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.

Back to the Beginning

Sometimes you just have to start over. Not saying that's always an easy thing to do. In fact, sometimes it can be downright painful. It can hurt. A lot. Even when you know it's the right thing to do, the knowing, in advance, of just how much it's going to take out of you can be enough for you to want to put it off. That is part of the appeal of procrastination, as we tend not to put off those things we enjoy, but instead delay those things we do not want to do, the things we dread.

I'm convinced there is also the tendency to not want to erase all the work that has gone into a project right up to that point where it becomes necessary to start over. No matter how deep the quagmire, there is the belief that some of what went before could be salvaged. A complete overhaul isn't really required, no, instead it will only take a little tweaking here and there, a couple of edits, and then it'll be easy to pull free of the muck and mire.

That Hollywood seems to defer to a re-boot every time a franchise stalls out may be part of the problem. For every Star Trek - which I still haven't seen - or Batman Begins - which of course I have - there are countless other attempts to rejuvenate a storyline or character just be starting over with new faces. Comics are guilty of this, too, often in the interest of sidestepping a particularly thorny plot issue that the writers backed themselves into. It very rarely goes well.

So the temptation to not hit the universal delete, and start afresh, is a strong one. It can trap even the most well intentioned author. You plug along, you edit, you move things around, but you do not start over because you have already done all this work, and it would be a shame to waste it. Not to mention disheartening, because why, oh why, did you invest all those days/weeks/months (years?) into something only to throw it all away?

All of which belies the fact that we all know it's not only necessary, it is at times the only way out. There was a Micheal Douglas film some years back, Wonder Boys, in which he plays a writer. A famous writer, who has been laboring for years on his latest opus. Laboring and not going anywhere, which as you might expect has not left him in the happiest of moods about writing in general. Ignoring the merits of the film - though I liked it - it stands out for me because of a scene, near the end, where this manuscript he's been working on for years is suddenly, literally, thrown to the wind, with hundreds of pages flying everywhere.

(This was the year 2000, when it was perhaps more conceivable that a manuscript would be in paper only format. I suppose there are still some writers out there who work that way, but I also suspect most of us would view such a scene and ask "why didn't he just save a back-up copy?")

The manuscript, as overblown, tiresome, and voluminous as it had become, was lost, leaving him with no choice but to start over. One jump cut later, we see him typing away on the final pages of his new, much shorter - and presumably much better - manuscript. More importantly, he seems happy again with the writing process, thus ending that part of the movie on a high note. (There's a great deal of other material to the plot, so this is hardly a spoiler if you haven't seen the film.)

Most of us will not have such a divine intervention. Any windstorm strong enough to blow away my laptop is going to leave me with far larger problems. Yet it needs to be noted there is nothing stopping me - or any other writer in a similarly stuck vein - from being our own winds of renewal. I rarely completely delete something, because you never know when you might want to mine that dusty idea for new inspiration, or those few gems buried in the dull dirt of the rest of your prose. However, this is not to say I cannot start over, that I cannot, instead of staring at the same text that has vexed me for days/weeks/months (years?) call up a new document, a blank slate, and take those initial ideas that I found so exciting back in the beginning for a brand new spin on a brand new surface.

Because sometimes, that's what it takes.

The Guilt of Putting It Down

I have no problems turning off a bad tv show. Or changing the channel on a boring movie. I've started to listen to an album only to realize there's only one decent song on it, and switched to something else. All of which I do without remorse. Books are another story. For some reason, putting down a bad book is hard to do.

Putting down a mediocre book is almost impossible.

I'm not sure why I feel guilty about not finishing a book, about taking the bookmark out when it's only half completed it's march to the last page. It seems to be much stronger when it's a book from the library. (Certainly there were books I was assigned to read that I put down without compunction, nevermore to pick them up again nor feel a twinge of regret for having done so. Even so, those were few and far between.) I think part of it is the idea that I picked this, I chose this particular book, so I owe it to myself to validate that selection by reading through it.

Sometimes I think it's a question of just the wrong book at the wrong time. There have been one or two books where the first time I checked them out I wound up returning them unfinished, only to get them again some time later and take them to completion. I don't often give books second chances. Usually it's only when I know it wasn't the fault of the story, or when it's a particular author whom I'm trying to give another redemptive shot to. In part this comes with the recognition that once I've put a book down from an author, I'm much less likely to get another one from them. (This has kept me reading authors who have long since managed to lose their spot on my "must read" list, by sheer hope that someday they'll pen something to find their way back onto that list.)

So I know, when I put a book down without finishing it, that author just got a black mark from me, and the odds of my getting another book from them have dwindled significantly. This means it is a major undertaking, a severing of either a well-established relationship, or the ending of what might have been a promising long term endeavor. I don't set a book down without consequences, and as a reader I tend not to be very forgiving.

Some of the guilt is also tied up with other people's expectations, especially if it's a story I'd heard good things about. Then it becomes a question of, everyone else loved this. I don't. Ergo there is something wrong with me, as a reader, that I don't get how awesome this is. It's not really a valid argument, I know, and speaks more of my own insecurities than anything else, but hey, we all have our neurotic ticks. This just happens to be one of mine.

Sometimes it's simply the reluctance to abandon a project once it's started, and often for reasons that make up only part of the whole. I'm finding myself struggling through Under the Dome right now, for example, because I absolutely cannot stand one of the major characters. I just want someone to put a bullet through his head, and suspect instead I am stuck with him for the next thousand pages or so. Abandoning the book now just because of one character feels slightly treasonous. Yet I have a hunch I may do so, and know also I'll check it back out again eventually.

Only to perhaps feel guilty all over again if I put it down a second time.

Loss

It's funny the associations the mind makes between things. How you can be going along about your day, and then out of the blue you come across something. Something that stirs up a remembrance, stirs up memories, and suddenly the years strip away. They say time heals all wounds but I don't think that's true - I think time just dulls the nerves. The wounds never go away.

Loss is an odd thing. It creates a blank spot inside, a place where you used to fill that blank with someone's presence, only they're not there anymore. Yet the space remains. You get used to it, over time, and it never feels as badly as it did that first time you knew that person was gone. It couldn't, I suppose, because that first time, even when it comes as something expected, is always still a moment of shock. Of realizing that this is it, they're gone, and that you are not. After that, it's just a question of getting used to it as much as you can.

Only with the big losses, I don't think we ever really do get used to it. We push it to the background, we deal with it (if we can and we're smart) or we don't (often with unpleasant repercussions), and our lives go on. You don't ever get rid of it, no matter how long you manage to go on. It's always there, sometimes stronger, sometimes not, but it never ever quite leaves. And it comes back in unexpected moments, with unexpected triggers.

Sometimes I think those moments are harder than the initial moment. They aren't, really, having been through them I know from experience the first is always the most difficult. Especially the kind of losses than can take you off your feet, either literally or figuratively, and leave you wandering around in a bit of a daze. But, because those later moments can come at you unexpectedly, and always when you aren't prepared for them, it can be almost as difficult. The only saving grace about them is that they are almost always shorter in duration. A moment's pause, a moment's reflection, and then they pass until the next time.

But they never really go away.

Marking Time

We mark the passage of time in multiple ways. The tickings of a clock, the turning of a page in a calendar, the number of candles on a cake. All of these are artificial, of course, as our divisions in the flow of time are largely arbitrary things. The turning of the seasons doesn't follow the days on the calendar, and things ebb and flow regardless of how we choose to designate their passing. We attempt to impose order on things that do just fine without us.

It's cultural, of course, this obsession we have with dividing time up into neat little categories that we can check off as they pass us by. Other cultures follow different divisions, mark the passing of the year differently, even the number of the years. We here in the West have imposed a certain order on the rest of the world, a certain clock and calendar, but beyond that (and some times in spite of that) the rest of the world moves on it its own way.

One of the things I learned while living overseas was that the concept of observing one's birthday, and making a big deal out of it, is very much cultural. Not every society does this, which to my mind was missing a great opportunity for cake and ice cream if not presents. But it's just not that big a deal in other places, and so the day goes largely unobserved, in favor of other ways of marking the passage of time.

There is also the passing of the seasons, which, I'm sad to note that it's not quite September yet and already there are Halloween items in the stores. I know Fall is just around the corner, and I look forward to it, but I refuse to gear up for the holiday two months in advance. Ditto with the Christmas season. I love Christmas, treat it like Scrooge after his conversion, but I am not going to start listening to carols before the end of November.

(Day after Thanksgiving, yes, but that's tradition, and when the tree goes up. Which, in my family, is how we mark the start of the Christmas season.)

So, as of today, it's been another year for me. And while if the rest of my year is as good as today I should be in good shape, in some ways it does feel pretty much like yesterday, and the way I expect tomorrow to feel. I mark the passing of this day, as do my friends and family, but really, the world at large takes little notice.

Which is perhaps for the best. I don't have enough cake to go around.

Things Forgotten

So, I'm moving. Which as anyone who has been through it will likely attest to, sucks. Sure, there might be someone out there who enjoys the process... but they are sick, sick individuals and not to be trusted. However, it's a process that does come with its own reward, not least of which is an opportunity to winnow out some of the stuff that's accumulated over the years and yet hasn't been used in decades. (No exaggeration there - I found an old backpack frame that I had back in high school. The camping backpack type, not the books for school type. I figure it may be a while before I can do that again, so it's "hello, Craigslist!")

More importantly though, with that winnowing comes the chance to revisit things I had forgotten about. This includes items of nostalgia (which reminds me, there was another blog entry on that subject I meant to pen a while back...) which, though I'm not keeping them, provide a momentary and pleasant side-trip down memory lane. There are also items that, having suddenly found them again, warrant dusting off and bringing out into the light to be used again. Those are the type of things that you look at them and wonder why you put them away in the first place. Sometimes the answer to that becomes apparent after a moment's reflection, and sometimes you never quite adequately answer it.

I suspect you all see where I'm going with this.

I was sorting through my folders the other day - digital ones, not the physical ones - and came across a number of story ideas that had been started and then for one reason or another not finished. Looking at some of them, I realized that while the idea was good the execution wasn't, and so they need to be filed away again in the idea pile until such time as they germinate into something more. I haven't deleted them, because being digital files they take up hardly any room, but I did right down the central idea in my little writing notebook, alongside other ideas that occurred to me in dreams or bookstore restrooms. (Yes, a bookstore bathroom. It was either the notebook or the toilet paper, and the idea was good enough to merit inclusion on more permanent paper.)

Some of them, though, are gems. Or if they aren't yet they can be with just a little polishing. I am noticing that most of the better ideas - and the ones that made it into better stories - are the ones that are more recent. Though that's relative, because the most recent any of these had been looked at was at least four years ago. Some of them stretch back farther than that, though, back to the time when they were stored on 3.5" floppies. That puts them back in the days when I was in college.

(I have no short stories from high school, as while we did have computers my first one was an Apple IIc. The kind with no hard drive. So anything I wrote on that old monitor, with its black background and strangely fuzzy tri-color text font, has long since been lost unless there is a print copy somewhere in my parents' basement. ... Given the quality of some of the things I wrote then, I would hope not.)

Yet even among the ones layered in feet, not inches of digital dust, there were some concepts worth exploring. If nothing else, by taking them out and looking at them it helps me appreciate not only how long I've been at this, but also how far I've come since I've started. And that's something I can take with me wherever I go, and it doesn't even need bubble wrap or a cardboard box.