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Coping With Chaos
It’s that weird time of the year when holiday mode has finally worn off and we’re just in plain ol’ wintertime.
Brainstorm
In life, as in art, I’m pretty well stymied about how to proceed. When I think I’m making progress, something flares up and shows me exactly how utterly nowhere I actually am.
I have no ideas.
I don’t know what to do or where to go from here.
I can’t do physical work at this point. I hurt myself making spaghetti and hand washing dishes last night. That’s genuinely discouraging.
The logical alternative is to do what I used to do. Problem is that even when I was doing what I did, the recruiters all acted like my skill set was preposterously obsolete. They couldn’t be more wrong, but they’re the ones who get you the work.
Frankly, being able to think logically never gets stale. Particular software packages and languages have their shelf lives but each new generation of software development becomes more user-friendly.
Not like I couldn’t learn it. Just that I can’t stand to lie just to get a job.
I hate having to compete with lying bastards who claim to have years of experience in a language or tool that’s only been on the market for months. The problem is, those assholes get hired and become a burden and nuisance to their team. Then they badger their recruiters to get the next gig for them before they get fired for incompetence. Those are the ones who hopscotch up the pay ladder.
In either case, all the programming work is far afield and my van has too many miles on it to start with the long commutes again. Being that the 21st Century is already 1/5th of the way over, you’d think there would be telecommuting jobs by now.
That’s not been my experience. Even if there were, nobody’s hiring for anyone who doesn’t have 500 years of experience in object-oriented programming or some ultra-specific software package. Fuck ’em. I retired from programming when I turned 50. I still don’t have much desire to go back to it. Not for any sum of money.
So, what’s the alternative?
Beats the crap out of me.
That’s why I’m still broke but I’ve got another problem.
I’m still highly susceptible to stress. When I start to get stressed about something, I can feel myself spiraling perilously down the abyss toward crippling depression again.
If I had a scar or lost a limb, maybe an eye, people might be more understanding. Maybe. My injuries don’t have big glorious scars for people to see and pity.
Even when the van fell on me, laying there in the ambulance on the way to the hospital struggling for breath (Side Note: In the off chance that you ever find yourself with 6 broken ribs, fair warning, lying down flat on your back is REALLY uncomfortable, I couldn’t do that for almost two months) the thing I found most amazing (apart from actually still being alive) was there was no scar, no bruise, no angry purple welt right across the middle of my chest. Nothing but the insufferable pain and inability to breathe properly.
If you don’t have something that jumps out and tells people what the hell is the matter, they won’t know. They usually won’t bother to ask either. Easier to assume you’re milking it.
Thing is, just sitting here typing this, it hurts.
But, who cares? Right?
I’m not going to get paid for being in pain.
What I need to do is figure out what I can do that’s worth something to someone. I was thinking eCommerce was the way to go this year. We’ll see how that pans out.
Obviously, I need to get my first book done and start marketing the thing but I need some kind of steady revenue to keep the lights on while that’s in progress.
We barely scraped by in 2019. In actual fact, we went under a few times. Thank God, we were adequately provisioned when things got bad.
That was then.
This is now.
I can’t do 2019 over again this year. Something else has to happen.
I wish I had some actual idea of what that might be…
Nobody To Blame
Is Earth’s Magnetic Field Reversing?
As much as Anthropogenic Climate Change is a non-scientific farce being perpetrated by assholes with an insidious agenda, there are things in this world and beyond that are transpiring that can and eventually will be harmful to us for which there is no one to blame. It just is.
If the people who claim to care so much about these things wanted to actually make the world a better place, they ought to spend their time learning how to fix things instead of “protesting“. Any asshole can march in a pink pussyhat. It’s a lot easier to carry around a stupid sign than it is to actually create something or fix a process or cure a disease.
I’d like to invent something that would fix a problem.
I used to do that with software. I could solve the problems of people doing repetitive bullshit work by giving them a magic button that would make their job easier to do.
Thing is, none of that was my idea.
My job was to listen to people and provide magic buttons. The problem was theirs. The work was theirs. All I did was create a way for the computer to provide them a shortcut so they could use the time they were saving to do something else that needed to be done.
That was an incredible feeling.
I’d like to have that kind of feeling again. I’d like to have that kind of impact again.
Ideas?
Not so much.
Chaos Phase
I sometimes start keeping a journal about the writing process itself. Particularly when I get the ideas, and I am trying to brood over the chaos phase. In writing a novel, you really have to brood over a lot of chaos of ideas and possibilities. ~Sue Monk Kidd
Fortunately, I don’t need new ideas for the Sentinels story I’m writing. I just need to suss out the important bits and write them from a POV character’s perspective rather than the third-person omniscient view I was using for the first draft.
Writing from the characters’ perspective forces me to slow down and describe things that would get glossed over by a top-down narrator’s view. I played back a few chapters of the rewrite for my son and he prefers the new version.
I can’t help but wonder if it’s not slowing me down too much. A paragraph or two in director-view becomes a full chapter in real time character view. I’m well aware of the need to only include what absolutely needs to be there to tell the story. However, the need for brevity shouldn’t trump the simulated reality. People still need to appear to be acting like people.
It’s a fine line and I feel as if I’m wandering on both sides of it as I go along.
I have to agree with Connor, though. The point of view character approach is preferable. Of course, depending on the viewpoint character is a mixed blessing.
Tanda starts off at home with her family. Perfect opportunity to describe them, but let’s be honest. Tanda already knows what they look like. She wouldn’t need to describe them. The burglar might describe them, but he only got a glimpse of Tanda and her sister before she zaps him.
It also poses a challenge in providing sneak previews, foreshadowing and even red herrings. When you can only see what the character can see and think about, there’s going to have to be some linguistic legerdemain involved in order to show clues to the reader that the viewpoint character might miss.
The next trick is picking the right viewpoint characters to move the story forward. The interesting thing about GRRM‘s viewpoint characters is that they’re generally the ones who survive throughout the series.
Arya, Bran and Sansa get to be viewpoint characters, but Rob is only ever spoken of. At some point, you realize that even though he’s the super badass warrior king who is kicking butt and taking names, he’s inevitably toast. You just don’t know how or when.
That’s what makes the Red Wedding so absolutely shocking. Note that Rob’s demise is told from his mother’s point of view. Even though she’s apparently killed in the aftermath, R’hllor doesn’t let people stay dead.
Those are the kinds of unexpected twists that I’d like to get in my stories. The thing is, even though I read through the Red Wedding with my mouth hanging open (literally), it was entirely obvious in retrospect that something like that was going to happen.
Another thing about GRRM’s characters is that not only are the viewpoint characters generally immune from death and the epic heroes are basically guaranteed to die horribly, but the hardcore villains seem to survive just about everything. The supposition is, however, that when they finally get their comeuppance, karma is going to strike them down like a meteor the size of Australia.
That’s one of the many things that made GRRM’s decades-long writers’ block so insufferable. I am desperately waiting to find out what calamitous end comes to the “Late” Walder Frey for screwing over his king and violating sacred laws of hospitality. He might get away with changing sides politically, but there’s no way he’s getting away with breaking divinely ordained taboos.
I’d like to be able to craft that much pattern into the Sentinels‘ tapestry. I’ve got the broad strokes, but I really need to sculpt the juicy details into it.
The work goes on…
Happy Hump Day. I hope you enjoy the latter half of your week.