An Academic in Ruins

Chris Amann Leave a comment

“I suppose I don’t really know what I am doing.”

“Sure, but you’ve never denied that. You just always followed it up by saying no one else did, either, and thus success goes to those who act first.”

“Sure, but I feel like that doesn’t really apply in this scenario. There is so very little I know that is directly applicable to the problems at hand, so action isn’t the problem solver I once thought it was.”

“It still solves more problems than it doesn’t.”

“That’s very true.”

“It would have solved our problems, if you had acted.”

The professor smiled as he surveyed the patch of dirt he’d cleared. The smile was a shallow uptick of his mouth that left his eyes as mirthless and barren as the ground around him. This was one of the first things he’d been taught when they started exploring. Find an opening in the brush, clear a circle of plants, use fire to char anything still sticking out of the ground, and then turn the dirt over until every trace of color but black was gone. A safe, semi-permanent campsite that would stay clear of plants until long after you’d left and clear of bugs or animals until the last of the scent of smoke had faded.

“Acting got us here, though, so I’m still not convinced my old philosophy was truly as sound as I made it seem back in Sargava.” The professor looked up from the campsite he’d cleared to the face of his towering companion, the empty smile still on his face. “Acting has led to far more ruin than success, once the gravity of each has been taken into account.”

The tall man standing off to the side folded his arms over his chest, a familiar action accompanied by the familiar creak of stiffened hide trying to stretch as the pensive warrior measured his words. “That’s the way it seems now, but our journey isn’t finished. If you are correct, and the ruins are out here, then it will all have been worth it.”

“Do you really think so, Amgoroth?”

Amgoroth nodded, his beard and long hair spilling over his face. “I do, Alleck.”

“I told you not to call me that.”

“It’s your name. I’ve known you for too long to call you ‘Professor Quiston,’ fancy degree or not.”

The professor dropped to his knees besides his pack and started pulling out his camping gear, smile sliding off his face so smoothly it left no trace it’d ever been there. Amgoroth stayed where he was, watching as he chewed at a bit of his mustache that spilled into his mouth. In the silence, the sounds of distant primates chattering in the trees cut through the ceaseless din of insect and bird calls. The professor had once found them comforting, in a way, but now they reminded him of the frequent silences he endured on a daily basis.

In a desperate bid to chase them away for a while long, he turned back to his companion. “Amg, I really wish you’d call me by my title. I’ve studied long enough to deserve the recognition.”

The big man broke into grin that showed his several missing teeth and pulled at the thin, silver scars covering on side of his face. “But you will always be my friend, Alleck, playing music for us as we romped through the jungles outside our village, looking for monsters to slay.”

“We both moved on from those days.” The professor’s smile came back, but this one was smaller and clearly showed the sadness hiding beneath it. “You became a champion of the wrestling rings and coliseum. I found a benefactor to put me through university. I can literally change the way the world works using my magic and you are an unstoppable juggernaut whose terrifying rages can send even a pack of jaguars running in fear.” He turned back to his bag and finished laying out all the parts of his tent.

“True, but we are still the same where it counts.” Amgoroth walked to the center of the clearing and spread his arms out to soak in the last rays of sunlight coming down through the dense canopy. “I am still looking for dragons to kill and you are still playing music as we go looking for them.”

The professor looked up at his friend and then back down at the disassembled tent, trying to let his hands take over the process of setting it up despite knowing they couldn’t. This was only his second time setting it up, after all. He’d need his full attention for that. Instead, he sat back on his heels and put his hands in his lap. “We’ve a long ways from those children, Amg.”

“We are a long way from where they lived, but we carry them inside us always, so long as we don’t let their dreams go out.” Amgoroth turned his face up to the light and the professor looked over the constellation of scars covering his arms and shoulders, remnants of the one time they’d found a monster as children and the price Amgoroth had paid to save them both from it. After a moment, Amgoroth turned to face his childhood friend and smiled again. “I still want to find dragons and you still want to see what no one else has. That’s why you spent so much time studying ruined cities and digging up old stuff.”

“It’s called Archaeology, Amg.”

“That’s more syllables than I’m willing to say in one word, Alleck.”

“Professor Quiston, please.”

“I may be your guard on this trip for some lost city, Alleck, but I won’t call you “professor” anything.”

“I’ll dock you a month’s pay.”

“You’re not paying me anything. We left as soon as you heard the rumors. Neither of us is getting paid unless we find the city.” Amgoroth turned away from the light and came over to the professor, sitting down beside him. “We’ve been wandering through this jungle for months, now, and we haven’t found anything.”

“Sure, but you know how to live off the land. We can do this indefinitely.”

“No.” Amgoroth shook his head, temporarily clearing the hair from his face. “You packed food, but it will run out soon. I will not always be able to find food. You’ve been eating your supplies a lot lately and there might not be enough to get home again, even if we knew how to find it.”

“I said I was sorry.” The professor looked down at his hands again, trying to focus on them as he fought to keep his emotions in check. “And I meant it. I still mean it.”

“That does not change the facts, Alleck.”

“What do you want from me, Amg?”

“I just want to keep you safe and alive.” Amgoroth leaned forward and started pointing to the parts of the tent in the order the professor would need them to set it up. After he was done, he gently touched the professor shoulder, so lightly it didn’t even stir his clothing. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted. To go on adventures and keep you safe. More than dragons.”

The professor nodded, not trusting his voice at that moment. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet and grabbed the first of the tent supports. Without looking back at his friend, he quickly set the tent up, playing the memory of Amgoroth setting his tent up every night for four months in his head as he followed along. By the time he had finished, Amgoroth was gone. The professor stared at the place Amgoroth had occupied and then turned his attention to gathering wood for a fire.

By the time night fell, he’d managed to get a good fire going, set up his tent, and even find a few edible roots Amgoroth had fed them almost every day they’d been trying to find the lost city of Saventh-Yhi. He roasted them over the fire and set a two aside. After he’d eaten his and washed them down with the last of his water, he glanced at the roots as if only then noticing they were there. He turned his head away, back to the place Amgoroth had been, and reached for the harp case leaning against his pack.

He pulled his harp out, tuned it without really noticing what he was doing and, once that routine task was finished, strummed a few chords. He added a couple of words in some ancient tongue and watched Amgoroth shimmer back to life.

“Sorry, Amg. I can’t keep it going if I don’t focus on it.” The professor tucked his hard away and watched his friend, stand up, walk over to the fire, and sit down by the two roots he’d set aside. Amgoroth didn’t say anything as he moved. His leather didn’t creak. He sat without the usual thump of a three hundred pound man hitting the ground, even if the little cloud of charred plants still gusted out. Even as he picked up a root and ate it, he was silent.

After watching for a few moments, the professor sighed and let the magic go. Amgoroth froze in place and, a few seconds later, vanished. The professor stared into the flames and at the campsite Amgoroth had taught him to make. Unable to stand it any longer, he climbed to his feet, harp still in his hands, and started playing a song as he walked out of the clearing. He wandered through the jungle, playing his harp to cut through the noise of the jungle and give him something to think about other than his friend’s death.

The music never really stopped it, but it softened the memories as they washed over him. The morning they’d woken up to find tracks of some large cat around their campsite. Hungry and eager for fresh meat, they’d packed up and chased after it. Right into the den of some kind of plant monster that had snatched Amgoroth off the ground. Amgoroth had been confident he could break free, but there had been so many vines… It pulled him up into the treetops and there was nothing Alleck could do but watch in horror his friend had disappeared.

Half a minute later, as he was looking for a tree to climb, Amgoroth’s shouts fell silent. Alleck had stood there, eyes and ears straining, for any sign of his friend of their attacker. When he’d found nothing, when the noise of the jungle and the silence became too much to bear, he’d pulled out his hard and walked away, playing as loudly as he could.

Once the tide of memory had receded, the professor put away memories of Amgoroth and Alleck. He turned around, retraced his steps, and went back to his camp. He packed up his tent, put out his fire, and wandered off into the jungle again, softly playing his harp as he went in search of the lost civilization he’d lost everything trying to find.

Tabletop Highlight: Finding My Way to Pathfinder

Chris Amann Leave a comment

The Monday night tabletop group I play with has two games we’re concurrently playing. One is a Fate game about a fictionalized version of the city we all live in, featuring fictional characters taking on problems we’ve heard about but never been directly impacted by. The other is a Pathfinder campaign using a set of campaign books meant to take out characters from some middling low-level to a much higher level. I joined halfway through the current campaign book, so I’m still a little fuzzy on the details of where this whole ship is headed. I’m just along for the ride because I will never turn down the chance to do something fun like play an Archaeologist Bard.

Professor Quiston, as he has introduced himself to literally everyone and everything with enough intelligence to pause at the flashily-dressed man wandering around in a jungle, is a representative of the research university from his home country. The country has a vested interest in the exploration of a lost city, which is how all the other players made their way from their normal lives to this remote corner of the world. Professor Quiston, being rather academic by nature, set out along at the behest of the university and entirely missed the memo that there was a group of adventurers looking to do the same thing. Rather than enjoy a set of thrilling adventures to get from the city to these magnificent ruins, he set out alone and promptly got lost in a jungle. To be entirely fair, he did get to the area of the ruins first. He just didn’t find them on his own for over two months. Instead, he walked through the jungle and used music to distract all the nasty beasts that wanted to eat him since he’s entirely too well-dressed to engage in that kind of rigorous physical activity. Truly, the life of an academic did not prepare him for the trials he faced on his own, but he found the other adventurers by stumbling into their camp one night after trying to calm himself by playing some soothing music on his harp and spotting the fire thanks to the bonus it gave him to his perception checks.

Since then, Professor Quiston has helped these much more qualified adventurers by playing music, knowing things, and being absolutely fascinating to the local wildlife. And the local civillife. Fascinate, the Bardic Music ability, works on anything even remotely intelligent and Quiston gets a bonus to his diplomacy checks if he’s using music as a part of making them. He lives a bit of a charmed life, providing illusory support, healing, and the occasional magical buff while staying far away from combat. He has a magical weapon and a magical shield, but he has yet to actually use them. He used his whip once, but that was to hit something full of baby spiders from fifteen feet away. He also used his dagger once, but that was to collect samples. He is still an archaeologist, after all. He’s gotta collect samples to ship back to his university once the support crew following the other adventurers shows up. And what samples he will have! He’s met a living god, engaged in civil discourse with a tribe of intelligent and possible demonic apes, and even found a crazy lady living in a decrepit, overgrown mansion in the middle of a slightly more jungle-y part of the woods. All without needing to bleed over it! His memoirs will surely earn him a place amongst the elites of his university, should he manage to survive long enough to make it back there.

Roleplaying aside, I’ve been having a lot of fun with Pathfinder. The system is close enough to Dungeons and Dragons’ 3.5 edition to mess me up on a couple of things since there is still some variation to how the rules work, but it has a distinctly different feel to it once you start to get into the details. The power levels are completely different and while I do miss 3.5’s penchant for having an analogue of pretty much everything in some book or another, I’m enjoying the focus Pathfinder has on improving the basics so each class feels new and powerful in its own way. I’m sure there are exceptions to this rule, but I haven’t found them yet. I’m still pretty new to the game after all. I’ve been getting a little more experience thanks to Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the computer game, but that’s not exactly representative of the whole Pathfinder experience since the computer game needed to have a bunch of stuff trimmed out of it in order to make it actually a viable computer game. I mean, I get that casters are pretty under-powered in low levels because of their lack of ability to participate in a fight once their spells have been used for the day, but I feel like fact that an all martial group can just power through every encounter is just bogus. It fits the trope of the weary, injured fighter facing off against a powerful wizard who just ran out of spells to cast, while yelling the iconic “I never run out of sword,” but I feel like there should be a better way to balance things out.

Part of the problem is that Pathfinder campaigns are set up around the idea that a group of adventurers can handle a certain number of encounters in a single day before they deplete all of their resources. The number is much lower than you might think, or else the encounters are much weaker than the party, and that doesn’t translate well to a video game. I found a dungeon that, based on setup, required me to clear large swaths of it in one run, without much of a chance to safely rest, and the sheer number of encounters that were above the “no sweat” threshold was staggering. I almost gave up and made a new character because I was struggling with it so much. It would have been fine, but all of the enemies had some kind of poison or another so even my martial fighters were running out of strength and constitution. Throw in the fact that camping supplies weigh an idiotically high amount per person per day and you find yourself unable to do anything but constantly return to the world map where you aren’t required to use camping supplies but can instead spend seventeen hours hunting in order to find enough food for six people. Instead of, you know, shooting a single deer and feeding everyone off that. Tabletop Pathfinder survival checks for food don’t generally take that long or are otherwise baked into a day’s activities.

I’m still enjoying Pathfinder: Kingmaker, despite it’s flaws. I’ve adjusted to how the computer game expects me to direct combat and manage my resources, so things are a bit easier now. I’ve also passed the weak low-level point, so I finally feel effective again. I’ve also learned a lot about Pathfinder thanks to me doing research about the rules, useful feats, and how to streamline character builds so I don’t waste levels on useless feats and skills. Still, it’s making me want to run a campaign of the tabletop version of Kingmaker, and I’ve got enough friends that it would be fun to do. I’ve never run out of a campaign book before, so I think it would be fun and relaxing to be able to do it. And, now that Pathfinder is producing a new set of rules, the original stuff should be on sale! I’ll be able to buy all the books and such for cheap! Except that’s not how nerds work. We collect shit for forever and the prices of rule books like this only ever go up unless it’s a total flop. And I do mean total. They only go down if no one likes it or buys if. If anyone likes it, the prices usually stay the same.

If you know any good online tools for Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or online games in general, let me know about them! I only know about a couple, but I’m looking to learn since I’ve got a couple of games that could benefit from being moved online. Happy gaming!

We’ve got a new Tabletop Highlight! It’s about my experiences with Pathfinder and what I’m looking to do in the future. It’s also about the computer game, Pathfinder Kingmaker, though I’ll admit that part is a tangent. Check it out!

Deck the Hall

Chris Amann Leave a comment

I got along great with my neighbors until John Hall moved in next door.

He had points against him moving in because he pushed his father, Jack Hall, out of the house he’d owned his entire life. We all pitched in, but Jack was getting to the point where he couldn’t handle things on his own. So it made some amount of sense, but it still felt awful to come home one day and discover Jack had been stuck in some nursing home before we could say goodbye.

That was only the start. John started throwing parties. Lots of people in beat up old cars attended and they went late into the night, often with frustratingly loud music. I tried to be understanding, but I couldn’t put up with it forever.

John laughed and flipped me off the first time I talked to him so I got the neighborhood association involved. They fined him, but he refused to pay since his father had signed the agreement, not him. I called the police, eventually, in the middle of one of his parties, and a bunch of people got busted for drug possession.

We got a couple years of peace out of that, but Jack was eventually back and John had passed away in the meantime. Instead of throwing parties, he started planting bushes that grew onto my property and sued about property lines. After he lost and had to trim his hedges, he started throwing things into our yard to get our dogs to eat them. Which is why I went over there today to confront him. He said he hoped our dogs died so I decked him.

 

-Statement to the Police regarding assault at 81 Oak Tree Lane on June the twenty-seven between one John Hall and one Lawrence Henderson.

NaNoWriMo 2019 Day -335 (Saturday Morning Musing)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

I did it. I broke one hundred thousand words in a single month (since I wrote this post last night). I ended this post with a total of one hundred thousand eight hundred thirty-five words for the month and I am immensely proud of myself. I even bought a bottle of champagne–excuse me, sparkling wine–to pop as soon as I finished this post and, while I’m too cheap to buy good champagne, it was nice to just have something to pop at the end of the day. It tasted alright, too, but I can’t really tell the difference between various wines and I don’t really care that much about it so I’m cool with that.

It was nice to actually manage this goal, given how my month went. So much happened…  Honestly, I’m pretty curious about how much I could accomplish in a month if I didn’t have to spend a lot of it learning to cope with my grandfather’s mortality and the constant stress of trying to lead my team at work into a new process I developed. If I actually had energy when I got home from work… The thought of just how much I could get done is staggering. I’ve done an average of three thousand three hundred thirty-three words a day and yet my actual median is about five thousand. If I could do that every day, I could do fifty percent more words in a month, and that’s at my current pace with my current levels of energy. If I keep up this writing thing, I might be able to get even more written during a focused hour than my current record of two thousand words. If I get a better handle on my mental health, especially my anxiety and depression, I’ll have more energy and get even more done in a day. There’s always room for improvement and I’m excited to see how I continue to improve.

While I’m sure plenty of people write more than I do, even if I do get up to one hundred fifty thousand words a month, I’m not looking to compare to them. Personal accomplishments count more to me, anyway. I’d rather beat my own record than compete with someone else for the high score, in both video games and my personal life. I love a challenge, I love having a rival, but I’m more about support and helping each other achieve new heights rather than trying to out-do each other or trying to be top frog in the well. As much fun as it might be to say I’m the best, that’s not really what motivates me. Striving to be the best is a journey with an end. Striving to be better is a journey that can take you from the day you start to the day you die. I’m all about the long-term, really, in everything thing I do. Finances, career, self-improvement, romantic/platonic relationships… Everything. I’m good at predicting outcomes and I rely on that skill to guide me. Trying to always be better than myself only ever leads me forward and upward.

As much fun as this was, though, I’m really looking forward to a thirty to fifty thousand word month. I need some rest and the winter holidays are going to be stressful enough without trying to spend every second writing. I mean, I’m not going to stop myself from writing when I want to, but I’m not going to force it again. I need a break to rest my mind. Since your brain is like a muscle, in that it gets stronger the more you use it, it is just as important to give it a chance to rest after pushing yourself to new heights. So I’m going to let my brain rest and recover these next few weeks and then we’ll see just how much stronger it’s gotten as a result of this month by trying some new personal challenge. Or, you know, just adding a reasonable amount of book writing in addition to my blog writing. It doesn’t need to be another month of one hundred thousand words. I’ll probably just aim for a thousand extra words a day of book writing. That seems reasonable but also ambitious enough to keep me moving forward. I’ll probably aim for a total over a month rather than a daily limit so I can deal with busy days that don’t leave me room for writing without feeling stressed out about missing a thousand words.

Honestly, as much as I really want to outline my plans for the next year, I think I need to rest before I do that. It’s not even nine and my brain is already so fuzzy that I have to go back and read through sentences I just wrote to figure out what I’m trying to say as I write them. I’m also looking forward to sleeping in. And an end to stress headaches…

As much as I want to keep going, I think I’m going to call it here. It’s time to rest and, while I plan to continue to update my blog every day, I think I might take an entire day off of writing for the first time in several months. Just… play some video games or something. It’ll be nice. Thanks for taking this journey with me and I hope something I posted was of use to you. I also hope you’re continuing to write. It’s a pretty great feeling to see your words on the page or screen, so I hope you get to enjoy that for a while longer.

Today is day -335 of #NaNoWriMo2019 and I’m excited about next year already! Really, though, this is a Saturday Morning Musing post and I wrote 999,999 words last month so I’m gonna rest now. I’m so tired.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 30 (11/30)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

Yesterday was pretty not-great. The minute I got into work, I had a coworker calling me to talk through a conversation we’ve had over a dozen times before that always included going over the same points at least twice per conversation. We talked for an hour and it drained the life out of me. All of today, from the minute that call ended, to now has been a pale imitation of the day that could have been if I’d only not talked to him today. Or if he wasn’t such an obstinate, obstructionist jerkwad who refuses to apply himself to the new processes I made for our team, specifically keeping in mind the issues he has always complained about. He, more than anyone else, stands to benefit from this new process the team is adopting and he is likely going to be the reason it fails should it eventually fail. It will only work if everyone pulls together and he is doing his best to pull in every direction but the one the rest of us are pulling it. It’s incredibly frustrating and it feels very defeating to have him constantly need the same questions answers, the same points rehashed, the same talking point discussed ad nauseam.

I’m not kidding when I say it ruined my day. I talked to him before I even had breakfast or my morning caffeine. I still got stuff done yesterday, but I know I could have gotten so much more done if I’d just ignored his call or worked from home where he couldn’t reach me. I’d have gone to dinner with my friends and then come home to write instead of going two important errands before coming home to collapse on my bed until my roommates brought pizza home. Even if I did pause to talk with them or check out the movie they were watching, I would not have stayed to continue watching it until almost ten because it was almost impossible to make myself get off the couch. I wouldn’t be struggling with the same sense of creeping dread, exhaustion, and failure that I felt last night. I’d have a new one or none at all. It’s difficult to tell just what my day might have been without the call first thing in the morning, but I can’t imagine it could have been even nearly as bad as today was.

I mean, it wasn’t that bad. Not objectively, anyway. No one died, my physical health is unaffected, my financial stability is the same as ever, and so on. But my mental health is in tatters because it has been ragged all month and this repeated conversation has been preying on a lot of anxieties even before we had it again today. Today just pushed it from a frustration to a feeling of never being able to do enough to make my process work and having to watch it all fall apartment as one person does his best to rip it to shreds because he lacks the vision to see beyond today or the open-mindedness to listen when I explain. It is so frustrating to watch something I spent over a year working on fail because the person I made it for can’t pull his head out of his ass long enough to appreciate how change could be a good thing.

Stuff like that is some of the most soul-draining stuff that can happen to me. I enjoy making things and I do make a lot of things for my own benefit, but I also like to make things with the idea of helping other people. To have someone pretty much throw away something I made to help them, something I have worked on for a long time, something I have spent dozens of hours talking to them about, something I told them about that got them feeling like maybe things could be better, it makes me want to stop making things. I have used my most valuable resource, my time, to create something specifically for them and they not just threw it away or didn’t use it, they brought it back to me and said it was making everything worse for them when they haven’t even given it a chance to work yet. Normally, after something like this, I’d just go home, play video games, and put off any kind of creativity for as long as I could manage. Even as I wrote this post, as I spent what I could salvage of my evening yesterday, the little voice inside me has gone from asking what the point of this is to saying there is no point and all I’m doing is taking my time and throwing it away, one second at a time.

It’s absolutely crushing.

But I’m stronger than it, now. I may feel as flat as a piece of paper, but even a piece of paper can be used to create three-dimensional art if you know how to fold it right. Since I am the paper, it hurts a bit to fold myself into something, but it still feels better than lying around in a pool of self-pity. I don’t feel like writing, but I’ve been doing it anyway because I want to write. I want to be able to go to sleep around midnight tonight feeling proud of just how much I’ve accomplished this month as I think about the two goals I completed. I’m only a couple thousand words away from having written one hundred thousand words in a single month. I’ve written almost thirty thousand of those words since Sunday, since I dug deep, processed all my own bullshit, and figured out how to keep working through the pain of my Grandfather’s failing health, the stress of the holidays, and the determination of my own brain to get in my own way as much as possible. These have been some painful days, but I’m trading short-term comfort and rest for long-term accomplishment and confidence. Even as much as I’ve written, as habitual as writing has gotten, I still need to win big every so often or I’ll start to feel like I’m not actually doing anything worth the effort. There are a thousand lessons to learn in failure, but having a success every so often is a good sign.

I wish I’d gotten more done yesterday. I wish I had more time to wrap things up today so I wouldn’t be writing in a frenzy to beat the clock. I wish my grandfather didn’t have cancer and that I’d been able to sleep peacefully every night this month. I wish I had just one more day this month, so I could land my ridiculous goals in style instead of cramming in the last few thousand words as my last hours ticked away. I wish for a lot of things, honestly, but I’m going to deliver. I have all day to finish things up and I don’t care if I need to take the afternoon off so I can get everything finished with enough time to spare to do some editing and work on this weekend’s blog posts before the month is over. I’m close and nothing sort of divine intervention or the collapse of society is going to stop me from achieving my goals. I’m past the point of compromises, of sense, of being reasonable. I’m just going to get it all done and then celebrate by sleeping for twelve hours.

Today is the last day of National Novel Writing Month and YOU. CAN. DO. THIS. The final stretch. No matter what the results are, just end it strong. Even if you’re at five thousand words out of the fifty thousand word goal, just throw sense aside and write as much as you can. This isn’t about passing or failing, this is about trying to grow as a writer. It’s about trying to grow as a person. You don’t have to out-do anyone but yourself and I believe in your ability to do just than. One more day. You’ve got this. I believe in you. Don’t believe in yourself, believe in the me that believes in you. Grit those teeth. One last push is all it takes. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

As you wrap up your last day of writing, either laconically typing in your last few words or trying to cram in the last few thousand you need before midnight, take a moment to reflect on your accomplishment. You should be proud of what you’ve done, just like your protagonist should be proud of what they’ve achieved, of the solutions they’ve produced to whatever problems plagued them. Write a scene about what your protagonist is most proud of and spend a little time about what that says about them or what that says about how much they’ve grown.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Today, on the last day of National Novel Writing Month, as you take a break from finishing your word count or lean back in satisfaction after confirming your total, I want to talk about what inspires me the most. This is not something you should find inspiring, but it is hopefully something you should think about. What inspires me the most is myself. Without me, nothing gets written. Without my own hard work, I’d have failed this challenge and all my little bonus challenges weeks ago. Despite how busy I’ve been, despite how crazy my life has been, and despite the fact that I only have about six hours a day to work, I’ve make incredible progress on my goals. As of this posting, I haven’t finished them yet, but I’m so close there’s no doubt in my mind that I’ll finish unless Godzilla attacks Wisconsin.

The only thing that has kept me going throughout this entire month has been my unyielding willpower and iron-clad desire to test my limits. I kicked my own ass to get this done, I pulled these words out of thin air/the grey matter inside my head/my ass/the realm of stories I like to imagine lives on the other side of the story door in my head, and I absolutely rocked it. I set myself a goal and I worked as hard as I could toward achieving it. That experience is more valuable to me than anything else in my life right now and I hope you can find a similar drive in yourself if you haven’t already. I mean, in terms of growth from one year to another, I wrote seventy-seven thousand words last year and I’ve passed that twenty-thousand already, and I’ve still got an entire day left to write and make the gap even wider. I inspire me to continuously grow and I hope that you inspire yourself. 

 

Helpful Tips

My last tip is to remember that, as long as you tried something this month, you succeeded. Even if it wasn’t necessarily more writing than you would normally do during a month, you’ve accomplished something. You put yourself out there and you tried something difficult. As long as you’re willing to keep trying, you’ve yet to failure past the point of learning something. As Jake the Dog (of Adventure Time Fame) once said, “Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.” No matter how you feel about your failure, I want to congratulate you on taking your first step toward success. It was a difficult step, to be sure, but it was the first step. Even if you succeeded, this was the first step toward something else. There are so many things you can do with fifty thousand words of a story and you should take the time to explore all your options. You can still do most of those things with any amount of words, so even if you failed they’re worth thinking about.

Ultimately, failing or succeeding based on the National Novel Writing Month metric doesn’t matter. Sure, some writers have turned their fifty thousand words into award-winning books, but there are authors who literally had an idea, wrote it down, did a couple of edits, and then sent it off to one person who instantly decided that this book was going to be big and threw money at them until they wrote more of those books. Other people’s success isn’t a metric to use to measure your own efforts. Measure them against yourself. As long as you did better than last time, that’s success in my book. A step forward is always good, even if it’s a small step. Sometimes, especially if it’s a small step.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 29 (11/29)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

I wanted to give up yesterday. I sat down at my computer around six, hoping to get a jump-start on the night’s writing so I could finish earlier than previous nights, and I didn’t even get started until nine. My moods are rather mercurial and yesterday had been particularly draining, so I wasn’t really surprised by my sudden lack of drive and ambition. Disheartened and frustrated, sure, but not surprised. I’ve been working with myself too long to be surprised by this. I’ve been under a lot of stress lately and I haven’t been getting enough sleep for a long time, so I’m not surprised I hit a wall. The fact that I was humming along on Tuesday, managing six thousand words over the course of the day, doesn’t mean much since I can keep working at full capacity right up to my moment of complete exhaustion. It’s probably why I tend to work by burnout cycles rather than in any kind of moderation.

If I took it easier, I’d maybe be in a better place, energy-wise. I don’t know that for sure, but I suspect and I’m usually pretty good at figuring this kind of thing out. Too bad I’m apparently only good at it after I’ve wiped myself out. The flip side is that I wouldn’t be able to avoid a night of low energy and exhaustion if I hadn’t pushed myself. I’d have needed to get even more words done that I did last night, and it wouldn’t have been a choice. I’d have forced myself to do them. Instead, I was tired and inclined to give up, but I was able to choose to keep working and then pack it in a bit earlier than usual. I didn’t get an amazing amount done, but I got enough done and that’s what was important to me. I did something.

Out of every year I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month, this year’s attempt has been the one I’ve wanted to quit the most. Since November fourth, the day I found out about my Grandfather’s failing health after being kept up all night by my neighbor, I have entertained daily thoughts of giving up and taking some time to rest and meditate. There have even been a few days where I half-decided to give up but wound up being able to make myself do it when it came time to write the “I gave up” post. I mean, I’m a few thousand words away from finishing the month and so close to my goal of having written one hundred thousand words this past month, but I still want to give up. It’s not even me feeling defeatist or incapable. It’s my bone-deep weariness. Just like my worst days of depression, it isn’t the feelings of failure or of ineptitude that get to me, it is the feeling that I am so tired I could just lay my head down to sleep and never get up again. The feeling that whatever it was that once pushed me forward has wound done. Gone out. Been destroyed. Decayed into nothingness. Any or all of the above. The rationalization hiding behind the worst intrusive thoughts coming from my OCD. They both come from the same place and they’re a mixture of depression and actual exhaustion.

Which is why I know exactly how to handle them. Which is why I managed to get some writing done last night despite wanting nothing more than to lie on my bed and be still until I fell asleep or ceased to exist. I know that this is just a feeling of legitimate tiredness being amplified by my depression that has latched on to a combination of my anxieties about whatever wore me out that day and my anxieties about how I’m going to manage my exhaustion. They get all bound up together and create a feedback loop that will eventually wear me down unless I manage to escape it somehow. I can meditate my way out most of the time, but that’s really close to the whole “lying down on my bed and not moving” thing that I’m trying to avoid so I prefer a more active solution. Like writing about it (which is why I wrote this bit about how I felt yesterday before doing my day’s writing and then came back to fill in the before and after parts to tie it to the rest of a daily blog post). It works. I wish I’d gotten more sleep, of course, but I needed to stay awake long enough to reframe “going to sleep” as something I chose to do rather than something my depression-based exhaustion made me do.

A lot of managing yourself, and by extension your mental health, is finding little tricks to convince yourself to do whatever it is you think you should be doing. That’s what most of my tips are this month, ways to trick yourself into focusing on work or into doing more work than you originally planned. That’s what the previous paragraph is, a way to trick myself into dealing with my mental health so I can write more before the day ends. Or write anything beyond a couple hundred words. Anything that gets the job done and doesn’t cause additional harm. I’ve got hundreds of little coping mechanisms I’ve developed over the years that can be adapted to fit almost any scenario and I bring a lot of them to bear during months like this one, where I’m constantly exhausted and stressed from working hard, all while trying to cope with the bad news I keep getting. Sure, taking a night off to sleep would be nice, but the guilt would be horrible. I’d feel like I’d abandoned my writing goals if I just took a nice off. So I found a way to get some writing down and get some extra sleep. A little bit of compromise can go a long way.

Anyway, I hope this made sense and I hope you got something useful out of it, even if it’s just an example of someone who is doing really well with their goals wanting to quit. We all have those moments and it’s usually better to deal with them out in the open than to try to hide them away or pretend they never happened. Denial gets you nothing, so learn to cope, learn to process, and know that you’re not alone in whatever you’re feeling. I hope your last two days of writing go well! Good luck! I believe in you!

 

Daily Prompt

As you look over your story and all the work you’ve done this month, you probably start to get an idea of what this story is really about. Sure, you planned it to be about one thing, but that really pans out. Too many changes get made during actual production for any plan to stay intact unless you’re entirely rewriting something that you’ve already finished or you’ve strangled your story in an attempt to get it to fit the narrative you initially chose. Now that you know, though, find the right place for this idea and work in a scene that solidifies it in the earlier part of the narrative. Maybe do a couple if it’s a complex one. Just make a few small adjustments so the story’s message says what you want it to say.

 

Sharing Inspiration

Last year, the writer who inspired me the most was John Green with his novel, “Turtles All The Way Down.” This year’s story is an updated and slightly adapted version of last year’s, so it bears mentioning that I was inspired by his candid way of writing about mental health. When the book was coming out and for a while after it came out, he also spoke more frequently and openly about his mental health and struggles with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. It means a lot to me that someone who struggles with OCD more than I do was able to openly discuss and still manage to make great art despite the struggles it often presents. While I can handle my OCD better than most, I’ve always kind of shied away from talking about it because I don’t really like admitting how constant and severe it is. Reading John Green write about his experiences, through the story of a teenage woman, inspired me to try to write about my own experiences since that’s a story I’ve never seen before. Hopefully I can get it finished and shared with the world. I feel like it’d be really helpful for people like me to read a story like that. I know my life would have been a lot easier from sixteen to twenty-five if I’d read something like this.

 

Helpful Tips

As we get to the end of the month, I just want to say that it isn’t a big deal if you failed this month. Failure is something you’re going to encounter frequently if you take risks and attempting to create something without taking any risks will get you nothing. No new lessons, no new skills, and quite possible no end result that you’re satisfied with or proud of. Last year, my entire department read a book about creativity and failure in an R&D department as my boss tried to foster a more adventurous and engaged attitude in his employees. The book 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 is hard work. National Novel Writing Month is also a lot of hard work. I’ve failed it twice, once because I decided to give up at the beginning of the month and once because I told myself I didn’t need to register–that I didn’t need to be accountable to anyone but myself. The former was a good decision on my part, a choice to focus my time and energy on finding a new job to leave one that was slowly killing me (and already almost had). The latter is a decision I regret because it was made out of a desire to avoid the appearance of failure. The first one wasn’t really a failure because I learned and made a change that helped me succeed in the future. I dove right in and took risks by starting a new job. The second was one of my worst failures as a writer because I let the fear of an ultimately meaningless goal prevent me from doing my best. Better to try and fail rather than not try and fail anyway. You always get something out of it when you try, even if still fail. I’ve learned this lesson many times through life, but my first “attempt” at National Novel Writing Month is the one that has stuck with me the most.

I want you to know that, 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 things you learned this month 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. So try hard, dive in, and fail quickly. You’ll be surprised just how much you learn when you learn to not fear failure.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 28 (11/28)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

Well, I’ve had another productive evening. I’m pretty sure a lot of my good mood was the caffeine since it disappeared once I had dinner and there was something in my stomach to dilute the coffee. It was a big dinner, which was nice since I love cooking, but I’ve learned that baking a ten pound ham is something I can do on a whim and that’s dangerous knowledge. I mean, loved glazed ham growing up and I was always frustrated that my family had put it solidly in the “special occasion” category of foods. I remember thinking that, when I was an adult, I was going to buy and prepare a giant friggin’ ham whenever I damn well pleased. Turns out, it took a few years after graduating from college for me to remember that this was a thing I could do and it wasn’t so much that I remembered I could do it as I saw a giant spiral-cut ham I could take home when I went to the grocery store to find something that would go with the stuffing I’d brought back from Thanksgiving. It was super expensive since the local grocery is exorbitantly overpriced, so it’s probably not a whim I’ll be indulging very frequently, but now I remember my love for glazed ham and I’ve learned it’s really quite simple to prepare since all you need to do is warm it up to a desirable temperature. Or, you know, eat it cold. Whatever works for you.

I meant to do writing sprints between trips to the kitchen to check on it, but I hit this weird point in my caffeine parabola where I was a bit over caffeinated and kinda loopy. I think I might be getting sick since I’m also rather congested, which wouldn’t surprise me given how high my stress levels have been lately and how crazy the weather has been this month. It’s a mini-miracle that I haven’t already come down with something before this week. I leveraged the uncertain future to push myself to write more last night, gradually working my way up to a nice three thousand six hundred words on my National Novel Writing Month project, but I think staying up past midnight is what is going to leave me sick enough to be glad I worked ahead. As I write this, I’ve only got six thousand more words to write for my project this month and I’m anticipating finishing on Thursday so I can catch a break from all this on Friday. Except for the blog post, of course. Can’t let that lapse. And the pre-writing of blog posts for the weekend so I can hopefully rest during those days. Which I probably won’t do because I’ve got a great idea for a parody of a song I want to write out.

Thus the cycle continues. Stay up too late working on something I’m passionate about, get too little sleep to stay healthy or function properly during the day, lean on copious amounts of caffeine to make it through the day, wind up energized and awake late into the night no matter how early I consume my afternoon caffeine. At least it’ll hopefully end soon. I can go from four thousand words a day to one or two thousand. You know, back to normal. At least for a little bit. I’m planning to actually keep some of this other, non-blog writing going after the month has ended. I’m not sure what, yet, but I know I’m not ready to go back to my lower writing numbers. I really enjoy having high “words written in a month” totals. This tracking is most to help me map out my writing habits, but I do love numbers and statistics, so I admit I probably spend too much time tweaking my number tracking charts and report outputs. At the end of year two, I’ll be able to tell just how many words of poetry I’ve written in a year. Or how many words I’ve written about video games. How many words of reviews I’ve done. I’ll be able to pick out my wordiest days of the weeks since I track what day the writing happens on, not just when the writing is supposed to go up here.

As much as I complain, this is working for me right now. I can always sleep in another hour or two if I need it and I’m almost caught up in my daily word count for National Novel Writing Month. It may not be the most relaxed way to do things, but I’m still getting there, which is what I’ll settle for given this month. I’ve done at least a little writing every day of the month and I will be able to end the month meeting most of my original goals. I’m going to be low on sleep, but I’ll have a whole weekend to catch up on that and unwind with updates to one of my favorite video games. I’ve even got a whole other pile of games for the Switch that I’m still working my way through, and they’re all proving to be quite relaxing. I like the movement of the smaller, simpler games to the Switch. Night in the Woods is way more fun when I can pick it up or put it down at will. The sleep mode functionality of the Switch makes it a godsend for games like that which aren’t super conducive to a gaming binge. I will never stop saying how great the Switch is as a handheld gaming console. This may be the sleep deprivation talking, but I honestly think going handheld was the smartest move Nintendo has ever made. I’m still a little upset about the reliance on motion controls for a lot of games, though. I dislike motion controls because I don’t have steady hands and that makes motion controls next to impossible for me to use for anything requiring accuracy or precision.

I’d like to get more sleep and needing only two thousand words a day to finish on time will be incredibly helpful for that, unless I wind up pushing myself to cram them all into tonight like I’ve kind of been doing the last few days. I could totally just not write a bunch extra and instead get some sleep. I told myself that last night as well, but I clearly stayed up late to get to a milestone and then stayed up even later to write this post. Sorry for how ramble-y it is.

Anyway, we’ve got three days left in National Novel Writing Month and we’re so close I can taste it! I hope you’re nearing your goal and that your last few days go well for you. Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Toward the end of a story, there’s a moment when everything comes together and the story reaches its peak. The conflict at the heart of the story is brought to the front and either resolved or circumvented. What comes next is largely up to you. You can take the Andy Weir approach and just end the story once the protagonist has been rescued with no wrap-up, or you can go around tying up loose threads like the hero of an RPG finishes all the sidequests after defeating the Big Bad Evil Guy. Or anything in between. For today, write about what comes after the climax of your story. Show us what you intend to do with your readers and either wrap things up neatly or slowly ease us out of the story by revisiting all the characters as they adjust to life after the conflict has been resolved.

 

Sharing Inspiration

My favorite storytelling medium besides writing is Dungeons and Dragons. I love the ability to make up and adjust stories on the fly, the chance to connect directly with my audience so I can tailor the experience directly to them and their investments, and the framework it gives me for detailed adventures filled with puzzles and audience interaction. Even if my players fail to unlock all the parts of the story I’ve created because they fail a skill check or decide to proceed in a different manner, I still love having the opportunity to create a game for them. I will always appreciate Dungeons and Dragons for giving me a chance to tell different stories and practice my framing on a regular basis. Being a Dungeon Master has probably helped me grow as a storyteller more than anything but my past year of daily writing.

 

Helpful Tips

If you can avoid looking at what you just wrote, I suggest you do so. As you’re trying to cram in your last few days of writing, now is the time to create new words rather than focusing on how to improve old ones. Editing is an important part of the process and there are a lot of people who edit as they go, but I think that there’s a lot of value in just charging ahead until the story is done. That method works pretty well for a lot of people, even if they prefer to do consistent and nearly constant editing. I prefer to write in what I call the “lapping” method. I review the work I did during the previous two days and then focus down on adding another day’s work behind it. I find most of my errors that way and it makes it a lot easier to stay consistent when I’m constantly reminding myself of what just happened. When it comes to pumping out new words, either for the last part of the lapping method or for a long-term writing marathon like National Novel Writing Month, I try to just focus in on adding more words and let Future Chris worry about whether or not they’re any good. There are always a lot of changes to be made after the fact, but it gets the job done. I suggest you experiment with both and then focus on whichever one suits you best.

 

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 27 (11/27)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

I don’t know what it is about today, but I’m feeling downright capricious. Which is a side-effect of feeling really energetic. It could be all the coffee I drank, though that never really lifts my mood so much as makes me the energetic version of whatever mood I was before. It could be the return to using my therapy light every day for three days straight after leaving it at home when I visiting my family for the Holidays. It could also be the fact that I wrote just over three thousand three hundred thirty-three words in an hour and forty-five minutes last night. That felt pretty good, especially when I knocked out another thousand in the subsequent half-hour. All of this on a night when I felt incredibly run-down and exhausted from a busy, stressful day at work. I wasn’t sure I was going to get the three thousand words I needed to more-or-less stay on schedule to finish my National Novel Writing Month project on Friday, but I managed to completely knock it out of the park despite starting at nine at night as a result of chores and coping with my depression.

Yesterday’s tip about using the milestone method to trick yourself into staying focused and driven toward whatever is your writing goal made it possible. Without slowly working myself to the start of the next page, to the next thousand, to the next five hundred, to the next round number on my word total, I would not have been able to get as much done as quickly as I did. There may be a fair bit of editing that needs to happen since I didn’t do any as I wrote, but it shouldn’t be much unless I decide to change something much earlier. It’ll be fixing sentences, trimming out repetition, and adding in a few extra words here or there for clarity. Mostly simple stuff since I’m still proceeding along the path I laid out in my outline at the beginning of the month. I’ve had a few deviations, but they’ve all been minor course corrections and adjustments of what topics get introduced where. There’s a lot to go over in this story and I’m trying to make sure it all flows naturally.

I also took my own advice from yesterday. I started setting aside some time to reflect. I took half of an hour after I was ready for bed to relax and reflect on what is going on in my head. It was surprisingly productive and probably set the stage for today’s tired but still good mood. I didn’t come to any big conclusions and I’ve still got a lot to think about, but it took some of the pressure off. It made it easier to focus at work today and, with some of my mental knots untangled, it made it less difficult to get excited about and engaged with stuff. I mean, not that work is any more exciting and engaging than usual. I like my job, but I wouldn’t say that there’s anything going on that I’m particularly excited about. I like the stuff we’re doing and I think it’s cool, but there’s no sense of urgency or anticipation to bring it up to the “excited” level. No, today’s excitement is about the content coming to Destiny 2 that started today and will continue over the next few weeks.

I’m seriously in love with this game after all the changes they made to it for the first “live support” year. All of the story content has been stellar, there’s enough going on from week to week that I actually feel engaged, and all of the niggling little problems that persisted over the course of the release year have been addressed. There are still issues, of course, but they’re much more reasonable and I look forward to them being addressed as live support continues. Because of how much better the story is, I’ve been getting excited about the game’s lore and am now apparently spending all my breaks from writing on the Destinypedia, reading about everything I missed from the first game and delving even deeper into the events I’ve witnessed in this game. I’ve tried to listen to all the dialogue and read all the text from everything I’ve found in-game, but it’s really easy to miss something when you’re running through a mission with your friends. Not everyone wants to stop mid-mission to read the wall of text they just unlocked by interacting with the lump of ore you found hidden behind a storage container in a side room you didn’t need to run through.

It’s been really fun to find out just how self-aware the game is. There are references to the giant mess that was the initial story-line of the first game, emotes that tie into inside jokes that the community has loved, and even a bunch of in-game references to the fact that Guardians (the player-characters in the game) tend to break into dance in the weirdest places without any regard to what is going on around them or whether or not there’s even music. Stuff like this makes it clear that at least someone is paying attention to the community and what we care about. And the dumb stuff we do. As I looked back into the events during the live support years of the first game, I can start to understand why people were so excited to start playing Destiny 2 as soon as it came out rather than waiting for the release year to end. It was such a different game from the release year of Destiny 2 and it incorporates that same fun, exciting spirit I’m feeling as we’re rolling through the first year of live support for Destiny 2.

Anyway, this is late because I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night and was busy at work today, so I didn’t have enough breaks to get this done. There’ll be a lot of busy for the next few weeks as I try to get a buffer going for my blog again, attempt to prepare for a giant move at my day job, and try to play Destiny 2 for five or more hours every week. I’m prepared for that, I think, but that might just be my current optimism speaking. It’s kind of hard to tell for sure, to be honest, but I’d like to think that the culmination of all of my work this month will be a more energetic and engaged version of me. I’ve dreamed about being that person for years, ever since my depression took deeper root and sort of supplanted my identity, so I’d be really excited to see it happen. It might also just be the caffeine.

We’ve got four days of the month left (well, three and a bit since this is going up in the evening), so make sure you stay focused! Even if you’re almost finished, don’t let up! You never know what might come up and there’s never anything wrong with finishing early, so just wrap it up as soon as you can and don’t depend on the uncertain future. You never know what might happen. Good luck today!

 

Daily Prompt

Stories are about change and one of the major modern catalysts for change is new people from somewhere else showing up. It’s been a catalyst for change since Beowulf showed up to kick Grendel’s ass (Debately. He only really won because Grendel tried to run away rather than fight), but the change isn’t always good. Lately, there’s been a lot of fear and hate involved in the change we see when new people show up rather than support and polite interest in new cultures. How does your protagonist react to new people? Do they see new cultures as a chance for positive change, or negative? How do they feel about the way the rest of their society reacts? Write a scene where your protagonist is introduced to people who are different from them and show us how they react to the way their life changes as a result.

 

Sharing Inspiration

One of my favorite finds on YouTube, using the “next up” feature, was Rush Garcia. They are a musician and composer who creates music on commission or as inspired by their interests, all of which means they make a lot of music about video games. I love music about video games and these three specific songs in particular are my favorites. They’re part of most of my writing playlists and they’re the core of one of my instrumental anti-anxiety playlists since they feel, quite literally, like emotion turned into music. They all vary quite widely and I can always count on whatever new song Rush puts up to be a beautiful listening experience that makes me want to create my own stuff.

 

Helpful Tips

I know I’ve mentioned thinking about what comes next and I know we’re super close to the end of National Novel Writing Month, but don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what you’re going to do on December 1st. If you lose focus now, you might not finish as strongly as you’d like. It’s a really awful feeling to be racing the clock as midnight on the 30th approaches, trying to beat the countdown to the end as your despair and frustration only grow with each update of the clock. Focus on getting all of your writing done and let the future take care of itself for now. There’s nothing wrong with idly thinking about what comes next, just don’t spend much time or energy on it. Don’t make a plan unless it’s for a bottle of champagne or something like that to toast a successful month of writing. Do plan that stuff.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 26 (11/26)

Chris Amann 1 Comment

Despite everything going on, I managed to be reasonably productive yesterday. Better than that, I decided to just go to bed at midnight, which is why you’re getting this post rather later in the day than I’d like to be putting it up. Unfortunately, despite those good things, yesterday still wasn’t great. I was busy all day trying to get my head out of the stressful holidays and back into anything resembling a productive mindset. It took most of the day and while I did have adequate time to zone out while writing without it compromising my ability to finish the day’s writing, it was still an uphill battle to get anything done. As today will be. Additionally, if that wasn’t bad enough, I may have been in bed by midnight, but I couldn’t fall asleep until after one. It was the worst, lying in bed and staring at the darkened ceiling while I waited for my mind to wind down for an hour.

To be entirely fair, I’m not exactly surprised. It’s been going on for a while and last night was just the latest in a long string of issues sleeping. As my stress level goes up, I start to struggle with sleeping. I’ve used some games in the past to keep me engaged enough that my mind doesn’t fret over pointless stuff but not so engaged that it can’t wind down (any Pokemon is my go-to since it has done that flawlessly my entire life), but that hasn’t been working lately. This is the first time in years that I can’t just shut down my mind when I need to. Or it’s the first time I’ve ever had something on my mind that I don’t want to just ignore. It’s difficult to tell the difference, sometimes, and I’m willing to be this is one of those scenarios where something isn’t happening because I don’t actually want it to happen.

I haven’t done a lot of thinking about my grandfather’s health, my aunt’s rudeness, and my relationship with my family in general. Or my relationship with my past. I honestly haven’t really been doing a lot of self-examination lately, which was a poor choice because I know just how cluttered my mind can get without it. Since my breakup, I’ve had a lot of stuff going on, some by choice to lessen the sting and some by circumstance that has added whole new elements to my anxieties and frustrations. The flood, a wisely abandoned but rather persistently reexamined decision to ask someone out, my grandfather’s health, a huge pile of things at work–participating in planning for the future of my team, a six-week period of crazy business as we tried to get a project done, and then leading the charge on a whole slew of new processes and best-practices for my entire team–and then I went straight from all that into National Novel Writing Month with only a week off to recover which pretty much all went to hell immediately because of my shitty neighbor’s music and the fact that I found out my grandfather was dying the weekend before I had to spend a week outside of my comfort zone in every possible way at work. It’s a lot and my few attempts at sorting myself out weren’t enough. I’ve been journaling every day, but that’s almost always surface stuff and my therapy visits have had quite a bit of time between them lately because of how busy the holidays are.

I really need to take some time to self-examine and process everything that’s been going on in the past six months (because I also went semi-viral on twitter and learned a lot about how I think social media should be used), but it’s difficult to get that time when there’s still so much going on. Numerous events in my friend group, we’re moving to a new building at work, the Christmas holidays coming up, new year’s, trying to figure out what comes next after National Novel Writing Month is over, and the ever-persistent issues of my health (mental and physical) and debt situation. It never lets up! Which is an unfortunate fact of life. The only time and respite I get from all of the chaos of life is the time I make and even that comes with a cost. There could be a lot of important things I miss in my life if I’m constantly pulling myself away from it to get the breathing space to calmly reflect on things. At the same time, taking a break from life to reflect once every six months clearly isn’t cutting it. I’ve been trying to work it into daily life, but enough Big-Deal stuff happens in my life from one year to the next that I need more than the casual reflection I can fit into my day-to-day life.

I really miss summer or winter vacations. I haven’t really had one in almost a decade since I worked every break during college, but I still miss them all the same. I miss the weeks of decreased responsibility and relaxation I had to recover from the mental rigors of studying. The US seriously need to address the shortage of vacation and personal time infecting most of its… everything. Infecting every part of its wage-earning culture since this is a systemic issue from the bottom rung of the job later to all but the top. The top gets to do whatever they want so they don’t count. Except, you know, they do because they’re the ones causing most of the problems. This is not where I saw today’s blog post going. I had notes to talk about how sore my back is from sleeping on an incredibly firm mattress for three nights before returning to my very soft and comfortable mattress but now that just doesn’t seem like something worth complaining about more than I already have in the face of corporate and governmental corruption’s impact on the economic health of all but the upper class.

Uh, eat the rich, I guess? Down with capitalism as a government policy? We should definitely get money out of politics, though, and probably ban anyone over retirement age from holding public office. That seems like a decent start, but we should also consolidating voting to one day every year and make that day a national holiday instead of “Columbus Day” since we’re trying to move away from people who ruin everything and then insist they didn’t do anything. While I’m talking about it, we should also institute a living wage, actually put money into gun violence research, limit the sale of fire arms/enforce conscientious ownership using reasonable gun control laws (Chesus fucking Jrist, can’t we just treat them like goddamn cars or something? With tests, licenses, and ownership certificates? This doesn’t seem like that difficult a fucking concept to work with), put limitations on banks and the whole “move money around to magically make more of it” economic sector to prevent the kind of abuse that led to the subprime mortgage crisis, and ban anyone who is a white supremacist/white supremacy sympathizer from participating in reasonable adult society like the job market and politics? And a million dollars for me, while we’re at it. Since we’re talking about impossible dreams that aren’t likely to occur in my lifetime.

On that depressing note, I’m going to go work on my writing for today. I hope your day is going better than mine is (and I kinda hope you don’t read this blog and my summation of a lot of the catch-all problems in the US). I hope you’re making good progress on your National Novel Writing Month goals and I wish you the best of luck when it comes to finishing strong! I believe in you!

 

Daily Prompt

A person’s musical taste can say a lot about them. I like music with big words and complex lyrics that is also usually indie rock or some kind of alternative or folk, which says I’m pretty much a hipster. I also like punk, hip-hop, older country, jazz, and electric rock, which says so many different things that it kind of clouds the picture a bit until you realize I actually like anything that incorporates instrumentation and vocals well, which means I just like melodious music. And that I’m still kind of pretentious and hipster-ish. What kind of music does your protagonist like and what does that say about them? Write a scene involving music that lets your protagonist reveal a bit of themselves that might otherwise keep hidden.

 

Sharing Inspiration

The book series that probably impacted me the most as a writer (aside from, you know, the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings inspiring me to actually be a writer), is Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. Not only does a read through his incredibly fun, clever, and quick books make me want to write, but his style of writing has shown me there’s room for writers with a voice like my natural one. His series and his writing is directly responsible for me starting to write like myself rather than as a mixture of my favorite writers. As anyone who has made the transition can tell you, that’s a pretty big deal. Also, as one of the biggest Fantasy series that isn’t full of giant tomes, it made me appreciate the value of a story told in three hundred pages, give or take fifty. There’s an elegance in simplicity if it’s done right and Terry Pratchett was a master of it.

 

Helpful Tips

As we approach the end of the month, there are probably more than a few of us who are behind on our word counts. I’m so far behind I’m going to be behind until the very last day when I finally hit fifty thousand words. For those of us trying to catch up or find a way to squeeze more words out of the day, I have a suggestion. At this point in the month, it should be relatively easy to get your regular words out. The issue is usually the extra words you need to catch up. For that, I suggest using what I call the “Milestone Method.” The idea is that you tell yourself “just another hundred words until I’ve rounded my total up to the nearest thousand” or “if I do three hundred thirty-three more words, I’ll have two thousand words done for today.” until you reach whatever your actual goal is. Try to pick amounts that you can easily reach in a short amount of time because that’ll make it feel more like sprinting toward the finish like rather than adding another lap to the marathon. I’ve gotten so used to this method that I have to consciously stop myself if I hit my writing target before I’m falling asleep at my computer. I only needed three thousand words yesterday, but I got myself up to thirty-five hundred so I could stop at a nice round thirty-six hundred. If you can break it down into smaller bites and track your word count accurately, it’s worth trying to slowly work your way forward.

NaNoWriMo 2018 Day 25 (11/25)

Chris Amann Leave a comment

As I sat at my desk with my therapy light going, trying to come up with something to write about for today’s blog post, I remembered a similar feeling from well over a year ago. From most of my life, actually. I’ve always been of the opinion that it is best to say nothing if you don’t have something worthwhile to say. We’ll, that particular thought has always been in my mind. It’s difficult to draw the line between something I’ve come to believe and something I was taught from an early age. They’re often related to each other in ways that aren’t necessarily clear. This one, though, is probably something I was taught early in life and internalized deeply enough that it became a strongly held belief.

Looking back, it’s pretty easy to see where I learned that lesson. As the second oldest of (eventually) five kids, it was difficult to get my parents’ attention. Not for me specifically, but for any of us. There was just so much going on as my parents tried to make not just their lives but the lives of the four little children they had (the youngest showed up a seven or eight years after the second youngest). They taught us a lot of things in order to cope with the sheer number of requests for attention, like waiting silently if someone is on the phone rather than constantly saying “mom” until we got a reaction. Or placing a hand on someone’s arm if we wanted their attention rather than yelling their name. Or going to look for someone to talk quietly rather than shouting across the house. Or trying to solve problems on our own before going to our parents. Or taking the time to decide if something was really important before bringing it to them. All of it points toward consideration for other people’s time and a thoughtful selection of what’s worth vocalizing.

There’s plenty of room to debate on whether or not thing was a good thing. I’m sure it made my parents’ lives easier when it actually worked and it taught me to be deliberate in everything I say which has helped me avoid saying something I’d come to regret when dealing with anger or sadness. The only real problem I see with it is the idea that holding back until you have something important to say lends power and worth to your words isn’t really how the world works. It may be how the world once worked, but I suspect that’s a bit of fiction we collectively tell ourselves to make it seem like the past was a more civilized time. I’m willing to bet the quiet considerate people who spoke only when they felt it was important were just as ignored back then as they are now. For similar reasons, too. I remember my first manager at my previous job telling me that I needed to speak up in meetings more if I wanted to climb the ladder. I told her that I generally didn’t have anything useful or constructive to add and I’ll never forget her response. “That’s not the point. You just need to appear like you’re contributing to the meeting so always say something about anything that comes up in a meeting.”

Needless to say, I refused. I still think this particular attitude toward meetings and competence is part of what’s wrong with corporate culture in every company or institution I’ve ever been a part of or heard about. The idea that someone will get promoted by constantly saying nothing important just so they appear to be involved in everything is probably why there are so many terrible managers in the workforce. Companies are literally promoting people who have done nothing useful except attach themselves to the accomplishments of others. It’s insane and I’d rather never get a promotion that get one because I’m faking competence.

Where this whole idea gets problematic is when it gets applied to my writing. I have had three other blogs before this one, all of them with the goal of updating every day or at least every other day, and none before this one ever survived very long. My common refrain, when talking to friends or writing teachers about it, was that I just couldn’t think of anything worthwhile to say or write about. For a long time, the first year and a half of this blog’s existence, I did the same exact thing. I created this blog because I had something to talk about that I felt was important, and then I self-edited myself into silence by saying it wasn’t worth posting about all the time or by telling myself I should never repeat myself.  Deciding to post every day for a year is what saved this blog from eventually be consigned to the trash heap like all the others. It also taught me that I have a lot that’s worth saying, even if I’ve said it before. A lot of things worth saying are worth saying multiple times and in many different ways. It takes practice to be able to do that, but so does every kind of writing.

I still often feel like I don’t have anything important to say, but I know that I still have a lot that’s worth saying. So even today, when I sat down and felt like there was nothing important on my mind or stirring inside me, I could find something worthwhile to say. It has taken a year of practice and several hundred thousand words worth of blog posts, but I can finally say that I’ve gotten over this particular hump. I may not be constantly keyed into all of the most important issues in the world, but my views and my thoughts are worth writing about. It’s really difficult to be a writer if you don’t believe that on some level or another. It still feels a little conceited sometimes, to be constantly putting my thoughts out there for everyone to find, but at least I’m not running an anti-vax or flat-earth blog. At least what I have to say isn’t really hurting people. Like the description of Earth from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I’m proud to say the worst I am is “mostly harmless.”

Well, I’m sure I’m also a little caught up in my own stuff from time to time and there are probably a lot of people who find my inability to get directly to the point frustrating, but all that kind of fits under the “mostly harmless” descriptor in my opinion. Even if I’m not doing everything I want to be doing, I still feel like I’ve gotten past one of my major hurdles to writing. It’s a good feeling, to be honest, and I think I should add that to my list of personal triumphs to be celebrated.

I hope your holidays are wrapping up nicely and I hope you got a lot of writing done! Or, you know, at least ENOUGH writing done. We’re on our last calendar week of the month and we’ve only got six days of writing left, but that’s still enough time! It might take a lot of work (I’ve got eighteen thousand words left to write), but if we dig deep we can get it done! I believe in you and I am here to support you as best I can! Good luck!

 

Daily Prompt

Humans are endurance hunters. We aren’t really faster than most of the creatures we’ve hunted over the course of history, but we’re certainly more durable than most. Animals often die of shock from a single broken bone and yet humans can live through things that take all their limbs. On a less gruesome scale, we’re also really good at enduring long periods of stress and strain. We can go without sleep for a while and are generally pretty quick to get back into the thick of things once we’ve recovered. How does your protagonist handle this kind of endurance? Are they graceful under long-term stress, or will they crack quickly without proper care? Can they deny hunger or exhaustion when the chips are down and they need to keep moving forward? Write a scene showing us how well your protagonist can endure whatever you’re throwing at them.

 

Sharing Inspiration

If you need a new book series to read or a fantastic series of fantasy books that’ll make you see the potential of Fantasy in a whole new light, you should check out The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. Technically, they’re classified as Urban Fantasy, but they helped solidify the genre as its own independent genre that doesn’t need to rely on vanilla Fantasy for shelf space. It still usually does because most bookstores dislike that level of granular sorting in the books since alphabetizing things is a pain, but I’ve gone a bit further afield than I meant to. The series is creative, the protagonist actually grows from a misogynistic egotistical jackass into a real human being who is CLEARLY out of his league and only surviving due to a mixture of luck, audacity, and lateral thinking. At least at first. More recently, things have changed pretty significantly so there’s been a big shift in the formula for the stories and that’s super exciting. You should check them out and get into a great series whose newest book COULD be coming out soon! Sometime in 2019! Probably!

 

Helpful Tips

If you’re having a difficult time working your way through a scene, trying drawing it out. Not lengthening it, but putting a pen or pencil to paper and representing it with images or something. I like to use bubble charts when I’ve got a busy scene to write and I need to keep track of too many people to juggle while writing. Since I play a lot of Dungeons and Dragons, I’ll do “round graphs.” The idea is that I represent the movements through the scene in six second intervals (skipping ahead a bunch when no one is moving) without attaching dialogue to the rounds because talking is a free action. If there’s a lot of dialogue between a lot of people who are also moving around, I’ll add dialogue trees to the rounds. If I’m trying to get some key element of a scene worked in smoothly instead of tracking a bunch of people or their speech, I’ll write down the core of that element and slowly wrap layers around it until it can fit in the scene. For instance, if I’m trying to show grief in each of the characters, I’ll start with what they’re sad about, how they feel about their grief, how they show their grief, how they think they’re showing their grief, and how other people see their grief. From there, it’s easier to just plop it into the scene where appropriate because I can just go to the correct layer for each character depending on narratorial perspective. The idea can work for pretty much anything, so I recommend experimenting with it until you figure out how to apply it for your own writing.