Something Old, Something New

So, this is it. 2012. The end. At least according to people with a bad understanding of Mayan cosmology and a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that the modern Mayans don't share this idea of impending doom and gloom just because their ancestors ran the clock out and didn't bother to start a new one. Needless to say, I really don't think 2012 is going to be the last year for all of us.

It being the new year, it is of course traditional to talk about making resolutions and some such. I'm going to buck tradition this year. It's not that I don't have resolutions; it's just that they were the same things I resolved to do a couple of months ago. They are fresh and new for the new year, which is probably for the better seeing as how so few of those self-made promises we all utter at the start of the new year make it past the end of January. That's part of the illusion of this time of year - that we will, somehow, make good on the things we didn't make good on last year.

Of course, New Year's itself is a bit of an illusion. If you're Chinese, the New Year doesn't officially kick in for another month or so, on the traditional calendar. Not to mention that, simply because we've started a new calendar, it's not as if there were great changes from Dec 31 to Jan 1. I got snow here on the 2nd, but aside from that there wasn't much else to mark the transition once you discount the traditional things like champagne and the Rose Bowl parade. It's a month, like any other, and while people go back to work and students go back to school, these are rituals repeated at other times of the year, too.

About the only thing that is new is the attitude and the optimism. We are somehow inclined, despite all past experience to the contrary, to assign the goals we make at this time of year a certain hopefulness. We will accomplish the things we want, this year, no matter how far short we fell last year. Some of us will no doubt do this, though often by taking a different approach from the past years. Sometimes it isn't the resolution but the execution.

I'm not trying to be gloomy here, despite the surprisingly depressive tone I see as I glance back through what I've written so far. I think where I'm going with this is that it doesn't have to be just this time of year when we make the attempt to better ourselves, and that it doesn't have to be doomed to failure. I would suspect that if someone out there has done a study, and they likely have, that resolutions we make to improve ourselves at other times of the year might have a better chance of success. Those are the ones we come to after looking around and assessing what needs to change, rather than just off the cuff promises made over that first sip of the bubbly stuff.

So that's where I'm aiming this new year. Not with brand new things, but with old things, brought forward into the new year with, perhaps, new determination.

That should get me to March, I think.

In the Spirit

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all out kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us." - Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol."

Someone asked today if Christmas was cancelled. I'm not sure the impetus behind the question, only that it echoed a fair amount of anti-Christmas sentiment I've seen bandied about in the past week or so. Now, while I understand some of that, and sympathize and even agree - seeing as when I was in Walmart the week after Halloween, when they had already started playing Christmas music, I made the comment to myself that it was way too early, and made the comment out loud, no less - it's never struck me as a legitimate reason to get down on the holiday.

I'm not sure there is a legitimate reason to dislike Christmas, unless you have one of those Phoebe Cates in Gremlins kind of stories. Then it's understandable. Barring that, no matter how drunk and disagreeable Grandma gets off the eggnog, I don't think you should let anyone get in the way of holiday spirit. You are responsible for being your own Ghosts of Christmas, and while I disdain the rest of the Dickensian oeuvre, he had things right with that one. You should celebrate, and make the best of it, regardless of circumstance.

This is not a pollyanna, as is well with the world kind of response. This has been a hard year on my end, and I'm not under any illusions Santa's going to gift me with everything I want. I'll settle for another hooded sweatshirt. Others have it worse, and there have been past Christmases where I've had it worse, certainly financially if not in terms of family. But for all that, it's a time to remember that you've gotten through another year, whatever the challenges, and celebrate that if nothing else.

So yes, it's been over-commercialized, and yes, you've probably heard the Carol of the Bells or Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer at least one time too many. And yes, every year someone breaks out the tired religious arguments, whether they are for the holiday or against it, which makes the rest of us who are sane want to beat them senseless with a yule log. (Okay, that last part may just be me.)

But you know what? The holidays are not about them, the ad execs or religious fanatics, or the just plain greedy. It's about the rest of us, who once a year rise to the better angels of our nature, and manage to set aside something for someone else, even if it's just saving up for that one present for a child who otherwise might not have much else to look forward to. Sure, it would be nice if the spirit filled everyone all year round, as it is said to do with Scrooge at the end. But that's asking more of human nature than we're capable of, if you ask me, at least for right now.

As Dickens' says, elsewhere in the book, "But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round [...] as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

So never fear. There shall be no cancellation. Christmas is better than the Post Office (and in less danger of being shut down). It has survived wars, disasters, cheesy Hallmark movies of the week, and other sundry difficulties and horrors.

As long as there is someone willing to wander about in a Santa hat, sing a few carols (however badly), and wish all their fellow travelers upon the globe a Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays if you aren't Christian) in the true, full spirit of the season, Christmas will exist.

And I, for one, have a Santa hat, and intend to proudly wear it.

Ghosts of Libraries Past

I was wandering downtown a couple of months ago when I found myself walking past the old library. That statement implies that there is a new library, which there is, and which I have been in recently. The new library is nice, certainly, and this is not going to be a blog post in which I rail against the shiny and the new. I'm not that old, yet, even if some days I think I'm getting there faster than I'd like.

Then again, the shiny and new had a pretty dismal science fiction section. But that's not the point.

The new library is a good library (lack of genre fiction aside), but there is a certain something that the old one had that the new one lacks. Of course, the old one lacked things, too. Like computers and windows and light. What it had though, was charm and aesthetics. The old library looked exactly the way old libraries looked, and I kind of miss that.

It had large Roman columns out front. They might have been Doric or Ionic, but frankly I don't remember the columns - or the classifications - well enough to really say after all these years. You walked up the big stone steps outside, and then there were more steps inside until you got to the central atrium. A dark atrium, because there was no window overhead (which, come to think on it, does it still count as an atrium then?). The center circle of the circulation desk sat in the middle, and there were stairs leading off to one side, along with half a dozen entrances to half a dozen different rooms scattered around.

Including what I remember being a pretty decent genre fiction section, in a room of its own towards the front.

I also remember the children's section was downstairs, and without question the new children's room is better.

As I said it was dark, especially in comparison with a modern library, but somehow that just added to the appeal. As a kid, this was the closet thing to what I imagined a castle to be like that I got to visit. It was the oldest building, or at least the building that felt the oldest, out of any I knew. I spent a fair amount of time there, too, even if it was rather inconveniently located downtown in a city with poor public transit. I loved the way everything echoed in the main chamber, and the narrowness of the research stacks, and the odd hallways that didn't seem to go anywhere (which probably led to the library offices), and even the various artworks scattered along the hallways and in dark corners.

It was a building with personality, and character, and history. A building that could have ghosts, though as far as I know it did not. A building that could leave its own ghost, create its own afterimage in the environment.

It still stands, obviously, but is now used for federal offices. I've heard you can still go in and look around, but I don't think I want to do that. I'd rather live with the old memories.

A Convert on the Stairs to Damascus

Okay, the stairs weren't anywhere near Damascus. Instead they were to my new apartment. Which has many things I like about it, starting with the affordability of it. It also has one thing I really don't like, which is the eighteen stairs it takes to get up to my deck and my front door. It's a nice deck, and the steps are necessary because it's a second floor apartment... but they are somewhat steep, and there are eighteen of them.

I counted.

Which is just something I do with steps, not specifically just for the Mount Everest that leads up to my apartment. It's a habit that has come in handy any time I need to know how many steps there are supposed to be under my feet. Like, say, for example, when I am moving boxes of books up the steps.

Many, many boxes of books. Heavy books. In heavy boxes. Up the steps. Many times.

Not each box, many times, of course. Just one time each. But they had to come down the steps in the old place - from the third floor.

Somewhere around box number five (out of how many? I'm not sure, but it was less than last time. Last time I moved I wound up donating seven boxes of books to the library, and selling two more to a local store. What I have now is mostly what I am left with) I came to the conclusion that the switch to e-books is a good thing.

I love my books, I truly do. However, one of my biggest complaints against e-books was how they looked. Having seen the new generation of them.... well, they look like they were printed on paper. Hard to argue with that. My other complaints against them was their non-bookness. They lacked heft, they lacked smell, they lacked feel. All of which remains true.

I've just realized that lack of heft, when you have only an apartment that you will eventually move from, is not a bad thing.

Balance

It's been a rough year here. Granted, there are two and a half months to go, but even so. I'm not going to tempt fate and say "it can't get worse" because, as I discovered last week, it can. Very suddenly so, in fact. I'm not going to into details, because this has never been that kind of blog, and also because for all the problems I've been through, many out there had it worse, and I won't pretend otherwise.

Even so, I'm having a hard time of late sorting through all of it, and expect that's going to be a long process. Motivation, for a great many things, has been in precious short supply, as has any sense of determination to go with it.

Yet the part of it all that intrigues me is the fact that, for all that went horribly wrong this past year, had that stuff not happened, this would have been a pretty good year. Even the summer, which is when things well and truly imploded, there were plenty of positive things I did that under other circumstances would have had me feeling great. I got accomplished just about all the things I wanted to, and had a good time doing them. I suspect without those things I'd be a wreck by now, or living with my parents again. (Been there, done that already and not looking forward to doing it again unless I absolutely have to. Which I still might before the year is out. One never knows.)

So what do I make of it all? How do I put this year into the grand scheme of things? Do I wait and see how things turn out? Do I judge it in the short term, or the long term? Do I seize it as an opportunity, however unwanted, to make changes - some of which I'll even admit are needed?

The truth is, I don't. Not just yet. Even for the short term there is still too much in flux. I'm trying to, of course. Certain changes have to be made, others, like writing here again, are more voluntary. So ask me again at the end of the year, then at the end of the year after that, and after that. Life is cumulative, and I'm not done adding it up just yet.

And at the end of things, if the worst I can say is that the good things balanced out the bad things, I think I'll be forced to say that's not such a bad thing after all.

New and Buzzworthy

A shameless plug for a fellow writer, and something to satisfy your inner cool sci-fi geek.

From the official blurb:

"2042. Bay City, California Free State.

Kat and Mouse are ronin--street mercenaries--who like cake runs. Simple jobs with quick and large payouts.

That's what these were supposed to be. Cake runs.

But when the Duo sign on, they suddenly find themselves targeted by a biker gang, a team of corporate commandos, a cybernetically-enhanced special ops agent, a stalker, a band of kidnappers, and a Japanese crime syndicate.

And they all want the Duo out of the way. Permanently.

Now these sassy sisters-in-arms must survive the onslaught and still get the jobs done. Because in the Biz, it's get paid or get dead.

As usual, Kat and Mouse are going to do things their way.

Heaven help Bay City."

And the official site: http://www.abnersenires.com/katandmousebook

Cooking Up a Good Story

I was going to title this one "The Muse Wears an Apron" but realized that while that would be a cool concept for an ongoing blog, this one already has a title. Which I happen to like very much. And those kind of blogs where every title starts the same way start to feel a little gimmicky after a while. Also, and probably most importantly, this one had nothing to do with a muse or inspiration anyway.

As I was in the kitchen the other day, pursuing one of my other passions (no, not opening a bottle of wine), I was struck by the similarities between the two separate creative processes - that is, making a meal, and writing a novel. While the former takes a great deal less time, being able to prepare a meal inside the span of an afternoon, and I've yet to write a novel inside the span of three months (more like six) - they nonetheless undergo a similar arc from beginning to end.

Like a novel, a meal takes preparation and planning. You have to have some idea where you're going. At times, this can be quite clear, particularly if you're working from a set of recipes or planning a menu. When writing, this is akin to those times when you know where the story is going. You have your plot laid out, more or less, and know what you want when you sit to write. Other times, however, you find yourself staring into your pantry and wondering what the heck you're going to make for dinner that night. A full pantry makes that easier, just as a full stock of story ideas or brainstorming techniques makes it easier when you have the same experience when writing.

And then, just as the various elements of the plot come together, so too does the meal. You assemble it bit by bit, following a set process. Unlike writing, where you can (and I do) write the ending first, cooking forces you to go from beginning to end. However, plenty of times I've written an ending as a starting point, so if you view the end product as the finished novel, it still holds.

(Hey, it's not the first time I've put a metaphor up on the rack in this blog. Won't be the last either.)

Subplots are like the appetizers of the side dishes. Satisfying and delicious, they help round out the meal, making it a more thoroughly enjoyable experience. The more ambitious the meal, the more prep, the more that has to come together, and, in my case, the greater the satisfaction at the end.

And of course, at the end, you have to present it to your audience. You ultimately hope they like it, and can be reasonably confident in your skills, but still you know in the back of your mind that no matter how many meals you've pulled off flawlessly, every once in a while something goes wrong. Then, you shelve the recipe until you're willing to take it out and tweak it later.

Though, unlike making a meal, when you finish a novel there are no dishes to wash.