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The difference between me and Rush

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Warning: The following contains a description of an obscure medical condition that may lead to uncomfortable visualizations of… Rush Limbaugh’s butt.

Rush Limbaugh got into some hot water this week. Agreeing with a caller, he referred to soldiers against the war as “phony soldiers,” implying that disagreement with our mad policy in Iraq makes a soldier somehow unfit to wear the uniform.

Which struck me as odd, since Limbaugh himself never served. He was of age for Viet Nam, but got himself a medical deferment. He has an obscure condition in which the skin at the base of his spine doesn’t completely close, making a tiny hole at the top of his butt crack in which lint and other material can collect. This, apparently, was enough to avoid the draft.

The reason I know about this condition is that I live with it myself, and in fact didn’t even know there was a name for it until I learned how Rush got out of Viet Nam. The difference between me and Rush, though, is that I’m a veteran.

Despite the extra hole in my ass, I signed up and served in the US military, and was on active duty during the Gulf War. I was never deployed to Iraq, but I could have been. Poppy Bush had the good sense to stay out of Baghdad and the first Gulf War ended quickly. Had he been as bone-headed as his son, desk jockeys like myself could be been ordered to drive trucks in Iraq, as they do today. And I would have gone, because I, unlike Rush, swore an oath to defend my country against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

It’s just that domestic enemy chickenhawks like Limbaugh have become. The war in Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, has cost over 4,000 American lives and driven up a debt that will cripple the economy of our children and grandchildren. War vets like those in IAVA.org have been there, and know what they’re talking about. Maybe we should listen rather than dismissing them as insufficiently jingoistic.

I’m not suggesting that only veterans are qualified to have an opinion. This isn’t, thankfully, Heinlein’s Starship Troopers where only military service elevated a mere “resident” to a “citizen” allowed to vote. But maybe guys like Rush who went to such absurd lengths to stay out of Viet Nam should think twice about dismissing those of us who actually did serve.

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The Fear

Saturday, September 8, 2007

Since “Coffee and waffles”, I’ve written precisely nothing. I keep thinking about it. I keep meaning to. But faced with the choice between writing and napping, I become narcoleptic. Or reading a novel becomes the most important thing in the world. Or, god help me, I hard reset my phone just to reinstall all my apps. Anything to avoid writing.

Why? I can’t say, really. I enjoy writing once I sit down and do it. Part of it, I think, is that I’m the kind of person that prefers keeping his options open over having things settled. I like to stay flexible. And if I don’t write, I can always have that much more to write later. The fact that this will always be true no matter how much I write doesn’t seem to matter to this frugal part of my brain. It’s always better to save for later instead of doing now.

Which, of course, sounds an awful lot like procrastination, and I’m sure there’s some of that in there, too. I am a world class procrastinator and freely admit to a bit of a lazy streak. Writing is effort, and I will avoid that when I can.

Fine explanations for my avoidance, all of these. But they’re mostly bullshit.

I avoid writing out of fear.

Even after all these years, writing is scary. When I’m really writing, head back, staring at the horizon as my fingers dance across the keys, I get lost. When I’m really writing, I get lost. Pick up enough speed and I’m not really there at all. I disappear, and the story writes the story. I’m gone.

It’s both exhilarating and terrifying. When I stop, when I “come down”, it’s like getting off a roller coaster that my body experienced but I have no memory of riding. My heart rate is up, I’m breathing deep, but I feel spacey, out of control.

We don’t think about it, but giving up control is a frightening thing. Maybe moreso for Type A westerners than it would be for someone who had grown up with Zen, but as it turns out I happen to be a Type A American 21st century male and giving myself up like that gives me the screamin’ willies. Maybe I’m afraid one of these times I won’t come back. Maybe I’m afraid of what might come out while my internal editor is off napping.

Maybe I’m just a chickenshit wuss and need to get back to writing.

After all, that’s what a Zen master would say, what the little one in my head has already told me.

“Roshi, I’m afraid.”

“Be afraid, then, but keep writing.”

Is that all there is to it? Keep writing, build a habit and stick to it in all circumstances, no matter how I feel? I’m sure I’ve read that someplace. I’m tempted to go look it up, but I have some writing to do.

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Why I need a waterproof PDA

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Because the best ideas come to me in the shower, of course. This morning, as I was getting ready for work, I had a mini-epiphany about Revelation.

After my writing session two nights ago at Village Inn, I’d noticed a few things shaping up in this retelling. Daniel seems both more capable and a little more unstable than he was before. And the accident at which he helps out is much worse, both more visceral and more deadly. And it suddenly dawned on me how to fix several things that had been bugging me in how I’m beginning.

At some point, I was going to have explain what Daniel was doing in DC, why he identified himself sometimes as a paramedic and sometimes as a doctor. I also needed a reason he’d be wanted by the authorities and a reason for him to be noticed by the FBI. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do any of this. I wanted to avoid doing any of it in straight on exposition if possible.

This morning I realized that when he notices the missing body (of the demon, but neither he nor the reader knows that yet), he’s gonna freak out. So much so that he gets arrested by the cops that finally arrive on scene. And while he’s being questioned back at the station, he’s going to explain who he is and why he isn’t a doctor anymore. Coming through dialogue in a police interrogation, this should be a good deal more interesting than a simple flashback.

Whether the cops let him go or whether they hang on to him and he escapes (remember, we still have a missing corpse they’re going to be looking for, and at the very least Daniel is a material witness), they’re going to have to notify the feds. After all, Daniel fits the profile. He’s the son of immigrant parents, highly educated (an MD) but working well below his training (a paramedic), he just moved clear across the country and he has no social circle, lives almost completely solitary. Add that to evidence of mental instability (possibly stole a corpse), and he’s a textbook example of a potential terrorist.

And just like that, without jumping through any of the improbable hoops in the original book, I have the setup. Daniel on the run, investigating a dead man, and can bring Jack Harris into the story that much earlier.

And I just barely got toweled off and wrote all that down before I had to leave for work.

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Coffee and waffles

Monday, September 3, 2007

1,200 words on Revelation tonight. I attribute this to two things.

1. Coffee and waffles. I work swings, so when I get off work at 10pm, I have the option of either going straight home or stopping for a little smackrel of something on the way home. As it happens, there’s a Village Inn near my house that makes excellent waffles. So I swung by, had a waffle and some coffee–I’m actually writing this post still seated in the booth with my coffee–and then started to write. I love writing in restaurants because the scenery keeps my Monkey Mind busy while I let the words flow out. Plus waffles!

2. I approached this session the same way I did NaNoWriMo last year and the same way Natalie Goldberg recommends you do Writing Practice. I turned off the internal editor, didn’t even look at the screen, and kept my hands moving. In this case, I kept my phone off to the side and typed continually on my Bluetooth iGo Sierra while staring off into the distance. Before I knew it, I had over a thousand words, some twists and surprises I hadn’t expected–while working the accident at the beginning of the book, Daniel tells people he’s a doctor, which is a stretch if not technically wrong–and I came to a good stopping point that will let me springboard back into the story next time.

Of course, before I do that, or at least before I show it to the Asimovs, I’ll need to clean it up. I’m not a bad typist, but going full bore balls to the wall speed while not looking doesn’t result in pretty prose. But that’s what word processors are for, neh?

Takeaway from this evening’s writing: Caffiene and sugar, good. Freeing myself up to Just Write by not looking at what I’m actually typing, even better.

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Variety, ADD and deadlines

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Regular readers know I’m both fiercely commited and fickle at the same time. In the moment, what I’m working on is the most important thing in the world, but when the moment passes, I’m easily pulled in random directions. This bizarre combination of focus and indecision has served me well as a pundit and columnist, allowing me to speak with authority and also switch my viewpoint quickly as conditions change. And from a Buddhist, “speak truth, but understand that permanence in anything is illusory” perspective, it makes perfect sense. Even if my “flip flopping” pisses people off, people who don’t understand how it’s possible for me to believe something completely and whole-heartedly, right up until I don’t.

I point this out because I was starting to waver on Revelation. Not in my determination to write the book, which I’m still excited about. But in my determination to write only that book.

My problem is that I have a couple other ideas that are also burning to be written, and my self-imposed dictum that I finish the Unification Chronicles, all six books of it, before starting any other projects was poisoning Revelation before it properly got started. I was starting to resent my book, this vile thing keeping me from working on other projects that wanted just as much attention. UC was starting to look too big, too long and I was afraid that I’d never get to these other projects in time to still feel anything for them.

Obviously, resentment is a negative emotion that shouldn’t be allowed to fester. So I tried to find a way out. Was there any way I could do both? I was approaching this as either/or, but my life has historically been more about the middle, finding compromise between two extremes (which is why Buddhism, often referred to as The Middle Way, appeals to me so much). What if I didn’t have to choose between projects, but would work on all of them?

For some writers, this would be madness, and the way I had originally envisioned it, it probably would have driven me crazy, too. My original idea was to not decide what to write that day until I sat down to write. A few pages of Dragons or Revelation, it would make no difference. Like a basketball coach deciding which five players to have on the court at any one time, I’d “go with the hot hand” and allow my more powerful projects to rest when they (I) needed it.

Now, I’m all for spontaneity, but that’s just nuts.

Fortunately, I have people to tell me when I’m nuts. I ran this idea past Josh Curry, my Maximum Geek cohost and occasional writing partner. He told me I was nuts.

“Dude, you’re never going to get anything done that way,” he said. He was afraid, rightly, that I’d fragment too much and lose my place in the various stories, eventually spending more time rereading and rewriting to get up to speed that writing new material. And in retrospect, he was spot on. Clearly, that wasn’t going to work.

At the same time, the folks in my writer’s group replied to me in private on my “Chickenshit” article (really, people, it’s okay to reply on the blog) about the necessity of deadlines and structure. In particular, my friend Dave pointed out that I was “literally on fire” during Nanowrimo because I didn’t have time to hem and haw, to second guess. He was right. Deadline pressure (also a key component in Natalie Goldberg’s timed writings) is a key to bringing out good writing.

And is so often the case, these two unrelated ideas slammed together and created a solution for me. A way to work on more than one project a time, keep myself focused and not lose track of what I’m doing.

Josh came up with half of it, so credit where credit is due. He suggested that instead of writing whatever I’m feeling that day, I instead focus on writing a full chapter at a time before switching to a different project (and let me point out that if I’m really feeling something, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to write several chapters in a row on the same book; I have the option to switch at the conclusion of a chapter, but I don’t have to). This keeps me focused and present on a single idea or event, avoiding any distillation in the middle of the action. Great idea.

Then it hit me that since I’m writing entire chapters at a time, I already have a perfect deadline structure in place that gives me the flexibility to skip a day here and there when my schedule is just jam packed from breakfast to bedtime (like tomorrow, when I have somewhere to be pretty much every minute from 8am to 11pm). The Dead Asimovs meet every other week. Two weeks is just about enough time to put together a solid chapter of a novel, again with breaks within for people with two jobs and a busy social schedule.

So this is my plan. I’ll write a chapter of something (more often then not Revelation now that I have a relief valve to work on other things when I really need to) every two weeks. I’ll submit it to the Asimovs for critique, and then start on the next chapter. I’ll stay focused but flexible, my natural state, and I think happy and renewed enough to keep going on this without getting bored or resentful.

Or am I still nuts?

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Opening lines

Monday, August 27, 2007

I blame SE Hinton.

When I was in seventh grade, we read The Outsiders in class and then went on a field trip to see a screening of the movie. The story is a classic, at least for me–and it was a first novel–and one of the reasons is a literary trick Hinton used. At the end of the first person narrative book, she has her central character, Ponyboy, start writing a book about his experiences. The first line of his book is the same as the first line of The Outsiders, bringing us full circle. It gives that opening line more weight, much more, than it would have had otherwise. I can still hear C. Thomas Howell scribbling while he reads out, “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the moviehouse, I had two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”

It’s no  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Hell, it’s no “Rosebud.” But it’s memorable. It sticks in the mind.

As I sit down to start working on Revelation, the hurdle of the opening line mocks me. It insults my lineage. It accuses me of doing things with poultry that are illegal in the lower 48 states.

And I know it’s pointless. I know this is supposed to be my “shitty first draft”. I know I need to just write something, anything, get past it and get into the story, it can and likely will all be changed in revision. I should just lie back and think of England. But SE Hinton still sticks in my mind. I need to have a good opening line. Something that sets up the massive epic to come. Something that foreshadows something important about Daniel Cho. Something special.

This is, of course, just another way to avoid writing. First drafts are no place for art. I ground Unification Chronicles to a halt years ago by getting hung up on a similar literary trick (putting quotations from books written after the story at the start of each chapter to foreshadow what was coming up, which I blatantly stole from Jack McKinney’s Robotech novelizations). I know better.

Write, dammit.

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Small bites

Monday, August 27, 2007

One of the key differences between the original draft of Revelation, back in 1996, and the current one shouldn’t be a difference at all. In 1996 I was out-processing from the Air Force, going from appointment to appointment and scribbling in my planner in between. I wrote anywhere and anywhen I could, sometimes for pages, sometimes just a few sentences.

This time around I seem fixated on “writing sessions”, sitting down with a formal commitment to write. The key problem with that is that I rarely have time, and wen I do have several hours without other commitments, I fall asleep. While I may love the idea of “making time to write” and settling in to pound out several thousand words at a stretch, it just isn’t going to happen. I work two jobs and have an active social calendar with several weekly recurring engagements. If I’m going to write, I have to write when I have the opportunity, even if it means just getting a couple sentences down. That’s still better than nothing, and if I get down a dozen words or so 10,000 times, I’ll have a whole novel. I don’t plan on writing only a dozen word at a time, but if I keep rejecting those opportunities, I might not write much of anything at all.

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Chickenshit

Monday, August 27, 2007

I’ve been ready to start for a week now. The outline is as complete as it needs to be, filling out any more detail will freeze the story. I have all my tools in order, I’ve given up on fiddling with mobile tech, I really have nothing to do with my time away from the office but read, write and sleep. (Seriously. My TV has atrophied down to a wristwatch, and there are pictures of my LOTRO character on milk cartons all over Middle Earth.) I’m ready, nothing ahead of me but the open road.

I am, therefore, spending a lot of time petting my cats.

Don’t get me wrong, my cats are great. But this blog isn’t about my cats. Nor are my cats going to write my gorram book, no matter how much they purr. That probably wouldn’t make much of a book, anyway. “Chapter 2, rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr”

So it’s up to me. I have to write it. I’m excited to get into it. I’m enthused, really. I’m also scared out of my mind.

I’m not sure why, really. I’m far better prepared to write Daniel Cho’s story than I was eleven years ago. I know the story, I know the characters, and I’m a much more mature and seasoned writer than I was. I should be able to knock this out of the park (without steroids!).

And maybe that’s the problem. Preparation is all fine and good, but now that I’m down to the moment of composition, the pressure is squishing me like a little bug. I’m so damn well prepared for this that I’m expecting myself to be perfect, to just start spilling out golden, finished prose. Very much not the freedom of writing Anne Lamott’s “shitty first drafts.”

I need to get over myself, sit down and start writing. I need to forget my preparation, forget what I know of the plot and the characters (forget these things in my concsious mind so that my subconscious is free to use them), and just write. I can spend weeks, months, years waffling and fussing about things like when I write, where I write, what input method I use (Letter Recognizer, Transcriber, thumb keyboard, onscreen keyboard, Stowaway keyboard, big comfy Microsoft Natural 4000 ergo board on my desktop), whether to start each writing session with writing practice or just dive right in, etc. But that’s not writing. It feels like writing because it’s peripherally related, but it’s not writing.

Writing is writing. Time to get to it.

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Undistracted

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

It’s spooky how easily writers are distracted from our purpose. While I’ve been into mobile technology for almost as long as I’ve been online, I’ve been detoured into a programming endeavour recently that has finally come to an end, and with it, I’ve found all the time to write that I could have sworn I just didn’t have.

Here’s the story. I was a frequent participant on a online forum dedicated to Windows Mobile devices, with a particularly strong community of HTC Apache users. As I have an HTC Apache (Sprint calls it the PPC-6700), I enjoyed interacting with other users.

On this site, the idea of “ROM kitchens” became very big. While I believe the meme started on xda-developers.com, it’s since spread to other sites and communities. The idea is for the user community to compensate for the big problem with smartphones: that the carriers don’t update the software very often, so we’re often stuck with outdated revisions of our operating systems and applications. The user community fixes this by contributing to a ROM kitchen, which is a metaphorical name for an environment from which you can “cook” a custom ROM for your phone with an up to date operating system and your preferred mix of applications and settings.

I got into this idea in a big way, as it let me re-engage my programming/design roots without mucking around with actual code. I began taking the existing official kitchen and tweaking things here and there, tricking out Windows Mobile to get more speed, more usability, more stability. At the same time, the official kitchen itself continued to be updated, and I based my modifications on the work of others, as they did on mine. It was a nice little vaguely open source effort.

I say vaguely because it should be noted that this was all technically against the rules. The guy who “created” the kitchen didn’t reverse engineer Windows Mobile the way Linus Tovalds did with Unix to create Linux. He decompiled a released ROM and grouped the files into folders to make discrete modules. He admittedly did some very difficult low-level work to get the core of the operating system and the drivers work on the Apache hardware, but he was building on Microsoft’s and HTCs work just as we built on his. The problem, for me, anyway, was that this guy (who goes by a pseudonym rather than his real name) wanted attribution for his work, wanted everyone to know it was his kitchen, and we used it at with his blessing.

This became a problem for me when I released my own variant of the kitchen without his pseudonym plastered all over it. I’d done a lot of work to tweak nearly every module in the kitchen in some way, adjusting registry settings here, deleting redundant files there, putting together a package that was both easier to use than his official kitchen and built a ROM that was faster, cleaner and more streamlined without the user having to do all that optimization themselves. And if you think that kind of elegance and simplicity is easy, ask Apple how many man-hours it took to get the iPhone right.

While I credited the original kitchen developer in my documentation, I released it under my own name since my custom ROMs had developed some brand recognition for being stable, fast and easy to use, and I thought that branding would be useful for newbies trying to figure out what to do. I still got a private message from the site moderator blasting me for releasing my “own” kitchen. Considering that I’m not making a dime off this and even asked people happy with my work to donate to the site in order to keep it going, I found this odd. The moderator explained that releasing diverging variants of the kitchen might displease the original developer and drive him away. It was weird, frankly. It came across very much like a nervous shaman trying to appease a fickle and jealous god. The end message was that all my hard work, the hours I’d spent tweaking and testing and debugging, were very much Not Welcome.

And that’s when it hit me, and why I’ve bothered explaining this. Like a flash, it suddenly dawned on me that I was wasting my time, that once again mobile technology had become a distraction from writing rather than aid to it. I’d been spending 2-5 hours a day reading about new developments, new software and working on further refining my Apache’s ROM ever finer. It was fun, it was interesting, but most importantly it wasn’t writing. All the while I was complaining that I had no time to write.

Now, I have time. I have lots of time. And I figure at the rate I type once I get going, I can do 2,000-4,000 words a night when I get home from work, writing from about 11pm to 2am before going to bed and getting up at 10 the next morning (I love working swing shifts, 1-10pm rocks). At that pace, I can in theory write the first drafts of all six Unification books, both trilogies, in 12-18 months. I say in theory because of course there’s no way I’m going to sustain that pace for a solid year and a half, but it’s still a darn sight better than the nothing I’m getting done now.

So I’m back to fiction. Full time and undistracted. Now let’s see what I can do with it.

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Conflict and adventure

Monday, August 20, 2007

When I was a teenager (okay, still) I was really into role-playing games. It’s a natural fit for a novelist, the opportunity to allow other people to help you, actually join you, in assuming a different identity for a while and being someone else. It was like acting without the stage fright.

When I was 14, I was admitted to a psychiatric hospital (come on, is anyone really surprised?) for depression. I was there for three months, not until I was cured, but until I learned to play the game and conform enough for them to deem me “normal” and let me go. It was good practice for Basic Training, years later.

While I was in the hospital, I was allowed to bring in books. I brought in dozens of SF paperbacks, nonfiction stuff by Asimov and my favorite RPG manual, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, by Palladium. I should point out that this was 1985, when the Turtles were still a dark, Milleresque parody and hadn’t yet really broken through to popular success.

The other patients were also teens, at least on my floor, and I quickly found a group of them that would play. I began teaching them the system and we had our characters rolled up when the nurses finally caught on to what we were doing. The looked over the book, and I was sure the jig was up. Instead, they decided that role-playing had a certain theraputic value, and we could continue.

One one condition. No fighting. No combat. No conflict.

That one had me stumped. How in the heck did they expect us to play with no conflict? That’s what adventure was, after all. What was my mutant wombat supposed to do, drive a cab? Of course he was going to beat up bad guys! I was sure this was a clever way for them to officially allow us to play while simultaneously making it impossible.

22 years later, I’m no longer so sure. I’m rereading Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, an excellent book on combining writing with Zen Buddhist meditation. I’ve also reconnected with Buddhism and Taoism recently (the same ideas from different perspectives, when you really look) and it was with this mindset that I started rereading Goldberg. I’ve read the book many times, but always thinking as a writer. Now I’m approaching it as a Buddhist, and things are clear that I didn’t see before.

In one chapter she talks about detail, and mentions the Viet Nam Memorial wall in DC, and that a classmate of hers from second grade is on that wall. That even in second grade, he always drew pictures of tanks and soldiers in the margins of his math papers. And that got me thinking about the GI Joes I played with as a child (and the 20th anniversary figures Josh keeps trying to get me to buy), how we indoctrinate our youth into the idea of war, and the nature of conflict in the human mind.

What I didn’t realize at 14 was that conflict doesn’t have to mean fighting. Yes, violence is the most visual and obvious form of conflict, but dramatic conflict can take many forms. When this was pointed out to me at the time, I countered that this was an adventure game, that violence was a key component of adventures going back as far as recorded human storytelling. And while that’s true, it’s not the whole truth.

Consider A.A. Milne’s Pooh books. Pooh, Piglet, Christopher Robin and the rest have many adventures without ever fighting or even facing much real danger. The most violent thing that happens is when Owl’s house blows over in a storm, and Piglet heroically goes for help. And yet, throughout the books the characters are captivating enough and the interactions between them interesting enough to entertain generation after generation of children and parents alike.

From a Buddhist perspective, I’m intrigued by the idea of doing in my writing as an adult what I couldn’t conceive of as a teen: creating captivating stories that have action without peril, conflict without violence. It can be done. They’re just different kinds of stories. And maybe, given how the stuff I grew up with desensitized me to rampant militarism (hey, it was the Cold War), stories like this will be needed in the not too distant future. 

(And before anyone freaks out, this is not Yet Another Waffle. The next seven books I have before me are either SF or action/adventure, with a good deal of violence in all of them. UC is, after all, the story of the war to unify the galaxy, and to quote Don Rumsfeld, in war, “stuff happens.” But down the road, in some of the other projects on my back burner, I see possibilities here.)

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