Wanting Willies

Okay, the title of my blog post here is a bit playful as a lot of fun things could be said about a certain kind of willy, let alone about wanting them. But here I'm meaning the kind of willy that for whatever linquitic reason always travel in packs.

It is the hair-raising kind of willies that can scare the bejesus out of you, which is yet another strange fear phrase we have. I'm not sure if Be is a twin to the Nazareth one or not, nor if Jesus stays when Bejesus leaves, but such things are for another blogpost.

Here, willies is not only a neat term, but also the title of a 1991 movie; an admittedly very cheesy movie and highly predictable if you're paying attention. But so what? It is still a fun one. And I love how it involves a story within a story: a story of boys camping out and trying to "outscare" (and outgross) one another with a scary and/or gross story that can top the previous one told.

Such a scenario isn't just situated in the realm of horror. Nor is it kept even in just the realm of fiction in general. Storytelling itself is the fundamental way we communicate, whether it is the fact-based storytelling of science, the faith-based storytelling of religion or the outright Mr. Roger's neighborhood full of make-believe.

It is an excuse to a boss of why we were late, yet also it is telling our spouse about the day we had, letting a friend know about a nice vacation spot, or letting others know about how you see the world; the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful.

We make up stories thoughout the day, some of us spinning truth with a little fiction, others of us with more fiction and a dash of truth, but the overall goal is the same with wanting the listener to share in what you have to tell, whether for a momen, an hour, a day, or a lifetime.

How incredibly wonderful and precious it is for us as humans to have such a device at our disposal. Every story we tell, even if just for a good scare, or to invoke a "gee whiz, that was lame" connects us humans with its common ground language that we are blessed to be able to interpret together.

"Dad, can you tell me a story."
"I always do son, I always do."

More than da Blues

I call it depression, for lack of a better term, when trying to describe it to doctors or anyone else on a short list of those who care either by choice or payment.  

But depression has always seemed too simplistic, too generic, of a term to me to fully capture the insidious miasma of melancholy that frequently pervades me.

For one thing, I usually  associate depression with sadness. And I guess sadness is often somewhere in there, too; but that is when there is a there for it to be. For me, when the darkness is at its worst, I feel gutted out, like there is so little there, a mild wind could scatter the remnants like so much ashes to ashes.

This is when I don't care whether or not I live.

Also depression seems restricted to mental, but the feeling consumes the  whole of my body. Its skin starts seeming claustrophobic tight and it suffocates me. The atmosphere becomes sulfuric and smothering, like I'm an astronaut on some strange planet without my helmet.

This is when I care not to live; not to die, mind you, as there is a difference here. But rather to somehow someway free myself of a mortal coil that chokes.

I usually can battle it by writing. Putting one word in front of the other helps, like putting a chink in a wall of a pit into which you might be able to set your foot or your hand for pulling yourself up towards the remaining light. I don't get writer's block, so if I choose to write I can.

But sometimes the feeling is so intense, so filled with meaninglessness, I can make no such choice. Such has been the case this past month with trying to work on TFK.

It sometimes presents itself in a façade of rationale: You're too tired, you're too busy, you've got too much on your mind.

All true things.

Other times it is more direct: Your writing is too crappy, too explicit, too amateurish, too fucking devoid of value (just like your pathetic life in general, it might add as a bonus taunt).

Which may or may not be true.

But that never is the point, is it? The point is…

Well, that's the buck fifty question, ain't it? If I knew the point I'd join Tony Robinson on the Self-help circuit. Instead, I know that buried deep inside a partial point for me is to keep on writing no matter what external or internal circumstances might bring.

So today I stuck my hand into my chest and pulled TFK back out. I shook off accumulated blood sweat and tears and put another 1,000 words towards completion of whatever it is wanting to be. And those words were probably too explicit to amateurish, and too fucking devoid of value.

But you know what? During the writing, I was able to keep the dark at bay. And the written words are still there.

And I am still here.

Doing the Disconnect

I am disconnected from our network as I type this.

For some reason our broadband gets kind of screwy at times, spontaneously deciding it doesn't have a connection to the Internet. It doesn't last, and is usually just annoying, but sometimes it can play havoc with blogging.

Oh, not my lowbrow kind of blogging where I'm typically just rambling like now. I mean, the seriously intelligent blogging like the kind my husband Gary does. He sources damn near everything, making sure his commentary is as informed as possible.

Which is good, as it makes his posts well-constructed and informative. But it also means as he composes his blog he typically has several tabs open for different articles he is citing and subsequently wants to link. A loss of connection, even for an instant, can cause problems for him as he tries to find all those lost web pages again.

So to help him out, I've been staying off the network as he works, wanting to ensure no sharing bandwidth issues encourage a lost connection.

But how I have done this in the past is put my computer to sleep by closing the lid. For generally when my computer is on it is also connected. I don't "do" anything to the connection, it just is on and when I open my computer lid and log-in it is on. I have a weird compulsion about not disconnecting it.

And yeah, I know you can disconnect it. And yeah, I've traveled to hotels where I have had to connect to new networks. So I'm not quite a Luddite. But I guess it's because I had to put in serial keys and what not to get it initially set up that I get worried -- unfounded sure -- about disconnecting it and finding out that connecting it is a huge hassle.

For I don't like things to be a hassle. Especially with technology. I know what I want to accomplish and hate having to deal with set up and codes and other crap. So I avoided such potential by just shutting the computer down altogether. But today I overcame such stupidity and just chose disconnect.

And it proved to be a painless action (I know this because I did test out reconnection, which was a similarly easy click). But it got me to thinking about how much can be done, really, without being Internet connected; something I sometimes forget.

Decades ago at Purdue, the Internet wasn't on my mind or even an option. Hell, I didn't even have a computer (not counting Atari 2600) until I met Gary. Instead, I had the library for occasional research and a dictionary when I was at home.

The Internet has definitely changed such things, with now my being able to spontaneously call up the most obscure detail if I need it for a story. It is a library on demand. But, as I am prone to do with real libraries, I can't help but wander beyond my original research purpose, until I'm in areas of knowledge  that are not needed for the current writing.

And for both better and worse, being connected now means I can click over whenever I want to check mail, or check Facebook, or check Twitter, or check a hundred and one different things. Growing up and going to school sans computer, the mail came once a day and then, unless the landline phone rang or someone physically knocked at your door, you were pretty much done with communication and there wasn't much else to do but focus on your work.

Oh, I'm not disparaging the current time and no way in hell do I want to back to what really wasn't all that golden of a time. But it does occur to me as I type this and Gary is in the other room working on his blog, that maybe I should periodically just disconnect for a while; not just for Gary's sake but for mine.

Disconnect and focus full-square on the words in my head coming out rather than all those distracting words coming in.

Addiction of Power

So I went to a substance use and recovery class today as part of a HOPWA requirement. I don’t use drugs other than caffeine. Not out of a sense of morality, but one of practicality: I create better art when my mind isn’t any more muddled than it usually is. So I guess I don’t use out of a sense of write rather than right.

Yeah, yeah. Feel free to groan at that…

So why was it a requirement for me if I don’t use? Bureaucracy moves in mysterious ways. But that’s not the point of this piece, anyway, so we can just leave it that I was there. And of course with substance use, the catch phrase power of addiction comes to mind.

But later as I was walking to the library sorting out the characters Randy interacts with in That Fargo Kid – a novel I am revising – I started thinking of the addiction of power. For that’s essentially what the story is about. Through circumstances, Randy finds himself in positions where he wields heavy influence on those characters, each of which have their own particular set of issues and insecurities.

Whether his influence is good or bad as far as the other characters are concerned will be up to the reader. But for the purpose of this mini-essay, it’s enough to say the influence is there. And Randy can’t stop himself from wielding it.

Power corrupts and all that. But it is not quite as simple as such a clichéd slogan makes it out to be. For we need power to accomplish anything in this world. You can surely harm people with your power; but then again, how can you help them if you have no power?

I think part of the “trick” of life is recognizing the power you have at every single moment while simultaneously making a conscious decision about how you use it; a decision to use it for the Good.

Moral might be a better word than conscious in the above, though I dislike using that term since people tend to wrongly equivocate it with religion. What masks as ethics in contemporary culture is far too often just a list of precepts rather than actual thought-out moral belief.

Deliberate would fit, too.

So what is the best use of one’s power? The answer to that is dynamic and wholly dependent on the particular situation. But I am struck by the last season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer when she shared her power with the other slayers of the world.

In our rush to use our power we forget that sometimes the greatest power we have is letting others use theirs.

And I wasn’t intending to go political with this piece, but I can’t help but end up there. For right now, we have a Republican congress that is using its power to take away my power as a US citizen; to harm me and my family. Why? Because they can or think they can. Just because they have the power to pass anti-gay legislation doesn’t mean they should.

Overcoming Can't

So the Draft of Hello Kitty is done. Now what?

Which really isn't a what at all now, but more of a how.

For the plan after I finished Thumbs, the work before Hello Kitty, was that I would revise. Not Thumbs, which needs to ferment some more before such revision. Not Jeff of Yellowstone, which needs revision, but more of the fine-tuning kind. And certainly not yet Hello Kitty which has just been finished. Instead, I had/have my sights on the novel That Fargo Kid, which not only needs revised but in some places fixed.

In fact, I intended for Hello Kitty to be just a short story to end 2011 and act as a buffer between the long work of Th and the expected long work of revising TFK; however, HK turned out to be a fairly long work in itself. Sometimes stories are like that, making me cautious to do another buffering 'short' work before such revision, as it could easily take up another few months or more.

Yesterday towards that end I moved TFK notes, an attempted formal timeline and incomplete reverse outline to OneNote (an amazing program) along with the current draft to the Working file on my computer. Everything is set. So what now?

Well, I should probably: read all 468 pages (134,000 words) of TFK first to get my mind back into that groove; take notes of certain sequences and/or details which I will likely need to change, delete, or expand; kill darlings that don't fit; and generate copy that fixes some things.

However, all of the above are wide-scope strategies that intimidate the daily. When I'm in the midst of writing a novel, my day-to-day goal is straightforward: 1,000 words a day and I feel like I'm making progress on the story.

Here, the envisioned work ahead is more difficult for me to break up into daily chunks that will leave me feeling satisfied with that's day's output. Heck, it is downright overwhelming and the urge to drown in a sea of can't washes over me: The story is broke; it's unfixable; go on to something else, something that will get you back into the bliss of 1,000 words a day.

But in the end I don't want to just write 1,000 words a day. I want those 1,000 words to be good words; the best that I can create. So I owe it to my craft and to my story to make every effort to thwart that nagging can't.

An effort that overcomes can't and takes do all the way to done.

HK Draft Completed

Of short story cum novella:

Hello Kitty, D1, 70,113 words, 213 pages.

Not my longest, probably not my best, and who knows if it will ever see readership. I'd like for it to do so, but that's a whole separate thing from the writing itself.

I'm particularly proud for completing this as my emotional health has been under quite a lot of strain and it seems like melancholy has loomed ever larger. Even though I love to write, I'd inexplicably push off writing in the morning, filled with doubt and depression.

This morning alone I got off to a late start, doing nothing really but being caught up in the stranglehold depression can have, unable to set myself down in front of the keyboard; unable to do much of anything at all except drink coffee.

Pangs of depression and doubt about where I'm going with the story, for sure, but more just ugly inertia preventing me from getting words on the page; preventing me from even starting.

And, as a consequence, I didn't start till long after 8, after I'd imported the five CD's I'd checked out from the library, read Gary's blog, posted to Facebook, pulled in the Sunday paper from outside, had waffles, drank several cups of coffee… quite the procrastinator, all pushing me away from doing the very thing I love; inexplicably pushing me away.

I just start feeling so empty and melancholic it is sometimes hard to even do the things I love. Time and life has been so hard on us, with us selling so much of our once cherished belongings and the continual struggle for mere survival that it is hard to focus on things that are important to me like continual creation. Things that once were important have been taken away, time and time again.

But I managed to break through such depression, not all the way but enough to type, which I'm glad. Not sure if any of my words will be good enough to be up for consumption; I sure as hell hope so. But at least I'm getting it out there from my head and not letting depression fully consume me.

I'm especially proud of getting this story down as my depression has been worse of late and there have been many emotional upheavals and stressful things going on with our lives.

This is at least one bit of constant in a life that is racked with a seemingly never-ending supply of uncertainty.

Today I can say I did at least this much: put some words on a page, as I have done every day since I started work on the story, regardless of my state. And some of those words are actually pretty good; pretty good for me, that is, as pretty good to the outside world is a judgment that can only be rendered by the outside world.

An outside world to which writing, perhaps ironically, keeps me grounded.

Hello Kitty Notes: thinking about word order

I wrote a small scrap thinking about tomorrow's scene and my characters went beyond it onto a philosophical tangent; I don't know if I'll go into that digression in the actual story, but I still found it interesting, particularly in light of Obama's State of the Union and Mitch Daniels' State of the Absurd.

The extraneous scrap I wrote was, in part:

"What if I didn't show up?"

"But you did. If you didn't I might have needed it. But you did and I didn’t; and also I didn't and you did."

"And also? Didn't you just say the same thing again?"

"No, I switched the words around."

"But it was around an and, making them equal."

"You're thinking math. Language doesn't have reciprocal properties. Where the words are placed always matters."

Language never is just the words with static definitions. Where they are placed in a given sentence can affect their meaning. Further, the surrounding sentences, paragraphs, pages can all affect it. Further further the whole baggage of environment brought to the reading continues to revise the work long after the writer is done.

I currently hear a lot of dangerous rhetoric in politics, where I have to wonder: are they fully cognizant of their use and being wickedly crafty or are they just being stupidly irresponsible?

The solution for us as citizens is the same either way: we need to be fully engaged and critically thinking consumers of the plethora of information being fed to us, regardless of the source.

For a blog that does an excellent job of that, check out The Russell Report.

Hello Kitty (a novella) Thoughts

From my daily writing log:

This story seems to be shaping up as one of my most explicitly moral stories, though I don't know if anyone will see it like that . But that's how I'm intending it. The power of love, the power of virtue, to win in the end.

I just use boys and boysex to tell it :-)

The story in question is a short story (now more a novella) that I would describe as a boy-meets-boy supernatuaral horror romance. Since it is a romance, sex and potential for having sex (and not having sex) are there. However, having and not having sex are not the morality I am referencing.

Sex in itself has no morality in my eyes; rather the morality is that of how sex plays out between the persons involved: is it an equal share of power, of respect, of giving/taking for example.

It amazes me to no end that my country seems to get all up in arms over things of a sexual nature, even allowing words to describe the act to be considered vulgar, such as fuck and suck and jackoff, while we have a vast societal tolerance for words like KILL and HURT and HATE.

Are we so afraid of our bodies that we find maiming each other much more agreeable than loving each other?

The AFA, FOF and other hate groups seem to think so with their constant anti-gay rhetoric. But a boy loving another boy isn't immoral. What is immoral is man or boy's inhumanity to man or boy. This inhumanity can involve sex but it is not sex itself.

The world would be better off with more people reaching for condoms rather than guns and using whole hands full of tenderness rather than just a pointed finger.

Whatever Weather

I have a problem with weather.

Oh, I don't mean the real weather. Sometimes I wish a day were nicer, or less gloomy, or less rainy, but in general such wishes are just passing thoughts that do not take up huge amounts of mental fretting.

So little mind is given that I tend to think in simplistic weather terms such as wet, cold, hot, dry, and so on. I don't dwell on shapes of clouds or hues of sunlight or ripples of water and find extended ruminations on such things boring.

This little mind carries over into my writing where I get much more excited about a dialogue between two people than how the sun warmed their skin or how the rain pattered outside their house or how the wind made eerie noises. I mean, ho hum. The sun warms, rain splatters, and wind makes noises. I don't need nor want multiple pages of a national weather broadcast to litter my fiction.

However, I am so disinterested in weather and other ubiquitous but boring to me elements of setting, I sometimes forget to include them at all. I get caught up in the back and forth words and character interaction which is what I'm most passionate about, and most skilled at, and forget details like weather, time of day, and other externals.

Not only can this manifest as poor writing which I'm trying to self-correct, it can also manifest as causing problems with the story itself. For instance, today I had a scene where a character thought back to when he saw something but wasn't sure if it were a trick of the light. It occurred to me when I was remembering it for him:  Trick of sunlight?  Of moonlight? Dusk? What kind of light?

The protagonist  had dropped a kid off home from school, left, then came back some time later where they had a conversation that I was excited about writing (as I said I get about such things). But I had only placed them in this vague and weather-less sometime later temporal space as I typed away their much more interesting to me back and forth exchange.

One of my writing goals is to improve this lacking. I will never be the kind of writer comfortable with long dissertations of atmosphere, but at the same time I don't want my characters to exist as talking heads in dimensionless space.

I don't need a hundred and one words for snow, but I probably should do a better job of solidifying in my work whether or not there is at least the one.