I will never complain about not having time to write ever again.

See, it never was about that, though I do admit I tend to overschedule myself professionally. This Distance Learning thing--I don't know if it's more work, or less, or the same amount, but I do know that the nine-to-five (or in the case of most teachers, something closer to eight-to-four) work schedule has been completely obliterated. Not only that, but even the concept of "weekdays" and "weekends" is beginning to dissolve. I am still prepping for a Monday lesson and have been so doing for four hours now on a Sunday. The lesson will take ninety minutes. From an efficiency standpoint, that's pretty bad--something like three times as much prep work as actual execution. But it's what's required if I want to do a good job.

Still, I'm working from home, so I don't lose any time in transit to and from school. I can take a break pretty much any time I want for as long as I want. I can do my planning while watching TV (I'm watching St. Elsewhere, of all things, nowadays). And I can pet my dogs whenever they look at me with that longing only a dog can muster.

All of that, I submit, is a nightmare. We need the mild tyranny of the workspace, I contend. My poor students, most of whom are highly disciplined and skilled youngsters, are struggling with the idea of stay-at-home school. All of the convenience of distance learning is conspiring to make the experience far less convenient.

And that's where my personal writing comes in. 

My usual routine, before the Coronavirus changed all of our routines, was to finish school and school-related work and then to go to the gym for a bit, then retreat to the local coffee shop to write for an hour. I'd usually be able to make it home at or around 6:00, in time to make dinner for the family (sometimes my daughter will have made dinner already. My wife, blessed though she is in many ways including a goddess-like body that refuses to age, has not found the culinary endeavors to her liking nor has she developed particularly strong skills in food preparation). Yes, it's true that on many days, I had a school meeting of one form or another, necessitating a change in my routine, but by and large, that's what I did.

One would think, therefore, being released from the inflexibility of a strict schedule, I would have increased my writing output. But I find myself lacking in the self-discipline to maintain a writing routine in the absence of outside factors.

In short, I'm lazy. 

So I am going to finish this blog, take my laptop outside where I will not be distracted (though Rocky and Eddie often believe it is Play Ball! time when I go outside) and continue to write. 

I hope if you are yourself quarantined by the Coronavirus pandemic, you can find your own way to fulfillment despite the lure of laziness.

Be seeing you!

Hello, all!

You'd think that with all this sequestering and changes to school and whatnot, I'd be more active as a blogger. Strangely enough, the disruption in ordinary life has been such that I've felt less productive as opposed to more. I'm hoping to reverse that trend, as it sure seems like we're going to be doing this for a while. So here are some random thoughts as we enter this new world.

I've been thinking about Orwell a lot lately, partially because I've been assembling readings for my AP students and he pops up a lot on AP lists, but mainly because I'm remembering what happened in his most famous piece of writing, 1984.  (He was originally going to title it The Last Man in Europe, but he changed his mind. Why that year? Not because he was making any kind of prediction--as we know, he was really commenting on his world as it was. He simply exaggerated. So why that year? Well, though the novel was published in 1949, he did the writing of it in 1948. He merely switched the last two digits of the year. Neat, huh?) In that novel, the protagonist Winston Smith is a minor functionary at the Ministry of Truth, which is in charge of disseminating propaganda to the public of Oceania. His job is to alter newspaper records so that the past utterances of the leader, a figure known only as Big Brother, line up with the reality of the present. For example, if Big Brother predicted on Monday that there would be an increase in the chocolate ration, and then on Tuesday there was a reduction, Smith would have to change the facts of the past so that Big Brother is and was never wrong. He'd go back and change what Big Brother was recorded as saying on Monday so that Tuesday's reality lined up with Monday's prediction. 

Why does this resonate?

Well, we've been living in the world of 1984 for some time now, having duplicated many of the novel's plot points and ideas. This is a new level of deception--not just lying about the way things are or what's happening in the present, but lying about what the past even was. What strikes me, though--and this is the terrifying part--is that in the world of 1984,  Winston Smith knows that what he is doing is deception. He resists it (not particularly well or particularly heroically, since he's just some dude who has been ground down by the Man) and has to be tortured with drugs and strange devices and eventually a face-cage full of hungry rats before he breaks and accepts Big Brother. (Spoiler alert: "he loved Big Brother" are the final four words). It's the complete and utter domination of a person by a totalitarian government, and it is awful and tragic in a way few books can ever hope to be. 

But...and this is the point...Winston Smith resists. Oh, sure--he can't fight the State torturer (whose name, incidentally, is O'Brien) nor the combined power of the State for that matter, and he loses everything. He loses his humanity, his love for Julia, everything. He loses in every way possible. But he had to be broken. And that's what terrifies me about what's happening today.

Our leader, Donald Trump, is attempting even now to rewrite history and his own remarks about the beginning of the pandemic. Aided by his own Ministry of Truth (Fox News and other affiliated outlets) he is blithely changing what he once said and believed so that he was never wrong. He always saw the Coronavirus was serious. He called it a pandemic before anyone else did. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. So in that, we're duplicating the storyline of Orwell's classic.

But we're going along with it! The number of people who are simply accepting these claims, these falsehoods, these lies is staggering. Orwell predicted the power of a totalitarian government could and would be able to break anyone, given enough time and enough brutality. But even Orwell, as bleak as he was, did not predict that we would go along with our own brainwashing. Winston Smith was destroyed, but he went down fighting. We are willingly screaming "do it to Julia!" before O'Brien has even begun his work. 

That is what scares me. Not losing the fight to a totalitarian regime ("who controls the past controls the present") but not even fighting at all. The State doesn't need Room 101 if we're going to surrender before the fight has even been joined. 

Truth matters. Reality matters. 

Fight for them.

Be seeing you!

Hi, everyone. This one goes out to all of you who have never been one of the "cool kids:" that inchoate group of folks who, for whatever reason or another, everyone else looks to for social cues. Or the group of people who prize a set of qualities that is hard to describe but which does not necessarily include talent, skill, diligence, or anything measurable. The clique. The In Crowd. Or, as the title of this little essay states, the Cool Kids.

I'd love to tell all you high school students that the idea of the Cool Kids doesn't survive past high school. That your exclusion from the Cool Kids' group will one day not matter, and that the Cool Kids will see that your skills and passion are not just worthy of respect but necessary. Or even that one day, the Cool Kids will crash and burn and come crawling to you for a job, since by then you've been building your business and slowly accumulating wealth and privilege.

As you can imagine, I can't tell you that because, sadly, it's not true. Not completely so, at least.  My dears, the Cool Kids still reign in the adult world. Being talented or smart or passionate doesn't trump the Cool Factor. If you're waiting for your time to come, for the tables to turn and the social order to be upended, you are waiting for something that won't ever come. 

The geek won't inherit the Earth.

I was talking to a friend of mine (someone who was kind enough to come to my recent book signing and even promote it herself) who really crystallized this for me. We were having one of those parking lot discussions where true academic wisdom is to be found when she talked about the Cool Kids. Both of us, in our way, had been excluded from the Cool Kids, and it was still happening.

It's not all bleak, though, my fellow exiles!

While I can't say that the Cool Kids always get their comeuppance, or that hard work, competence, and kindness always pays off, what I can say is that you will come to the realization that success is something you define yourself. I know that sounds simple, but you'd be surprised, Young Person, how difficult that is to live. You think that when you become an adult and don't have to worry about grades and dates and social media likes and all that it'll be easier? I'm afraid grades will be replaced with salaries, dates with spouses, and social media...well, that one may stay the same. Making sure you're in Honors and AP classes for the prestige will be replaced with making sure you get the promotion or the title on your office door. The rat race never ends--you just get put into larger mazes.

And yet...

You can make it. You really can. When you suffer a loss because you're not a Cool Kid, or get snubbed because you don't know someone or something you ought to, go back into yourself and your passions. Go to the indie theater to see Hedwig and the Angry Inch, design your own video game, or even just sit at home and play with your cats. You won't be a Cool Kid, but you will come to realize you don't need to be one to be happy. 

Be seeing you!

When you have a hard week (hard week is of course relative) it's comforting to know people around you sympathize. They offer support and listen to your diatribes and know when it's time to try and offer solutions and when it's time to just listen and be present. They open up about troubles of their own and relate them to yours to show you you're not alone. But most of all, they offer time. I've made some demands on some people in my life recently to listen to me (and I can be quite the long-winded bore at times) and they have all, unfailingly, come through. I've made people late for other appointments I'm sure, or taken them from their homes and families (not by abduction, mind you) while they patiently wait for me to be done talking.

Those kinds of friends are ones to cherish. I'm glad I have all of you--you know of whom I speak.

But there's a whole different level to support, and fittingly, it comes from a single person in my life whom I am constantly amazed I have. My friend of about thirty-five years and my wife of over twenty-eight, Sue.

See, what she did was empathy, and when Sue does empathy, she does it all the way. I was feeling slightly miffed--a little bit irked, as it were--and she took that and ran with it to boiling rage. Where I was saying "I would have rather that hadn't have happened" she was cursing to the gods, both current and ancient. In other words, she became my knight in shining armor to my damsel in distress.

It's nice to have a knight once in a while. And I look pretty good in one of those flowing dresses, let me tell you.

My point is that it is rare in the extreme to have someone in one's life who will not only sympathize and listen and value your company and validate your problems. But it is a unique person who will make your problems her own, who will take your feelings and feel them herself. I love Sue for many, many reasons (I've been talking a lot about her in class, and I said "I don't love Sue because she is my wife: she's my wife because I love her") but right now, chief among them is how much my life is hers. 

​Be seeing you!

I get it, okay? I know that nudity is not always sexual. Heck, it usually isn’t: babies are born naked, toddlers run around naked, medical exams sometimes involve nakedness, prison involves nakedness (so I am told) and people bathe and shower naked.

Nakedness is not inherently sexual. In the gym locker room, men are sometimes naked as they come back from the shower, or even go to the shower. They’re naked in between changing clothes. Some guys in the gym stay naked when they dry their hair or clip toenails.

And let me add something else that I get: I get that just as nakedness is not inherently sexual, a man being naked around other men is not inherently homosexual. It’s part of the same kind of thing. I can and will go further: men touching other men is not inherently homosexual. A man giving another man a high-five, or a hug, or even a kiss is not, by itself, homosexual. A man telling another man he loves him is not inherently homosexual. 

No, nakedness is not inherently sexual, and man-on-man contact is not inherently homosexual. As a society, we simply have to be mature enough to be able to discriminate between situations where sex and sexual orientation matter and when they don’t. I think this is especially true for men. If men can’t discriminate when nakedness means something sexual and when it doesn’t, they’ll be forever uncomfortable. Imagine such a man needing a prostate exam from a female doctor. If such a man were unable to separate medically necessary nakedness from sexual nakedness...well, you can see what might happen. Along the same lines, a man who can’t separate, say, medically necessary man-on-man contact, especially in the genital area, might not avail himself of medical checks he needs.

Worse, men who can’t discriminate between homosexuality and honest expressions of nonsexual affection will, sadly, refrain from telling one another how they feel. And what a sad, sad world that would be.

So, in short, I get it. I get that nakedness need not be sexual, and man-on-man nakedness need not be homosexual. Because of this, I ought to be able to encounter such situations and be completely non-reactive. 
​
But for God’s sake, does this mean that at the locker room at my gym you HAVE to make sure when you drop your towel that my face is near your scrotum?

Be seeing you!

So I posted a little blurb on Facebook about starting over in a novel I'm working on (the one I did NaNoWriMo about) because I was writing the wrong story. A friend of mine asked--in all caps, so I know she was serious--how that could happen.

To her, then, and to anyone else who's interested, here's a little more on that.

What I meant was that I'd created my protagonist and had her pretty well fleshed out (not quite where she was always writing herself, but close) and had done a lot on world-building to where I was satisfied. I had the end line all worked out, and the main beats of the story plotted.

But I was almost 60,000 words in and I wasn't interested. I myself was bored, which would mean the reader would be very much bored. I wasn't telling her story--or rather, I wasn't telling the story that needed to be told. I was telling (which was key right there: it was really telling, not showing, which I know is trite but it's still true) her background, her circumstance, everything that I knew about her that had gone into making her who she was but wasn't actually giving her anything to do, other than just live her life.

I told myself, "it'll get good once I get through all this stuff. I have to tell it, because it sets up some stuff later."

What I forgot was some advice I usually give out to my own students and fellow writers when they ask me questions. The most interesting part of your story is the part you're working on now. The best page of your story is the one your pen is on. And so on. You get the picture.

It's not all bad news--all the work I've done is valuable, since it goes to her character and backstory. But that doesn't mean it all needs to be written out. I need to know it, and I need her story to inform the parts I'll show the reader, but I don't need to show Captain Kirk filling out personnel reports. Sure, he must do that, but that's not where his story is.

I hope this makes more sense now, my friend!

​Be seeing you!

At the risk of getting into Forrest Gump territory, I hereby postulate the title as a truism. Imagine if you will, that every year, you're dealt a new card from the deck of life. You might get a good one, a bad  one, a useless one, or a vital one, depending on what hand you're trying to build. Or perhaps you don't know what kind of hand you're trying to build, so you just wait and see what cards life offers you and make the best of it. Some of us are dealt good cards, some are dealt bad ones, and that's unfair. I'm not one of those to shrug off unfairness and repeat the tired cliche "who said life is fair?" Why not? Because life is what we make of it, isn't it? Life isn't something imposed on us from the outside that we all have to deal with. Life is within us. Hell, life IS us. Saying that "life isn't fair" should be followed up with, "you know, you're right. Sometimes life isn't fair. Can we do something about that? If not change the fairness/unfairness, maybe mitigate the injustice? Treat those who were dealt poor hands a little better, give them a little leeway, maybe a bit more help?"

Anyway.

I'm going to press this analogy/metaphor/trope that life is a deck of cards whether you like it or not, Reader, so bear with me. Granting that we are dealt different cards in our lives, and granting that a just and worthwhile society should take steps to try and even things out when possible, we still have an obligation to play those cards. Yes, we should all have the resources we require to succeed. Notice I didn't say "the same resources," because we don't all need the same things. I'm not in favor of issuing reading glasses to every single student, for example--but we absolutely should give them to those who need them. But having done that--having tried to distribute resources to reflect need--it's still up to the individual to actually play the cards.

Why am I pushing this analogy so hard? Well, if you imagine getting a card a year from the deck of life like I said earlier, then I've reached a peculiar moment in mine. I'm 52 today, which coincidentally is also the number of cards in a standard deck. So this seems like a good time to take stock: not of the cards I have been dealt, but how I've played them.

Do I have regrets? Of course. There are things I wish I hadn't done (some which I will carry in my heart forever and never, ever wash away the stain) but mainly, it's the things I didn't do that bother me. The plays I didn't make, the times when I folded (to torture this metaphor to within an inch of its life) instead of went all in, or times when I walked away from the table entirely. 

Here's the good news, though:

I feel like I'm doing a lot of them now. My main one is, of course, writing. I wish I'd tried to enter the professional world sooner. I've been writing for literally as long as I can remember--somewhere in primary school we were tasked with writing a story to reflect Christmas (this was before we had matured enough as an American society to fully realize the diversity of belief in public school). I was so engrossed in the story that I dove into the project with the fervor of a zealot. I asked for an extension so I could complete my Magnum Opus. My brother, God love him, several years ago found the original story and reproduced it faithfully--including illustrations--and presented it to me at a family holiday celebration (remember, Jeff? "Mender, Mender?") 

I wrote in middle school, I wrote in high school, I wrote in college and beyond. But it wasn't until 1996 that I first gathered the courage to send something in for publication. And it's taken even longer for me to try to get into the novel publishing business.

But, dammit, I'm there now. Sure, I sloughed off a lot of cards, and was timid when I should have been bold, but despite taking the long way 'round, I got there.

(I should note that the one time I was bold beyond my character has been the single greatest event in my life--approaching that spellbinding girl from across the gym dance floor at the Homecoming Dance  in 1983 at Newbury Park High School. I performed a magic trick involving a disappearing napkin and thus won her heart. We've been together ever since and just recently celebrated our 28th wedding anniversary)

So. Anyone reading this, it's never too late. But also, don't wait. I know that may seem contradictory, and maybe it is, (I am large, I contain multitudes) but it's my birthday message to you.

Be seeing you!

Hart to believe that we are in the year 2020. 

I recall nineteen years ago when we entered 2001 how many comparisons there were between the reality of 2001 and the fictional picture painted by Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick in the motion picture 2001.  Some stuff was pretty spot-on accurate, like the ipad-things Dave and Frank had on board Discovery-1. Other stuff was less so--commercial flights to the moon and to orbiting space station (which was admittedly under construction, but still). Overall, however, I remember the feeling that once 2001 had come, we were now officially living in THE FUTURE-RE-RE-RE-RE...(imagine the echo effect: that's what I'm trying to type out). 

Now that we're in 2020, the disappointment is firmly entrenched. The disparity between where we are now and where we thought we'd be by this time is so great that it's hard to be optimistic at all. I suppose that may be why we don't get a whole lot of utopian sci-fi much anymore: it's all dystopian and bleak and dark and that overused word, "gritty." Hell, even the gleaming chrome of the original Star Trek  (and even the bright optimism of the revival series, Star Trek the Next Generation) is tarnished and grim. Maybe sci-fi has just "grown up" from the so-called Golden Age, but it somehow seems more than that.

Optimism seems to have become passe, naive, even downright dangerous. I mean, honestly--who can look at where America and the world is and think that we're on the brink of some bright, utopian future? I imagine most of us feel like we'd be content to just stop sliding into darkness for a short time.

Ah, well. I didn't mean for 2020 to start out so glum--but there's no point in ignoring the reality. So let's try to work through it as best we can and strive for a future we can all imagine. 

Be seeing you!

Finally got this one out there, back to the folks at EDGE for their consideration. I'd been using this one to try and leverage an agent, but no dice. I suspect that since I don't have much of a presence in the publishing world, I'm not that attractive to agents.  So I've started a much more intensive blitz for Silent Manifest and Beltrunner (just set up a signing in February, for example) and will do the same for the Moth trilogy, assuming the EDGE people decide to go with me.

The Moth series was a blast to write--it was the first novel/story that just sort of "came" to me. I hate to be dramatic about this, but it seriously came to me in a dream. The whole thing did. Yeah, the specific beats and plot points had to be worked out, but it was such a strange thing, having the idea come ex nihilo like this. 

Anyway, I'll follow the progress of the novel and keep you posted!

Be seeing you!

Some words in English are pretty much single-purpose words. "Faucet," for example, pretty much means one thing and one thing only. Other words might have a dual purpose, either because of meaning or part of speech or both. "Knife" might be such a word: as a noun, it's a bladed weapon or tool, while as a verb it can mean to sort of find a way through obstacles or clutter ("he knifed through the coverage into the open field"). It can also, of course, mean to attack someone with a knife, but that's not all that different from the noun meaning. 

Other words are sort of hybrids--they have many meanings and even within those meanings have different connotations. "Hustle" is one such word. As a coach, I use this word all the time to mean "move quickly and energetically." My wife just watched the movie Hustlers, which was about a group of women who, through a complex and systematic mechanism of deception and trickery, fooled people out of their money. 

There's a kind of middle ground with that word, meaning "to obtain through forceful action or persuasion." Or to go and get something because you put a lot of effort and energy into getting it. Or being indefatigable. This aspect of the word doesn't have a negative connotation--it means to work hard at something until you get it.

In the world of the arts, we usually apply this word not so much to the actual effort involved in creating the art (we won't usually say "I hustled until I created my sculpture" but rather in selling it, in getting the word out about your work, in getting eyes or ears on your project. Say what you want, but the creation of good art is not always enough for the world to notice it (and, conversely, the creation of bad art can be noticed through hype and hustle). 

So what does this all mean? The publisher I've worked with on my last two novels (Beltrunner and Silent Manifest) sent me a marketing guide that included a list of questions for the writer to answer. Stuff like "is this a hobby or a career?" and "what are you willing to do in order to market your work?" Maybe the good folks at EDGE Publishing didn't know it, but those questions really stuck with me.

Here it is: I'm not huge on New Year's Resolutions, but since we're sort of close to that, here come a few.

I resolve to commit to marketing my writing, not just to writing.
I resolve to up my social media footprint.
I resolve to overcome my natural reluctance to self-promote.

That seems good enough, right?

​Be seeing you?