Tag: SoCS

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Finish Lines

Pavowski3 Comments

I’m very close to the end of my 2nd book.

When I was close to the end of my first book, I recalled something I read in Andre Agassi’s memoir, Open: that the end of a big match is like a magnet, both pulling you in and repelling you at the same time. The closer you get to the end of the project, the more your momentum builds, but the less you actually want to cross the finish line. Like a magnet, spinning off its poles until it doesn’t know which way to turn.

So, here, at the end of my second novel, I guess the muddled feeling in my head is to be expected. This week I’m writing the climax of the book, and while that’s incredibly energizing and the energy has me completing my daily writing goal in about thirty minutes, it’s also pretty terrifying. Because when I finish the draft, the only thing looming for me is the Edit.

And the edit is a fearsome beast, indeed.

Editing this thing will be a monster, because I’ve made so many changes along the way that the project probably looks like a plateful of soggy scrambled eggs in the rear view mirror. The list of fixes to make will be longer than a five-hour drive to the beach, to be sure. But I know that’s coming.

What I didn’t see coming — what was surprisingly and delightfully unexpected — was the series of things I’ve learned from writing this draft, as opposed to my first. My first novel was largely plotted out before I ever started writing it. This one… well, let’s say that it was about 10% plotted and it’s 90% off-the-cuff. I’m not a good planner to begin with, but this has been an exercise in embracing the whim of the moment and charging fearlessly into the dark.

Well, I can’t say fearlessly. Every step has been filled with doubt like the Kool-Aid man is filled with creepy Kool-Aid blood, but that hasn’t stopped me from hurling myself into the unknown. There have been a ton of missteps along the way. Lots of dead ends, lots of pitfalls, lots of bottomless cliffs disguised as comfy places to rest. But I think that there may be some sparkling gems hidden in the shrapnel of my passage. There just may be enough salvageable junk to build a functional story out of.

What’s the takeaway? Well, I guess in fairness, I can’t quite rightly say yet — I’ll check back in a couple weeks when the project is well and truly finished. (Or rather, when this leg of the project is well and truly finished.) But having one draft in the bag has taught me enough that any future writing project will be just about equal parts expected and unexpected.

Best you can hope for is to buckle up and enjoy the ride.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Neat Little Boxes

Pavowski2 Comments

The blarg has been populated overmuch lately with thoughts of death and of passing, and this is the last post on the subject, I promise. Happier topics are on the horizon.

But in the meantime, I have to reflect on the subject of burials. As much as I understand and appreciate the power and the lure of tradition and ceremony, I just don’t understand it. I never have, and I don’t know that I ever will.

There is something strange — I’ll even say, for me, unnatural — about making all this fuss over a dearly departed loved one’s body, draining it of its fluids and preserving it, saying these lovely things over it, reflecting on the life lived, and then carrying said loved one up the side of a hill to leave them in the ground.

Shakespeare once said, “We are such stuff as dreams are made of.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson said, “…We are part of this universe, we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.”

Moby said, “We are all made of stars.”

The things that make us up — the energy, the atoms, the dark unknowable forces of creation, whatever — move out of phase with our bodies as we die and return to the chaos that spawned us. Burial maybe slows that process down a little bit, but in the end, we all turn to dust. I don’t understand the point in putting it off by putting a body in a neat little box.

We are humans. We are more than the skin we inhabit. We deserve more than a six foot by three foot plot in the ground when we meet our end.

When I go, I want to be scattered over the ocean or over a mountaintop or maybe in the coffee of a bunch of pretentious coffee snobs.

…This doesn’t particularly jive with my theme of writing motivationals. Or maybe it does. But I think maybe mostly it doesn’t.

Ho hum. Regular programming will return next week.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Video Game Endings and the Writer

Pavowski6 Comments

Writing the end of a novel is something like the last stage of a video game.

A really long video game, that you’re playing through for the first time. And you find yourself in the last level — the final dungeon, the Temple that Houses the Big Bad — and all of a sudden, there’s that rush. It’s all been building up to this. There’s that moment of doubt: did I collect enough ammunition? Are all my magic spells charged? Did I re-forge my +9 sword of nerditude in preparation for this? But before you know it, the monster is upon you, and you’re in a fight for your life.

He looks familiar — he’s been hinted at throughout the whole game to this point, after all — but he’s got some entirely unexpected tricks up his sleeve, too, and within a few moments, you’re in the fight of your life. With reckless abandon, you reach again and again into the bag of goodies you’ve been collecting all along: plasma grenades, portable portals, chicken legs that somehow restore your health, hypodermic needles full of spirit energy. One after another, you deploy your best gambits, and one after another, they seem to have a tiny effect but they keep coming up short.

And, ultimately, you probably screw it up. Screw it up badly. You probably don’t do much more than leave a bloody stain on the boss’s knuckles after he beats you down; leave a greasy smear of your DNA on the walls of the temple.

So it is with writing.

You’ve laid the groundwork, you’ve brought your hero(es) to some grand, lofty conclusion, ready to face off with the demons (literal or figurative) that have hounded their every step. They’ve learned some things along the way. The story has built in a certain direction. And the ending you envision is right there, just at the end of the next few days’ worth of writing.

And holy crap, do you screw it up. The resolution to the conflict comes flying out of left field like a meteor, solving the problems but opening up all new ones. Or you realize that the conflict you’ve been building to all along is the wrong one. Or that the conflict is right, but your hero has changed along the way and no longer wants the ending you thought she wanted all the way through.

Luckily, the video game, just like writing, has a reset button. When you get to the end and find that you didn’t pack nearly enough rockets, well, you can just reset to an earlier level, stock up on rockets, and come around to the boss temple again, better equipped to deal with the monster awaiting you. With writing, you can re-write the story as many times as you need to to get it right. No judgment, no shame; you just go back and recreate your story, from the ground up, if necessary.

Point is, I know I’ve felt, at the end of my first novel and again at the end of this one, that I somehow had to stick the landing on the first try. That the ending I wrote would be somehow etched in stone, unchangeable. But nothing is unchangeable. That’s why writing is even better than video games. In the game, there’s only one path to the boss, one ending to shoot for. In writing, the end is whatever you want it to be.

The first time I made it to the last level in Bioshock, I spent nearly five minutes just running from the boss, trying to figure out how I could even find a window in his attacks to do something as simple as aim a gun in his direction. I didn’t want to screw it up, so I simply dropped into survival mode and ran for it. Then I remembered it doesn’t matter if you die in a game, and I turned and threw myself at him with everything I had. And yeah, I died a few times, but I learned the patterns and soon I was able to handle him without even taking a spot of damage.

So here, I find myself in the closing chapters of novel #2, and I’m feeling that same pressure: the ending has to be perfect, I can’t screw it up, I’ll ruin everything if it isn’t all rainbows and dancing unicorns. But to quote Marty McFly, “I’ve got a time machine, I’ve got all the time I want!” Which is doubly relevant, since my story features a time machine rather prominently. So, enough doubting, enough stressing, enough worrying. Time to go screw up this ending so that I can reset and fix it.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

The Weekly Re-Motivator: Light and Life

Pavowski5 Comments

If there’s one motif in literature the world over, it’s the struggle between light and darkness. Good and evil. Heaven and Hell. It’s often as simple and straightforward as good guy / bad guy: here the guy who fights for righteousness and justice and really good things, and there the one trying to subdue him, or even better, subdue the world the good guy fights for.

And that’s fine, and good, and even compelling, from time to time. But light and darkness are bigger than good and evil.

Humans crave the light.

It sustains us, nourishes us, protects us.

Our entire planet only supports life at all because the universe creates light by smashing the elementary blocks of matter together again and again.

The light of a fire at night means warmth, means food, means survival.

The light of the sun in the day means growth, means sustenance.

The light of a cityscape at twilight means vibrance and strife.

We sleep in the night because that’s when the monsters come out; only in the light can we see them for what they really are. We seek out the light because the light means other people.

Light, in short, is life.

Darkness, on the other hand, is the great unknown — it’s the monster lurking just out of sight, it’s the cold bleakness of night, it’s the blasted wasteland of a sunless world. Darkness is death.

I’m in the midst of teaching Beowulf to a bunch of, at best, mildly interested near-adults, who aren’t particularly interested in working to understand that basic symbolic dichotomy: that light means life, and darkness means death. The world of men, in the piece, is always surrounded by a warm golden glow: the glow of a fire, the glow of a nourishing sun, the glow of human heat. The lairs of the monsters, by contrast, are dark, bleached out, shrouded in shadow. Grendel attacks the halls of men and steals from their safe places the light of life; only when Beowulf arrives from across the sea, bringing the light of God with him, does light and life return to men. Heck, one of Grendel’s weapons in the fight with a demon in the film is a glowing artifact that he uses to light up the darkness.

And it got me thinking about my own works. This symbolism of light vs darkness, of life vs death, is so obvious, so simple, so hardcoded into our very brains, it seems almost silly not to tap into it. So am I using it? Well… yes, and no.

The hero of my first novel is struggling to overcome an insecurity, a lost ability. Along the way, the power is cut off in his apartment, and he is forced to write by candlelight; a shallow pool of light keeping the demons and his fears at bay. He invents new sources of light, but they are all artificial — only when he overcomes his tribulations and embraces his potential does he win the windfall that lets him put the lights on. (Okay, so that didn’t happen at all, but now that I’ve thought of it, IT’S GOING TO.)

In the second novel, things are a little more complicated. Machines have taken over the safekeeping of men, and their world is bathed with light, but a harsh, sterile, impersonal one. The blank, faded light of fluorescents, a cold light. Interlopers from another time and place arrive and slowly begin turning out the harsh light of machination, and the world lurches into darkness for a time, but little by little the darkness and the artificial light are replaced once again by enlightened human light; a blinding, all-illuminating force that drives the shadow out of all the dark corners and exposes the truths that have been forgotten. (Again, at the moment, this isn’t happening at all, but CRAP IT NEEDS TO.)

And I could write on and on about the play of light in my books, the way it ebbs and flows with the spirits of my characters, but my heart’s not really in it right now.

Because I fear my grandfather’s light is going out.

He’s been battling with infirmities and sicknesses for a while now, and in the last month or so, seems to have lost his spirit and his will to fight. He’s old — no getting around that — and seems to be making the choice simply to allow his candle to gutter out, rather than to rekindle it through artificial, uncomfortable, even painful means. This isn’t a shock to us, but that makes it no easier to bear. Life — and light — are precious and fleeting. We have them for a short, little while, and then the darkness takes us again.

Life is about the struggle with that darkness, and my grandfather’s struggle is almost over.

So, as a tiny disclaimer, my thoughts are likely to be a little jumbled up in the coming days or weeks. If the material here turns dark or nonexistent for a while, that’s why. Programming will return to normal as soon as we are sure what is normal in the first place, to bastardize a quote by the late great Douglas Adams.

In the meantime, I’ll leave the lights on around here.

This weekly Re-Motivational post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. Every Saturday, I use LindaGHill‘s prompt to refocus my efforts and evaluate my process, sometimes with productive results.

A Fresh Coat of Paint

Pavowski4 Comments

This post is part of SoCS. This week’s topic: Attachment.

We’ve spent the past 48 hours fixing up this old house, the wife and I.

That’s 48 hours of parent time, which is measuredly and markedly less efficient than regular human time, because parent time is punctuated regularly by appointments with a baby who is hungry, a baby who is sad, a baby who is upset, a baby who is angry, a baby who wants attention, a baby who is attempting to pull all the sharp things off the table and into her mouth, a baby who has somehow figured out a way to deepthroat the remote control that’s twice as big as her head. We even got her big brother out of the house and off to the grandparents’ for a couple of nights to buy us extra time, and we still spent the day scrambling. As a result, in 48 hours we got three bathrooms painted.

It’s a chore which, we realized after just a few hours, was about four and a half years overdue. (We’ve been in the house for five years.) For all that time, the walls have remained the same bland, inoffensive taupe, plus or minus the scribblings of our two-year-old and a few decorative pictures and photos. They say taupe is soothing, but what it is, really, is invisible and characteristic of nothing. Which I guess makes it the perfect color for a house you’re trying to sell: it’s a blank slate for prospective owners to color with their own hopes and expectations. Somehow, we never got around to filling it with those things for ourselves. We can blame it on the kids a little bit, but ultimately, we just hadn’t taken the time to do it.

And therein lies another realization. Why were we able to let this little thing go so long without being done? Why have we stared for five years at the same bland, inoffensive walls, without being overcome by the surge of frustration at the vacuous sameness of it all? Because we’ve never been particularly attached to it.

Don’t get me wrong: I love our house. It’s a weird kind of wonky style with lots of open space and plenty of room for us and all of our stuff. It’s been the empty husk in which germinated the pale little seedlings of our tiny family. It’s in a nice enough neighborhood, away from traffic, and with pretty decent neighbors. But I also hate our house. That wonky style is born of the 70’s, which is when the house was built, and you can tell, because parts of the house are starting to fall apart as you might expect things built in the 70’s to do. Underneath the taupe paint we’ve discovered layers upon layers of horrible — and I mean really quite atrocious — wallpaper with nausea-inducing patterns and colors. I’m talking about gold-and-green flowers on chocolate brown background. It’s buried behind the light fixtures and air vents, and any time I undertake a home improvement project, I’m always discovering the stuff, like little breadcrumbs leading me back to the house’s horrifying past.

At any rate, my wife and I are both feeling that it’s about time to move on. Our family has grown, and like a snake growing too big for its skin, we need to leave our old trappings behind. We need a basement. I’d like a study that doesn’t double as a guest room. It’d be nice if we could find a place that comes with insulation in the walls. It’d be peachy if the pipes in the new place don’t explode at the slightest glance from the gods of winter.

Our little project this weekend has shone a sharp light on just how ready we are to move. All of a sudden our heads are full of all the little things we need to do to get this place ready to sell: fixing up the porch, replacing carpets, painting rooms and walls and doors… the list is growing by the minute. That said, we handled three rooms this weekend, which is not bad for a sleep-deprived couple with a nine-month-old who still isn’t sleeping through the night.

Not that I’m complaining. That little girl, unlike the house, I am actually quite attached to.