Writing as a friend

Tags

deep thinks, pen as friend, writers block, writing

I’ve done a lot of writing that I just keep refusing to hit the publish button on. The reasons vary, but the underlying issue is one of perfection. I’ve gotten backed into an uncomfortable mental corner where I feel that every word has to be just right. Every sentence has to be grammar school perfect. Every thought has to be full and complete. Yet that’s often not how my best writing comes forth. My best stuff comes when I start tossing ideas out, then let others interact with them, helping me find ways to refine the thoughts.

Stream of consciousness writing isn’t polished and sparkly, but it’s the fuel that leads to that polished, sparkly stuff. So for now, it’s time to push some of the less sparkly bits out into the world, and see what I get. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It does need a little time to breathe so that I can get comfortable with it again. Writing is work, but for me it’s also been a long time friend. When I can’t view it as that friend, then I lose interest and the overall tenor and quality drops.

Like most friends, you go through phases. The relationship goes up and down. I’ve been in a bit of a down phase. It’s time to push it back up.

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Tough conversations

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365, life, Musings, writing

It’s easy to get locked up in the expectations of others. We can get so fixated on what we should be doing that we loose sight of the need to do things which lock in with our core values. Contrary to popular media opinion, most of us have a good grasp of doing the right thing, even when it’s uncomfortable. That knowledge is what generates the feeling of discomfort in the first place.

That uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach is a warning. It’s a physical manifestation of the fears, knowledge and core values that are all running through your head. Need to have a talk with the boss? Have that horrid feeling of doom in your stomach? Odds are that you are saying something that needs saying. You just aren’t sure it’s going to be received well.

That’s not a reason to not say it. Understand that when you avoid those moments, and avoid those conversations, you don’t resolve the issue. You just chip away at your own inner happiness. Eventually things will eat at you to the point where it bleeds over into your personal life. In extreme cases, you can lose your life.

Taking the steps to confront the issue will often make the butterflies in your stomach worse. But by taking action, you take the next steps towards living a better and more authentic life. It’s not always easy, and at times it doesn’t always feel right. But eventually you realize that by saying what needed saying, you sleep better at night.

I like sleeping well. I like seeing the person in the mirror each morning. If you don’t, it may be time to have a conversation with someone.

Christmas kick-off

Tags

Christmas, holidays, life, nablopomo, pac man tree, writing

So I did a pretty good job with NaBloPoMo. Slowly my writing groove is getting better. The goal is to keep working on a daily posting schedule. It so happens that it’s December, and as such Christmas is coming. Now I know there’s a lot of folks who don’t like the hype of Christmas. That’s fine. For me it’s always been a special time of year. My birthday is close to Christmas, so the build up and hype always tied in with a personal holiday. I’ve always refused to be overly cynical when it comes to Christmas. I look at the concepts of good will, caring for others, and reaching out as core components of the season. Growing up the religious aspects were minimal.

This year I’m doing a kind of personal Advent Calender. Sharing various elements of the season that I find meaningful, both secular and religious is a good way to keep writing, and give folks a different look at the world.

Kicking things off we have the ultimate expression of secular Christmas. I present to you, the Pac Man Christmas Tree.

Caffeine BAD

Tags

life, nablopomo, writing

Prompt: Tell us about something you’ve done that you would advise a friend never to do.

—

Did you know that you can indeed overdose on caffeine? Yes, yes you can. I discovered this in college. Junior year during finals week I was juggling an EMT class, plus multiple finals. In typical college student fashion, I’d put off writing a paper, so the night before it was due I sat down at my trusty Mac and commenced writing.

It was a paper on some obscure aspect of Victorian literature. I can’t recall for the life of me what it was supposed to be. I do recall words, lots of words, and a focus on page and word. It was like NaNoWriMo, only with major problems if I didn’t finish. To fuel the 15 page paper, I relied on a trusty combination of Pepsi and Mountain Dew. Two liters of Mountain Dew to be precise. When the buzz of the Dew passed sometime around 3am, then there was Viviran. Four of them. I was on a roll.

Somewhere along the way I finished, and flopped into bed. A few hours later, I woke up, jittery and anxious, laced with exhausted. I went to check on the paper. No paper on the hard drive. Somehow I’d managed to fail to save the full paper. In a panic, I slammed more Dew and cranked out more drivel. I still have no clue how I passed that class.

I went to class, dropped off the second paper the headed to an exam. I popped a Viviran in class to stay awake while taking the test. I managed to stay upright in class. From there it was off to EMT class.

At that point in time, I crashed, HARD. Jitters, shakes, and a need to vomit all crashed down on me. The slightly amusing part of this was the EMT class subject was drug withdrawl. The class instructor took great delight in pointing out my symptoms. I just sat through class and wallowed in my misery. I went home that night, dropped into bed and stayed there.

Moral of the story, excessive caffeine BAD. Don’t do that.

As long as I remember

Tags

life, nablopomo, politics, writing

Prompt- As long as I remember

As long as I remember…that no matter the outcome of any US election, the world does keep turning. It’s easy to get wrapped up in the hype around Election Day. With the rise of social media and instant everything, it’s hard to forget that this isn’t the first contentious election in US history. It won’t be the last. This is part of the American political heritage, and in a way it’s part of what makes the country so remarkable. When you look at the broad strokes, we have an amazing resiliency in our system of government.

What happened in 2000 with Al Gore and George W. Bush would have resulted in military coups in multiple countries around the world. Here we still had an orderly transition of governance. That’s pretty cool when you think about it.

As a nation we’ve survived some truly stinking presidents. James Buchanan lead us smack into the middle of a war between the states. Guess what? We survived. We grew as a nation, and the world kept spinning.

Don’t get so buried in the hype that you forget the lessons of history. America is stronger than any one individual, or any single election. We survived Buchanan, Polk, Pierce, Van Burren, and a host of other sub par presidents. Only history can tell us what the true results of this election will be. Odds are most of us will be dead by the time the verdict passes. So take a deep breath, then keep moving forward.

You will survive this.

Seasons

Tags

life, nablopomo, writing

Prompt- The seasons are changing. What do you look forward to this time of year. What’s your favorite season.

—

Favorite season has always been winter. I love snow. I love the silence when the world is buried in piles of white fluffy stuff. Nothing out there but the breeze and silent flakes falling down. My favorite part of Fall is that Winter and Christmas aren’t that far away.

Thanksgiving is something to be endured, a speed bump on the way to the fun that is Christmas. Thanksgiving is boring, just food and football. Christmas…Christmas has presents! It’s got sparkly lights, and pretty packages, and bells. I love the lights and the magic. Even better is snow with Christmas lights. There’s something just magical about that. I’ve been trying to get a good snow/Christmas lights picture for years. It’s actually rather hard to do. You need snow at Christmas time (which contrary to popular belief isn’t nearly as frequent at stories would like you to believe), good technical photography skills (which requires practice and as such experience with snow/night photography/Christmas lights), and a bit of good timing. The shot still eludes me, but I can dream.

Silk

Tags

nablopomo, silk, writing

Prompt- silk

Exotic, foreign, quality, luxury. One of the strongest fibers known to man, silk has been used as a commodity as well as a fabric for over a thousand years. Emerging originally from the East, it was a radical change from homespun, wool based fibers found throughout most of Europe. It was rare, meaning that possession of it indicated a level of status. It came from “over yonder”, and there’s always something appealing about products that you can’t find locally. Because the thread is so fine, it produced a very tight weave, and required skilled tailors and seamstresses to work it properly. It was the ultimate luxury good, with the added advantage of being lightweight, strong, and warm.

It’s a product that changed the world. Demand was so strong that it spawned one of the early major trading routes, the Silk Road. A network of interconnecting trading routes, the Silk Road linked the Far East, India, Persia, Arabia and Europe together.

Take a letter Maria- Part 1

Tags

letters to me, life, nablopomo, writing

Prompt- a letter to your 14 year old self

1988

Man I know how bad things seem right now. It’s middle school and you’re miserable. Nothing seems to want to go right. You’ve been held back a year in math and you think it means you are stupid. It doesn’t. It means right now that your teachers don’t understand how to help you comprehend math. Give it a few more years and you’ll find out that geometry is easy. Remember that, and don’t dwell on the fact that your brain doesn’t operate like a human calculator.

Friends will come. I know it doesn’t seem like it. You’ll find some amazing ones as time goes on. It’s not about quantity, but quality. And you are going to end up with some remarkable people in your life.

Breathe. Celebrate the quirks that make you unique. Don’t worry about fitting in, embrace the differences. While your peers spend lives in McJobs, struggling to find happiness, you are going to travel the world. You’ll see new places, and experience new things.

You will make a difference. In ways large and small, you will enrich the lives of people around you. You will be remarkable.

Promise

Bodega

Tags

life, nablopomo, new york city, Postaday, writing

Bodega- a small store selling everything from groceries to videos. A descendant of the old corner grocery, a reminder of times before the supermarket. It’s an iconic part of city life in New York, a staging place for conflict in cop stories, a landmark for directions, a boundary line for a neighborhood.

Neil Gaiman, the pencil necked weasel thief

Tags

GOP, matt dean, neil gaiman, pencil necked, republicans, writing

The latest political tempest in a teapot features international sci-fi/fantasy writer Neil Gaiman and head of the Minnesota GOP (Republican Party) Matt Dean.

Quick background here: Neil Gaiman is a Hugo Award winning, New York Times best selling author. He’s written books, comics, and done some screenplays. In short, he’s a very successful author who prefers writing things to going out and speaking.  (Do take the time to read the link).

Today the Minneapolis Star Tribune published an article discussing the Legacy program referenced above. Now I won’t go into the validity of the Republican efforts to potentially cut funding to arts programs in Minnesota. I’m not well versed enough on the program in question to have an informed opinion. I am informed enough to be rather floored that Dean states he “hates” Neil  Gaiman, and then proceeds to call him a “pencil-necked little weasel who stole $45,000 from the state of Minnesota.”

Those are fairly strong words about a man who Dean has apparently never met. Further more, accusing anyone of stealing money from the state is a rather strong statement. (Remember to go back and read  Neil’s original post about his Legacy talk in Stillwater, MN).

Since when is it stealing for any professional, working individual to ask for payment for services rendered? Frankly, this is something the GOP as a whole tends to advocate. Pull yourself up by the boot straps, go forth and make oodles of cash! It’s the American dream. (Gaiman is British, but you get the idea.)

Apparently Dean is upset that Gaiman was paid with taxpayer funds. That’s not his fault. The Legacy program is designed to bring authors in to schools and libraries to talk about reading. The money doesn’t roll over year to year. If they don’t spend it, they lose it. That sounds like an issue of program design to me.

1) The Legacy program had around $40,000 dollars in the fund which was set to expire in a month. (There’s some question of how much Gaiman was paid. His rate is around $45k per engagement. Per another post by him he recieved $33,600 for that talk. You can see the original talk here.)

2) Individuals have the right to ask for fair payment. In a free market economy, this is how it works. You put up an amount, the individual asking for the services then decides if they want to pay or not. Capitalism at work here. It doesn’t matter if it’s a government entity who pays or not. Every single day, taxpayers pay for services from individuals. This is how it works.

3) The Star Tribune fell down on the job. With a fairly provocative statement like the one Dean made, I’d expect to see some sort of follow up with Gaiman in the article. There was none. That’s poor editorial control and poor reporting in my view.

4) Don’t tick off an internationally known author with 1.5 million folks on his Twitter feed. Gaiman was steamed this morning. He fired off several tweets, one of them resulting in a “#neilwebfail” where he managed to crash the server hosting Matt Dean’s website. (Yes I am a fan and do follow Neil on twitter.)

5) Blame the right people. With a month to go, Legacy still had $40,000 available to spend. That indicates to me they were not using the funds effectively. THAT is where focus needs to be directed.

Interested to hear your thoughts. Do me a favor, and keep it civil. As noted, I’m not judging the validity of the Legacy program. I am not pleased with the implication that private citizens (or those who are here legally working) are somehow not allowed to set fair market value for their services. Remember, “fair” is determined by what people will pay.

(Note- Dean has since apologized for calling Gaiman pencil necked. No apology as yet for the stealing comment, which is the one I actually objected to.)