Poetry and Mind Reading

I was reading a poem that I didn't quite get, but I could get some sense of the meaning and passion behind it, just out of reach, and it occurred to me that if some sort of mind reading were possible, this is what it would be like: Sometimes a message comes through loud and clear and you get it and can either agree or not, or you can at least appreciate it. And sometimes the set of experiences that you'd need for the thought to speak to you are just slightly skew of your own, and you get some vague impressions but at the end of it all you just can't say what it's about. And usually, even when the meaning is reasonably clear, it takes a little bit of intellectual work to unpack it all. I'm not claiming for a moment that this is an original thought, but when I approach it this way, even poetry I don't get provides me with a neat experience.

This is a switch from my experience as a literature major in college and grad school. So much of my schooling focused on decoding poetry, as if we'd intercepted from the front--"If they be two, they are two so/As stiffe twin compasses are two"--"Roger that: the lovers are staying together BRRRSSSCHT!!!" "The white dove sails at dawn" "BRRRSSSCHT!!! Wait--what?!" If you decoded it the same as the professor did, you had succeeded. If you decoded it differently or not at all, you failed. And that's where my discomfort with poetry probably stems from: too much experience of failure. Who likes feeling inept so much?

I've been stumbling across a lot of poetry lately. I suppose discovering Taylor Mali a few months ago reawakened my interest in the form. I don't ever find that I don't know what Mali is talking about. Maybe because he places an emphasis on accessibility, or maybe because, as a teacher, I share enough common background with him that I get what he's talking about.

I'd like to go to a poetry slam sometime, ideally with someone who was into them and knowledgeable. I don't pretend for a moment that I could write anything worthwhile myself, but I'm just enjoying the opportunity to appreciate what others can do. It's a little bit of a relief, actually, to be able to come to art as a consumer only. I think I can maybe appreciate more purely when I'm not thinking about how I would like to do it myself.

And yet . . . and yet part of me wishes I understood the medium better because I'd like to crystallize thought this way. I wrote crappy poetry as a teenager like every angsty, arty kid does. I don't mean that. I mean I wish I had some sense of how to write poetry that captures and evokes something without being self-conscious. Maybe I'd like to experience more poetry in the hopes of getting a sense of how this is done. Lord knows we don't need crappy teen poetry from nearly-forty-year-olds.

Some poetry I've been reading recently, along with how I ended up there:

• "On the Amtrak from Boston to New York City" by Sherman Alexie. I read this because The Rejectionist posted it on her blog, and I was especially interested because Alexie wrote a YA novel I'm dying to read, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. (You saw what I did there, didn't you?) I have no experience of genocide, but I can thoroughly identify with being a minority who can pass for Anglo, and with having white people say things in front of me they might not say if they realized I wasn't Anglo. So while all of this poem speaks to me, parts of it do so as experiences I share and parts of it as experiences I'm grateful not to share. Here's some more poetry by Alexie: http://www.slipstreampress.org/horses.html
  
• "Love poem in the shape of a cochlear mechanism" by J. Mae Barizo (not a permalink, sorry). I found this poem while looking for more online poetry by Alexie. This poem actually prompted this post, largely because I don't get it. My uncle and aunt are deaf, so I have some passing awareness of what a Cochlear mechanism is and the pros and cons of restoring hearing this way. I feel like I can *almost* sense meaning here, but like I lack some experience that would tie it all together and make it understandable to me. This is what prompted the comparison to mind-reading without the background to make the thoughts intelligible. In the past, coming across a poem like this would make me feel inadequate, like maybe if I were smarter I would get it. This would be followed in short order by anger: This poet is obviously some pseudo-intellectual playing a masturbatory game by stringing together cryptic phrases so that a bunch of snobby elites would stand around and nod thoughtfully, with nobody daring to point out that the emperor has no clothes. Now I'm just appreciating the experience for its very alien-ness.
• "Narrative 5" by Paul Guest. Another look inside someone else's head. I like the images here, particularly that of the soaked book and the crude drawing of a bus. I feel like a lot of it sails over my head, but that's okay. I ran across his poem when I followed a link to his excellent rant about the idiocy of the new TSA screening procedures, and his uncomfortable experience with them.
  
• "Song for an Ancient City" and "To the River," by Amal El-Mohtar and Jessica Paige Wick, respectively. Elizabeth Bear linked to this page on Twitter, and possibly in her LiveJournal as well. She was linking to "Song for an Ancient City," but I actually found "To the River" more compelling. Later I read here that El-Mohtar wrote "Somg for an Ancient City" as a love song to Damascus and this seemed to emphasize my sense that my ability to "get" poetry depends on my ability to step at least partway into another's shoes*. I'm not going to feel embarrassed if what I took from "To the River" is something other than what Wick intended, or if I missed a world of nuance--because there's the flipside: that our experience of someone else's poetry is our own, neh? I guess the speaker is a ghost or possibly a vampire, but I keyed in on the images of stolen innocence: the ribbon, the knee-socks, the unmade bed. As an adult survivor, these images speak to me. There is a sense, to me anyway, that the speaker is now tempting new victims to the river, which is of course disturbing when I look at the poem in that light. But I focused instead on the confusion embodied in the lines "And I'm hideous and hair-thatched/because I must be trash/for him to throw me to the river/like a used cigarette." Who can't identify with being used and discarded?
  

Anyway, I don't think I'm fully communicating how much this idea of poetry as imperfect mind-reading changes my appreciation of poetry, but to me it's kind of game changing. It goes beyond a throwaway metaphor. It basically empowers me to enjoy poetry without regard to whether I'm decoding it in the way the author intended, where before I could only enjoy it if it spoke to me perfectly.

*Um, I totally intended to put a footnote here, but now I can't remember what it was. Damn.

Checking In

I basically haven't looked at my blog since school started, so I figured I ought to check in lest people think I fell by the wayside when it came to writing too.

This school year has been brutal--the hardest I can ever remember. There is so much paperwork and jumping through hoops. Some of it is punishment for having been a D school for two years--clearly we teachers aren't doing enough. (I'm sure the powers-that-be would take exception to my labeling it a punishment, but the shoe fits, you know?) We also have new textbooks, and I feel like I'm reinventing the wheel at every turn. I've never worked so hard, nor felt like I was accomplishing so little. I feel like the sacrifices I make, the time I put in, the things I do well, are all largely unnoticed. The things I don't get around to, though--because there's so much to do I can't possibly get around to it all--are immediately noticed and commented upon. I get to work at 6:15, on average, and leave at 4 on average, and still feel constantly guilty for every second I'm not working.

Through it all, though, I haven't let the writing slip. In fact, I've done a better job this year of being dedicated to my art and craft than I did last year. Since I'm getting up early to do schoolwork, I'm giving myself the evenings to write. Every night I put in at least a couple of hours, and progress is slow but steady.

Good News: I think I mentioned that Vanishing Act was a finalist in the Royal Palm Literary Award in the category of Unpublished Young Adult Novel. Well it won! First place! So my record in contests continues to be pretty good.

As for the submissions process--some up, some down. I'm submitting to agents at a snail's pace, because it seems better to fire them out in small bursts and be able to use whatever feedback I do get, rather than to blanket the literary world and see what happens. I can still count the number of agents I've queried without taking my shoes off. I've had a grand total of one form rejection, which I think is some kind of awesome, even with as few queries as I've sent out. I got a rejection today from an agent I'd really been crossing my fingers on. It had good feedback on it--good points, though I'm going to have to sleep on things for a bit to figure out how to make the improvements she said the MS needed. (See? Querying slowly was a good call!) To be unbelievably arrogant, I kind of have a feeling someone's going to want to represent this book, but if it doesn't happen, hopefully this agent will like my next manuscript better.

Anyway, I feel like a loser for not updating this blog more, but right now my priorities seem to be work, parenting, writing, and reading. There pretty much isn't room for a fifth thing on my list right now, be it television, going out with friends, tweeting, blogging, or reading other people's blogs. I have a feeling next year won't be much better in that regard, because I'm helping to kick off a new IB program at my school, so I'll be reinventing the wheel yet again. Hopefully someday I'll find myself teaching courses I've taught before, using materials I've used before. Certainly I've been in my career long enough to have reached that point. Now I understand why my father, late in his career, didn't want to take on the opportunity of starting a new Computer Science program at a school that didn't have one.

Speaking of reading: I've been reading Justine Larbalestier's Magic or Madness trilogy. Why is it so hard to find in bookstores? I thought How to Ditch Your Fairy was fantastic, but I think these are better. Razorbill is not exactly a small house, so what the heck gives? Among YA authors, Larbalestier and Janice Hardy are the ones most writing the kinds of books I want to be writing. (Among science fiction writers, in case anyone's keeping score, the list would be Steven Gould--whose writing is often so close to YA as to blur any meaningful distinction--Mary Robinette Kowal, and Elizabeth Bear. I'm probably forgetting someone, but that's who comes to mind.)

How do you want to be remembered?

Thursday I was able to get away from work for a few hours to attend my kids' fifth grade graduation. (Who schedules an event like this at 9:30 in the morning?! Are those of us who actually work for a living such a small minority around here?)

Since I was giving a final exam until 9:15, I got there with literally seconds to spare before the ceremony began. The graduation was in the school's gymnasium, and I didn't even bother trying to find a seat in the bleachers, because I basically would have had to walk in front of the action to do so. I was able to find a nice spot to stand in the wings, and I've never minded standing. (I pretty much do it all day anyway.) Shortly after I got there, a guy with a camcorder showed up and decided that smack in front of me was the perfect spot for him to shoot the entire ceremony from, so for most of the event, this was my view:


Anyway, I spend the week or two leading up to the graduation trying not to be too cynical about it in front of my kids. Seriously, though, why do we need to many graduations? Before my kids ever get to high school, they will have graduated three times from the very same school! Seriously: there was kindergarten graduation, now elementary school graduation, and in three years middle school graduation, but they go to a K-8! And I was annoyed at some of the expensive ways this was turning into a big deal. For instance, there was an expectation that the girls would wear a nice dress, but they have occasion to wear such a dress maybe once before they outgrow it. I couldn't see buying fancy dresses just for this.

They actually had nice dresses from last summer that they could just barely still squeeze into, but we were worried that the straps on them would be too thin for the school's dress code. They also had nice shoes, but they could not wear those because they were backless. This has been a tough few years for teachers in this state, with pay cuts, cuts in benefits, and rising prices on everything, so the idea of buying new things when we actually had stuff they could wear was doubly aggravating. Seriously, if you've decided this is such a big event that they need to dress up for it, then suspend the parts of your dress code that would rule out a lot of nice clothes. In the end, we went with the dresses they had, but we bought new shoes. We couldn't find any that were dressy and closed back and flat while still being a good fit, so we also had them wear bobby socks with them. I thought that would work fine, but I'm embarrassed to report that they're the only girls who wore socks. :-/

Rather than imitate a high school graduation to the hilt, they had each teacher introduce the kids in his or her class. As the kids crossed the stage, they were handed the microphone and they told the audience either one thing they were looking forward to in middle school or one thing they'd like to be remembered for. I thought that was a nice twist.

So as I stood there listening to kids giving their little soundbites and watching the head of the guy in front of me, I turned the question on myself. What would I like to be remembered for? (I'm not planning on going anywhere any time soon, but then, my kids aren't planning on leaving their school for three years either, so I guess the question is just as relevant to me as it is to them.)

I don't need to be remembered as talented or successful. I hope people remember me as generous and as hard-working. I think I am these things, but I often feel that other people don't notice it. I'm not necessarily showy in the things I do, so sometimes I work really hard on something and people assume it was easy, or sometimes my definition of generous doesn't seem to match that of other people. (For instance, as a teacher, I don't define generous as "giving everybody good grades." I define it in terms of generosity with my time and effort.)

So what about you, my three or four regular readers? What do you want to be remembered for?

New School Year, 1/4 down (Self-Analysis Edition)

So the new school year is 1/4th past now. Now I have two AP preps, as opposed to last year, when I had one (and the year before, when I had none). In some ways, Calculus AB is like a new prep to me too, because I'm approaching it rather differently this year than last year. Last year my students' pass rate wasn't what I hoped it would be, so I'm trying different strategies--different and time-consuming.

Still, I tend to find the first quarter the most draining, in terms of my personal time. The reason for this is that I don't believe in spending a ton of time reviewing material from previous classes--especially when teaching honors or AP classes. So I tend to fly through the early parts of the curricula, hoping that in so doing I can free up time for me to go more slowly later on in the year, when we cover material that is actually new to the kids. The consequence of that for me is much more frequent quizzing and testing, and so a heavier pile of grading. The fourth quarter gets rough too, but that's just at the very end.

So it's time to get off my ass when it comes to writing. I've hardly done any writing or revising at all since the start of August, and I am properly ashamed about that. (In my defense, I have done more than you could tell by looking at this blog. I sacrifice blogging before I sacrifice writing. Since my last blog post, I have revised two short stories and done some preliminary planning on a new YA novel. Not a lot, I know, but not nothing.)

A huge problem of mine, and one I need to work on, is my tendency toward perfectionism--more in teaching than in writing, actually. For the past nine weeks, I have averaged around four hours of sleep a night on school nights. When I grade, I don't just mark stuff wrong--I make detailed comments explaining where student work went wrong. But most kids don't look at that; they just look at the number at the top and put the thing away. So I need to find a way to help the kids that want help, but not spend my whole life on grading. I also operate a forum where I answer questions from kids, but I tend to spend too much time on silly details. For instance, the forum doesn't support LaTeX or any other mathematical mark-up features, so I make mathematical expressions with other software, capture it as an image, and upload it that way. But then I waste time trying to get the typeface and the background to match, so that it will look as if it were actually native text instead of an image. Who the hell cares? Well, besides me, that is.

(Not all the things I spend time on are that silly. I spend several hours each weekend on lesson planning, where other teachers tell me they spend maybe a half hour. I almost never give kids seatwork in class, which means I can't get my work done while they're doing that, which means all my grading and lesson-planning and communicating with parents are always take-home work. I tutor kids four afternoons a week. I think a lot of these things make me a better teacher, but it's time for me to start thinking about bang for my buck, and about when I get time to be more than my job.)

It's not perfectionism, exactly. It's that I'm very detail-oriented. As a consumer, I appreciate that tendency in the art and craft I most enjoy. That's what I love about Disney--both their movies and their architecture. Always that little bit of extra "Ah ha!" for those of us who are looking out for it. Maybe that's why I'm such a big fan of the Indigo Girls--those amazing harmonies are like that little bit of extra detail that most artists don't bother with. That's what I loved about the original Star Wars trilogy: the sense that there was a greater storyline, and that someone behind the art already knew where this was all going. (That's probably why I'm more of a plotter than a pantser.)

I have a difficult time giving myself permission to not get the details right. I think as an artist, this leads to some of my strengths. I think I use foreshadowing well. I also think I'm good at throwing in little self-referential "symbols," for lack of a better word. Of course, this also leads to my tendency to spend too long revising.

As a teacher, this focus on details may be hurting me, and, ironically enough, making me less successful. I spend so much time doing things that nobody notices. Things that nobody particularly appreciates. I may be the hardest-working teacher I know; but I don't necessarily work smart. Who appreciates that I stay up until 2 am or wake up at 4 am to grade or lesson plan? Am I crankier or less effective during the day because I'm tired from working so hard? Am I crankier or less effective because I put my artistic dreams on hold for so much of the school year?

I had a bit of an epiphany at the end of the last quarter. I tend to fall behind on my projects because of my perfectionism. If I don't have time to do it perfectly, I'll wait until I do. Eventually, some things become emergencies, and that's when I finally give myself permission to cut corners, to do less than a perfect job. It occurred to me that perhaps on some level I fall behind on purpose, as a way of giving myself permission to cut those corners. (Ironically enough, nobody notices the difference between when I cut corners and when I don't, though they certainly do notice when I'm behind.)

The trick, then, is to learn to back off on the things I do for my day job without waiting until things are emergencies.

We'll see . . .

Don't worry, Bev Vincent, I write like a girl too . . . Or maybe we should both worry, because neither of us will ever win a Hugo award. ;)

By now most people who follow SF blogs have heard of this story. In case you haven't, the short version is that Mr. Bev Vincent received an editorial note back from an editor who had been brought in on an anthology that had already bought one of his stories, explaining at length that, like many women, Mr. Bev Vincent could not write men convincingly.

Leaving aside for a moment the absurdity of an editor looking no further than an author's first name before making all sorts of erroneous assumptions, the rigid gender profiling the editor showed in his letter hits on a hot-button topic of mine. Look at these assumptions for yourself:

The editor says: “The story seems far too personal, introspective and emotional for a man . . . It is hard to imagine a fellow from a place like [the setting] uttering the following line.” The editor then provides three sentences from my story as examples. He or she continues, “And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family” [Emphasis his or hers]. Another brilliant insight: “Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.” The ultimate conclusion: “She [sic] needs to write more convincing [sic] from a man’s perspective.”

I've always had problems with such gender stereotyping because I've never felt like I fit those stereotypes myself--yes, I do think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature. ;)

I lean toward thinking that traditional gender roles are societally constructed and not inborn. No, I don't have a ton of evidence for that position, and I'm comfortable in my unmanly unscientificness. I've seen evidence for traditional roles being genetically determined and found it unconvincing--I've never believed it was possible to adequately control for the pervasiveness of society's messages. Parents of daughters who, like me, tried to keep their kids away from Barbie and from the Bratz know what I mean. If you didn't do a good enough job of reinforcing society's stereotypes, don't worry: your kids still got the message from their teachers at school, from their classmates, from their friends on the street, and, most of all, from television. My kids find it odd that I'm the cook in the house--why would something that's been true for all of your life seem odd to you, unless you're hearing the message somewhere else that it runs contrary to expectations?

I'm not sure the question of where traditional gender roles come from can be answered satisfactorily, but you know what? It doesn't matter. The question is actually irrelevant. (Like the question of whether homosexuality is a choice or not, but that's way beyond the scope of this rant.) Let's suppose traditional gender roles are in fact in our blueprints; I'll concede the point. It's not the real issue. The real issue, to me, is that regardless, there will be exceptions. There will be boys and girls who don't meet your stereotypes. Artistic boys who like to cook, draw, and write, who grow into young men who focus on relationships and on their feelings. Athletic girls who like to play with toy cars and tools, who grow into young women who like to figure out how stuff works and who can opine knowledgeably on football.

The exceptions are out there, and I can't for the life of me think of a reason why anybody should have a problem with this. And because they are out there, I think we should honor our children's right to be individuals. When we as a society hammer home the message, over and over, that males are Y and females are X, we tell those children and young adults who don't fit the mold that there is something wrong with them. How damaging this is--and for what? How much healthier to send the message that there's nothing unusual about a nurturing boy or about an empowered girl. Better yet, let us send the message that all children can have the healthiest features of either gender, and all grow into nurturing, communicative, empowered, confident adults.

Anyway, enough ranting. In the wake of this story, I started seeing references and links to The Gender Genie pop up all over the place. If you're not familiar with it, the short version, once again, is that some researchers did a study of the writing tendencies of men and of women and came up with a complex formula for determining the gender of the author of a writing sample, based on the frequencies of certain key words that men were more likely to use and others that women were more likely to use.

The word lists are the most common of stereotyping: women use personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, possessive pronouns, and words like "should." You know, 'cause they always gabbing about relationships and shit. Men use prepositions, articles (Seriously?! Men use more articles than women?! How is that even possible??) and forms of the verb to be (except for "be" itself, curiously, which is a woman's word). That's because men are always building shit, so they need to look at blueprints. I guess.

No, this is not a detailed look at their methodology, just my overall impression from several hours of playing with the thing when I should have been revising a story for submission.

Anyway, I first played around with the Gender Genie, er, so to speak, two or three years ago, but seeing it again in the context of Bev Vincent's story made me want to look more closely at the supposition that a fiction editor could distinguish between manly writing and womanly writing based on the textual clues.

So I fed through the story I was supposedly revising. Gender Genie said it was written by a woman. No surprise . . . it was a first person story with a female protagonist. Probably lots of womanly words there. So I ran through "Spacelift," the story I posted here last week. It has a gender-ambiguous protagonist, but at least it's not first person. And it's on a space ship, so maybe there are more engineering words there. Nope, couldn't fool Gender Genie. That was definitely written by a woman. So I tried my coarsest, most vulgar story, which featured an unambiguously male protagonist. Written by a female, said Gender Genie again. I tried my wife's WIP next. Female. *whew*

Well, big deal anyway. Like I said at the beginning, I never felt like I fit those stereotypes very well. So it's no surprise that Gender Genie says I write like a female. Besides, writers tend to be artsy types, right? That probably skewed things. Maybe all fiction writers showed up as women on Gender Genie.

There was an easy enough way to check: coincidentally enough, it's almost time to award the Hugos, and that means most of the nominees are available online. I thought it would make an interesting experiment to run as many of those stories as I could through Gender Genie.

First the short story nominees. According to Gender Genie, all of those stories were written by men. Yes, that includes the stories by Mary Robinette Kowal and Kij Johnson.

Now I started to freak out a little bit. It's one thing to be told I write like a woman. It's quite another to discover that a sampling of the most well-received short fiction in SF this year is written in a more masculine style. Gender Genie didn't peg a single one of my stories as being written by a man, so what did that say about my chances of publication? Is this what I've been doing wrong? Am I not butch enough?

Oh, but the plot thickens. Because next I tried the Best Novelette nominees, and three out of the five were identified by Gender Genie as being written by women. Oddly enough, though, none of those three was the one by Elizabeth Bear, the only actual woman among the nominees.

Mike Resnick is an interesting case. His "Article of Faith" was written by a man, while Gender Genie thinks his "Alastair Baffle’s Emporium of Wonders" was definitely written by a woman. Don't worry Mike. I empathize with your painful gender confusion. (((Mike Resnick)))

By this point, I wasn't sure what to make of it all. Maybe the novelette form is friendlier to a more feminine style of writing because it's longer. Women write florid, dontcha know, while men use fewer words and more grunts and gestures.

I plowed on, because the alternative was productivity, and found that, among the best novella nominees, Gender Genie correctly identified the three stories written by men ("The Tear" by Ian McDonald was not available for examination) and the one story written by a woman. Thank God for Nancy Kress--finally, a woman who writes like Gender Genie says a woman should!

(Many of those were extremely close calls, though. A couple more "with"s, maybe one less "around," and we'd have some more gender confusion among SF's leading men.)

The only novel I could try, Little Brother, was correctly identified by Gender Genie as being written by a man.

So what wisdom can I take from all of this?

Beats the hell out of me. In twenty unscientific trials, Gender Genie was right ten times. A .500 batting average is fantastic in baseball, but a 50% average is not so good in school. The samples I fed were 75% by male authors, and Gender Genie guessed male 55%, which is basically comparable to results I could have obtained by flipping a coin. Beyond questioning the stereotypes underpinning the algorithms of Gender Genie, maybe we can say that some men write "like men" and some women write "like women" and some don't, and yet they all seem to please their fans enough. Or, in other words, that it doesn't matter much whether you fit the stereotype.

Nah. That's sissy talk.

Oh, and Bev Vincent is right. I ran his blog post through, and Gender Genie says he definitely writes like a girl.

And now you know the rest of the story

I was thinking more about last night's post this morning, and I think in my rambling and flailing around, I actually put my finger on something.

Let me tell you a bit about how story generation goes for me. I'll get the barest suggestion of an idea from whatever--a bit of nonfiction, or a dream, or a chance reverie--and I'll automatically begin to generate story elements as I see the possibilities in the premise. A scene, a complication, even just a line of dialogue. And then when I sit down to write the stories, I try to arrange the plot in such a way as to get all that good stuff in, and that's where the contrived bits come in. Because some of those ideas are like different branches of a timeline . . . the story could go this way, OR it could go that way, and I'm trying to make it go both. Is it any wonder my stories sometimes hemorrhage under the strain? It's obvious in hindsight, but I wasn't even questioning some of these ideas . . . it was all good stuff, or so it seemed, and so I wanted to include it all. Now I'm seeing that I have to make choices sometimes, include some ideas I like, and leave out some ideas that I like and wish I could have written in.

So referring to killing darlings was an apt comparison. (Or maybe everybody but me knew that killing darlings was not just about verbiage, but about plot points too, and I'm just coming to that realization late.)

-o-

It's been a hell of a summer, hasn't it? I think it will go down in my mind as the summer of death. It seems like a disproportionate number of national news stories in the last month or so have been about high profile deaths. One of them touched me personally.

You probably know about the monorail crash at Disney early July 5th that killed one driver. That driver was a former student of mine. In fact, I taught him for three years, and was also the sponsor of the FIRST Robotics Team, which he was an integral part of, for another year. America knows him, if they know him at all, as someone who was proud to be a monorail driver and loved his job. That's all true, but I also knew him as a genius, and a generous, funny kid. Monorail driving was a job he was pleased to have, but it wasn't going to be his career. He was a senior in college, and he had a very bright future.

My thoughts and feelings about this go far beyond this little banality I'm about to share here, but I try to focus on writing in this blog, and here's the connection I'm seeing between Austin's death and the writing ambitions I and my handful of regular readers share. A couple of posts back I talked about why some talented, even brilliant, people with artistic ambitions achieve them and some don't. I was talking about perseverance, basically, but now I'm also thinking about not wasting time. Austin was brilliant, but he didn't live long enough to put in his ten thousand hours. I'm sure he would have accomplished amazing things; he was just that special. It's unusual to die so young, but even those of us who live long enough to have a career and a family don't know if we'll make it to eighty, sixty-five, or just into our forties. So the thought I'm taking away from this right now is to make the most of your time, because you don't know how much of it you have.

Whence these flowers?

I'm just wading back into the blogosphere now after a three or four month hiatus, and one thing that's suddenly standing out to me much more than it did before is how uncharitable comments on blogs tend to be.

I don't mean my blog or those of other aspiring writers, but those blogs that are somewhat famous within the universe of aspiring writers, those agents' and editors' and authors' blogs that give lots of advice. It seems to me like a form of sucking up. Editor A says in her blog that she doesn't care for this or that little idiosyncrasy that had nothing to do with writing--an opinion she's entitled to, mind you--and then two dozen people line up to post snarky generalizations on the same point, presumably hoping to earn brownie points through their ridicule of whatever the editor wasn't into in the first place.

In other news, get the hell off my lawn!

Why do the best ideas come when the laptop is off?

Went to bed early last night (midnight) because I was passing out. Before I could fall asleep, I had a brainstorm on the idea I've been toying with for my next novel. Suddenly I was wired, with one idea after another coming to me in rapid succession. I didn't grab my journal. I knew these would keep until morning, and they did. Actually, I had to fight the temptation to get up and start working on it, but I knew if I didn't get some sleep I'd be dragging through today. Still, I'm pretty excited. I wish I could work on this now, but I have a short story to finish, revisions on a couple of short stories, and *blush* revisions on Vanishing Act.

Oh, for thirty hour days.

And it's July already! How the hell did that happen?!

*sigh*

Know what's worse than catwaxing for two hours? Catwaxing for two hours and having the person you were trying to amuse not get it. :-\

The delicate psyche of the aspiring writer

I went to a writing workshop last weekend. It's how my wife and I spent our anniversary, in fact. Yeah, I know, we're nerds. We've made our peace with it.

It was a one-day version of Todd A. Stone's Writer's Boot Camp. I definitely learned a few useful things, but the day had an effect on me that surprised me. I normally eat this sort of stuff up. I like learning about writing. I have at least a dozen books on fiction-writing, and I read a lot of writers' blogs to see what useful tips I can glean. I look forward to conference sessions and hope they'll be time well spent.

But this time I found my spirits getting down. Maybe it's the timing. A lot of times books on writing and workshops spark my creativity. This time, though, I kept hearing these great ideas on character development and thinking, "I didn't do that. My characters suck." And then these great ideas on plotting, and thinking, "I didn't do that. My plotting sucks." And then these great ideas on revision and thinking, "I didn't do that. My book sucks."

:(

It was hard not to come out feeling as if I'd been set back.

Ultimately, I had to compartmentalize a lot of what I learned, as great ideas for the next book, because it's too crippling at this point to think I need to tear my book apart and rewrite it.

Dagnabbit

I'm a mean critter. I just am. :(

I hate making people unhappy. Why can't they be pleased when I tear into their hours of work?!

-o-

In other news, I seem to be using the "blarging" tag a lot more lately. This is troubling.

-o-

I've been productive on my book today. I finished rewriting my synop from scratch and I incorporated the remarks by one of my critters into my current draft.

I'm still behind on other (read: non-writing) stuff, though. This will need to change. I think I need to stop playing writer for the next two days.

Good thing I waited a few days to make those resolutions

After being pretty successful with my New Year's resolution for 2008, I had some pretty ambitious plans for 2009. Then Monday came and reality slapped me in the face. I'm now sitting here at my desk, surrounded by piles of paperwork I need to get through, and coming to the realization that I need to reprioritize. I know what you're supposed to do when you finish one writing project: begin the next one. Writers write. Duh. But I've got four preps, two of which are new to me, and way more work each week than I can get done in a measly forty hours. It isn't fair, but that's the way it is: I need to devote more of my off-time to my day job.

I'm deeply conflicted about this. I don't want to be one of those people who say they want to write but always have some excuse for not doing so. How many times on this very blog have I commented on how much of this year's growth could have come sooner if I'd just pushed a little harder? But until someone wants to pay me to sit around and write, I need to make sure I keep giving my employers reasons to keep me around. Hopefully what I've done this year will keep my internal self-critic quiet for a few weeks.

Twenty, to be precise.

So here are my scaled back resolutions for 2009:

• Finish revising Vanishing Act, including the feedback from my critters.
• Send Vanishing Act to Moonrat for the critique I won, and incorporate her feedback into my submission.
• Begin sending Vanishing Act to literary agents, starting with the ones who've asked to see it.
• I can't control whether or not I sell any fiction in 2009, but I resolve to either sell something in 2009 or have rejections for at least five different works to show for myself. This isn't as ambitious as it sounds, because I have a backlog of completed and unsubmitted stories.
• Do the preliminary work for my next novel.
• This summer I will begin writing that novel.
• Complete a first draft of that novel.

That last one may be a bit iffy, if I don't even get started until June, but I can work pretty solidly for almost ten weeks over the summer, and then I'll still have about twenty weeks left in 2009.

No specific goals for writing short stories or for attending conferences and such.

EDIT TO ADD: One more resolution I nearly forgot:

• I resolve to stop bringing up my blog traffic stats anywhere else, no matter how fascinating, troubling, or just plain weird they are, because it makes me look like a total goober.

Where did my vacation go?!

I had such plans for last week. I was going to get a whole bunch of revising done, and build a nice backlog for my beta readers of chapters that had been sifted with a fine tooth comb, with as much suck as possible filtered out. I was also going to resubmit that lost short from long ago, because the editor of the market in question responded to my follow up with a request to resubmit.

Ha.

Between cleaning like mad--long overdue, because, as I've noted here, I've let things slide around the house to free up more time for writing--and entertaining and several big holiday meals, I've been at least as busy at home as I was the week before at work. Yesterday was the first chance I've had to work on my book in a week. I've got some annoyed beta readers, I think, since I've also slacked on sending out new chapters to read. Last thing in the world that I want is for them to lose their momentum.

I've also slacked on the blogging. Of course, blogging is a lower priority than writing, but I do want a record of my writing process to look back on later. I read this idea somewhere--I think one of my friends posted it on his forum--I'm making a note of the things I've learned not because I think people can learn them from me, but because I tend to forget, and so months later, flipping through my archives, I might learn from myself. So in the next week or so, I plan to blog about what I've learned through the process of working on Vanishing Act, and some sort of look back at the highs and lows of 2008 for me, from a writing standpoint.

Blargety blarg

You've been warned.

Tomorrow is the awards ceremony for the award Lisa and I are both finalists for (different categories, so no marital competition issues). I've mentioned it here, but I don't think I've mentioned it elsewhere.

I am excited about this. Maybe I'm silly for that. It's not some famous national award, and even if I win it, I'll still be an unpublished nobody. But if I win or place, it will still be validation. It will mean maybe I'm not being stupid to think that I'm talented enough to find success as a writer. It will mean that, given a small enough pond, I can be a fish of note. (Which is not to say that not winning will mean the converse; it will just mean that two or three people were better. But winning would still be nice.)

I wish I had people sharing my excitement. I wish I had people who were excited for me, and pulling for me to win. But I've hardly told anyone. I don't know a classy way to say, "Hey! I'm a finalist in a literary contest!" I don't like how egocentric that would make me feel. I don't want to appear to be a braggart. I haven't found a smooth way to bring it up, so almost nobody knows.

Ironically . . . or, um, something . . . someone in a forum I frequent pretty much implied last week, not for the first time, that I'm a narcissist who makes everything about me. So either I'm a really horrible egomaniac, given that I come off as one even when I'm trying to keep things to myself . . . or I should just go ahead and brag all I want, since I'm damned whether I do or I don't.

:-\

Small Town Jericho

I took the girls out to a playground today, and they spent the entire day running around while I wrote. We had our first slight nip of the fall, and one of those gorgeous sunsets that only seem to happen in your imagination. The sun hung low in the sky, enormous and red, and I looked up from the picnic bench I was typing at to where the girls were chasing some little boy with a football, and thought, whether or not I ever achieve any success as a writer, I will look back on moments like this and romanticize them. Usually that's hard to see except in hindsight, but I guess I was in a reflective mood. I thought about my first kiss, about when Lisa and I still lived in our first house, about when the girls were babies. I think the lie of nostalgia is that all those moments are behind you. It rarely occurs to me that those moments never stop happening, but this time it did. So I drank as deeply of the moment as I could, trying to lock it into memory, so I could enjoy it again later. Call it preemptive nostalgia.

Learned an important lesson tonight

I firmly believe that some time in the relatively near future, I'm going to be in a position to write an acknowledgment or a dedication on a work of art. Maybe not this year, maybe not next. But sometime. When that day comes, I'm going to try really hard not to snub anybody, just because I can.

Cause that shit hurts.

Effect without cause, sub-atomic laws, scientific pause

I've been getting increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that I haven't made a backup of my novel since mid-August or so. I've since rectified that.

I think I can realistically cut another eight or nine-thousand words. Beyond that, I just don't know how to do it without making the story suffer. So I'm going to cut what I think I can but start moving away from cutting to more active suck-vacuuming. (i.e., concentrating on the quality of what remains, rather than on what to take out.)

In other news, I sure can be an insufferable prig sometimes.

Hey, I see that I got my 666th visitor. Greetings, satanic portent from Arkansas!

Cutting: Icarus's Labyrinth goes emo on you

I needed an impartial person to help me go through my MS and find scenes I could cut. This week, my brilliant wife helped me do just that. There were some tough decisions. Some scenes I love that aren't strictly necessary. Scenes that serve a purpose, but where the purpose can be served by another scene. A whole freaking character. Luís, who went from being a very important character to being a minor character to being left out altogether. Sorry bro. I like to try to work at least one Latino character into everything I write, but now this story's just about all white.

But still, it wasn't too hard to make the cuts--on my outline.

Now I'm trying to implement those decisions. And it's not as easy as highlighting scenes and pressing the delete key. Scene one established my protagonist's age and physical appearance, and some sense of what the chip on his shoulder is. But it's too similar to scene eleven, really, and scene two has some nice, tense action that will make a good opening hook. But now I've got to find a way to convey the information that used to be in scene one. I've got to look closely at the good stuff I'm taking out and think about making the story work without any obvious gaps. Sorry for going gruesome on you, but it's the difference between having your dog put down and doing it yourself.

And now I'm back to getting up at six every morning, and staying up late grading and lesson-planning. It's finally Friday . . . and I'm exhausted.

(Say, why do places like Writertopia only make counters for counting up to a certain goal? What about those of us trying to make works shorter?)

Well, we all need someone we can sneer at . . .

. . . And if you want to, well you can sneer at me.

Just got in from NerdCon WorldCon. (Hey, it's like how minorities are allowed to make fun of their own group. I was there, so I can make fun of it.) Our flight landed at 1 AM, we got home at 2 AM, and at 7:30 AM I was back at work. ≥_≤ I'll probably blog about WorldCon several times, because it was a great and wild experience. Just one thought for today, though.

Throughout the week, I was struck by how naturally we tend toward building little hierarchies and ingroups and outgroups. My wife and I dressed pretty normally. While we are fans, we were also there hoping to make contacts with people who could help further our writing career, so vaguely professional attire was the order of the day. Besides, my body doesn't lend itself to costumes. But as we were heading out to lunch one of the days, we saw some yahoos in a pickup truck shout disparaging remarks at a guy in costume outside of the convention center. (And he was far from one of the more freakishly dressed people around.) The local media was about at least once or twice, and I'm sure some Colorado locals couldn't decide what to make of the freakshow that had descended upon them. Getting out and mocking them is always a good way to build up your own self-esteem, though.

I'm sure most if not all science fiction fans have had somewhat similar experiences. Heck, on my Rate-My-Teachers page, some nimrod said you shouldn't take my classes if you don't like Star Wars, when I never bring up Star Wars or science fiction myself, and, really, Star Wars and Star Trek are the least of my fannish obsessions--I'm much more about the printed word than I am about movies or television. But neither do I hide the fact that I like Science Fiction, and those of us who do seem to be a little bit threatening to those who don't, for some reason.

That's not what fascinates me, though. No boo hoo woe is us emofication here, thanks. What fascinated me was seeing the exact same dynamic played out inside the Con. I'm sure anybody who reads this blog has seen The Geek Hierarchy. Well, I kind of got to see it played out in real life. I saw fans not wearing costume point and snicker at those who were, and likewise at those who had stuffed animals about their person somewhere, and heard derogatory comments about filkers. On Thursday, I was at the bid party for Peggy Rae’s House in 2010 when a little mustachioed troll of a woman glanced at my name tag and made a derisive comment about the fact that I'm from Celebration, Florida. Hey lady, we're all freaks--you more than me, truly--why do we need to bag on each other?

It reminded me of growing up Cuban-American in Miami. In Miami, there is such a tension/rivalry/what-have-you between Latinos, African-Americans, and Jews. Miami politicians love to play us off against each other for their own gain. And hell, in the end, we're all minorities, and we all experience prejudice and discrimination. Don't we have more in common than not? I've seen prejudiced minority group members--where's the sense in that? Oh, no, all those people who bag on Cubans are wrong--except when they're talking about blacks! Seriously?!

Anyway, sorry for going Deep. I was just so thrown by nerds looking down on other nerds.

Greetings from *wheeze* *gasp* Denver

It's always wild when you plan something for months and the day finally comes. My wife and I decided to go to WorldCon like in January . . . I hope it can live up to that level of anticipation!

The thin air thing is freaky because I *don't* notice it most of the time. Then suddenly I'm short of breath and I don't know why--until my brain kicks in and I remember it's because I'm in freaking Denver. I wonder if people from Denver have issues with the air when they travel at sea level. I've lived almost all my life in Florida, where most people say it's unbearably humid--and I agree, in general. But when I've spent substantial periods of time, like more than a month, where it's less humid, even other places most people find too humid, like North Carolina, I've found it unpleasantly arid.

Anyway, that's about as much time as I'm devoting to blogging today, after spending a fortune to get out here. See ya!