Writing and not-writing

I am a weird person.

I know. Stop the presses.

But sometimes I don't realize why I do the things I do, and who I do it to (sorry, I started writing a Bill Withers style song there ... take that last little part off.)

One example: I spent over two years not writing fiction. I have now started again, and I can't believe I ever allowed myself to stop. I want to explore it in a blog post, because maybe someone else has this problem, or maybe I'll entertain you with my stories of suffering and chillaxin'.

I started writing down stories as early as I could dictate them for my mom or grandmother to write down, and continued doing so until they actually made sense. (I also no longer dictate to my mom, as she claims more important things to do.)

I guess you could argue that my mom and the other authors in my family are the reason I have always had this interest. At least, if you're anything like the 8 million people who have learned I have degrees in English and have responded "AWW, YOU'RE TAKING AFTER/JUST LIKE YOUR MOM!!"

But that isn't true. Maybe there's a genetic component, or maybe my seeing it going down all the time in my house prevented me from finding it weird, but... It's always been my thing. And it's always been designed to make myself laugh while I do it. My mom's writing is great, her books are some of my favorites, but they ain't funny, that's for damn sure.

Anyway, I digress. I wrote for many years, sort of seriously beginning in high school. I received nice encouragement from a teacher or two and some other folks, which was cool, but didn't make or break the thing. It was still just a part of every day, just like eating breakfast or awkwardly trying to talk to some girl in second period I thought was hot.

Once I went off to college in Greensboro, I stepped it up quite a bit. I took fiction workshops, where I actually got some great feedback, along with some less-great feedback -- but that's the nature of the thing. It didn't bother me to get criticism. I liked it. It helped me to see things I had missed, to add dimensions to the stuff I never would have considered.

At some point, though, a couple of years later ... I just hit a wall. I'm not sure what it was. I lost faith in my ability to tell a story. Completely. It seems so simple to sit down and just start writing, but I was robbed of that process. Or I robbed myself of it, maybe.

The great thing about writing stories in high school and early on in college is that it was the one part of my life where I just. Didn't. Care. In life, I was going around feeling like I was "different": in the way I thought about things, the things I cared about, etc. I was awkwardly aware of that fact.

But I could make up weird characters and mark them with all the silly, dumb, sometimes screwed-up thought processes that I was afraid others would see in me, or that I saw in others, and there were no boundaries. I could write them all down in a way that all the surface details had changed, but the issues were exactly the same as I felt them. I was completely protected while completely exposed. In short ... it was a pretty great thing to be able to do, just for my own peace of mind.

But at some point, I got way too "serious." As an undergrad, I won some creative writing scholarship after doing pretty well in one or two workshops. And I won some writing contest at Greensboro. It was the thing that was supposed to tell me, "hey, pretty good job as a beginner, perhaps if you WORK YOUR ASS OFF you will actually do something with this." For me, though, it was: yo, you're going pro. Better get REALLY good really fast, because the standards have changed. Better not screw up!

All of a sudden, it wasn't something I was doing for me anymore. I was trying to write something that professors, classmates, etc., would like. Every single line being written on a blank page -- in a first-draft situation, mind you -- would be read, re-read, re-re-read, and then exasperatedly deleted. I'm a ridiculous perfectionist when it comes to school or work projects, etc. Something like this blog post is just tossed off, but "serious" things I spend insane amounts of time reworking over and over. So I guess I moved my creative writing into that domain, which was an imagination-killer.

And I hate admitting this. But after some time -- in which there was a major health scare dealing with my mom's heart and a pretty bad breakup with my long-term serious girlfriend, at which point I transferred to NC State -- I just gave up. Started putting my energy into some pretty stupid stuff. Wasted time, money, hung out with the wrong people, the whole nine. Knew I was not being true to myself but just ignored that glaring fact. I just wanted to get away from acknowledging that I'd failed at the life I chose, or maybe that chose me, before I'd really given myself a chance.

There was one spot in between then and now that I wrote seriously. I picked up this mentor at State who saw some of my old stuff and started riding me to write a novel. I thought he was crazy, but finally he got through to me. I started it. Just pushed myself really hard, wrote 25-30 pages in the first sitting and was amazed that I had managed to do it without thinking about the opinion of my intended reader (in this case, that prof). I got the best response imaginable from him, so I was suddenly energized. I got a little over 100 pgs, turning it in to the prof bit by bit to great praise, before it started seeming real. And then the dumb shit started happening again.

I was suddenly doing the write a line, erase the line, erase the line before it, go twenty pages back and find an awkward sentence, rewrite the entire page, forget what I was doing thing. I was getting concerned about the thing not working, particularly since I chose an insanely convoluted form and a similarly weird plot. I started thinking about all the wrong stuff, and it stopped me in my tracks. No other way to put it.

After a month or two, this professor got sick of my not turning stuff in to him, so he (publicly, in front of most of my classmates) told me he was tired of caring about my writing more than I did and even that I should find a new thesis adviser (an unrelated project), etc etc. What I had been trying to tell him was that I did care, in fact I cared too much. I never did succeed in explaining why that was my problem. His response was usually something along the lines of, "Why the hell do you care [what others think]? You're just some guy in RALEIGH." For some reason, I didn't find that helpful....

Well, I was seriously bummed by that. I felt like I was finally the failure I had always worried I might be. It seems so, so very dumb in retrospect, but sometimes perspective is nowhere to be found in situations like this.

So that's when the drought REALLY started. And I was unbelievably sad, all the time. Life was not cool for a while there. I took a semester off from school, tried to reassess what I was doing with my life. Sat on a couch a lot. In a completely unrelated tale of woe, got injured at a job and reduced to one hand. That was a rough time, but it was actually somewhat beneficial as far as this writing saga goes...

I came out of it thinking I needed to put my nose to the grindstone and finish my master's degree. I only had a little bit left to do, and I felt fired up to do it. After that "semester off" thing, you kind of want to apply yourself twice as hard to make up for it. And I did that. Finished the degree, and now I've truly achieved Mastery (in looking stuff up and writing papers about it.)

But as that was going on, I just started messing around with fiction a little bit here and there, just to pass the time once in a while. It was tentative at first, and I didn't want to jinx it by getting really excited.... but I have been building it up for months as a practice again, and I'm happy to say it's BACK TO NORMAL. I hate to trumpet that so loudly, but I AM SO HAPPY THAT IT'S BACK TO NORMAL. I just wish I could randomly flag people down on the street, just to yell in their face IT'S BACK TO NORMAL.

I no longer really care what anybody thinks of it. Yeah, I've missed some time that I could really have been putting into it, and maybe I'm a little bit behind, ability-wise, than I would have been if I had never had this weird block problem. But I really *don't care.* It's funny how good it feels not to care.

I think part of it just has to do with the natural course of "growing up", which I once didn't think I'd still be doing at 26, back when I was... well... naive. I have gotten older, heavier, perhaps a little dumber, and I just kind of stopped caring as much what people thought of me in social situations and stuff. It's kind of a take me or leave me attitude. Lets me be freer in my speech. I don't worry about sounding "different." I think the not caring about some imagined "audience" for my creative work is just an extension of that. So what if I fail?

I'd rather write some stuff and have it be a complete failure than not write stuff and sit around playing internet poker, or playstation, or watching some dumb movie I'm only half focusing on. This is my free time, I'm supposed to use it in a satisfying way. So I'm doin' it. Yeeaaaahhhhh.

So, the short version of this (oh holy shit why didn't I just write the short version of this) is that I can now safely say, after testing the situation for quite a while, that writer's block has been vanquished, the novel I started has advanced to a new place, and I feel generally more creative and more whole as a result. Which, I have to say, is bad-ass.

I owe a lot to the people in my life that have offered me words of encouragement here and there about this. I have a few good friends that have hounded me about why I wasn't writing. At the time, I found that somewhat annoying to have to deal with. Now I can't say how much it means to me, because it would have made a lot more sense to just give up on me like my mentor did. Oh yeah, and no thanks to that dude. That's a whole other story, but at least he gave me a horrible character to use.

I hope this is the end of my not-writing phase, but I am not ruling out the possibility that I'm going to have to battle that again. It would be silly to assume I have completely won here, but it's hard not to feel really good about it. For the first time since I was 19 or 20 years old, I am writing because I want to for fun, not because I'm trying to please some professor or classmates or win some fiction contest. That's an... oh, fine, I'm going to say it... epic win.

Next post: more entertainment, less emo. More than likely also less length as well. In other news, wtf, it's 2 a.m.

Cell tastic

So I finally got to upgrade my cell phone today, having been a faithful Verizon customer for two years. It came just in time, too, because a young lady I was hanging out with recently pointed out that I was using the phone she had TEN YEARS AGO!!! Embarrassing. You gotta be more up on your cell technology than that, if you want to really impress someone.

Well, I will still not be impressing anybody with the new phone, but to me it's pretty brilliant, because it has a keyboard (no more taking eight hours to peck out a 120-character text message) and it kinda LOOKS like a smartphone, even though it isn't one, and will be bulky and uncomfortable in my pocket. Holster, anyone? If it's good enough for Aaron Dixon, it's DEFINITELY good enough for me. Nah, just kidding Aaron, you're one of the few people that can actually pull off the cell phone holster. I would look like a wannabe IT guy. And by that I mean information technology, not like the trendy flavor of the month "it girl" gracing the pages of your favorite fashion magazine.

However, there is a major problem with my new cell phone. It has a very stupid, horrible name. And it is printed in all caps in the email I received, so I repeat it here: it's the VERIZON WIRELESS RAZZLE.

Now, that's a horrible name for a phone. So bad that I'm worried that letting it out here is going to result in lowered respect from my peers. But it's a risk I'm willing to take.

What I want to do, though, is to come up with some other name for the phone. Now cell phone names are kind of arbitrary, which makes coming up with something else a simpler proposition.

I wanted to just make up a few ideas for a name and hopefully get suggestions from others. Whatever I decide on, I'm going to tell people that's the name of the phone. Because I can't bring myself to say "Verizon Wireless Razzle." (However, I just realized I probably won't ever be asked the name of my phone, since I never have before, but I've come too far into this hypothetical exercise to give up now.)

-the Verizon Amused Salamander
-the Samsung Narwahl
-the Droid Moisture Farmer
-the Motorola Motorola
-the Blackberry Useless Piece of Crap Without a Pricey Data Plan
-the Sony Playstation 4 [would enjoy breaking nerds' hearts with this one]
-the Kyocera Michael Kyo-Cera
-the Nokia Let's Go to Burning Man
-the Samsung "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" [ed. note: Sam(my Davis Jr.) sang that very song. He also sung it.]
-the Sanyo What Have I Done With My Life
-the Siemens ... there's nothing I can add to that to make it more amusing
-the Panasonic Bacon, Egg and Cheese


I could go on, but I think it's actually getting a little bit TOO silly, so I will call it a night (holy crap I just realized it's really late) and hope something better appears to me in a vivid, meaningful dream.

See ya soon Razzle!

Later, home

I left my childhood home, my mom's house on Mayview Rd., for the last time ever a few days ago. My mom and I moved there in late 1986, when I was three years old, after having first lived on Oakwood Avenue. I don't remember much about Oakwood, but I know we moved away from there after having one too many drunks stagger into our yard to pass out. (My mom may well have embellished this, but I still kind of like the image.)

I remember the first time I ever saw the inside of the Mayview house. What I noticed were ... stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. I did not like the fact that my bedroom was only reachable by climbing what seemed like Mount Everest at the time. But I'm sure it didn't take me long to get used to it.

It was really a wonderful place to grow up. It had a big backyard -- seemed much bigger to me as a kid -- two stories and a basement, a lot of nooks and crannies to explore. The basement started out as my playroom, where I hosted many an imaginary sword fight with plastic weapons and suits of armor. There was this wooden toy chest that was filled with all kinds of random plastic crap and nicer toys as well, and in those days of constant entertainment, it felt like I could just drop a hand in there and pull out something that would define the entire day, at least in my imagination.

The yard was amazing, too. It felt like there was just so much running space for my friends and me. When it snowed, it was an even better playground. And when I was eight, a treehouse would be added to the mix. I spent the night under its little tin roof during sleepovers with friends many times, and have vivid memories of being woken up by the sound of rain on that roof.

Other things that come to mind include: Christmases. It was always me and my mom, and while she was alive, my grandmother. Our tradition of buying a tree every year slacked off over the past few years, but we used to get a big tree that filled up almost a quarter of the room. When I think of this, I remember the smell of the tree mixed with the odor of cider on the kitchen stove.

It's funny how you can't write about this without sounding like cliched tripe. I apologize, this is a rare occasion on which I am getting sentimental without much cynicism mixed in. I am actually a little embarrassed of that, but it's probably because I'm programmed to distrust cliched images like rain on a tin roof or cider cooking on a hot stove. But that's actually how it was.

Some other completely random things I remember:

-Getting Shaq's rap CD, Shaq Diesel, when I was in 5th grade. Thinking I was the coolest human being on the planet, and, in an attempt to impress a girl in the neighborhood I had a perpetual crush on for many, many years, opening my bedroom window, setting my boom box on the sill, and letting it blast its siren song out into the neighborhood. "You better than Shaq Attack? Fool, shut up liar, / I lean on the statue of liberty when I get tired."

-my 5th birthday party, which included a crazy amount of organized games in the backyard, a crazy magician dude named Tate the Great, and the gift of a Nintendo Entertainment System from my dad. Hooking it up in the basement after all partygoers had left (because I was ordered to wait until they had all left, damn these stragglers!) and completely killing it on Duck Hunt.

-going ahead exactly one decade for the hell of it ... my 15th birthday, where all my friends came over for a game of Diplomacy. Aaron Dixon and I, as Italy and Austria, kicked some Russo-Turkish ass. Then a limo came to pick us all up and take us to ComedySportz (greatest use of a limo ever. I don't know why I wanted that as a birthday gift, but it was my gift that year.) Afterward, we all came back to my house for some rousing battles in Bloody Roar and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

-the time Hurricane Fran destroyed the place. My mom and I had just moved downstairs to sleep in the living room when two gigantic oaks fell on both sides of the house, destroying both of our bedrooms. The living room ceiling was starting to leak major water so we bailed out, drove through the hurricane to a friend's house and came back the next day to survey the damage. I'll never forget how incredibly upset my mom was, the most frightening mix of terror and grief I've ever seen anyone express.... and I guess I was in such shock that I was amazingly calm, almost shell-shocked as I walked through the rubble in my bedroom, trying to find things to salvage. We moved into an apartment for a year, the place was rebuilt, and we finally were able to return. I was so happy to be home. Man... I'm going to miss it.

-my grandmother picking me up from a Christmas Eve visit at my Dad's house, telling me my mom has my present ready for me, but I 'won't like it very much.' Arriving at home to see my new puppy Chopsticks, with a bandana tied around his neck, running down the stairs to greet me. I thought there was going to have to be a catch, that we'd have to give him back for some reason. We took him for a ride in my grandmother's car and he puked a ton. I thought that was going to be it for ol' Chopsticks -- take him back to the previous owner! We don't want a puking dog. But fortunately, he was forgiven, and he lived until I was a junior in college.

-being allowed to have a girlfriend over, with privacy, at age 16.

-other ways in which I pushed the limits of what I was supposed to be allowed to do as an older teenager. Not things I'll share here :P But I do associate some of those memories with that house, and they're mostly good ones.

-the draft in the kitchen, the way my mom always kept house plants next to the table that grew much too large for their allotted space, and the framed Yeats poem with illustration she kept on the wall. It was one of the first things I was able to read on my own after learning to read.

-the way the basement went from my playroom to a room for Ed, at the time a graduate student who rented the room in exchange for teaching me guitar lessons and driving me places. I looked at him as the big brother I always wished I had. Then when he moved out, his room became my room. I felt like more of a man, just having turned 15. These days, Ed is still a great friend of mine, and I'm past the age he was when he lived there. Time moves far too quickly.

This is just a random assortment of memories and nothing approaching a coherent post, but I don't care -- I just wanted to save some of these things for later, when the house will be more of a distant memory. Because just as with all things that were once a given, or routine, change is inevitable after enough time has passed. The thing that bums me out, though, is that there is no replacement for "home." My mom's new house isn't my home, it's her home. My apartment now is sort of a temporary home, but it doesn't have the same comfort, exactly. Anyway, I've been enjoying remembering things about the place, and I'll continue to write other things down as they come to me.

Next post won't be so sentimental, I promise. It might also have coherent paragraphs, but I can't guarantee that.

Bloggawhat?

It has been far too long since I blogged, but I've got a good reason this time -- I've been pretty caught up in the vast amount of shit I must accomplish in order to finish my master's degree. It is a year late, due to circumstances out of my control, but in some ways that makes it even sweeter. Honestly, last fall when I got injured, I figured I didn't have a chance in hell of finishing. I was already feeling like the practice of writing papers and reading swaths of critical articles had left me, and had the conviction that I had chosen the wrong field of study when I started out.

In many ways, I still feel that way, but I have gotten real about it as well. When I was applying to graduate schools, I was being advised about my fiction writing by a professor who I really looked up to at the time. This person encouraged me to apply to MFA programs, and to go for the best ones. I only applied to a few of the top programs, and NO mid-level programs, which was probably some of the worst advice I've ever gotten and I should have known better. We all want to believe we're awesome, though. The "safe" school I applied to was good ol NCSU, and since my mom had been a fiction writing teacher there until recently, I didn't want to enter the MFA program, so just applied for the MA.

Well, that was dumb, because wouldn't you know it, I bricked on those MFA applications. The prof I was dealing with said sure, come to State, we'll do the thesis together. Blah blah blah. But the latter part didn't work out, and I was forced to change topics very soon before I was (originally) scheduled to graduate.

The rest is kind of history, but this is all to say I have felt very, very unmotivated to write a paper in a field that doesn't interest me (I guess I was hoping for more close readings of texts and analysis of the way they actually worked, as far as style, mood, word choice, etc. -- and less about politics and horseshit, which much of literary criticism seems to be.)

So the fact that I have finished a draft and now am just shy of finishing a major revision is a very, very good thing. I have like two weeks before it's due, I've got to pass a Spanish test next week, and if I can square all that away, I will actually finish. Which is amazing to me. I really had just about written it off.

The next barrel of monkeys will be finding a job, and I am drawing thin as far as ideas for that. Ideally, I'd like to work for the government. Like, starting off at the bottom at some agency office, being a solid worker, rising up through the ranks. I know that the government takes good care of its employees and offers a good retirement package. Unfortunately, however, all those jobs are being cut at the moment. So I will have to figure something else out.

Some volunteering I've been doing has been making me think working with young adults/kids might be a good thing for me. Believe it or not, I've been a teacher for a 6th-7th grade Sunday School class for the last couple of months. I've just enjoyed it so much. Anyone that knows me well knows I'm kind of a cynic about religion, but this is a church I grew up in, with all the right political/social stances, and it just seems to have naturally worked out to come back. That has been a major plus for me, probably the best thing that's happened to me all year. I was really proud of them, they put together a fundraiser and raised like $500 for Haiti relief in one afternoon. Cool stuff like that.

What else... well, I had an awesome experience at an invitation poker tournament that my good friend Ed brought me to. It was a 45-man (or thereabouts) tournament with the top 5 places winning money. I had an awesome run... though I can't really credit myself with amazing play, I just managed to get my chips in when I was ~60% favorite or better, and all my hands held up, until the end. When there were four of us left, I caught two pair on the flop out of the big blind. A guy with a similar chipstack to mine made a huge overbet, I thought he was just stealing so I reraised all in, which was an overbet in itself. To my surprise, he called, with just one pair. It was looking AWESOME for me, but the turn and river cards were both diamonds, giving him a flush. So I was out in 4th for 200 bucks. If I had knocked him out, the 3rd place guy would have been out quickly after (tiny stack) and I would have been playing heads up for the win. 500 for 2nd, 1000 for 1st. So while I was happy that I won what to me is a fairly significant amount of money (lets me have some entertainment anyway), I was hurting over that for days afterward! Man, so close yet so far away. But that's how it goes.

This blog has been all over the place so far, and probably won't be entertaining to most, but whatever. The last thing I wanted to say is that I have gotten back to doing the kind of writing I love to do, just for myself. I haven't had a lot of time for it the last week or so because of the impending school stuff, but it feels so good to be back to exercising that creative muscle. The best thing, probably, is not caring about showing it to anyone. If I write anything worth showing, I'll show it, but otherwise, I'm just going to enjoy myself. And that's a nice feeling.

This is gonna sound over the top, but it's true -- I feel like this has been one of the best years of my life so far, things seem to fall into place one after the other. There are plenty of things I still lack, like, well, a job, and a female that is not my dog -- but I trust things will continue to line up properly as long as I keep giving all my effort. I am actually happier on my own than I have ever been, and I think that's saying something.

So this hasn't been a very humorous blog post, lacking all the constant attempts at sarcasm I normally season these with, but screw it, I just wanted to throw a general update out there. I know a few people read this, but I also like to keep it kinda as a log for my own reference, like "oh, looks like I was feeling pretty good in April 2010, what a naive fool I was!!!" Or something like that.

Who are the Word Police?

Since no one has yet stepped up to the challenge, I'm declaring myself a self-appointed sheriff in the realm of lame, useless, and often cringe-inducing new words that somehow become ubiquitous within days of being introduced. If a word or phrase is lurking around these parts without my approval, this is fair warning that it may be shot down.

I apologize in advance for offending anyone who uses these words, I'm just cranky about the English language. I'll be the old guy yelling at kids to get off my lawn and to stop using double negatives.

Let's try a few of these on, shall we?

1) Epic. Let's get a quick google definition... "very imposing or impressive; surpassing the ordinary (especially in size or scale); "an epic voyage"; "of heroic proportions"; "heroic sculpture"
So it's a specialized word, right? One of those words you save for, well, a truly epic occasion. Like when you decide to set out from San Diego in a kayak and wind up in Wilmington, NC months later. That's epic. Eating a sandwich that is delicious is not an epic action. It's just a good sandwich. It would only be epic if it took you years to eat, or if you had to slay some sort of demon/dragon to gain access to said sandwich.

*sub-annoyances*
-Epic Fail. I know this one has been around for a while, but it still makes my skin crawl. You're walking down the street and you drop your lunchbox. It pops open and your apple rolls down the street and into the gutter. "EPIC FAIL!" you announce to anyone who'll listen. "I JUST FAILED EPICALLY! CHECK ME OUT!" No, to fail epically would be something along the lines of Napoleon and/or Hitler staging a massive invasion of Russia and losing a bloody war of attrition, leaving millions dead. That's an epic fail. Since the war in the middle east has cost many lives since 2002 and hasn't yielded Bin Laden, you could argue that it's an epic fail. If they caught him after 10 years, that'd be an epic win. An epic win is not finding an open gas pump at a crowded filling station. And this brings me to...

2) For The Win (FTW). How hard is it to say "This cookie I'm eating is good"? Why complicate it by holding it up, grinning, and saying "cookie FOR THE WIN!" What did the cookie help you win? Are you the new cookie eating champ? Or is it the cookie that won? I don't get it. Places where this phrase is acceptable: the set of Hollywood Squares, sporting events.

3) Fuck my Life (FML). OK, this is one that started out kinda cool in my view, just because the site that spawned the saying was pretty brilliant. You could peruse all the horrible things that were happening to others, which made you feel slightly less pathetic. But now people have started WAY overusing this. "I missed the bus and I have to wait 15 minutes for the next one. FML." "I just opened a soda and a little bit of it sprayed out on my shirt. FML." I think there needs to be a minimum requirement of a certain level of horror and embarrassment for this one. "I got explosive diarrhea with zero warning at my senior prom, FML." That should be considered a mild FML.

4. Creeper. I am not sure why this has caught on so much, but I have heard people at many different age levels using this. I'm not really opposed to the word so much as the idea that you can just add "er" to an existing word and have it mean basically the same thing. Letters cost money, you know! Plus, 'creeper' should really mean 'something that creeps', like maybe a spider or a millipede. A creepy person doesn't creep, they're just creepy.

OK, allow me to apologize for my curmudgeonishness (new word!... I guess that makes me a curmudgeoner) but I thought it would be fun to attack a few words head-on. There are plenty more that I object to, but I'll save those for another time. Oh, and if I offended anyone, I was basically just joking... you can use whatever words you want. It's a free country. FML.