Unfortunate Business

Wren Leave a comment

Arthur walked through the door into the sunshine, briefcase in hand, and dreaded the walk to work. His office building was only a mile and a half away from his apartment. That was one of the perks of living in the city, he supposed. But he hated how crowded everything was. It always took him longer to walk to work than it should have. He was in a hurry this morning. There was a meeting at 9 o’clock at which he was supposed to present his proposal. He patted his briefcase unconsciously, feeling the reassuring bulk of the envelope.

Arthur nervously adjust his silk tie as he watched the heavy flow of foot traffic moving up and down the sidewalk from the stoop of his apartment complex. People paid little attention to him as he stood there watching them. With a small, tired sigh, Arthur stepped down the stairs to the sidewalk and joined the throng.

Arthur waded through the sea of people moving back and forth, to and from apartments and offices. Some of the people had the almost unkempt, disheveled look of those coming off a night shift, and others had that crisp, almost vacuum-sealed look he associated with lawyers. There were punk rockers, high school students, women going shopping, men drinking coffee and glancing at their watches, women applying makeup as they shuffled through the crowd, and everywhere was the noise and smell of automobiles.

Arthur was bumped and jostled as he did his best to stick close to the buildings. Someone as small as he was did their best to stay away from the street. It was only last week that he had read of some poor soul accidentally getting pushed out of the sidewalk traffic and into the way of a bus.

Arthur checked his Rolex and ducked into a small alley between two large buildings, taking advantage of the decrease in foot traffic to speed up. About halfway through the alley, someone jumped out from behind a dumpster and, with a disgustingly wet “THNK,” clubbed him in the head with what looked like baseball bat.

Arthur stared for what seemed like almost an hour, stunned, at the dark figure holding the bat in its hands and wondered why he was taking so long to fall down. Arthur noticed a large red splotch on the side of the dumpster. He wondered if it was blood. Maybe it was blood from a previous victim? But no, it was only rust, he realized, as he got closer to it; some of the paint had been worn off over the years and the metal below it began to surrender to the harsh elements of the big city.

Finally, with a “thud” that sounded like it was coming from fifty feet away, he hit the ground on his stomach. It was surprisingly dry. He had always imagined that the alleys where people got mugged had pools of water and slime everywhere. Thank goodness there wouldn’t be any wet spots on his freshly-pressed suit when he made his presentation. The ground was also very warm, despite the approaching winter.

Light kept flashing into his eyes as it reflected off cars passing by the far end of the alley and through the gaps in the passing crowd. Why did none of them come to help him? A driver in one of the cars should have been able to see him lying there, and surely one of the people on foot would have already called the police. But why did no one come to help him? Why did no one stop and look in the alley?

Hands rifling through his pockets. They took his wallet out of his jacket pocket, his cell phone from his pants’ pocket, and they just TOOK his entire briefcase. They didn’t bother looking through it. They just took the whole thing.

Arthur had an important letter and plans in that briefcase. They were part of a business deal that would finally get him that promotion he’d been dreaming of for the past two years. At 34, he would be the youngest junior partner in the history of his company. He would finally be able to get a house in the suburbs for Alice. He’d be able to buy each of them a nice car. An extravagant SUV that just guzzled gas. He and his wife would finally be able to have children, a dog, maybe even a cat.

But the hands had taken his briefcase with his letter and the plans for the proposed office complex. And now his watch too! They also began tugging at his wedding band. They were leaving him with nothing. Suddenly, the ring popped off his finger and the pressure of the prodding hands was gone. After a few moments, Arthur supposed that they had finally left him alone.

Suddenly, a pair of feet walked into his vision. He wondered what the feet were doing there. Where had they come from? Had they noticed him lying there and come to help? And what was that? There was a long, thin object next to them. It looked like it was round. The bottom didn’t rest very well on the ground. It dragged behind the feet, never once lifting from the ground like feet would.

The feet stopped right in front of his face and the round, thin object got closer to his face. He realized then that it was made of wood. Very well-polished wood. With some dark, wet splotches on it that partially covered some writing. The unstained portion read “Louisville Slu-”. He wondered what a “Slu” was.

Suddenly, it moved a little on its own, skittering about on the concrete, no longer following the feet. Then, it jumped up and disappeared from his sight. He heard another one of the meaty, disgustingly wet “THNK’s” from earlier. It seemed like he should have felt something. But he couldn’t quite place his finger on what it was he should have been feeling. It was all very odd. He had taken this shortcut through the alley almost every day for the past 3 years and he had never fallen down onto the ground, nor had hands ever searched him. He heard another of the “THNK’s” and thought he should have felt that too.

The feet finally started moving away. They ran down the alley and he saw then that the feet were attached to some legs, and these legs decided to go into the back door of one of the buildings bordering the alley. Arthur hoped that the feet and legs were going to call the police. But why, he thought, did he want the police? That’s right. The hands. They took his house in the suburbs with a car, kids, and pets. He wanted those things back. But first he needed a nap. He was extremely tired. He had been up so late working on his car and kids. He smiled as he drifted off, as the world slowly faded from his senses. At least he had remembered to make photocopies.

Tabletop Highlight: D&D 3.5 and Knights

Wren Leave a comment

One of my favorite classes to play in Dungeons and Dragons is the 3.5 edition’s Knight. This class is listed in the Player’s Handbook II and is probably the best class to use for the “Tank” role based on class abilities alone. Almost all of their abilities are geared toward grabbing enemy focus, surviving, or protecting their comrades. All of this comes at the cost of a lot of more the damage-oriented abilities or skills you might associate with fighter or barbarian tank builds. So often, a front-line tank fighter or barbarian’s skill set is focused around the idea of “if it is dead, it can’t hurt me or anyone else.” Yes, you can build a fighter’s AC (Armor Class: it determines how difficult it is to hurt you character with an attack) super high while still focusing on damage and you can get a Barbarian enough HP to tank a few disintegrate spells (which are as dangerous as the name implies) without healing, but Knights are focused on both of those things.

As one of the few classes with a d12 hit die (the die used to determine how many hit points the character gains each level), they can have almost as much HP as a barbarian before they start raging. Since their primary focus is staying alive and taking damage so other characters do not, putting the highest attribute score in Constitution is almost a requirement. The second-highest attribute score can work as well, but raising it with magic items as soon as possible is a must because a Knight can never have too many hit points. The alternative attribute for the highest attribute score is actually charisma. A lot of a Knight’s abilities are based on Charisma. Charisma can help a Knight challenge the boss to fight them and only them, grant them and their allies bonuses based on the Knight’s inspirational battle cries, and can help Knights come up with clever challenges to cause all enemies to charge them. Outside of battle, a Knight’s charisma can help them move through the social circles graced by royalty and nobility as they further their knightly cause.

As they progress through their levels, Knights enjoy a full Base Attack Bonus progression (one point per level) but, oddly, have only Will as a primary save. If you look through their abilities, you will find that Knights have abilities that can help them save allies who are being mind-controlled or mind-affected (made afraid, under the power of suggestion, etc), so having a high Will save means they are more likely to remain free long enough to save their companions. Other interesting abilities include being able to prevent enemies from easily moving past you (or using the common rogue trick of tumbling past the tank in order to attack the squishier characters behind them) by causing the space around them to be treated as rough terrain. This means that people cannot simply run past them or tumble past them thanks to the knight’s defensive capabilities. Other abilities include a boost to their AC as a result of using a shield and the ability to take part (and eventually all) of the damage dealt to an adjacent ally. If you’re protecting a spellcaster who gets shot by an arrow or stabbed by a rogue, you can opt to take some of that damage in order to mitigate what might have otherwise been a killing blow.

As far as combat goes, Knights get access to mounted combat feats, along with a lot of technical combat feats through a “bonus” feat system ever few levels. While a Knight may never do a lot of damage, compared to other martial classes, they can still dominate a battlefield riding about on a well-trained mount using a Lance in order to maximize their damage. They also have an ability called “Fighting Challenge” that gives them bonuses against a specific target they’ve challenged to a fight. The Fighting Challenge is a type of “Knight’s Challenge” which also includes things like the “Test of Mettle” which causes all enemies in earshot to focus on attacking you, the “Daunting Challenge” which causes weak enemies to flee in terror, and the “Bond of Loyalty” which allows a Knight to continue making will saves against mind-affecting spells or abilities until the Knight is free or out of Knight’s Challenges.

The most interesting use of the Knight’s Challenge, and what makes them the ultimate tank, is what they earn at 20th level: “Loyalty Beyond Death.” This allows a Knight to spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to literally continue moving after they’ve functionally died. At 20th level, a Knight will have over 200 hit points. A character typically dies once they pass -10 hit points. A 20th level Knight can spend uses of their Knight’s Challenge to continue moving and acting once their hit points pass below 0 until their body is completely destroyed or they run out of Knight’s Challenges to use. This means they can still be healed back to the point of being alive or just sacrifice their live in one last glorious charge as they face down an ancient, all-powerful dragon or lich in order to buy a village or their allies time to flee.

There any number of other feats that can greatly benefit a Knight as well. Shieldmate lets you provide adjacent allies with an AC bonus based on the shield you use. Heavy Armor Specialization, a feat with dovetails in with a Knight’s ability to ignore movement penalties resulting from wearing Heavy armor, provides you with a permanent reduction to the damage you take as a result of wearing Heavy armor. The proficiency feat for Tower Shields also benefits a Knight because it increases the bonus provided by Shieldmate, increases your AC even more, and lets a Knight use their shield as protection from arrows or AoE (Area of Effect) attacks for anyone who isn’t tough enough to survive them. There is even a feat or a type of enhancement magic for armor and shields that lets your AC bonus from your armor and shield apply against certain magical attacks that normally just need to make contact with a character, rather than break through their armor. With the right builds, a Knight can because an almost unstoppable tanking machine.

I wouldn’t recommend using a Knight as the primary front-line combatant because their damage output is lower than most other martial characters, so they’re not always great picks for 4-person groups, but they work amazingly in larger groups, even if there are no other front-line martial characters. Especially if there are no other front-line martial characters. Next time you need a tank and don’t want to play the lawful good paladin, play a night! They can be lawful anything and their emphasis is more on their knightly oaths than obeying the rules of the land.

A Day in the Life of a Twenty-Something

Wren Leave a comment

You wake up at a variety of times on any given day, but you went to bed early yesterday and slept until 9. With over 9 hours of sleep, you feel more refreshed and ready than you’ve felt in weeks. Your back kind of aches, but you know it’s a sign that you slept well and it’ll eventually disappear when you can afford a new mattress. Specifically, a mattress that wasn’t bought of the cheap end of the discount rack. Content that your morning will be quiet, you grab you phone off of your nightstand and review the notifications.

A few texts from your friends who wake up early or stay up late, the usual plethora of social media updates, and a message from your parents about Christmas plans are all that great you. No application updates happened over night and none of your passive games have anything to report. You set your phone aside for a moment to rub your eyes  and turn on your lamp. After you eyes have lost some of their crusty feeling, you open the social media account of your choice, looking for updates from friends or the latest news on your interests.

Instead, all you can find is people screaming out about the latest tragedy perpetrated by your government. Maybe there’s some news about the latest disaster to happen exactly as the protesters predicted it would and the corporations swore it wouldn’t. Perhaps there is some heartening news about the investigations into corruption at the highest levels of your government, but that is almost always tempered by the commentary from a few trusted analysts that there has been solid enough evidence to prosecute for months now and the ruling party has so far refused to do so. Instead, the heads of your government are intent on pushing laws through the legislative bodies without giving anyone a chance to read them or without even fully understanding them. Gone are the days of your childhood, when it seemed like everyone worked together to do the right thing. The stories your parents told you of sensibility, logic, and justice ruling at the end of the day are no longer relevant. Now, everything is “us or them” and no one is willing to reach across the aisle to actually try to understand.

You close your social media application without ever looking up your friends or for developments in your hobbies or interests. Instead, you put your phone aside and open a book, play a video game, or fire up Netflix. You disengage not because you don’t care, but because you care and there’s too much for you to care about. Ten minutes of browsing has left you almost as tired as you were the night before. At least you managed to avoid finding any articles written by previous generations about how your generation has ruined the country or will soon ruin it. That much irony in the morning isn’t good for anyone’s health.

After a suitable amount of time, you finally haul yourself to your feet and start getting ready for the day. Some kind of food is consumed, nothing terribly interesting but enough to keep your body functioning, and the usual hygiene routines are observed. Perhaps a little more quickly than you would like, but water is a finite resource and not free. Neither is the electricity used to heat your water or power your stove. After you’ve finished the more pleasant parts of your day, you clench your jaw and make yourself attend to your bills. It is early in the month, and most of them come due over the next two weeks, carefully staggered so you can make sure they all post to your account before the next one is due. It wouldn’t be good to get overdrawn again. Once a year is more than enough.

Bills paid, almost happily because it means you’ve got more than enough money to pay them all sitting in your account, you start reviewing your Christmas gift list. You’d like to buy presents for a lot of people, but you’re not sure you can afford to. If you bought everything from Amazon, you probably could, but you just read an article the night before about how the warehouse employees are collapsing on the job and that the CEO finally passed the 100 billions net-worth mark. The idea of that much difference between the people who actually do the work for a company and the person who sits on the top of the human pyramid sickens you.

You still buy several gifts from Amazon, though, as you go about acquiring Christmas presents. There’s just nowhere else that can get them to you in time, much less actually has what you want. Most places that might have been able to do that at one point have buckled under Amazon’s greater financial weight. Just like the local post office that’s been marking packages as delivered because they don’t have the staff to deliver everything on Amazon’s promised day. They need to cheat so that they’re not penalized for failing to make good on the contracts their superiors have signed with the cross-industry giant that is Amazon.

Christmas attended to, you settle in for the remainder of your evening, alternating between reading, watching TV, or maybe attending to a creative project or two. Even though you’ve made effort to avoid it for just one day, the raging inferno of inequality and corruption has leaked into your life through your friends and through the constant awareness that you are a part of the industrial machine driving your country and your world toward ruin. The only way you could avoid being a part of it is by abandoning modern life entirely and taking up life as a sustenance farmer.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that, as appealing as it sounds at times. Your debt, accrued at the behest of your parents, older relatives, and role models, must be paid back. If it is not paid back by you, then it will burden your parents who, while much better off than you, are still trying to get their financial future back in order after the bubble burst last decade. You know what its like to feel the weight of that debt hanging around your neck, changing the way you make every decision. You wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Instead, you eat a quiet dinner of something simple and filling, go back to your Netflix subscription and watch it until you feel sufficiently removed from your problems to go to bed. After preparing for bed, you lay back and feel the steel springs shift and twang as you stir beneath the covers. Eventually, you fall asleep after consoling yourself with the thought that maybe tomorrow will be better.

Saturday Morning Musing

Wren Leave a comment

I’ve always enjoyed spending my weekend mornings by myself. I have a very busy life, by choice, constantly filling my time with projects and activities. In more recent years, this has made it more difficult to spend time reflecting every day. There have been times in the past year where being busy has been a specific choice to avoid too much reflection. Spending too much time in my head can be a bad thing, just as not spending enough time can be a bad thing. It’s a fine balance to strike.

However, when there’s nothing going on and I’ve got no obligations I need to see to, I like to take my mornings on Saturday or Sunday to just stay in bed, revel in the comfort of my dark room, and reflect. I’m usually awake enough to not fall asleep while meditating and, since I’m in my bed on a free morning, it isn’t a big deal if I do. I like to pick over what has happened during the week and what might happen over the next week. This is my time to plan events, figure out if I should be calling on friends, and to decide how I’m feeling on anything I was too busy or emotionally distraught to handle as it happened.

This last thing, unpacking the boxes I’ve filled and tucked away for later, is my main occupation during these morning reflections. If I was stressed and upset by something a friend said the other day, I’ll unpack it and review it. Did they intend to upset me? Was I upset about something else and it colored my reaction to their comment? Should I say something to them or let it go? Heck, with how stressful the world is these days for anyone not supporting the current US Republican congress, maybe I’ve packed away something that happened because there’s so much going on that I can’t process it all at once. Maybe I’ve packed away the latest horrible thing that’s happened in the world. Maybe I’ve packed away a bunch of insecurities and invasive thoughts stemming from my OCD taking advantage of the normal stresses of a relatively new relationship.

Packing things away is my main coping mechanism and I need to take time to unpack them every so often or else they build up to the point where the shelf collapses and all the boxes unpack themselves, all at once. Panic attacks and mental breakdowns aren’t super fun, FYI.

If unpacking is about 50% of the time I spend reflecting, then planning is 10%, reviewing my week is 10%, and reviewing my social needs and activities is 10%, the last 20% goes toward simple mental wandering. If the brain is like a muscle and Sudoku or reading are mental workouts, then a good mental wander is like going hiking. Sure, you get some exercise, but the main reason is to go see something or explore. I like to take interesting ideas and explore them. This can be reflections on aspects of ethics or morals, it can be a philosophical concept, or it can be a story idea. I’ve mentioned that writing can be a lot like climbing a mountain (check the Helpful Tips section of this blog post), so this sort of mental wandering is a lot like looking for the right kind of mountains. There’s a lot of metaphor to unpack here,  but I think I’ll save that for another post since I could easily write a whole post or two on my creative process.

Most of the time, all of this takes place over the course of a couple of hours.  Sometimes, I wake up around 9 or 10 and then finally drag myself out of bed around 11 or 12. Most days, like today, I get up at 7:30 and lie in bed until 11. I’m no longer very good at sleeping in since I’ve officially been getting up at 6 more often than not for 13 years, but that’s alright. I like my quiet mornings and the chance to get a lot of thinking done. Today, I actually planned my blog update schedule, all while snuggled cozily under my blankets in a dimly lit room full of the quiet sounds of a peaceful neighborhood. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Broken Words (My Self-Titled Post)

Wren 1 Comment

I’ve had this blog for over a year now, and I’ve never shared the poem that inspired the title. I think I’ve talked about it in the past, and I definitely remember writing about posting it eventually, but I figured that would be a good way to start my year of daily posts. And a way to solidify Friday as “Poetry Day” for my blog. So, here it is, without further introduction or preamble:

 

“Broken Words”

What point are there in words,
Hear how sweetly they sing,
When they fail to tell a tale
And no understanding bring?

What point are there in words,
So full of heart and love,
When they can be cast away
and easily disposed of?

What point are there in words,
So full of awe and wonder,
When they fall upon empty heads
And lose their flash and thunder?

What power is there in words,
Only so much empty wind,
That tumble out so carelessly
Like peels from an apple skinned?

What power is there in words,
Nothing more than empty lies,
That I will use to quiet
The tears that fall from your eyes?

What power is there in words,
Such simple seeming sounds,
That form the bones of our speech:
Verbs, adverbs, prepositions, and nouns?

What use have I for words,
Such lovely, crafted things,
When no one quite hears them
Despite their melodic rings?

What use have I for words,
So beautiful and bright,
When they cannot illuminate
Or show anyone the light?

What use have I for words,
So difficult and simple,
That cannot change a heart
Or cause an iron will to dimple?

What words have I to use,
A lexicon at my fingers,
To tell you of the thought
That cannot stay but lingers?

What words have I to use.
So many different choices,
To make you hear inside my head
The many clamoring voices?

What words have I to use,
So many and yet so few,
To make you understand
What I’m saying to you?

What point have I to make,
Flimsy as a tin foil,
That cannot be made by action
And take far less care and toil?

What point have I to make,
Nothing sharper than a spade,
When all the words are dead
And all their parts are played?

What point have I to make,
Swift and small as a pin,
That can pierce the patchwork
Armor that you wear within?

What power have I to take,
To steal so quick and sly,
Your mind and heart away
And leave you with a sigh?

What power have I to take,
Remove with nary a sound,
The echoes of your dreams
That hold you to the ground?

What power have I to take,
To shatter beyond repair,
What you thought you knew
And all that you hold dear?

What words are left to say,
To mumble murmur and mutter,
That will leave my thin mouth
Without a drawn out stutter?

What words are left to say,
Hollow sounds of passing air,
That will show you what I see
And teach you how I care?

What words are left to say,
Gurgle grumble and weep,
To convince you of the truth
That I, within me, keep?

What words of point and power,
To take and make and play,
Can I use to convince you
Of the truth of what I say?

The words of power that make,
The words of point that take,
No matter what one may say,
If you use these words,

they break.

 

NaNoWriMo Day 30 (11/30)

Wren Leave a comment

I finished last night. I wrote my last 1500 words and then celebrated. I also wound up taking today off of work because I was up so late celebrating last night and I decided to reward myself this morning with a nice day off. A day of video games, reading books I’ve been ignoring, and reflecting on my month. Honestly, I could use a whole week off, but that’s a rather unreasonable expectation when I’ve actually got a 9-5 job to support my writing. It’s hard to support your writing with a job you’re not doing.

I think my biggest lesson from this month is that I’m still capable of incredible writing feats, though I really need to work on the “every day” part. Despite all of the time I’ve spent away from writing over the last year, since I entered NaNoWriMo in 2016 and decided not to attempt completion a day later, I’m still capable of pushing myself to produce a large number of words when I need to. My ability to write isn’t diminished, only my discipline and self-control when it comes to writing. Those will still be problems for a while, though. The end-of-month panic writing is clear evidence that I still need to work on pacing myself properly. Sure, I updated my blog every day, but the goal is to be able to write some of my story every day AND update my blog every day.

Which is something I still plan to do. Update my blog every day. I’ll find something for tomorrow and then spend my weekend working out an update schedule (for topics) and writing up a week’s worth of posts. Once I’ve gotten a decent buffer built up and worked out the kinks in WordPress’s scheduling function, I should be able to be able to just write the post a week ahead of time and schedule it for the next week. That way, I can still post on holidays without actually having to work on Holidays. Or, if I get sick again, I don’t need to struggle to make cohesive sentences, I can just focus on getting better and let my buffer take the hits. All-in-all, it sounds like a very solid if somewhat ambitious plan. Which is a theme of my plans. I really hope I manage to follow through on this one. It’d be really cool.

As for regular story writing, I’ll probably aim for 1000 words a day. Less than NaNoWriMo, but I’ll be able to go over 1000 words any time I want to. That, plus daily blog updates, should put me in the 1500 to 2500 word range which seems like plenty. I plan to continue my NaNoWriMo story until I reach the end, which should be in less than 100,000 more words. I would definitely say I’m in the 33%-50% range, so maybe I’ll finish it some time this spring. That’d be nice. Then I can get back to work on other projects while this story sits for a bit.

I’ve got so many things I want to work on and only what amounts to a part-time job’s worth of time to use unless I completely give up every other aspect of my life in order to write more. As rewarding as writing is, I think the last week has made it pretty clear to me that I need balance rather than unfettered pursuit. I’m super tired and ready for a rest. Maybe not a complete rest, but definitely a slow down.

 

Daily Prompt

In every story, there is a moment after the main action has concluded where the characters wrap up all the loose ends and make the last points on behalf of the author. Today, for the last day of National Novel Writing Month, write a scene about your character wrapping up your story. Maybe they’re talking with their friends after defeating the Big Bad Evil Person. Maybe they’re having a moment to reflect on their growth and the growth of those around them after coming of age. Maybe they’re looking back on all of their mistakes and realizing that they were wrong the entire time. Whatever it is, write it so that you can have the same sense of closure as the month ends.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite things that crops up in older storytelling is the narrator speaking with the audience or invoking a muse. Tolkien didn’t do it in most of his fiction, but he wrote about what he called The Tree of Stories. Milton invoked a muse he referred to as The Holy Spirit. Shakespeare, in some of his plays, had the narrator invoke a muse. My favorite muse invocation is from Shakespeare’s King Henry V. The play begins with

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

The narrator is calling upon a muse to help them tell the tale of King Henry the fifth, a tale of war that could not be properly captured on a stage alone. At the end of the play, the author follows up the invocation of a muse with an apology:

Thus far, with rough and all-unable pen,
Our bending author hath pursued the story,
In little room confining mighty men,
Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

This is a sentiment I feel a lot of writers share and one that I don’t think was entirely an affectation by Shakespeare. King Henry the Fifth was incredibly popular in England when Shakespeare was alive, so he likely felt exactly as the epilogue of the play depicts–the same way almost any amateur writer feels–like we’re not good enough to tell the story properly. It feels nice to see that even someone as huge in the literary world as Shakespeare struggled with these same feelings of inadequacy.

 

Helpful Tips

Remember, as long as you did something this month, even if it wasn’t necessarily more than you otherwise would have, the important thing to note is that you tried. Try often, fail frequently, and try again. As long as you’re willing to keep trying, you’ve never really failed. There are many lessons in a project and almost all of them come from the failures you experience as your go about completing it. Failure isn’t bad. Its part of learning and growing. If you don’t fail, then you’re not really pushing yourself. As Jake the Dog once said, “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.”

NaNoWriMo Day 29 (11/29)

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I did it. I got home from work early yesterday, dug deep, and wrote 5,000 words. I’m officially over a day ahead of schedule. I’m 1500 words away from finishing. I would have stayed awake longer to just power through those last words, but I was practically dead from exhaustion. I’d been nodding off during a meeting at work and couldn’t shake the feeling of fuzzy-brained idiocy I get when I’m warm, not nearly caffeinated enough, and sleep-deprived. So I opted to go home early at the cost of working an extra hour or so every other day this week. The trade seems to have worked out for me because I’ll easily be able to finish writing tonight and I feel so much better than I did yesterday.

I was always sure I could finish (and I REALLY hope I’m not jinxing myself by assuming I’m going to finish at this point) but I know that I truly considered giving up more than once as I fell further and further behind during the first two and a half weeks of the month. If I hadn’t gotten sick, I probably wouldn’t have been so exhausted that I had to write almost half of my word count in four days. I’d have spaced it out better. If I’d had better discipline from the start, I wouldn’t have fallen so far behind that giving up seemed like the right option. I know for a fact that I only persevered because I knew I could do it and I am too stubborn to do anything but double-down in the face of this kind of adversity. If it is something that relies on my ability to work hard and keep going, I will always double-down.

As much as I’m often conflicted about the many different parts of myself and my internal life, I really appreciate this sort of stubborn inability to give up. I can safely say that it is either a result of learning to cope with my mental illnesses or has been instrumental in coping with them. Or both. Something as core to my self-identity and self-experience as my stubborn refusal to accept giving up as an option is hard to trace to its source. Maybe I was born with it, maybe I developed it, maybe its just a tiny voice inside me that constantly says “you’ve gotten through worse so you can get through this.”

Whatever the case, I can verify that the wakefulness and focus this sort of determined stubbornness provides is one of constant and exhausting tension. I can always feel it in my back and in my neck when I’m relying on it. I can feel it in the way my head rests uncomfortably on my pillows and in the way my headaches start at the base of my neck and work their way up when I get so tired I can hardly see properly. Losing that tension, born of a need to accomplish a goal, leaves me feeling all limp and unfocused. After I finally caught up, it took me almost an hour last night to get back to work and only by focusing on another goal, on getting my word count to the point of being ahead one day, was I able to become productive again.

Today, I will finish writing. Tomorrow I will look back and reflect on my journey through National Novel Writing Month. Friday, I will look to the future. I’m interest to see where this goes.

 

Daily Prompt

Even the best of friends will fight or have disagreements from time to time. No matter what we do, we will eventually lose out temper with someone we love and respect. It may not even be their fault. Maybe we lost our temper with them because they were the dozenth person to ask us a question we don’t want to answer or address. Maybe we’d had a very frustrating day and something they did that normally is just a cute annoyance was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Regardless of why, a lot of the burden of fixing what happened is on the person who lost their temper. Not because expressing their anger or frustration was wrong, but because they lost control or weren’t respectful. To be sure, that is not always the case, maybe us losing our temper was entirely justified, but we’ll still often feel incredible guilty about it. For today, write a scene in which your character loses their temper with someone they love. Show us whether or not they were justified and show us what they’re willing to do to fix things, even if they weren’t the one who was in the wrong.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is something I’ve technically shared before. On the second day of this month-long project, NaNoWriMo Day 2 (11/2), I shared a link to an hour-long compilation of Pokemon Route music. Today, I’d like to share a specific song from it because this song, to me, is what victory sounds like and I’m feeling pretty damn victorious today. This link is to a half-hour version of this song. This one is to a Jazz rendition of it. They’re both pretty good, depending on which sort of music you’re in the mood for. I was definitely feeling the jazz version last night as I sat in my room, writing, my room light only by the softened glow of my monitors and the four pillar candles I’ve placed around my room. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do and that it propels you on to finish your writing.

 

Helpful Tips

Music has a huge influence on my mood and on the tone of what I’m writing. I like to keep a variety of playlists around specifically for changing and influencing my mood as I write. I used to keep my playlists on iTunes, but I’ve changed computers and had my library deleted by iTunes too many times to rely on it any longer, so they’re all on YouTube. That way, I can access them pretty much anywhere on any device that has internet access.  I high suggest that you do something similar if you’re looking for a way to affect your mood while you write. Even just putting on something that makes you feel good about yourself or the world or other people can turn what started out as a burdensome day of writing into a more exciting and fulfilling day of fun.

NaNoWriMo Day 28 (11/28)

Wren Leave a comment

I’m a little ahead of schedule so far. I had to write 2500 words last night in order to finish on time, but I wrote 3200. That isn’t very far ahead of schedule, but doing it twice more means I only need to write 400 words on Thursday to finish. Which means I’d be able to start my recovery period and early nights on Thursday instead of Friday. I’m all for that, so we’ll see how it goes. Maybe I can do even more writing tonight so that I can just take Thursday entirely off. Nothing wrong with Finishing early, you know?

I also noticed that the “schedule your post” functionality of WordPress isn’t very precise. I had yesterday’s post all set to go up at 9 am, since I was going to be at work, and it didn’t actually post until I’d pulled up my website and logged in (of course it posted immediately when I logged in). I’m thinking I might be able to schedule the post, but I’ll need to actually still check every day if only make sure WordPress is doing what I told it to. It feels rather silly to have a schedule function that doesn’t really work, though. Maybe I should write up a bug report and submit it to the WordPress team. I do it for Google and video games all the time now, since I’ve become a professional software tester and all.

I haven’t gotten any comments on my post asking for suggestions of what to do with my blog after this month has ended, but I’m think it’ll probably be something a little more focused on creativity since my last blog before this one had focused on that and did much better in terms of views and followers even after I’d stopped updating it. The exact schedule it yet to be determined, but I’m pretty sure my first days of recovery are going to be spent creating a buffer of scheduled posts for me to fall back on while the actual recovery is happening this coming weekend.

A year of daily posts seems like a tall-order, but I’d have said the same thing before I decided to update this blog daily, so I suspect it’ll be a bit more achievable than I think it is right now. I might need to get an editor, though, since I’m clearly not that great at editing all of my posts before they go up. I’ve re-read some of the earlier ones and been horrified by the things I’ve missed.

I actually spent some time tonight playing one of my current favorite video games, Overwatch. I tend to prefer playing Tanks and Supports since I prefer the more strategic style of playing the game and playing a good tank is all about timing, situational awareness, and knowing where the tipping points are. Feeling the pressure building means you can anticipate when to drop your defense and attack with your DPS, while feeling it fall means you can be ready to cover the retreat of your supports and DPS when you need to get to a more defensible position or risk being torn apart. Those are my particular skills. I’m not great at soloing or flanking, but I am one of the best tanks I’ve played with at seeing the tipping points and being ready to take advantage of them. My main problem is that most of the people I play with online don’t even know that these tipping points happen, much less how to actually group around a tank. Tonight, though, I got to play with my friends and I cleaned house. It was wonderful. I’ll look into uploading some of the videos in the future, since I feel like they’re classic examples of the tipping points I’m talking about.

Hey! Talking about video games like that would make an excellent weekly feature! This content practically writes itself.

 

Daily Prompt

For those of us who spend a lot of time working on projects or doing things we’re not particularly good at, failure becomes a familiar face. One of the most important aspects of learning to create or improve is to accept that failure is going to be much more common than success, no matter how long you’ve been doing it or how good you get. If you aren’t risking failure, then you likely don’t have much to gain from what you’re doing. For today’s prompt, write a scene in which your character comes face to face with repeated failure as they try to learn something new or create something.  Show how your character responds to this failure and what happens as a result of them recognizing it.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Sometimes, you stumble across something that can only be a labor of love. Someone, at some point, wanted something and then took an incredibly long stretch of time to create something that perfectly fulfilled it before putting it up on the internet for everyone to see. One of my favorite examples is this list of 1000 totally random magical effects. I found it when working with a D&D player on a character concept that revolved around them causing random magical effects whenever they were frightened. I found a way to simulate rolling a d1000 and then would take whatever magical effect I got on the table. Examples include her character and the source of her fright had to pay 20% of their character’s total worth in the form of taxes. Another one was that the nearest tree (or, in this case, the mast of their airship) turned into a fully decorate Christmas tree complete with presents for everyone around underneath it. She also grew wings once. That was fun. This sort of dedication to an idea is something that always inspires me to keep working on my own crazy ideas and stories because someday, someone I don’t expect at all will find them and appreciate them.

 

Helpful Tips

Like I wrote in the prompt, failure is something you’re going to encounter a lot if you take any risks and trying to create something without taking any risks is not really worth doing. One of the books I’ve been reading for work, as my boss tries to encourage a creative and adventurous atmosphere in our R&D department, suggests that failing early and failing often is the best way to approach any task. If you spend all of your time planning, you’re still going to come up with one or more failures later in the process but you’ll have less time to correct those failures than if you’d just dived right in and started failing immediately.

Writing and NaNoWriMo are hard. I’ve failed NaNoWriMo twice. The first time, I failed so hard I didn’t even sign up to participate. I tried to pretend I didn’t need the accountability and that I’d be able to succeed on my own because I wanted to be able to hide any failure. Last year, I failed because I wasn’t willing to put the energy I had into writing every day or writing enough on my weekends to make up for not writing every day. Sure, I had my reasons, but there will always be reasons to not do something. Better to try and fail rather than not try and fail anyway. You always get something out of it when you try, even if you still wind up having failed just as much as if you hadn’t done anything.

Even if you know you won’t finish in time, don’t give up. Keep trying. Make your failure the best failure you can because the lessons you take out of this, the writing you’ve done when it is over, that will all still be there whether you succeed or fail. Every attempt is a learning experience and the ones that teach us the most are almost always the failures.

NaNoWriMo Day 27 (11/27)

Wren Leave a comment

As I enter into the last week of National Novel Writing Month, I’ve begun to reflect on what’s coming after this. I intend to keep up my writing every day. Probably at a slower pace of at least 1,000 words a day unless that feels too light after all of my cramming in the last couple weeks of November. I probably won’t go much higher than 2,000 though. More than that tends to put too much stress on me and I am really going to need to rest after this month. A lot. Beyond even the mental and emotional rest I’ve been denying myself. My wrists hurt and my elbows ache from being pressed into the awkwardly placed arms of my chair. My fingers are still and achy, caught between the warmth of constant movement and the cold air the rest of my prefers to have wafting over my monitors and into the rest of my room. My sleep schedule will need repair as I’ll finally be getting more than 5 hours of it at a time. I’ll have to do something about my caffeine dependency without going entirely cold turkey. I need to stay cognizant at work. Maybe do a few weeks or months of tea only.

There’s a lot to think about and to plan for. I’ve enjoyed the feeling of updating this blog every day, but having to come up with prompts, inspiration, and tips every day is make this a lot less fun than I’d like it to be. I’d like to get a buffer made, too. Write a week’s worth of posts ahead of time so I don’t need to worry about forgetting on night or what happens when I need to stay up late to finish my writing. Also, what do I post about for? Book reviews are good. I’d also like to get some of my creative writing up here, too. I want to start addressing issues I feel qualified to talk about. Also boost other projects I see that I think are cool, even if I don’t really have a huge audience yet. Maybe a weekly story update of some continuing adventure? There are just so many things I can post, but they all sound like way more work than the random hodge-podge I’ve posted here in the past.

I suppose that’s the price of setting goals, though, isn’t it? I might actually have to work. If I can get a structure hammered out and start actually creating content ahead of time rather than writing these updates at midnight or later of the day I’m going to post them, then I should be able to do this more easily than I think.

I know my readership isn’t very constant and I’ll admit I’ve got no idea how accurate the WordPress stats tracking is, but I would definitely love to hear from anyone who reads this blog. Tell me what you would like to see, what you’ve enjoyed me posting about, and I’ll look into my most-viewed posts to see if I can find a theme. Talking about my depression seems to get a lot of views most of the time, but so did talking about NaNoWriMo during the first week of this month, so who knows?

At the end of the day, I’m really doing this for myself, to prove that I can, and this wouldn’t be the first blog I eventually abandon because I wanted to change the way I present myself online. I’m a bit more fond of this one, though, so who knows? I mean, I actually paid money for this blog instead of just using the free option so I could have a URL without the .wordpress part. Maybe this’ll explode in a super rewarding way and I’ll get the sort of feedback and participation I want and keep updating this blog until the day I die? The future is far-off and inscrutable. I’m sure I’ll find out eventually, though.

 

Daily Prompt

We all make mistakes. One of the most famous “sayings” points this out to us. “To err is human.” Half the time we make mistakes, they wind up being better for us in the long run because we’ve learned a new lesson or found ourselves with an opportunity we never expected to have. There’s a certain mental philosophy out there that there’s no such thing as a true mistake aside from choosing not to make the best of whatever happens.  We spend a lot of time trying to convince ourselves that this is true, perhaps to keep us from wondering what might have happened if we hadn’t made the mistake. Maybe we appreciate what happened because of our mistake, but it can be hard to avoid wondering if things would have been better for us if we hadn’t messed up. The times we can actually find out are so few and far-between that the whole concept is a popular iteration of stories about wishes being granted, almost as popular as seeing how worse the world would be if we’d never been born (“It’s a Wonderful Life” style). Write a scene in which your character, through whatever means you life, gets a chance to find out how things would have been if they hadn’t messed up before. For those of you writing more real-world oriented fiction, maybe they’ve got a second chance at a date they missed or a new opportunity for interview for a job they didn’t get.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is Wikipedia, the source of literally every bit of useless information I need to write about any number of things. I once spent an entire night learning about ships, sailing, and boats, with a few forays into diverse topics that showed up in surprising places. Fried chicken–chicken cooked in hot oil–started in China and traveled to Italy as a result of sea-faring trade and eventually made its way to the southern half of the US where it became breaded chicken cooked in hot oil because there was just so much grain down there that people just threw it at everything just to see what would happen. This practice also resulted in what we call country fried steak. So much useless information for the inquisitive mind that can wind up being surprisingly useful when you least expect it. Most of what I learned about searching for good results I learned from trying to avoid Wikipedia pages on Google. There is just so much information on those pages that is either un-cited or refers to sources that aren’t necessarily trustworthy. I have no idea if fried chicken really came to the US because of the slave trade, but it sure gives you something to think about. If you posses a critical mind capable of reveling in new information without losing the right amount of skepticism to doubt everything on some level until it is proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, Wikipedia is one of the best places to go to just stir up your mind in a whirl of new thoughts.

 

Helpful Tips

Sometimes, it can be helpful to look at the world through fresh eyes. As we grow, we often lose the ability to see the magic and wonder in the more mundane parts of life. We’re all quite used to getting up in the morning by our alarm clocks, but have you ever really thought about how much work had to happen in order for your phone to be small enough to fit in your pocket, smart enough to be able to tell the time even when it’s not connected to the internet, complex enough to handle not just time-tracking but also the management of all the hardware parts that keep your phone going. All of that does without even thinking about the electricity that powers your phone or the way the screens can detect the touch of fingers.

If you have trouble with taking a step back to really look at things, the easiest way to regain that ability is just head to Wikipedia. Spend a lot of time learning about really mundane things like the origins of Fried Chicken and how older TVs worked, specifically the ones that predated flat-screen TVs. Learn about the process of how coffee goes from being a bean growing in the dirt to an integral part of your morning routine. Learn about the origin of energy drinks and how caffeine is added or removed from soda. Learn about why keyboards are laid out the way they are and why staring at a monitor for too long hurts your eyes. Another way to do it is to spend time why an inquisitive child who wants to learn about everything. Teach a child to ask “why” and you’ll wind up learning more than you believed possible, all while restoring some of the wondering and mystery to the world you thought you understood.

 

NaNoWriMo Day 26 (11/26)

Wren Leave a comment

I managed to write my desired 7,000 words yesterday. It took until 2am, but I did it. I really hope I get more done this afternoon instead of needing to be up super late to finish. I’ve got work tomorrow morning and I’d like to get at least 6 hours of sleep before that. Even though I got 7 hours of sleep after finishing, I’m still super exhausted and worn out. This goes beyond my poor, murdered sleep schedule. I’ve hit a point where I’m putting out more creative energy and material than I’m taking in, thanks to the combination of my writing marathons and my illness, so I can feel myself being drained. I’m hoping that, after one more day of pushing, I’ll be able to settle back down for a quite 1,666 words a day for the last four days of the month and actually start reading and playing games I love again. The tank is nearly empty and I need to fill it back up again.

This sort of feeling has always been worrisome to me because I have a very similar one when I’m having a bad bout of depression. The only real difference is that this creative deflation feeling is centered in my chest and spine. It makes me feel like I’m propping up my head using sticks and strings tied to the ceiling. My depression feels a lot more like my entire self has been deflated and all I am is a rubbery suit of myself that can only flop around from one thing to the next. The reason it worries me so much, despite the clear distinction between the two feelings, is that my depressive episodes always start with a smaller deflation. The rubbery suit gets punctured somewhere and the air starts to leak out from there first, before all the old holes open up and I just quickly fall to the ground like an empty balloon.

The same is true of emotional exhaustion. That leaves me feeling empty and deflated in a different part of my chest and my head. The only kind that doesn’t is physical exhaustion because I’m usually too tired to feel anything at that point. If I do feel anything, it’s the burn of my muscles, an overwhelming desire to sleep, or the stretched and tight feeling of muscles that have been worked out regularly.  That’s one of the reasons I have a tendency to stay up late or choose to not sleep as much when I’m feeling a depressive episode coming on. If I’m physically exhausted, I’ve got no room to feel deflated and I’ll just crash when I go to bed instead of staring at my ceiling with little to think about other than how deflated I’m feeling.

One of my friends advised me to take care of myself when I told her how much I’ve been writing and how much social energy I had to spend yesterday. I, of course, commented that I had too much writing to do and that I’d have time to rest next weekend, once NaNoWriMo was over. I went on to say that, if I spent enough time writing, eventually that would become a form of self-care itself. Of course, I then joked that it was a lot like Stockholm Syndrome, which was met with an appropriate amount of skepticism. The more I think about it, though, the more I wonder if I was really joking or just trying to find a way to embrace an exhausting activity that routinely leaves me feeling drained in a way I associate with one of the most negative aspects of my life. It certainly is appealing. If I could find a way to feel good about the creative drain feeling, maybe I could find a way to make myself hate my depression less.

I haven’t really decided, yet. I’m a little too busy to spend my time thinking about it right now, so I think its going to get stuck with the rest of my self-care in the “on or after Friday” bucket. Only 13,700 more words to go.

 

Daily Prompt

Selflessness can be very important in a protagonist. It can be something for them to learn, a value them exemplify, or perhaps a flaw that they need to dial-back a bit. The place it most commonly enters into our lives is when we are confronted with a situation in which we stand to lose much by taking any kind of action at all. Perhaps it is a no-win situation and the only way to minimize the loss is by turning away from it entirely. At the same time, a lot of these situations are also more complex than just the result to those directly involved. What does your action or inaction mean for other people down the line? By acting now, and accepting the losses involved, could you maybe cause some good further down the line? Write a scene for your character where they need to evaluate a situation beyond its immediate outcome in order to find the best solution, regardless of whether it is good or bad for them, and then their process of deciding what to do with that situation.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today’s inspiration is not the media that inspired today’s writing prompt, despite the fact that I want to share it everywhere and with everyone. It is one of a series of backer comics from a Kickstarter campaign and, while the artist made the first comic publicly available recently, it took three or more years from its original share date for that to happen. This comic was only sent out this year, so it’ll be a while before he posts it online. Instead, read the Dresden Files. Harry Dresden may not be the knight in shining armor and bastion of selflessness that I wanted to share, but he’s constantly putting his life on the line to help protect people around him, even when it’s not his fault that the city he loves is in danger. He’s a good example of it means to act toward the greater good even when its going to cost you personally. Most of the time, anyway.

 

Helpful Tips

As much as I personally struggle with striking a balance, it is important to remember that you can’t create endlessly. Every so often, you need to stop. You need to rest. You need to recover. You can often push yourself far enough that you’ve left what you thought were your limitations far behind, but there’s always a price and you’d better be mindful of what it might be. Eventually, you will need to stop whether you want to or not. If you struggle with feeling in control, it is almost always better that you choose to stop than be forced to stop. Take the time to care for yourself, and not just in a bubble-baths, tasty food, and new books kind of way. Self-care is more complicated than that. Self-care is making the best decisions for yourself when looking at your life beyond today and tomorrow. Sometimes, self-care means pushing yourself to work out every day. Sometimes self-care means pushing yourself to write every day until it becomes a habit. You need to figure out what your self-care needs are, though. I can’t tell you what you need most. All I can do is let you know that there’s an important line to be drawn between writing every day (my self-care) and writing so much every day that I’m left feeling exhausted (causing me to need more self-care). Don’t think of it as a treat to make yourself feel better, think of it as a balance you must find in your life between all the things you know you need to do and all the things you want to do. As long as you don’t neglect an imbalance for too long, you’ll be fine.