Go for the Throat

All---

I hope to avoid making this post either corny or bittersweet, but please forgive me if I'm able to avoid neither perfectly.  What I want to do today is simply this: to encourage you to look your dreams and your goals in the eye and then go for their throat.

As someone with an overly complex philosophical and theological outlook, I try not to live with regrets.  Except when I'm suffering from exhaustion or general malaise, I usually manage that pretty well.  But while I do not regret the choices I've made in my life, I can still encourage others to make different choices.  Rather than wallow in memoirs and rambling advice, let me boil down my thoughts for today to points and examples:


If you're young, so what?  I know some impressive, productive young people who are involved in writing, such as Tiffany Cole and Golden Eagle, and some who are not much older than them such as Misha Gericke.  These writers are energetic and enthusiastic, and I hope every day that they manage to keep up being aggressive.  I know when I was in junior high, high school, and even college I often thought to myself, "But who's going to publish a guy who's only ___ years old?"  Don't think that way.  Just write well.  If your writing makes your age irrelevant then, well, your age is irrelevant.


Don't procrastinate.  I've written hundreds of short stories.  I've probably submitted about a dozen of them.  There are dozens more, at least, that are worthy of submission.  And most of the ones that have been rejected have only been rejected once -- and are certainly worthy of re-submission.  But for much of my writing life I've had this habit of lazy planning.  Ugh, I need to find a way to print this, and then I need to get stamps and mail it.  Oh, and I need to make a SASE.  I'll get to that this weekend.  Or, um, next weekend.  Or maybe the weekend after.  Or... perhaps... never.


Perfection is a goal, not an expectation.  So don't wait until you've written something perfect to start submitting.  Write something good.  Write something of quality.  But it's trap to try and wait until you've perfected the craft of writing or until you feel like there's nothing left to improve about a story.  No one perfects the craft of writing, and there is always something left to improve about a story.

Health is not irrelevant.  Your emotional, physical, and social health are important for your functioning as a productive, creative being.  Do not neglect them, even in favor of pursuing of your dream, because when they suffer, your pursuit will suffer, too.

Take the time while you have it.  This is a hard one for most people to respond to, because everyone  feels busy and you always feel like you have pressures to meet.  And you are busy -- and you do have pressures.  But life rarely gets simpler between the ages of sixteen and thirty-mumble, and it doesn't look like it gets simpler by forty-mumble or fifty-mumble either.  Find ways to maximize the time you have now, because a year from now, you're probably going to have more and more complicated pressures for your time than what you have now.

Be smarter than me.  Writing and getting published are challenging enough without creating your own obstacles.  So don't do it.

.Nevets.

Writing in My Sleep

I need to figure out how to write in my sleep.

Here's the thing. I have suffered from breathing problems all my life (literally) and fairly severe allergies for most of it. Between these and the medications I take to manage them, I spend much of my life feeling like I'm walking around in my sleep. Add to it, some other crazy health issues, pretty severe SAD the past few years, and a neurological sensitivity to ions (I think), and pretty much everything I do suddenly requires effort and concentration -- neither of which come easily when you feel like you're walking around in your sleep.

Consequently, when work keeps me busy and other things in life get crazy, I end up mentally and emotionally crashing. This leaves me little time for my writing, or for the things I want to do affiliated with my writing (such as this blog, and following of yours).

Sometimes there's an extended period where work is slow and I still have mental and emotional energy at the end of the day. That's fantastic.

Sometimes I leave the region of the country I live in (and to which I am most allergic) and I get a a two or three day window where I am productive *and* creative all in the same windows. That's amazing.

Most times, I just wish I knew how to write in my sleep so that when I do crash, I can still go on with something that I earnestly believe is an important part of who I am.

Of course, I feel like I half wrote this blog entry in my sleep, so I'm not quite sure I did it.

.Nevets.

Not Quite Dead Yet

Dear friends, I apologize for several months absence with no word. Health problems, including often debilitating allergies this summer, made a burn-out / near break-down difficult to re-emerge from. Between 100% energy to writing and 100% energy to my straight job (which went redline this summer) and 100% energy to my wife, I ran out of emotional, physical, and metnal energy 200% ago.

That's no excuse for not keeping you posted, just an explanation.

I am resurfacing and hopefully will manage my writing in a better way this time around and figure out how to balance all the different aspects of my life. For someone with a perfectionist's desire to do everything full-on, that won't be easy. Your patience and your advice are both appreciated.

I look forward to reconnecting with you all.

.Nevets.

Personal Interjection

All---

I keep the blog pretty much to my writing, but I do think occasional personal posts are appropriate. Tomorrow, I've got an echocardiogram scheduled. I'm 33 years old and just a couple months ago the doctor was checking my heart routinely and I watched him go back and forth, back and forth. Never seen that before. I presumed it wasn't good. When he used the word, "murmur," I knew it wasn't. He's not terribly worried, since it never has come up until now, but he's taking seriously enough that I'm getting my heart valves checked out tomorrow.

This is a new one for me. I've been through my share of emotional ringers, of course. (Who hasn't?) And all the stuff I've been part of involving bones and dead bodies has forced me to encounter some some existential realities in a really personal way. And I've had family members in danger before. I've not been a picture of good health, but this is the first time I've really faced the real possibility of a doctor telling me something that has a lot of life-threatening potential.

In my personal life I play it off for the most part. I emphasize the doctor's confidence like the optimist I trained myself to be. I crack Dr. Who jokes like the smart-ass the cops and forensics people trained me to be.

The interesting thing for me, though, and the reason I wanted to posted about this here, is how this impacts my writing. Ever since I first read Camus, I've been really intrigued by the notion of life-defining moments in the face of absurdity. Ever since I first starting working with dead thing, my writing tended to reflect that interest in the form of situations involving death.

Now that I'm sort of looking into the face of one of those moments, it's a little weird. The writer in me is intrigued by the possibility of seeing how I would actually respond, given the worst. The real person in me is terrified of that possibility and a little offended by the writer in me. And I think this is the first time the writer in me and the person in me have been at odds like that.

It feels very twisted.

Anyone else have moments like that? Where the writer personality has an interested in observing and learning from the worst option that the person in you rebels against?

.Nevets.