Compel

Just got off a Zoom with my writer's group. The pandemic has taken its toll. It's been about a year since any robust discussion of writing has happened, interspersed with some good moments. One of them has continued working on her memoir. The other two have struggled with mental health, family stuff, and a lack of motivation to write.  In the meantime, I've written a full novel plus another 118k words on my projects. But I wonder how much of it is robotic and unfeeling vs. actually being interesting or fresh or adding any value to the literary world. I know they're first drafts and have a lot of future work to go. My hope is that I don't heap so much expectation on myself that I get deflate or start to resent my failures. There are a lot of incredible writers out there whose voices need to be heard and who have been working really hard at making sure their work is its own unique thing.  I think each of the projects my writing group is working on are fantastic. I wan...

I listen to the same music over and over and over again. From project to project I'll have different playlists, but then I'll listen to the same thing for the duration of that project, more or less. Whether there's any truth to it, I think about the music as a shortcut into the writing. Even more so, whether consciously or subconsciously, I channel the vibes of the music into my work.  Right now it's a YouTube playlist with some Skyrim tracks, some Donkey Kong Country relaxation mixes, a Zelda rain/waves/night mix, and a Final Fantasy 6 loop of calm and relaxing tracks. I must need the calm. Calm helps in marathons, and this project is certainly that. 117k words in and I'm only just scratching the surface of the larger story.  For my YA Sci-Fi novel it was the Fez soundtrack. That atmospheric gamer-synth style felt right for a story set on the moon, even if it wasn't the type of music my main characters would be listening to. After 3-4 drafts, the final one (so ...

Running in the rain. There's a calm in it. My memories surface like earthworms. The gray and green all around us as we trudged from locker room to field. The squish and squelch of grass that never really dried. Then the soft thud of sneaker on asphalt. "Run for an hour." We would. We'd laugh and talk about stupid things we'd said or done as we headed out past the women's prison. It would be halfway or more into the season, so our conditioning was at its peak. The drenched pine forest would swallow us and we were ghosts, beating down the well-trod trails. We'd breathe and breathe, more alive with oxygen than anyone else on the Earth on those afternoons. The rain went to our bones and souls which would grow smooth as glass but not brittle, green with the grit of renewal.  After a while we'd go quiet. The forest spoke for us. Rain found fern and needle and a trillion love stories sprang to life while we floated past. And then we'd leave for the road a...

I never took Calculus so I don't really know anything about limits. I like asymptotes though. Funny name. And the concept that you can forever approach but never arrive is the most quantum insanity I've ever heard.  My threshold is an asymptote. I do have a limit, but all the flotsam and jetsam of life have pushed ever toward and never to this magical point. I feel closer to it than ever. The fabled breaking point. The scene in movies where the main character is doing something strange and wild and life changing.  How much of my current feelings is the pandemic? It's hard to say. Perhaps COVID has been the extra light on in the room. I want to go to the mountains and sit in the snow. I want to put the minutiae of my day job in a capsule and launch it into deep space. Nine times. If I'm spending 8-12 hours a day working in front of a screen, I want it to be on my novel, a draft of which could be done by Spring Break if I made better choices. I want to ride my bike all ov...

Whales were my cousin's favorite animal so they couldn't be mine. Then I moved away, so she wouldn't know they were my favorite. When we first moved to Gig Harbor there were rumors of an Orca pod hanging out in the south Sound area. Every time we drove across the Narrows Bridge I would look down thinking just maybe I'd see a dorsal fin or a tail.  In 2014, Amy and I went to New Zealand to visit our friends and see a new place. We went whale watching off Kaikoura. Sperm Whales. Only the males though, because the water was too cold for the females and the kiddos. We saw great gray bodies come up to breathe and then, just as they were diving to feed again, they'd give us a glamor shot: a perfect fluke.  For the rest of the trip, all of us sang old contemporary Christian songs replacing God and Jesus with whale. A few years back, they sent us a cross-stich of a fluke diving in choppy water with "Whale of Ages" sewn over the top. "Whale of Ages. Whale is t...

Every single sentence should be interesting. No one buys an apple and says, "I hope that I get a few good bites out of this thing." No. An apple should be delicious to its core. The writer's job is to entertain, entice, tickle, tease. The writer's mistake will be to overuse alliteration or stretch a sentence on until, like a guitar string wound too tight by amateur hands, it snaps and lashes out in discordant ire.  Every sentence is a lightning bug in a jar, and it's you, writer, who are collecting these jars and placing them in a broad field so that a passenger in a plane overhead might look down and see the light show. They'll watch in wonder, only just feeling their hearts fill before the view is gone.  Every line of dialogue is life and you are God. Every paragraph can be something that inspires creation in another. You're an infinite matchbook. You strike. Flame bursts forth. You search for wicks and if none meets your fire you go dark, and maybe you...

I often think about the individual vs. the collective. Individual freedom is the driving force and promise of America. The shrinking world seems to now be divided less into countries and more into groups and chats and various corners of the internet.  Gone are the days when a person was forced to act for the good of their family, their village, their place of worship, rather than in their own best interest. All humans have always had best interests, but we have not always been empowered to use them. But now we have nothing but that power. And that power is driven by the false promise that we can each be more interesting than other people. Hence Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Tik-Tok, and so on. These media conglomerates even use the narrative that they're bringing people together to earn profit which just further stokes the fires of fierce individualism.  I became an Arsenal fan in 2008 more or less (though I was exposed in 2007 at a time when it was part of my identity to hate...

 That's what Alexa calls it. When asked how long the movie Mulholland Drive  is, Alexa will tell you Mulholland Doctor is 2 hours and 17 minutes long. Not even a robot with all the brain power in human history can figure out what the hell David Lynch is up to.  My earliest understanding of Lynch was from Dune , a movie I'm pretty sure he tried to disown, or at least distance himself from. I loved every second of it. The film made me want to read the book, and once I had, I could feel how much effort Lynch had put into creating a close facsimile to the Herbert masterpiece. He created room to breathe on screen, room to think and feel, and helped us experience what Paul Atreides might be feeling as a rising god-king. A lot of people who know a lot more about film than I know shit all over this movie. To those I say, let me have my much-maligned sci-fi classic.  Twin Peaks was a revelation for me. I'd never watched something in which every scene was so enthralling, carri...

For the past six or seven years I have been low-key rooting for the Warriors. A frontrunner. A bandwagoner. I lived in Chicago during the Jordan era and got to watch the GOAT on a nightly basis for a little while, rooting hard for Jordan's Bulls even though I should have been a Pacers fan. I guess I'm easy to bait. Just give me a transcendent player to watch and I'm buying League Pass to catch all the games I can.  So it's been with Steph Curry. Sure, I'm a burgeoning Klaytheist, but he went to WSU so he could take a long walk off a short pier as far as I was concerned (though I respect the hell out of his game now and wish him a speedy recovery). Sure, Steve Kerr was on those Bulls teams I loved and the bone-deep racist in me was happy to root on a white guy back in the 90s--an instinct I still have to be mindful of today: just because Payton Pritchard is a short white dude does not mean I should root for him (plus he went to U of O, so fuck him); between the lines...

 Education post, incoming... We overuse the word "mastery" at my school. We've got mastery of abilities, mastery sessions...hell, we even have a Master Teacher (lol, what a weird title). And while we don't have control over what trickles down from above us, I think we can all take a step back and understand that what our students are doing is not so much as becoming masters, but becoming more competent.  Benjamin Bloom first foisted the mastery learning model on us back in the 60s. (Yes, that Bloom, the taxonomy guy). It was a response to the wide variety of student achievement Bloom was noticing (aka the achievement gap). In his paper "Formative Classroom Assessment and Benjamin S. Bloom: Theory, Research, and Implications," Thomas R. Guskey notes, "Bloom argued that to reduce variation in students’ achievement and to have all students learn well, we must increase variation in instructional approaches and learning time." This is what we do! We emp...

Inauguration Day!  I cast my first vote in a presidential election for George W. Bush in 2004. I was horrified at the prospect of a Democrat taking over the presidency. I was fiercely Conservative, without fully knowing what that meant. I was pro-life, wanted people to help themselves rather than the government help them out, and felt the most important trait of a politician was whether they were a Christian. Democrats couldn't possibly be Christians--not the type I knew.  Casting a vote for George W. Bush was like casting a vote for Jesus. It meant our country could remain a nation under God, rather than what the corruption of the world would have it be.  In 2008, I abstained from voting. In January 2009, my then-girlfriend-now-wife had a chance to attend Obama's Inauguration. Wow! In 2012, I stood in line for nearly 4 hours at a gym in Rogers Park, Chicago to cast my presidential vote proudly for President Obama.  Exposure to new people and places and ideas expande...

I'm writing a fantasy book. A series, hopefully. Well, I've been writing it off and on for 20 years. At some point you just have to commit, right? I don't think my 14-year-old self would have imbued the story with much about class. But that's what it's getting imbued with now.  My story has five castes. Probably sounds familiar, but don't worry, it also steals from a number of other ideas and cultures. Equal opportunity theft. I wonder if my focus on class, and my choice to write the majority of perspectives from the lower classes, comes from my time in LA?  Yesterday I spent some time with a homeless vet (I guess I'll take his word for it) looking at his artwork. He said he'd been drawing for 15 years. He's just okay. He needed money for a motel room that night. I didn't give him enough for a motel room. But as I was driving home, I thought about a listing in the neighborhood next to mine: a 2 bed, 1 bath, 885 square foot piece of shit, not much...

In the 1960s, Elaine May did not have a high school diploma. When she discovered that California colleges required a diploma for admission, she hitchhiked with 7 dollars across the country to Chicago, because she learned that the University of Chicago would take students without a diploma. It appears she never fully enrolled in classes, but would show up anyway, "auditing" until she made some connections. That launched her stage and screen career, and she ultimately gave us treats like A New Leaf , The Birdcage (writer), and some other films I haven't seen but that people like (and some they don't).  It's not always the story. A poll of Hollywood creators would probably return with at least a plurality coming from an industry background. Dad was a director or a sound editor, mom was a costume designer, they grew up in Burbank and went to USC. That sort of thing. But despite the legs up and the nepotism, there are still hundreds and hundreds of stories of people wh...

In his didactic essay "One Page at a Time," George Saunders tells us that what makes a piece of writing a story is that "something happens within it that changes the character forever"(51). The subject of his essay is Chekhov's short story "In the Cart." A bleak story. Tight, dynamic, and with a main character as complex as any I've read in so short a space.  What happens to Marya Vasilyevna in this story leaves us with the impression she could be changed forever. Or she could resume her monotonous, unhappy life, that moment of possibility dwindling away like all other things. Maximum relatability. Marya is lonely, but can't or won't change that.  I've been thinking about loneliness a lot in the past few years. Even more so during the pandemic. From the day we're born we move away from the axis of connection into loneliness. Not all of us feel it so strongly, if we're lucky. I'd wager in 2021 there are more tools for connect...