An Interstitial Post

Current Reading: A Critter's Manuscript (still).

Inspirational Quote: "I have nothing to say And I am saying it And that is poetry." -- John Cage

I've been kicking around possible topics for a post for about two weeks now.

Unfortunately, I still don't have one and for the life of me I don't have a good excuse.

I've considered posting something funny, but the few ramblings I've put down have interested me to the point that I find myself thinking they'd be worth serious work. They deserve to become short stories:

"When yet another barbarian shows up to pillage the Temple of the Dark God, the temple caretaker has to balance defence with the needs of a God who's spent a little too long alone in the dark."

"When his orphan nephew refuses to leave the farm in search of adventure, Uncle Jed turns to the local watering hole for solace. Unfortunately, he discovers that his problems are far from unique."

I haven't done news commentary or a science-related post in ages, either. Unfortunately, the news is sufficiently dire that I have difficulty finding an entertaining angle and recent science news just hasn't excited me that much.

As for the more serious stuff, there's only so much a man can produce before going mad, throwing up, or writing a romance. I have no desire, at this point, to do any of those.

Still... I'm alive, and the blog is alive and here are almost 250 words to prove it.

Guides to Conventions and Cliches

A couple of valuable and entertaining references for writers:

The Turkey City Lexicon - A handy guide to common writing mistakes. It's a wonderful resource which provides a common language for discussing storytelling glitches. When I critique work, I run into a lot of Fuzz, a number of As You Know, Bobs and far too many idiot plots (which I refer to as plot-induced stupidity).

TV Tropes - Don't let the name fool you, because this wiki of storytelling conventions applies to every medium. When you're crafting character development, are you Flanderizing minor characters? Does your protagonist perform a Heel Face Turn? This isn't about things to avoid, it's about things that exist, a beastiary of story features and it's a fascinating read.

Giant Japanese Killer Robots

Current Reading: A critters manuscript.

Inspirational Quote: "The unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking, and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophes." -- Albert Einstein

Robotech. Gundam. BattleTech. I loved these things as a boy, but when I grew up I began to see that they lacked a certain realism.

"GJKR-114 Online."

"Watch it, you're falling over."

"Whoops! Neural helmet takes a bit of getting used to."

"I wish it were just that."

"Now I'm tipping over backward. What gives?"

"Gee. I don't know. Maybe there's a flaw in the whole idea of a humanoid robot with so many weapons in its torso and arms that it's seriously top-heavy?"

"Oh, geez. I think that was someone's house."

"Yep. 13 Rosedale Lane. Not a lucky number. I see you've put your foot right through their roof. Garage is gone too."

"I was trying to stay upright!"

"I'm sure the rest of the neighborhood appreciates your thoughtfulness."

"I thought this thing had gyros to keep it vertical?"

"Gyros designed by men who spent too much of their youth watching cartoons and built by companies who get work by underbidding everyone else. If you were expecting perfect functionality, I'm afraid you're in for some disappointment. I see you're finding your seat a little uncomfortable."

"Actually, yeah. How can you tell?"

"Neural interfaces are wonderful things. I've never seen a forty-foot tall robot pick at its butt before."

"Sorry."

"Could be worse. We lost our last test pilot due to a lapse in manners."

"You mean he was dismissed for insubordination?"

"No, I mean he decided to pick his nose. Pushed the index finger cannon muzzle right through the cockpit."

"My God!"

"Yep. Learned a lot from him before he left us, though. Did you know that sexual fantasies create the same neural patterns as the command to fire all missiles? He got, er... distracted during a test run and took out most of the base."

"I see the craters from up here. What about the north end of Pratt Park?"

"Combination of the napalm launcher and a badly-timed sneeze."

"The brass thinks these things'll inspire fear in the enemy. It'll work. I'm already terrified."

The Pursuit of Happiness.

Current Reading: A manuscript from Critters.

Inspirational Quote: "Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude." -- Denis Waitley

"The basic thing is that everyone wants happiness, no one wants suffering. And happiness mainly comes from our own attitude, rather than from external factors. If your own mental attitude is correct, even if you remain in a hostile atmosphere, you feel happy." -- The Dalai Lama

I find myself contemplating happiness a great deal lately, and I've decided to share what I know and the circumstances that led to that knowledge.

1) I can fly.

I'd love to be able to fly. Ask me what superpower I'd want, and I'll tell you "flying" without even a pause for thought. Sometimes I dream that I can just drift off the ground and up into the sky. While I'm dreaming like that, I have no worries. I'm just glad to be there, to feel the breeze, to drift. I hate waking up after those dreams because I hate being stuck to the ground again.

In the late nineties, I worked a contract job for I.B.M. Canada. It was a good gig. It ran two years and near the end of it, I was faced with an uncertain future. Penelope and I were sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a basement apartment, barely making ends meet, but it was a comfortable existence and seeing it coming to an end made me tense and irritable. Then one night, I dreamed I stood on top of a mountain cliff, near the edge. I was going over, pushed by something. I'm an acrophobe, and this is the kind of nightmare I get. Suddenly, though, I found myself thinking, "What am I so worried about? I can fly!" And I did. Suddenly the cliff and the fall were no longer terrifying. They were irrelevant. I woke up that morning with complete confidence that I was equal to whatever challenges the future held.

I don't need to be afraid. I can fly.

2) If I don't see anything beautiful around me, I'm not looking in the right direction.

Every morning I drive a half-hour to where I work. I listen to the radio. I think about the day ahead. Sometimes those things are cheering. Sometimes they aren't. One morning, after Aeneas had said something to cause Penelope to read the riot act, the news was full of death and the music full of sad songs. I was beginning to think driving into a ditch at top speed and hoping for instant fatality was the only sensible thing to do. Then I rounded a corner and found myself faced with a row of depressingly identical '70's sub-division houses. The sight just killed my soul, and I had to look away.

On the other side of the road was a ditch filled with reeds. It was early winter, one of those cold, clear mornings when your breath fogs up and a snap frost has given every puddle a thin crust of ice. Frost had gathered in beads on the leaves and stems of the reeds. In the bright sunlight, the ditch shone and sparkled like a field of diamonds. In that moment, it was enough to take my breath away.

Beauty is everywhere. I just have to let myself see it.

3) Every day is a good day.

A few weeks ago, a teenager in my town committed suicide. He was seventeen. I don't know the circumstances, and I can't imagine what had happened in his life that had suddenly made him absolutely unable to face his future. Earlier this year, two people close to me died: one after a long illness, the other suddenly. All those lives were too short, and one of them ended before it really had a chance to begin. In the face of that, the realization that all our days could end in a heartbeat, how can I not find some pleasure in every moment?

Things are not good now with my job. Morale is gone, and the only laughter I hear is the ironic or bitter. At home, my boys are becoming teenagers with all the worries and frustrations that have always accompanied these things. Life is rocky, difficult. And yet, this morning, Cassandra woke up and thumped downstairs to where I sat at the computer. I was trying to work on the Magnus Somnium, but I'd been struggling for days and the scene on the monitor right then was clumsy and discouraging. Cassandra was carrying her stuffed rabbit and a blanket. She said, "Can I watch you write?"

No living being can write with a four-year-old on their lap. If I wanted to get anything done, I should have sent her away. Instead, I took my fingers off the keyboard and let her climb up on me. She smelled of watermelon shampoo and milk from her sippy cup. She asked a lot of questions. Few of them made sense, and that didn't matter. I was listening to the curiosity and wonder in her voice and feeling how warm she was against me and marveling that anyone could bring themselves to leave a life before seeing the miracle of their own child. I'm not saying that, after this morning, I'm ready to go. I'm saying that I'll never look back and wish I'd sent her away.

Today I'm alive. It's a good day.

Rainbow Connection

Current Reading: Nothing, still.

Inspirational Quote: "I hear his name bandied about a lot, but I don't know him. I don't know who Henson is. He seems to have his hand in a lot of things around here, but I don't particularly know what that means." -- Kermit the Frog, on Jim Henson.

It is an established yet often overlooked fact that the Muppets have provided more entertainment than any collection of felt socks and ping-pong ball eyes could rationally be expected to deliver. As mentioned before, there is no upper limit to the Muppet content of this blog, and with that in mind here is my favorite Muppet at what is, for me, his finest.

Well, I Think I've Put This Off Long Enough...

Current Reading: Still nothing. Does that make me a bad man?

Inspirational Quote: "You may delay, but time will not." -- Benjamin Franklin

Note: I'm not a psychologist. I don't even play one on television. What I've done here is collected some information from web-published sources (much of it published by psychologists) and synthesized it into a whole that may or may not reflect effective treatment. If you have (or suspect you have) a psychological problem, stop looking for answers on the web. Contact a professional.

Since the causes of procrastination are not well understood, there exist a myriad of ways to combat the tendency with greater or less success. Some of them are quick fixes that rely solely on will power, the effectiveness of which I always doubt because you're fighting yourself and both of you are employing the same will power so it balances out. I'm also not a fan of the quick fix because, like duct-taping, it addresses the immediate consequences of the problem while doing nothing to actually address the problem. I prefer more in-depth treatments that work on the underlying causes of behavior. Unfortunately, changing habitual thoughts and behavior requires considerable time.

A lot of information about procrastination comes from educational institutions, since student procrastination is one of the most studied and documented forms of the problem. Most college/university counseling services offer informative cheat-sheets on how to overcome reluctance to finish a paper or study for a test.

A few actions can be taken to address mild forms of procrastination:

Plan:
Break down a goal into sub-goals. These sub-goals need to be S.M.A.R.T:

Specific: No vague, "work on the story," type of goals. Get detailed and concrete: "Finish first draft of chapter 14" is good. There's no hedging there.
Measurable: You should be able to mark progress toward your goal either in a "pass/fail" sense, or in a fractional/percentage sense. Not only should you know when the goal has been achieved, but you should be able to tell how far along you are toward that achievement. Word count goals are great for this.
Achievable: Make sure the goal is something you can achieve, and not just wishful thinking. "Finish final draft of chapter 14" is fine, provided you haven't set a deadline of midnight tonight and you've just written the first sentence of the first draft. Setting goals you already know you can't achieve is just setting yourself up for failure.
Realistic: If you've never written more than 1500 words in one sitting, it's unrealistic to set a goal of 5000 words a day. Use common sense and your realistic assessment of your capabilities to set a sensible goal.
Timed: The previous four letters specified the WHAT of your goal, but a WHAT is not truly a goal until you also specify WHEN. "Finish first draft of chapter 14 before Saturday" is good. "Write 1000wds/day" is good. "Work on the story Saturday," isn't.

Start off with small goals, even tiny ones. Often, some of the anxiety that causes procrastination comes from fear that goals are unattainable, that your goals are beyond your abilities. The best way to combat that kind of thinking is to start accumulating evidence to the contrary. Small goals let you see results right away, and give you confidence in your ability to meet more challenging goals. 1500wds/day may seem daunting, but you can look at writing 500 or even 100 and think, "Even blind, arthritic Aunt Milly could do that." It may seem pathetically small, but consider that 100wds/day adds up to 36500wds/yr: a third of an epic fantasy, half a YA, or even a full MG novel.

Plan on a reward for achieving your goal. The nature of that reward is up to you, but it should be something you enjoy. Lunch out. A new book. Twenty minutes under an apple tree admiring the sky. The reward is often a supplementary motivation for success.

Visualize:
Psychology tells us that those who clearly perceive their own success are most likely to achieve it. Imagine yourself working on a goal. How does it feel? If the emotions associated with working are unpleasant, try to figure out why (see the bit on Cognitive Behavioral Therapy below). What changes can you make to your perceptions to turn those negative emotions into positive ones? Imagine completing each of your goals. How does it feel to be done? If your only emotion is concern about the next goal, then reconsider the nature of your goals and come up with something a little less challenging. Allow yourself to imagine feeling relieved, elated, deserving of congratulations. Every accomplishment is a victory and should be celebrated.

Keep Your Energy Up:
Life wears one down. Stress and responsibility consume spiritual and mental energy constantly. If you do nothing to replace that energy, you'll run out. Exhaustion of emotional energy is one of the triggers for depression, and no-one can do anything well when they're depressed. So make time to relax and do something for the joy of it. Read. Walk. Meditate. Play.

Act:
Set aside time to write. Schedule it the way you do all your other important activities. Make it as much a priority as the kid's dentist appointment or reporting for work. You don't skip out on those, and you shouldn't skip out on your writing time if you're serious about this. You don't need much time. How long does it take to write 100 words? Twenty minutes? Fifteen? Five? Don't ever tell yourself you can't set aside enough time. The time you require depends on your goal, and if you can't find enough time to achieve your goal, then your goal isn't realistic.

Once you have set aside time to write, commit to it. Put your tail in the chair. Fire up the word processor. Write. Another frequent component of procrastination is the expectation of perfection: the words have to be right, and there's no point in starting until you are confident that they will be. That's defeatist thinking, because perfection is not a realistic goal. What is realistic is that you write something: 100 words (or 500, or 5000) of whatever occurs to you. They don't have to be the right words. They just have to be. Everything changes in revision anyway.

Assess:
Once your deadline expires, whether you've succeeded in your goal or not, take a look at your performance.

If you didn't achieve what you set out to achieve, congratulations. You're in the majority. However, step out of that majority by trying to figure out why you didn't succeed. Maybe your goal was too challenging to be achievable. Maybe you ran out of energy. Maybe you kept violating your writing time, or just stared at the screen instead of pounding keys.
Don't be hard on yourself, and don't criticize yourself. That you've gotten to this point is a tremendous step forward whether you're willing to recognize it or not. View the unachieved goal as an experiment and examine the results without taking them personally. Remember that you set the goal and the bar for achievement, and we're not the best judge of our abilities. If we were, we wouldn't need critique groups. In fact, it's unusual to set the bar at the right height the first few times as you explore your capabilities.

If you did achieve your goal, more congratulations are in order. Still, you need to take a look at your performance. Maybe your original goal was achieved too easily. You wrote 100 words in an average of ten minutes, and you had set aside thirty minutes for writing. Chapter 14 turned out to be only about 5000 words, and you'd given yourself a month to complete the first draft. Jumping over a high-bar that's on the ground is not really a challenge, and there's little emotional satisfaction in victory over trivial opposition. Next time, raise the goal a little bit. Don't set goals as high as you may think you can achieve given your performance this time, because initial enthusiasm tends to give a boost to production that quickly fades.

Examine your goals and, in light of your performance, modify them accordingly. Find the balance between challenge and achievement with which you are most comfortable.

Reward:
If you did succeed in your goals, then enjoy your planned reward. Don't put it off. You've earned it just as you earned your paycheck, and you wouldn't put off collecting that. Your reward is now positive re-enforcement of your victory over procrastination. It's encouragement. It's short-term payment for work in a field where the usual, tangible rewards are often years away.

Repeat:
Procrastination is a habit that cannot be canceled by a single act. It must be eroded, replaced with other habits, and habits are only formed by repetition. Set goals, visualize, watch your energy, act, assess and reward. The positive cycle of achievement will give your subconscious evidence of your abilities that will reduce the anxiety that pushes you into putting things off.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy:
Again, I'm no psychologist. I do, however, have some experience with using the following technique to modify emotional responses (see Mind over Mood in the Reading List). It's excellent at bringing subconscious thought patterns up to conscious awareness and providing a method for changing them.

When faced with a strong emotional response, as when sitting down at the keyboard and suddenly needing to do anything other than write:

1. Consider your emotions. What do you feel? Anxious? Afraid? Nervous? Write down every word that seems descriptive and accurate. Now rank these according to how strongly you feel them, and identify the dominant emotions.
2. Listen to your thoughts. What are you thinking when you feel these things? "I can't do this." "It's not ready yet." "The words aren't going to come out right." Write these down as well. Don't stop to consider or assess them, just write them down as they occur to you. Once you've collected a bunch, rate them in order of contribution to your feelings. Choose three of the dominant thoughts.
3. For each thought, gather some evidence to support it. When you have a few instances, gather some evidence to oppose it. "It's not ready yet." Go back into what you've written before. Find some examples of times when you wrote even though you didn't feel ready. Read them over. Can you tell you weren't ready? Can you fix them in revision? Do you think it will matter that you weren't ready at the time you wrote them? Try to be objective in your selection and assessment of evidence.
4. Based on your assessment of the evidence, do you need to formulate some new thoughts more in line with reality as you now see it? If so, write them down. Repeat them a dozen times.

A list of web references for the curious:
http://http-server.carleton.ca/~tpychyl/index.html
http://www.procrastinus.com/
http://sas.calpoly.edu/asc/ssl/procrastination.html
http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/procrastination.html
http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/pto-20030823-000001.html
http://ub-counseling.buffalo.edu/stressprocrast.shtml
http://webhome.idirect.com/~readon/procrast.html
http://www.learnmarketing.net/smart.htm
http://www.canmat.org/cme/interviews/inter_cognitive.html

Rejection, Where is Thy Sting?

Current Reading: Nothing, actually. I notice I had a reading break last year around the same time. I wonder why?

Inspirational Quote: "I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me." -- Lisa Alther

Yes, I've noticed I haven't finished up the series on procrastination. Don't look so surprised.

So let's discuss rejection.

It's a fact of life. Written work is statistically more likely to be rejected than accepted. It should be a default expectation, and anything other than rejection should come as a wonderful surprise, like finding a bloom in winter.

But the other fact of life is rejection STINGS. Good word, "stings." Very appropriate. It calls up a bee-sting: that quick, sharp jab that becomes a hot throb that seems to go on forever before finally fading. Someone has decided my work, an expression of my mind and my soul, of the things that make me unique, is "not quite right" for them. That hurts. I think my work is good, but I'm never sure if I'm being objective, or if my personal perspective has warped my judgement completely out of reliability. Maybe I'm deluding myself. Maybe I've come up against an objective measure and been found wanting. My story could be flawed beyond correction, maybe because of my flaws. Maybe I should find something else to do with my time.

Writers looking for publication have to walk a very thin psychological line. We have to accept that our work will be rejected repeatedly while simultaneously holding on to the hope that THIS TIME will be different. Although this may be easy for the incipient schizophrenics among us, those of us with lesser illnesses have a difficult time.

I've been out of the commercial writing market for a decade. Never out of the writing, of course, just out of the competitive selling arena. Things have changed. I have changed. In the midst of my efforts on the Magnus Somnium, I thought I'd write a few short stories. I decided to try and sell them as a reminder or a test or just a way to re-familiarize myself with the realities of a writing life. Well, it's worked. I'm familiar with rejection again. Ow.

One big improvement since my last attempt is the creation of the web and e-mail. I used to have to buy a copy of Writer's Market and spend a day reading every word of the science-fiction/fantasy section looking for prospects. Then I'd have to write away for guidelines and sample copies. After a few weeks, I'd get them back, or maybe a note indicating they were closed to submissions, or possibly a "No longer publishing" card. I'd study the material I got back, reading the stories, looking at the advertising, thinking about the audience for my work and trying to figure out whether they were the magazine's target readership. Only then would I send my story off. Six weeks to twelve months would pass before my SASE would come back to me. Most of the time with a slip of paper that had the word "No" written on it in one-hundred words intended to soften the blow.

Now most markets have their guidelines up on the web. They have tables of contents and advertising, sample-copy order forms and editorial comments on their web pages. Research time is cut from weeks to hours or days. A lot of magazines accept electronic submissions as well, and their response times have shrunk accordingly. I can now receive rejections in a matter of days instead of weeks, weeks instead of months. And then there's the savings in stamps and international reply coupons,..

So now I'm rejected faster. To that, I give a qualified, "Yay!"

The rejections themselves haven't changed much. Mostly they're just form letters. That's alright. "No" is succinct and to the point. Once in a while there's a bit of encouragement, or a sentence of critique, which is nice because it means someone's taking me seriously and believes my work (maybe not this work, but another one) has potential.

I have a proven method for dealing with rejection:

• I curse a couple of times. The world has yet again refused to acknowledge my overwhelming genius, and it's frustrating.


• I mope for a while, during which I may curse some more because a good curse needs mileage to really sharpen its impact.


• I do my job. My job is writing and selling stories. If A isn't buying, then it's time to pitch to B. The story goes out to the next market and I brace myself for the likely results of that submission.


• I write another story and then I send that out to face rejections too.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It's easier to just write, and enjoy my writing, and talk about it with friends who aren't too critical, and just feel like I'm an undiscovered genius. It's a lot harder to put my work out there, to accept the certainty of rejection and cling to the slim hope of acceptance. So why? I leave you with the words of John F. Kennedy (who was talking about a moon landing, but the principle is the same):

"We choose to write and submit and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win."