Tag: Writing

Time Will Pass.

Pavowski2 Comments

GOD.

That last post is depressing the haberdashery out of me, and I’m afraid I just can’t let it stand. I’m not going to bed with that kind of negativity bouncing around in my skull. (Yeah, I’m already prepping for bed at 8:30, WHO WANTS Some?!) (I totally do not want some. Please just let me go to sleep.)

Here, then, is a little bit of positivity and productive inspiration. I discovered this quote about a year ago, and I guess it built a little rat-hole in my brain. It really resonates with my current obsession. I rediscovered it over at Doyce Testerman’s website and I’m stealing it for posterity.

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Doyce Testerman, btw, is the second most British librarian-slash-villain name ever, superceded only by Benedict Cumberbatch. Heart Sherlock.

TOYS.

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I am obsessed with toys.

Not the toys that my toddler leaves strewn about the house.  Those haberdasheryspawned contraptions of plastic and plush and cacophony without cease are the stuff of my nightmares, and I’m convinced that, when I have shrugged off this mortal coil, if hell is waiting for me, then at least one level of it will be a simple living room floor covered with toys that, much like the severed heads of the hydra, only spawn more toys when I try to clean them up.  An ever-growing, inescapable bramble patch of sharp-edged Legos waiting for my tender underfoot, a never-flagging symphony of bells and xylophones and singing woodland creatures.

Ahem.  Not those toys.

I’m talking about adult toys.  NO NOT THOSE ADULT TOYS.  Toys for grown folks.

The problem is, they don’t really make toys for grown folks.  There’s a toy section at Target (Yeah, Target, because FARGO WAL-MART), but it’s for kids.  Toys for grown folks underwent some serious branding a long time back and are now known as “accessories” or “programs” or “electronics” or whatever other title the little odds and ends are for whatever fascinating little squirrel-hole of a hobby you find yourself falling down.  My holes are reserved for things like running and writing and watching movies and maybe I should rethink the phrasing of this sentence.

I should make something clear at the outset here.  I’m a packrat.  It’s awful.  I love stuff.  I really do.  The American credo of getting as much as you can (that’s a thing, right?) has found a happy little home in my brain and I feed it at every opportunity I get.  I find a hobby, or a thing that I love, and I buy all kinds of little useless crap that has anything to do with it.  I’ve got a storage tub full of decks of cards from when I went through a card tricks phase a few years back.  I’ve got boxes in the garage filled with little action figures (THEY’RE NOT DOLLS, SHUT UP) from cartoons (okay, anime) I watched in college.  I’ve got dusty plaques and trophies from when I was less than ten years old.  No less than four sets of serious-ANTZ darts (because, yeah, darts were a thing for me for a while) — the ones that come with their own little carrying case and you have to screw the whole shebang together, feathers and all.  A personalized goldfingered bowling ball from when I was in a bowling league at the age of fifteen.  It’s not memorabilia.  There’s no sentimental value.  It’s my STUFF, man, and I’m a-keepin it.

So I hoard stuff.  And my wife hoards stuff, too.  Like opposite ends of two magnets, we attracted one another, except that like magnets would repel each other, and we’re the same, so the metaphor kind of falls apart at this stage, but sharknado, I’m on a roll here.  Our garage is not a place we like to show off to people.  It’s a repository of our shames.

Because, make no mistake, there is bountiful shame.  I know that, on many levels, it’s ridiculous to have all this stuff.  Who the haberdashery needs thirty decks of playing cards?  And yet, I can’t get rid of it.  Even as I profess to strive for minimalism and simplification in my more recent years, the demons of my past keep working behind my back.  Organizers to decrease desk clutter?  Yes, I’ll take two, and try them for a week, and then put them on the pile of clothes that I keep meaning to donate out in the garage.  A fancy new bag to keep my job stuff organized as I go back and forth from home to work and back?  I’ll take one in blue AND black.  One will live in the back of my car; I will call him Tim, and feed him empty tin cans and drive-thru receipts.  BECAUSE I KEEP THOSE TOO.

New hobbies?  New toys.  With running, it was new shoes, the soles lined with the down of angels to comfort my delicate feet, new socks made of synthetic fibers to absorb shock and sweat (socks that actually care which foot you put them on – seriously, I had never seen socks emblazoned with tiny L’s and R’s before I took up running), a fancy watch which can triangulate my position and tell the government (I mean me) how fast I ran that mile, what neighborhood I ran it in, and how long I was meeting with the terrorist operatives in the woods (wait, what?), new shirts woven of mystical threads to provide legendary comfort and style, hats, gloves, shoes, headphones, all of which are covered with little reflecty bits to ensure that I am not struck by oncoming traffic whilst I’m out pounding pavement when the rest of the world slumbers.  They say running is cheap — all you need is your shoes and you can head out the door.  The romanticism of that idea drew me in.  I shudder to think how much money I’ve “saved” by taking up running rather than or instance shelling out for a gym (which I would not have gone to, that’s off topic, STAY ON TOPIC).

Now, writing!  I am new to Serious Writing (about as new as this blog is, which is to say, not quite a month in), so my list of purchases is still rather short.  BUT NOT NONEXISTENT.  I am typing these very words on a spiffy new bluetooth keyboard with my tablet (the bluetooth keyboard actually makes the tablet totally decent to write on). I bought some e-books, which DON’T COUNT because they don’t take up space, but yeah they still count because they are still representative of my inner slobbering consumerist packrat self.  A new bag, to facilitate carrying the tablet and keyboard as well as my other stuff going back and forth between work and home (yes, I got a new bag a couple paragraphs ago, just… okay?)

And apps!  Holy schlamoly, there are so many apps out there for writers, it’s a wonder that writers haven’t buried the world in the pages produced by all the productivity they’ve gotten out of all these apps. (Because a thing that writers definitely do NOT do is buy all these toys, read all these things, download all these apps, and proceed NOT to write anything of value, right?  Right??)  Dictionary apps and thesaurus apps and blogging apps and word count apps and timer apps to make sure you work undisturbed until time is up and apps that shut down the Internet while you’re working and apps that do all of these and also pour you a nice cup of coffee, just kidding, unless you’re reading this from the year 2020 because surely by then there will be an app for that, right?

My favorite at the moment is a little word processor called WriteMonkey, a stripped-down plain text editor which aims to eliminate distractions and allow you to focus on your writing without the urge to check e-mails, surf the web, watch an hour’s worth of Mental Floss videos… to be fair, the urges are still there, but the program blacks out everything else on your screen, theoretically making it more difficult for you to indulge your urges.  Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. It operates pretty well as advertised.  But the big dumb draw of it for a distractable donut like me is that you can toggle on these little keyboard clicks to make it sound (and, if you’re really into it, look) like you’re typing on an old-school typewriter, complete with a cheerful ding when you hit return.  I know, it’s dumb.  But it sucks me in, man, like a brand-new Dyson.

I punched out a solid 1400 words today to the soft ratatat of classic typewriter keys today, and left myself well-poised to jump right into Tomorrow’s writing (getting started is the toughest part).  Who knows how long these new toys will hold my focus, but I’m gonna keep working them as long as they’re working.

So.  Many.  Things.

Forty Two Pages

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Another week in the bag, another few thousand words on the page. I finished today’s writing on page 42, which has a happy significance for me. You sci-fi geeks out there won’t need me to explain this, but my wife will.  Seeing as she reads this pile from time to time, it’s better if I […]

Super-Secret Hidden Writing Goals

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I am pleased to report that I made my writing goal for today.

I am less than pleased to report that it’s the 4th day in a row in which I have just barely made my writing goal for today.

Disappointment over not exceeding goals is sort of a first-world problem to the stars; this I fully realize.  Truth be told, though, 900 words daily for five days every week is not the “real” goal.  Okay, it’s the goal I talk about and it’s the goal I won’t allow myself not to meet.  I understand it’s maybe even still a little bit of a lofty goal for a guy like myself with a full time job and a full time baby and a full time wife and a full time distractable streak hold on while I get a cookie.

Where was I before I ate that ENTIRE BAG OF COOKIES??  Ah, secret goal.  Yes, the 900 words is the public goal, but the secret goal for my id-writer half is more like in the range of 1200-1500 words daily.  “Why two goals,” I hear myself asking myself.  “Because,” my self tells myself, “the first goal is for your baseline don’t-feel-like-sharknado-goal so that you can have the sense of accomplishing something for the day.  It’s the congrats, you got up and put on pants today – you have officially reached the bare minimum for living in society, you may now relax goal.  It’s not the goal you strive for, it’s the baseline standard you set for yourself.”  “What kind of sadist (masochist?) sets a crazy-ANTZ goal like that for himself,” lazy me further asks, “it’s bad enough I’ve undertaken this writing project in the first place, now I have to deal with a bare-minimum goal that’s higher than it really needs to be AND a super-secret psycho goal?”  “Only if you want to feel a soul-saturating sense of true accomplishment.”

Lazy me then kidney-kicks Overzealous me and curb-stomps his neck.  And overzealous me has gotten curb-stomped a fair bit this week.  While the soul-saturating sense of true, deep, secret second goal accomplishment is nice, it just hasn’t happened this week.  Maybe I’m coming down off the high of committing to this project, maybe it’s because I’m about to start the murky middle of the book, maybe it’s because the freaking bottom dropped out of the temperature outside and my lizard blood is cooling in my veins.  One way or another, I just haven’t been able to push through and go the extra mile this week.

This is the same problem that led to my running injury, of course.  The desire to be greater than the challenge rather than just meeting it.  Had I been satisfied with simply starting back to running a little bit at a time following a minor injury, odds are I could have avoided overdoing it and borking things even worse than before.  (By the way, I borking love the Swedish Chef.)  Similarly, if I could just be pleased with myself for meeting the public goal, I wouldn’t have to deal with the sense of shortcoming that I’m suffering on the inside from not meeting the real goal.

Having two goals suddenly strikes me as kind of dumb.  But then, id-writer says NUT UP, SOLDIER, AND WRITE SOME FARGOING PAGES.  This little internal feud is not likely to get resolved or to go anywhere, so I just need to make sure it keeps pushing me forward.

This kind of circular thinking was almost certainly driving my words today; I slipped into a much more verbose, Douglas Adams-esque prose, which never fails to make me smile.  Problem is, I fear it may be a little bit too verbose to be viable if I want to move toward actually getting this thing published.

HOWEVER STILL FURTHER, the first draft is not a time for second-guessing or over-editing.  The important thing is getting the words down.  I accomplished that, and while I don’t know if the way I’m telling the story is right, the story I’m telling definitely feels right.

Here’s a bit of the text in question.

  • “Still,” the reader might protest, “a live chicken?  Surely the ability to produce such a thing at will is nothing short of magical and should, therefore, be outside of the realm of her ability.”  Too right.  And were the muse in question any other than the muse of comedy, the reader would indeed be correct.  However, being, as she was, the muse of comedy, Thalia always kept chickens around in various iterations (live, on the verge of laying eggs, shedding feathers crazily, cooked, rubber) because the comedic possibilities really are inexhaustible, as Gonzo of the Muppets would readily avouch.

    Comedy, however, was the least of her concerns at the moment; what Thalia wanted was a distraction, and as far as distractions which can be found in crummy apartments in metropolitan areas go, a live chicken will certainly do in a pinch.

     

So, I dunno.  Probably too wordy.  But it still kept me on track for today, and that’s 14 writing days in a row on track, and THAT AIN’T BAD.

Why All Parents of Small Children Should Learn to Love the Mall

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Taking a day off from work as a teacher is an odd proposition.

Sure, you get the day off, and you don’t have to go in to the office, as it were, but it’s impossible (perhaps I shouldn’t speak for the legion – for ME it’s impossible) not to think, throughout the day, “Oh, my 4th period class is starting right now.  I hope they’re getting their work done.  I bet STUDENTNAMEREDACTED is being a jerk to the sub.  I’ll make them all write a five-page essay when I get back.  Nah, no I won’t, that’s more for me to grade.”  Okay, I didn’t have to go in today, but I had extra work to make plans for today and I’ll have extra work to get caught up when I get back tomorrow and for the rest of the week.

This is why I don’t take days off.

That said, it’s nice not being at work.  Got to spend the day with my dear wife and the sprout and my sister-from-out-of-town, and it’s all pretty swell.  Took the sprout to the mall to let him run around before his nap because it’s a bit too cold to be running around outside today (shut up, it’s cold in the South today; I know, it’s colder up North, SHUT UP).  It’s been a while since I’ve done this with him, which is a shame.  There are only a few places that the boy is allowed to run around off-leash (meaning I can just sit and watch him play); one is the living room, which hardly counts, and the other is the mall before it opens.

Say what you will about how this proves I’m a hopeless zombie in a consumerist culture, but the mall is freaking AWESOME.  As long as you get there before it opens.  Before it opens, the mall is that rarest of things: a paradise for parent and kiddo alike.  Don’t believe me?  PICTURE IT:

You’re two feet tall.  You are learning to walk / run / speak, but your stick-in-the-mud parental units will hardly let you take five steps without scooping you up to save you from falling down the stairs or knocking over the dining room table or throwing pancake syrup all over the dog.  The yard is no better; you can run free but the units are always stalking you to make sure you don’t run into the road (where, let’s face it, all the real fun is) or fall in the sinkhole or fall on the driveway and crack your skull and let your brains leak out onto the concrete.  (Why do kids have a death wish?)  Then, you arrive at the Mall.  Huge, wide open hallways, most of them carpeted.  Enormous, wall-covering murals and windows presenting a delightful banquet of color for your tiny eyes to feast upon.  The walls echo as you shriek in delight, and your own voice fills the cavernous space with an aria of joy and wonderment as you stretch your tiny legs and careen off into the wide-open spaces feeling an exhilaration you’ve felt only in your tiny, lunatic toddler dreams.

Smell what I’m cooking?  Now, the adult side of the picture:

You’re indoors: there is no traffic to save the kid from.  There are very few people around: no potential kidnappers to guard against.  There’s a carpeted and cushioned playground: you can turn the kid loose without fear of him smashing a tooth out or breaking another goldfinger glass / plate / priceless Hummel figurine.  It’s large and spacious and full of ambient noise: nobody cares how much noise the kid makes, you might as well be in a baseball stadium.  And there are no toys.  I’ll repeat that.  THERE ARE NO FARGOING TOYS.  Toys which the kid strews in his wake like a deranged Santa’s Workshop Hansel and Gretel.  Toys with inexplicably sharp bits upturned for your hapless, tender underfoot.  Toys that overwhelm your home and your soul with their inexhaustible supply, a zerg rush of plastic and plush (whoa, I liked that).  NO TOYS.  *Beams of sunlight pierce through the overcast sky as a choir of angels begins to sing*

So I reiterate: the mall, for both parents and kiddos, is the haberdasheryfied sharknado.  BEFORE IT OPENS.  After the mall has opened, if you plan on taking your toddler there, just cut out the middle man and kill yourself.

Anyway, the sprout had a blast and holy god, he is getting fast.  Like, I can no longer keep up with him at a brisk walk fast.  Sailing through the air as he takes one leaping bound after another fast.  Faceplanting into a full scorpion-stinger fall when he loses his balance because he ran too fast fast.  It’s awesome to see, and it means that very soon, I’m going to be testing all the running I’ve been doing these past two years (I started, ostensibly, so that I’d be able to keep up with the sprout when he got bigger — well, he’s bigger now, by crackey).

So, all that excitement, and I still got a solid 1000 words in on The Project today.  Oh, and another thousand HERE.

Here are some of the best of them:

  • Part of him knew he should take action, defend himself or something, but all he could do was think about pandas and try to figure out how to stop his brain from vibrating.  The pain was exquisite, but more exquisite was the ringing sound in his ears and in fact his whole head, which as far as he could tell was a perfect b-flat.  Unlike a perfect b-flat, which sounds sort of warm and makes you feel mellow, this one was inexplicably painting his vision yellow.  Hands grabbed him roughly and conducted him to a chair where he fish-flopped a few times, casting his head back and forth, trying to remember whether he had one ceiling fan or, as his eyes seemed to be telling him, fifteen.

I just now realized that I rhymed “mellow” and “yellow” in there, and I am not at all sure if I approve of it.  Future me will have to decide if he wants to be a poet or just let it slide.  Okay, that one was deliberate and awful, and I apologize to the committee for the error of my ways.  FARGO.

Tomorrow is runday funday, so I will get to test out the heel again.  The word count has slowed to a trickle the past few days; hopefully I can finish the week strong.