’t know what to do next, once that was finished.  A mistake I don’t plan to run into again.  Between the blarg (where I vent what’s in my brain on the regular, and which is quickly becoming a repository of little novel seedlings vis-a-vis my growing collection of flash fictions) and the spin-off ideas that creep in there when I overhear snippets of conversation or just, I don’t know, where do ideas come from?  They come, and I write them down now (something that, again, I have neglected for far too long), and I’m saving them until they’re ready.  I’m not actively thinking about them, but even when I’m working on AI, I can feel them back there, bubbling away in the dark.

4. What advice do you have for other writers who may be struggling with a lack of inspiration, right now?

This is one I really feel entirely unqualified to answer, because I’m just bouncing back onto the horse myself after getting thrown off it, what, seven or eight years ago?  (God, kill me.)  But in my short experience at capital-W Writing, here’s what’s working so far:

Write off topic or read. Writing about something unrelated to your focal project has, for me, a way of unstopping the pipes and burning out the gunk. Reading — whether it’s good lit or bad — fills my head with all kinds of ideas — new storylines, phrases, voices, characters, conflict structures, paces, artful misspellings, the list goes on — that, after a while, I can’t wait to bring back and experiment with over in my shallow end of the pool.

 

 

 

 

So there you have it.  A few thoughts on writing from your resident Pav.  Maybe it’ll help you out, maybe not.  At any rate, it helped me, and that’s the point of all this, so consider me selfish, and turn the lights out when you leave.  I do my best thinking in the dark.

A Word About the Words

Pavowski2 Comments

Time-out.

If you read this blog in the past two weeks, you might have noticed that I am a fan of colorful language.  And by colorful I mean rude.  And by rude I mean naughty.  And by naughty I mean werty dirds.  (Fargo, there’s no good way to spell that phonetically.)

As I mentioned in a previous post, my dear wife has pointed out to me that due to the visibility of this little dumping ground of mine (and I mean that as an entendre), i.e. that anybody could see it, not least of which my students (fear for the future), I should perhaps be a bit more conscientious of what I post here.

In my head, I argued that conscientiously, I choose virtually every word I recreate here with love and care, and every word which I write here is exactly the word which I meant to write, unless I happen to be posting from the tablet, in which case all bets and all syntax are out the Goldfinger window.

I also feel that a good epithet is the spice of not just language but maybe also life itself, and by that rationale, saying, for example, that a particular sandwich was “a great sandwich” just doesn’t mean the same thing as “a great Fargoing sandwich,” no matter how much we want it to.  Maybe you like some smoked gouda on your burger, and maybe I don’t – but that doesn’t mean that the gouda has to come off the menu.  Gouda, after all, has only the power we give to it and no more.

However, I also know that my dear wife is smarter than I am, so the rational side of me got my foamy-mouthed writer half in a headlock and eased him gently into sleep for a little while.  And by eased him gently into sleep, I mean clubbed him with a DonDraper two by four to lay him out, and hit him once more for good measure once he was down.  Seriously, that guy hasn’t had his shots.  Keep your distance.

So while the unchecked-stream-of-consciousness-happy id-writer Me was napping, world-conscious, livelihood-conscious Me (Goldfingerit, there are so many DonDraper mes crashing around this joint) did a bit of reprogramming and spruced up the place.  To be specific, I stole a page from John Green and crew at CrashCourse and made some substitutions.  John cleverly uses the names of well known authors to stand in for his favorite unsavories; I like movies.  And characters.  And nonsense.  So I’ll use my own code.

So when you’re browsing through these halls of egotism, and you come across a word that sticks out, that just isn’t like the others, fear not, it’s simply the word fairy hard at work keeping this place semi-presentable.  She’s got a lot of Fargoing work to do, though, because I keep a pretty high level of Sharknado flying around this place at all times.  But we can keep it between ourselves, dear reader, you and I.  YOU know what I’m talking about.

Goldfinger it, THE WORD FAIRY, that’s brilliant.  I need to write that down.  Nobody touch that, I’m totally going to use it later.

Anyway, the words may have changed around here, but the feeling won’t.  I write at my best when I let it all hang out, even if it is thinly coded.  I have to say, though, that there is a certain liberation to cutting loose and letting all the gouda bounce off the walls.   Without actually calling it gouda, I mean.  Sharknado, I think my metaphor’s gotten convoluted.

Aaand now I’m hungry.