Semi-Random Thoughts

Semi-random thoughts on coming up on the end of the year.

I'm fortunate that I can look around at this time of year and look for folks that can use a few bucks; not yet anywhere close to the point of one of my heroes, the gentleman around these parts that yearly manages to slip a double-eagle coin (i.e. one Troy ounce of solid gold) into a red kettle without being 'caught', but I'll get there someday. This year, due to the tornadoes in the U.S. that started this month, and the floods in Malaysia as I write, I'm reminded that, whatever my personal concerns about the International Red Cross and the Salvation Army, what those organizations do in the immediacy of a crisis is peerless, necessary, and a blessing. I can save my gripes about them for encouraging both organizations to strive for always getting better, not for getting in their way when they're doing the work.

That said, there are also many other folks involved in both crises, and the others besetting our little world. If you're able, seek out and give where you can. May any such blessings you are able to give, especially the good voice in your heart, be multiplied a thousand-fold.

On other subjects:

I couldn't help thinking of the Big Chill when I read Cassandra Khaw's Nothing But Blackened Teeth. Which means soundtrack. Which, for me at least, for this story I think the sountrack lies somewhere between, on the one hand, New Order, Depeche Mode, and Ministry, and on the other hand 30 Seconds to Mars, Linkin Park, and Evanescence? Maybe something more EDM, Prodigy? I dunno, there's a thousand threads here, which I know all seem like Shirley Manson's territory, but either way Nothing But Blackened Teeth just seems to demand music from this stream.

A mentor/hero/idol figure will always fuck you if you let the relationship stay that way for too long. There's a certain point where, if they're doing their job right, you're supposed to become their peer, not their employee/sidekick/follower perpetual. This I think is where the "Never meet your heroes/Never revisit your faves" bit comes from. We all have that moment where we see the feet of clay, whether it's a book the suck-fairy hit up while we weren't looking, or a person we 'should' have learned to treat with a little more distance. It's hard though, isn't it? There's almost always a reason we never wanted to think of them as just another member of this poor fallen mortal choir...

Working definition of a peer: not Reviewer 2. Nor really Rev 1. Rev 3, the one who kicks your ass and tells you what you did right, that's the magic combination.

Rev 2 just pisses me off, they're picking a fight just to pick one. Rev 1 I never know whether to trust someone who blows smoke up my ass; that, or I recognized the reviewer's writing and discounted it due the friendship. Rev 3, on the other hand, is where I always tried to land: here are the things I'm worried about, here's how to fix them, and here's where I think you really hit the good stuff.

Outside of an explicit peer setting, and my real and total life friends and family, how often have I encountered this?

Approximately never. Real collaborations are a rare and precious thing. I dunno, maybe I just have a different view of what collaboration means; more likely though is that, just like real love or real friendship, there are only a few people out there that we can really and truly work with on a peer-to-peer basis for extended periods. The literature examples I know of seem to bear this out.

Mark Lawrence's Red/Grey/Holy Sister trilogy was a fun ride. So too the autobiographies of Keith Richards, Dave Grohl, and Mel Brooks.

Holy crap did I read a lot of LitRPG/GameLit fiction this year. To the point of forgetting, which is normal for me when I find a new story niche to explore. Will I write any? No, but that doesn't mean I didn't learn anything from my sojourn here. A lot of fun stuff, but I'll be honest, there's so much here that I did read that I'm not really seeing any titles that I'd say "You've got to read this". Instead I'd have to say, just dive in, if you pick a "book 1" and can handle the conventions, and persist a little, you'll find your way I think. The genre definitely seems to have found its space, that's for sure.

A friend at work turned me onto a band called The Warning, from Monterey, Mexico, they're an absolute blast. A sister trio, imagine Heart if they'd had a sister on the drums and you're in the right ballpark. Very real chops here, and their songwriting approach is going in some really fun sonic directions as the sisters grow into their world. I really look forward to seeing where they're headed.

I'm looking forward to next year, and hoping that it comes up well for you all, dear readers, as well. We'll get there, I promise.

Sure it's a bumpy ride, but that's what we pay our nickles for, isn't it? I'm up for the ride if you are. Come with me, let's see what they've got.

Winter's Creeping

I keep trying to re-do some of my daily reading habits. Trying and failing, a little better each time.

Some years ago, I realized just how many web sites I had in my everyday bookmarks folder, and how much time I spent each day reading the whole lot. Even the ones that were updated only weekly or what have you.

So I pared them back quite a bit. Plus, over the past couple of years, I've even eliminated web browsing from the computer almost entirely. But there's the phone. Oy.

Even without setting up favorites or anything, thanks to autocomplete all I need to spend hours of web browsing is to have a vague memory of the web address, and autocomplete does the rest.

The problem isn't all of the wonderful writers that I visit, the problem is that I've only so many hours a day, and so much time for conversations that I'm actually part of.

So that's working about as well as you can imagine. Ah well, I'll get there.

So other than the oh so transient web, what have I been reading that's interesting? I've got quite a list of reads according to my electronic library, and the majority of them were well worth the hours of enjoyment.

But of those hours I've really enjoyed lately, the ones that I keep returning to are those I spent watching Michaela DePrince and company in a really wild and interesting version of Coppelia.

I won't get much into it, other than to say that melding animation with live ballet wasn't what I expected when I tuned in. I also wasn't expecting what is, if I understand the history correctly, traditionally a comedy ballet to have been turned into a Grimm Brothers version.

Unexpected. But absolutely delightful. My poor wife was traumatized, though, the dolls of the animation were far too much for her. Me I was enraptured; I suspect this is one of those that I will stop for whenever it comes around again.

The story itself came across in a way that I don't usually have in ballet. For me, like with most classical music, ballet is impressionistic, rather than the more direct realism of written or spoken text with respect to story.

The combination of live action ballet and animation here absolutely reached through my normal sort of broad focus taking it in viewing and came alive in the immediate sense of story, here and now. And without the sort of old-guy narrator that Nuryev and Baryshnikov's various appearences used to require to let us know what they were up to besides the obvious.

First time for me seeing Michaela DePrince dance as an adult, as well. I'd heard so many wonderful things about her since she came to the public attention, and I absolutely fell in love with her dancework.

Hers and the rest of the team, both the company itself and some of the marquis names that guested with Michaela.

All of this is a longwinded way of saying, if you like your fairytales and your ballet, seek out Coppelia from PBS/Great Performances, it's an absolutely must-see.

Am I Doing Alright?

Am I Doing Alright?

Always with the existential questions, Moriarty...

Yeah, I'm doing pretty ok. So what happened then?

Burnout, that's all. A little more than a year ago, I had one of "Those" calls from work. The kind where I have to tell my family I'm headed out on the road and I don't know when I'll be back. In this case, it was a fortnight and done, but by the time we managed it I'd reached the point where I was ready to ask the hotel what kind of rate they'd give me if I booked a month at a time.

I was kind of burnt out on the day job after that one. Fortunately, I recognized it for what it was and so, by the time I got a similar phone call a couple months back, I was both prepared in wellness and mind and body, and able to pace myself a little better over the weeks I was on the road. These sorts of emergencies are part of the gig, I get it.

Which is why much of the past year, for me, has been spent looking at my daily and re-working my mind. I've been through it before, you see. I'm susceptible to it, I spend years at a time focused on technical, difficult questions of the kind that require that kind of focus and thought.

When it catches up to me, I tend to lose a year or so before I get my head on straight again. At least this time I didn't run off to join the circus.

Ok, and what's that got to do with writing, then?

Well, dear reader, I thought I could plow straight on through with the writing. More or less anyway, I'm sure you've noticed that I haven't put out any books over that time period, just the short stories I posted here. So I did know that I needed to address myself to myself on the writing front, as well.

I just put it off, you see. Until I couldn't.

Or, rather, not the writing. But my writing was the most obvious symptom. The act of it is still just as joyous.

When I can drag myself to the chair. And there I finally recognized the problem. I couldn't get to the chair to write, except under pain of posting here.

I couldn't get to a chair to play guitar, either. And then it hit my reading again. See, that's what happened the second time I burnt myself out completely.

I couldn't read fiction anymore. A book a day reader, and I couldn't finish a goddamned one of them. Up against the wall, you bastards... and if it's never happened to you, I can't even begin to tell you how broken that can make you feel.

I went for years like that, only able to read a couple fiction books a year, and those only from authors I knew and trusted that I could sit with and get lost for hours. New voices were too hard a lift for me.

I got better. But now I'm not just reading, I'm writing. So I have to figure out what makes it fun.

The start of it was realizing that publishing a story here once a week had run its course for me. I've always had a problem with practicing; I can't do it. Not the way "normal" folks do it, anyway.

I have to play games with myself. And once a game becomes work or a habit, I have to change what I do and quick.

Or I'll quit and lose all progress. The grey matter's a funky old place where it sits between my ears I admit.

For now, what that means is that I will be going back to a much more free form of posting for a while. I'll need to be able to tell myself that I don't have to do anything that I don't want to.

Note well, that doesn't at all mean that I don't have story projects I want to do. Oh, no, dear reader, you're not getting away from me that easy. Keep the faith, all. Be well. Take care of yourselves, please, and when the voices in your head start warning you of trouble pay attention.

And thank you for sticking around.