Resolute

So, I’ve committed to this revision of Da Book and also registered for an event in July at which I’ll be pitching it to multiple agents and editors. I always seem to work better under the pressure of a commitment to another human, so there it is - the work shall be done.

Not that this is what I would call a dreadful chore, since I actually love the whole process of revision. Which is not to say I look forward to it. Making a start is the hardest part but that’s behind me now, so off we go.

I said, off we go…

Hmmmm…

(Was I rambling there? A bit? Sorry.)

While we’re on the subject of things that are more likely to be accomplished under the pressure of a deadline, I do have several of the genre in my life just now:

I’ve been going back and forth about the prospect of dumping this little vanity blog in favor of an actual writer’s website and now, with a book submission looming it’s time. Don’t know how to build a site or where to have it hosted but the research is in progress. If any of you have thoughts regarding the best way to go about this for an Old Fudd with very little in the way of IT chops, please feel free to drop moi a line at mcwordsmith@comcast.net. Seriously.

I need to be much better at communicating with friends. It seems that the first thing that comes into one’s head is not always the best way to express one’s thoughts and feelings. No harm intended does not always mean no harm done. Damn.

The ideas residing in my noggin for future writing are many and diverse. And the only way to get them out of my head and onto paper is to do the work. This means having the time to do the work. Which in turn means I have to get serious about planning for retirement from my day job, yes, but more important, I need to take steps to be around long enough to get the work done. Which in turn, means a slimmer, more health-conscious version of me. And the clock is definitely running down on this one.

Speaking of health, I need to get all those nagging last projects done around our house and yard. Who knows how long I’ll be able to climb ladders and dig post holes and at some point, Chez Us needs to be attractive to potential buyers, so… (Kindly refer to preceding paragraph.)

I need to be better at being a dad. It was much easier when I could rule by fiat and expect with reasonable certainty that Daughters One and also Two would obey my decrees. Which of course means it was much easier to make decisions when the decisions were mine to make. The thing is, they grow up and gradually at first but then with gathering and eventually breathtaking speed they pull the rug out from under your standing as ‘font of all wisdom and truth.’ They will make career and personal and life decisions that are not mine and, more and more, without the need to consider my preferences. And the sole decision that is left to me is whether or to what extent to make my feelings known. Which means – usually - not. Anyone know where I can find a comfortable muzzle?

I can’t control national or even local political stuff. All I can do is model the behavior that I wish I would see in the people with whom I share the world. And the time is definitely now for this one.

Time to leave off here and get to Da Book.

Meanwhile, I hope this finds you well and happy. I hope and intend to be the same. 

Decisions

I’ve a few decisions to make this morning. It’s 9:30am December 23^rd and I took the day off work to get my pre-festivities chores and errands done. So here I sit in my writing room with my cup of coffee going tepid, trying to decide what to do first and next, and next…

Should I write a blog post in case I don’t get back to it before the Big Day? (Okay, I guess you can tell that one has been decided.)

Should I go to the gym, and then come back to do the house cleaning or vice versa?

I should probably run out for those last stocking stuffers but do I go now and avoid much of the crowd or later and revel in the holiday bustle?

Wrapping. There’s always wrapping.

I’ve about two hours of sorting-shredding-reorganizing files to finish before I finally begin the (last? One hopes) rewrite of the book. Do it now or after the gym? If I work out first, I tend to be able to put up with a longer period sitting in my office chair. And once I’m ready to begin, I know – knowing me – that the rewrite will consume me and everything else will come to a screeching halt for a couple of months. So, there’s that.

I can’t decide whether or how to reach out to the friend from whom I’ve become estranged.

Okay, friends, if you must know.

And what about getting a haircut? If I do, it should come before the gym so I don’t gross out the barber with sweat stink. Also, so showering after gym will wash away the hair detritus.

So many decisions to make.

Here are some decisions I won’t have to make today:

How to feed my kids with no money.

Whether I should try to run the (government / rebel / warlord) gauntlet and get my family to safety at risk of having them killed in the process.

Whether to come out in a time when we’ve just elected the King of Bigots, with the resulting emboldening of every hateful yahoo in the land.

Whether to make the store run wearing my hoodie or just be cold because for a young black man, wearing a hoodie in public can be fatal and being caught running will only make things worse.

How to help my dying (mother, brother, lover, child…) have one last good Christmas that (s)he can enjoy and we can remember.

Whatever the nature and gravity of the decisions you face today, please know that my best thoughts are with you. This is a time for pulling together and that can only happen person to person. You know what to do.

In case I don’t get back to you for a few days, have a happy holiday weekend and please, let someone know they’re loved. 

America

I wanted to get this said before the electors cast their votes and we’re off on another round of impassioned argumentation: I’ve decided there’s an upside to the fact that a lying, ignorant bigot won the election.

Which is not to say – and I hope this is obvious from earlier posts – that I’ll be glad to see him and his cronies in office. Not a day has gone by in which I didn’t feel a sense of doom regarding this horrific turn of affairs. But it’s time to take the long view.

The fact is, some of us are getting a badly needed wake up call.

We’ve been guilty of complacency. We’ve allowed the Internet to become a de facto propaganda machine for the ignorant and for those whose evil designs depend upon enlistment of the ignorant.

We continue to tune in to ‘News’ outlets that are little more than conduits for partisan rants. And yes, I mean MSNBC and NPR just as much as Fox and Breitbart. When we stopped demanding ‘fair and impartial’ and accepted news-as-entertainment we surrendered our right to be informed. That has to change or nothing else will.

Four years after Sandy Hook, we have a President-elect who is in bed with the NRA. And we – all of us, red or blue or in between – helped put him there.

I could go on but what’s the point? Those who elect to read this journal are already shamed by the recent electoral outcome.

But I believe there is an upside. I see elements of it every day. I see it in the North Carolinians who protested and accepted arrest rather than let a brazen, anti-democratic power grab go unchallenged.

I see it in my fellow bus riders who go to lengths to smile and chat and reassure each other.

I see it in the outrage and the disappointment and, yes, the fear of people of good will who seem to have found a renewed dedication to the cause of true democracy.

Yes, this is a scary time. But we’ll get through it. We’ll survive him and them.

Because we’re America. We pull together when the chips are down.

And they don’t get much further down than they are right now.  

This is real

For more than two decades I’ve had this story rattling around in my noggin. It started as a love story and then morphed into a coming-of-age story and characters came and went. I went at it in fits and starts. Meanwhile, over the years I wrote other pieces in a variety of forms and for an assortment of channels and audiences. I wrote essays and short stories and very short stories and shameless doggerel. I’ve had – and still have and will develop – other book ideas. But it was to this story and these characters that I always returned.

Because I couldn’t not.

And so as you all know, I finally wrote the thing. And when I had the first full draft in hand, I sent it out to a few trusted, smart friends for comment. And then I worked some more.

Eventually I reached a point at which I knew it wasn’t where it needed to be but couldn’t for the life of me decide where to go next. I knew… I know this is a story that people will want to read, will love reading and it’s up to me to bring it home.

So, I took a bold step. I engaged the services of a developmental editor. I watched her teach and I read her own writing and I met with her face to face and I came to believe she was the one to whom I could entrust my literary child.

I was so right. I received her edits and notes yesterday. Every comment she made was spot on and I have a red mark where I repeatedly slapped my forehead whilst reading her notes. And what I discovered was that it was all there, but the forest had been hidden in the trees. Some trees need to be pruned and others to grow some more.

My blinders removed, I’m ready. I can’t wait to get started on what I believe will be the final draft before the book goes out to the wider world. I’m terrified and overwhelmed and confident and truly thrilled to reach one more time into these lives and see what they have to tell me.

Because I want you all to know them and that means publishing.

This is real.

Please send me your best thoughts. I’ll need them. 

The Internet

In my day job, I’m immersed in a project requiring input from, output by, and cooperation between a diverse assortment of departments, teams and individuals.  The percentage of them that I can count on to do their best work in a collaborative mindset is definitely in the high 90s, so you would think that the project would proceed fairly smoothly. But people are people, we each have our unique experience and lens through which we see the world, so frequently we have to stop and check to make sure we’re speaking the same language.

Usually, we’re able to repair the disconnect in fairly short order, in part because I work with a lot of very smart and reasonable people and also in part, because none of us has the luxury of a lot or spare time we can spend chasing rabbits down holes. Still, even with this group of people, misunderstandings can arise, tempers flare and we sometimes waste time and energy rebuilding relationships. It happens.

So it should come as no surprise that in dealing with a population of the general public, unfiltered by the effect of dedication to a specific mission, not everyone is always reading from the same sheet of music.

The Internet was created specifically to provide effective communication over long distances in real- or near real-time. Depending on what you read and who you believe, the first example of an Internet-like network took place at MIT, UCLA, Stanford or government labs, in 1959 or 1960, or maybe it was 1962 and was the brainchild of Kleinrock or Roberts or, or…(NOT Gore). But wherever it was created or by whom, it has turned out to be a great boon in some ways and an unmitigated disaster in others.

Folks my age or thereabouts are the last generation that will remember living our day to day lives without the Internet or anything like it. The knowledge base I built during my formative years came mostly from books. We learned early on to use card catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System. We had a set of encyclopedias in our front room and each year I was assigned the responsibility of updating the information, using the reference tabs mailed to us by the good people of World Book. 

Once a year.

It seems strange now to recall that in order to conduct research on just about anything required at least one trip to the library, hoping against hope that you’d get there before a more motivated kid from your class who was working on the same assignment got there and checked out the books you needed. And even if you got the hoped-for tomes your learning would unavoidably be shaped by the particular point of view of the author and authors’ points of view were skewed more often than not. Accordingly, we learned from histories that ignored the contributions of minorities and women, that told us more than we cared to know about Paris and Rome but nothing about the Great City of Zimbabwe or the Chinese dynasties.

From books I learned a great deal about how civilizations were formed over time. That is, civilizations based in Europe. We learned a lot about George Washington  and Junipero Serrra (sanitized version, that is) but almost nothing about the Mandan or Lakota tribes or the Mexicans or Athapascans.

With the advent of the Internet, we had the opportunity to level the playing field, to share the knowledge and experience and cultures and points of view of the whole world and not just those of the currently ascendant. It has done that but the very nature of the openness of the Internet, the fact that anyone can post anything means that, well, anyone can post anything. The unintended consequence of leveling the playing field is that it has truly been leveled. The collected works of brilliant scholars and deep thinkers share equal billing with the musings of the ignorant and uncaring.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could count on the unworthy to self-identify through their tortured grammar or faulty logic. But many of the people whose contributions are less than dependable are well meaning and those whose motives are less cordial frequently take pains to seem knowledgeable and reasonable. And of course, the reader too often has no good way of judging the veracity of the ‘information’ they encounter.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about this problem, especially since our recent electoral disaster. I’m not sure how we reverse it, how we as a society can use the Internet as a boon rather than the cultural quagmire it is quickly becoming. After all, the Internet is just a tool that carries no moral weight in and of itself. A hammer can be used to build or to tear down. Choice is revealed by the hand that wields it.

We can’t rely on the level of positive intent that I enjoy in my day job. I don’t know that it’s even possible to keep ‘bad’ content off the Internet and not convinced we should try, given our inability to predict unintended consequences. But we should try to sort what we see there. Perhaps we could start by taking the time and effort we currently spend on ‘teaching to tests’ and instead teaching our kids (and ourselves, for that matter) to be smart and discerning consumers of content.

Seems to me, that would be a start.

Snow

The weather turned in the four minutes it took me to drive to where I board the bus. 

From rain to sleet, then to snow, which in the course of the next twenty minutes strengthened to a flurry of fluffy flakes (yes, I’m in an alliterative mood). All the way across the lake and up into the heart of the city, snowflakes. Lovely things, really, when they’re not melting on your shoulders or obscuring your eyeglasses.

I love snow. Which is not to say I love all of the effects of it having snowed. Driving can be a pain when our hilly neighborhood is covered in white. And far too many of my neighbors seem to take slippery roads as an excuse to play bumper cars. I don’t love the prospect of slipping and falling, the cause of a dislocated elbow years ago. And tracking slush into the house means extra cleaning.

Still, I love snow. I know blanket is a cliché but don’t some words or phrases become clichés because they’re true? It does feel like a blanket descending.

Of course, given where I live, it won’t last. In fact by the time I was settled in my office, rain had taken over.

That’s okay, I like rain, as well.

Go figure.