Writing Beyond My Current Abilities

I have been writing a book for twenty years.

Now, that's quite an oversimplification, to be sure. It started out as a short story in high school that I insisted was going to be the beginning of a career. Soon the short story evolved into a novella, and then into a series of novels, all before even beginning to put pen to paper and writing.

Now, that, too, is an oversimplification. I did write. In high school, and then in college, I did write. I wrote pages and pages of free-style poems that, I thought, were going to show my budding genius and build the foundation of a successful career as a writer and a thinker. I imagined I would be invited to do speeches and readings. My life would finally make sense.

Now that.... that's not really an oversimplification. Though I sometimes wish it were. See, those years... well those years were very problematic. Without going into nauseating detail, suffice to say that I had years of depression to face and years of recovery after that yet to go. At the time, this craving to write, to act, to philosophize, all of this came out of a need to feel special, worthy, to fill that void inside of me, and it ultimately kept me from actually facing the hard work that I needed to do to really prepare to be a writer.

Those who have experienced mental illness in various forms and degrees can probably understand, much more quickly than most others who have not, that the mind can have an immense power over one's well being and sense of self. The very part that controls the gates of logic and self-care is sick! The very part that says "well, that's not very productive of you, moaning in the corner" is shunted aside by a foreboding, a palpable, physical sensation of fear (in the case of depression, at least) that says that you are worthless, leaching oxygen out of the air that could be breathed in by others more worthy than you.

Wow. That's enough of that, I think.

And yet, yep, yep, this is how I lived the years of the early to mid 90s. With an absolute certainty that I had found myself in a corner, the long end of a bad choice in a maze. And I was very, very seriously considering suicide.

(What does this have to do with writing a bloody book?!)

All of the sordid details of that little death spiral I will share when plied with alcohol in a safe environment. Maybe. But suffice to say that one of a small number of decisions and discoveries I made to help me get out of that funk was the realization that a big part of my depression was drawn from the belief that the only skill and career I had left as an option was writing. And my muse was gone. I was no longer inspired to write. None of what I wrote was compelling. My little nuggets of gold that I had in my hand, my creativity, had turned into lumps of tin.

So I decided to go ahead and let myself suicide.

I killed that part of me that was the actor, the writer, the dreamer, the philosophizer. I decide though that I would let the other half of me -- the boring worker, the 9-to-5er that came home and paid bills and watched the parade go by, fighting the impulse to run onto the streets and join in the fun -- to live on.

And for 10 years, I did just that. I had developed almost a phobia of anything of the creative in me. The very consideration of committing to a writing project would make me shake and sweat. Accuse me of being dramatic, and I'll stare you down with such conviction you'll walk away shaking your head. I was terrified.

And then time passed.

And friends reconnected.

And old memories came back to the surface.

And like Lazarus himself, that corpsed artist inside of me started belching up putrid coughs warning me that things were going to change around here, buddy! Things are going to change! And somehow I was ready for it.

I had spent 10 years recovering from depression and building my life from the ground up, developing a stable inner core that I could rely on.

(So at last we get on with the Writing??)

Besides the depression, I also had to face a late-diagnosed ADD. Seems to have been integrally involved with my depression, as it was a large part of the reason I could not commit to projects of nearly any kind long term, and certainly explained why I wrote great when I was inspired (short, frantic and mad bursts of writing till the wee hours of the morning!), but couldn't organize a thought for five minutes when I wasn't. As a creative (and successful) friend once put it, "At first we write because we are inspired. Later, we are inspired because we write." Well, it seems I had not figured out how to transition to that later stage.

And yet this process of tending to my core, building on my center, growing, has also led me to learn new tools, ways to write things down and track them, keep them around, knowing that I can use them later.

(Like when you finally get to the Writing part of this essay!)

Like now. When I finally face the realization that I really do want to write this long, fabled book again.

I last left my writing as a notion of a series of books that explored the nature of reality and its experience in a very direct, personal way for the hero of the story. Fortunately, I did not throw most of my writing away, choosing instead to pack it in boxes and wrap it in so much tape that it could easily be confused as a bean bag (though not a very squishy one) wrapped in a shopping bag and... well... tape.

Over the years before my breakdown, I had somehow got it in my head that ultimately I could not bring myself to write several books in separate worlds, all with their own history and characters. The more I found myself exploring the nature of the experience of reality, the more the universe itself had to be, I argued, the same universe. Different people see the world in entirely different ways, be it two crazy loony artists or two pragmatic business executives. The only way I could compellingly explore that was to drop the convenient dishonesty of creating a different universe from scratch each time I started a new story. Each story had to be part of the same world.

I started calling my project TGAEN. Or, "The Great American Existential Novel".

Now, here I am, facing the challenge I have set before me. And I realize I have to re-learn the process of writing. Practically the whole process of creating. I am a different person, who is more aware of his failings and strengths and tools. And I have set before me a task that is far beyond my current skill set.

I have a story that will likely be broken up into several novels. I still don't really know the main character, or the rules, or "laws of physics" I will be applying. In terms of meaning, message, take-away, inspiration, hell even in terms of conflict/resolution, I am completely unclear.

What I have is a series of very tantalizing back-story notes, an overarching tale of existence and the transformation of characters from the very beginning of time, themes that are difficult to convey to even me, who is describing and discovering them!

I am using Google Notebooks and Google Documents to track articles, quotes and ideas that seem to resonate with my project. I use my hand-held smart phone to coordinate much of this and to review. And recently I purchased a LiveScribe digital pen, thinking that maybe one problem is that, since I entered the world of the World Wide Web, perhaps I walked away from the one avenue my muse required. Hand to pen to paper.....

I have topics and themes and ideas and character sketches that are more complex in this vaporous stage than I can organize in my ADD-ridden brain.

I am nervous. Shaking -- just a little. And I am excited as hell. Even if I work on this till the day I die of old age, it will be the most enjoyable project I've ever done.

However, I'd like to make more progress than this.


Is there anyone who has suggestions, resources, ideas? Do I pay for a writer's coach, go to every writer's retreat? How to I manage to track and organize my story, when I am not yet even at the stage that I know what my story is going to be?

Who has found themselves in the same situations, facing a task that was larger than they were, and how did you break it down, and keep yourself motivated and on task?

I am interested in meeting anyone who can share their experiences and their tricks of the trade. Now that I have a paying career during the day, this is not about a desperate act of finding something useful to do. This is about finding out why this book won't let me go....

And finding out how it ends.

An Obsessive Compulsive's 'Life In Rewind' : NPR

A fascinating, tragic struggle with the horrors of a brain just slightly out of balance. Tortures of OCD told from the point of view of the man who experiences the compulsions.

An Obsessive Compulsive's 'Life In Rewind' : NPR

I am working on a story idea (well, have been for quite a long time, actually) that deals with different views and experiences of reality. I've been exploring, lately, the notion that the main character might be, by the strict clinical point of view, showing signs of mental illness, perhaps scizophrenia, perhaps more. When I started thinking of this approach, I found that I really wanted to understand more about life from the perspective of those who suffer from these conditions.

As someone who has suffered from crippling depression, moderate anxiety and a processing disorder that fits under the rubrik of "Attention Deficit Disorder", I know something about how one's mind can color and twist the world around you.

So I am seeking sources that can help me understand even more the human dimension of mental illness.

Anyone who is interested, please feel free to email me at vania at pandorasdream dot com. Or if you feel comfortable, feel free to leave a comment.

Smiley Lore :-)

I first started using the Internet in 1986, my freshman year in college. Al Gore had not invented it yet, so I guess this was a prototype.

Anyhow, this Internet wasn't something that was available on your PC that would allow you to view web sites and see porn movies or the latest news video. In fact, this Internet bore little resemblance to what we commonly think of today. It was really little more than a gentleman's (and -woman's) agreement between science facilities, universities and military bases (and telecommunication companies, which primarily was AT&T at the time) to establish a commonly accepted method (we call them protocols) of taking messages and instructions and converting them into simple little packets of information that could be sent from facility to facility to share information and otherwise keep in touch.

Email and news boards were pretty much the primary method of people communication, and there were ways to access files like kermit, ftp, telnet (which also allowed you to control the machine you were connected to).

About the time I started school, a recent experiment had been in play for some few years called "Internet Relay Chat" (IRC). Like email, IRC allowed you to send messages to other people. But unlike email, IRC was real-time, and with multiple people. You would sign in with a name of your choise, you could choose different "channels", and any message you typed would only be seen by others on that same channel, and you could direct private messages to specific people.

If this is familiar, it should be. It was the pre-cursor to what we now think of as Instant Messaging.

But I digress.

This is when I was introduced to "emoticons", though I don't think most people refered to them by name, and I'm not even certain they were even named that at all by this time.

There were the still-used icons :-) ;-) 8-) (and their frowny versions as well). There were several other variations, too, but there were several others that had little to do with faces.

Being a lonely geek who found that gals actually talked to him on IRC, there were all sorts of flirting symbols that could be used, too! Like roses: @}---,----'------.

There were others, too, but I can't think of them. Perhaps you know of some?

To whit, here is the story of the origin of the use of tyographical symbols to cheat out the nuances of communication:

Smiley Lore :-)

http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~sef/Orig-Smiley.htm

Evolution of Dance

Somehow I missed this video when it went around in 2006. A very thrilling 16 minutes, and a great laugh!

Web providers must limit internet's carbon footprint, say experts | Environment | guardian.co.uk

This is something I've been reading about for months, but it's become particularly common in the last week or so.

Could the Internet, with it's Tweets, Spam, Porn and YouTube, News, Blogs, Facebooks, reach a point soon where it implodes due to energy and environmental concerns?

Personally, I think that the growing drain on resources by computer servers will only serve to (finally) push the hardware industries to develop for efficiency as a priority in their future designs. And hopefully, new energy sources such as sunlight, wind and wave will make a great deal of these issues go away.

But there is no way that these efficiencies and new power sources are going to stave off the energy demands any time soon. And if priorities change, how will the Internet be affected? Will it go back to the extreme of being primarily used for military and science? I'm doubtful it would go that far.

Perhaps Internet use will ultimately become metered, despite the emphasis on the Internet as a democratizing tool. Perhaps the energy costs to Comcast and Google and Microsoft et al. will ultimately force them to charge per use.

Now that would definitely change the nature of the Internet.

Web providers must limit internet's carbon footprint, say experts

Many Twitters are quick quitters: study - washingtonpost.com

Many Twitters are quick quitters: study - washingtonpost.com

I find the conclusions in the article absolutely wrong. With every new "social networking" site that's come out in the last four years, from LinkedIn and MySpace to Facebook and Twitter and the various and sundry others, I personally have joined, played, then dropped its use within weeks.

But then after a few months, with the occasional check-in and addition of detail to a profile, or not, I have always found that I will one day just find how I like the tool and just be a regular user.

The question is not whether Twitter users will sign up and then never use it again. The question is how many of those 60% who drop Twitter will come back every couple of months and then start using it within a year. That 10 percent growth only accounts for a small fraction of the overall growth, which should be higher.

Facebook Manners And You

Ah, Facebook. Such a long history. As this old school public service film reel attests, there are rules of etiquette to follow.

Hysterical!

Simon's Cat 'Cat Man Do'

Oh this is so my cat Kritter!

Moving to Louisville, KY, summer 2010

My wife, who is half-way through a 3 year residency, has been offered and plans to accept a position at a veterinary clinic in Louisville, KY, when her residency is over.

Thus, we will be moving in a year and a half. My hope is that I will be able to continue at my current place of employment, which I love and hope to retire from (which is a strange thought for an IT person to think, as there seem to be so few companies that last that long, do not lay off their employees, and offer benefits worth staying for). But if I cannot, I want to be sure that when I get to Louisville, I already have a deep appreciation for what the IT industry is like there, what non-IT companies exist that invest well in an IT infrastructure, what companies treat their employees well and are stable and appear to understand their place in their industry well enough to suggest they will last a long time.

I'd like also to know where I can reliably find good food, good entertainment (I think the theater scene is great there), museums, parks, shopping (my wife likes to shop, can you believe it?).

Most importantly, I would like to find out where I can find us a good home, fenced in yard, good sized fenced in yard, plenty of space in the home, good neighborhood, good traffic.

Do you know anyone in Louisville, KY?

If you know anyone in Louisville, please post here whatever you need from me to get their contact information. I've been in Knoxville since 1985, with the exception of just 9 months, and I have come to value the in-depth knowledge a long-term resident can have about a city and it's businesses.

Thanks!

Google Friend Connect

This site has been integrated into Google's new "http://www.google.com/friendconnect/".

As an experiment, I am trying to integrate Pandora's Dream into Google's new attempt at creating a social network out of ordinary web pages.

Please join! Make comments and suggestions!

Emails from an estranged, and alien father

My father and I have had what can only be called a non-relationship ever since my parents divorced 30 years ago. He would call from time to time, usually every two years or so, to wish us happy birthday for the missed years, to say he would be visiting my sister and me.

These contacts became fewer and fewer as time passed. (Someday I'll share one reason why -- he was in a Saudi Jail. But that was hard enough for a teenage son to deal with (How can I be mad at my dad when he's being tortured in a Saudi jail? How can I just out of the blue love the man when he has done nothing to earn that love?), that I'll just as soon put off any details on that until some other date.


After a few more years, we suddenly came into contact again, this time while I was studying world religions at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Suddenly things had changed. Like magic, I was now in contact with someone whose intellectual curiosity was very much in tune with mine. My father, as a sometimes-student of religions himself, was asking questions, and providing new ideas, that were very much in line with things I had become interested in as well.

Home - Declare Yourself

Home - Declare Yourself

Go visit this site.

Go watch the video.

All the way through.

Then either go vote, or find someone who hasn't and drag their ass to the closest polling place (look it up on their site, under the video).

I don't care if you vote for the other guy. MAKE SURE PEOPLE VOTE!

Election Status

A thought about presidents « Exquisitetruth’s Weblog

A thought about presidents « Exquisitetruth’s Weblog:

I wonder, does George W Bush relate with the common man because, from his bedroom window, he can see the servant quarters?

Why then, do the rural blue collar workers of the United States gravitate towards these blue blooded children of privilege, while vilifying the members of their own class who have proven to be exceptional men on their own merit?

How can anyone say, with a straight face, that Obama is an elitist, while McCain is for the common man?

Here's a blog worth following. The Exquisite Truth's main writer has some sharp observations. Read this and ask yourself this question. Why is it the so-called "elitists" called democrats are so often not moneyed by birth?

Great article!

Publish Post

FactCheck.org: FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate

Here's another thing that got me steamed last night watching the debates. Thank goodness for FactCheck.org, which, by the way, has happily caught Obama and Biden in their share of misstatements as well.

FactCheck.org: FactChecking Biden-Palin Debate: "Palin: Now, Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians. And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause. Obama did say that troops in Afghanistan were killing civilians. Here’s the whole quote, from a campaign stop in New Hampshire: Obama (August 2007): We’ve got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there. The Associated Press fact-checked this one, and found that in fact U.S troops were killing more civilians at the time than insurgents: 'As of Aug. 1, the AP count shows that while militants killed 231 civilians in attacks in 2007, Western forces killed 286. Another 20 were killed in crossfire that can’t be attributed to one party.' Afghan President Hamid Karzai had expressed concern about these civilian killings, a concern President Bush said he shared."

Palin, Russia, Invasions and the Alaska Highway

Okay, I've heard this National Guard and Putin's Ugly Head in Alaska bullshit for a long time, and I need to figure out one thing.


Why, in heaven's name, would anyone seriously think Alaska is such a prize that the governor could seriously be considered a "commander-in-chief" protecting the United States from invasion?

I mean, okay, sure we get invaded. Maybe Russians drop off an invasion force off the north slope. Are we assuming that the United States military radar facilities and air resources are not going to be able to catch them? That's not National Guard, under the governor's purview. That's the president's oversight.

But sure, okay, they slip past them, right? Sneak down the icy slopes, with warm parkas and plenty of vodka to keep the chill off.


Now, when they're ready to place their forces to attack the rest of the nation, are we expected to believe that the invading Russkies are going to sneak down the 1500 mile Alaskan Highway that is surrounded by Canadian territory the whole way, fully exposed to satellites and any passing Moose and local Canadians, just to get to Washington and invade the contiguous states of our nation?

How gullible are people, really?

Tighten focus even further?

So here is my quandary now.

I had decided I would focus on one narrow part of my village, a view out of a Chinese restaurant onto a city street in the downtown area of the city.

Now, I'm thinking, that may even still be too big for a first time 3D project.

See, I have been a 3D hobbyist for over ten years, and have experimented with Strata 3D and now with Blender, and have even played with Blender specifically for, we're 2008 now? ...for eight years. But I have really done very little actual modeling, because to compensate poorly for my ADD, I have tended to let myself get into a hyper-focus, where I do one thing to insane extremes.

In this case, the insane extreme was to begin with the landform of the city. From my story planning, when I decided to create this mystical village called Noumonde for my many different stories, I knew a great deal how the area was laid out physically. I knew there was a deep lake in the center of this area. I knew the village was mostly on one edge of this lake. I knew the opposite side of the lake had some pretty steep hills.

So I began with a 3D topography of the village, which I created by using Photoshop to build a shades-of-gray picture, with really black areas to define the deepest part of the lake, and with really white areas around the edge to define the peaks of the hills. Apply some gradient patterns, smudge a little, and import it into whatever DXF converter I could find, and voila! I had a huge, high-poly-count surface upon which to build my village!

Which I used on computers that were too slow and with too little RAM to do anything useful with it.

So back to the present. I can play with that landform today pretty easily, but I mostly just use it for reference. My task today is to actually find a good starting project. The theory is that, if I can settle on a few good starter projects, I can internalize the methods of doing 3D scenes and feel confident enough to tackle larger projects.

My ADD, (or if you don't believe that scientists have found neurological evidence for ADD, just call it distractedness or whatever) has always led me to tackle huge projects that never give me anything to latch onto, that are too large for me to do for a first project. And my question is, did I do that again in this project? By deciding against an aerial tour of several streets and focusing on one single scene, I'm finding, with all of the photo studies that I have done, that even this is a very tall order. I have cracks in the sidewalk and in the parking lot. I have paint on the road with chips and discoloration. I have weeds, for God's sake! If I'm going to aim for photo-realistic, I'd better focus on a smaller task......

So maybe that's what I'll do. Technically, by the terms I set for myself on this project, producing a rendered image is not an early objective anyway. I could very well just stick with note-paper and photographs for a year and I'd be okay. But I'm going to include some rendering projects, too, because I need to move from theory to practice, too.

Current status: reading up on and experimenting with how Blender uses external files. I don't want to have ten thousand separate knives!

Project Strategy for ADD

One of the challenges I face with this Noumonde project is -- well, frankly -- me.

This project was begun around 1995, when the immersive game Myst had peaked, and when my company was dabbling in doing 3D design for some of their education software. I'd decided that the many short stories and novels I'd been working on, stories which had all seemingly lost focus for me, were perhaps victims not of a poor writer but of the wrong media. Perhaps, I reasoned, these ideas would come together much more cleanly if the many variations on story I struggle with were all part of the same story, but the "reader" had some influence in changing the story.

(I'll tell you now that I rejected that notion on its face, because I didn't like similar games, like CyberFlix's "Titanic", where you were unaware of many other stories hidden under the surface, simply because you hand't hit a plot line at the right time. But the solutions I came up with, where I would come up with subtle and disturbing ways of showing the audience the alternate possibilities, turning the story increasingly toward the horror genre, are out of the scope of this little essay.)

After a while, the notion I was exploring was clarified and had grown into a beast of its own magnificent proportions.

This.... This, I would come to learn later, is a classic expression of my own ADD. I tend to get lost in the "neat" of my ideas, and soon, the neat is the be-all and end-all, the entire purpose of the project, and I don't have anything left over for the actual work itself.

See, at the time, I didn't know I was ADD. I did wonder, yes, why I was so often told how intelligent I was, and yet had problems finishing college. My wife has since suggested that maybe I wasn't smart at all! (I love my wife!) That perhaps they were just being nice. But more than simply being told I was smart, I felt like I was smart enough. I understood material, I got the notion of physics pretty well -- my mental model fit things pretty accurately. I understood the calculus problems well enough. I just couldn't solve them correctly on a test. Too many missing minus signs, to many mis-written numbers. Too many half-remembered theorems.

Welcome to the village of Noumonde

Aside from my day-to-day work and home responsibilities, I have always had a sort of back-burner project going through my head. I used to think of myself as a writer and a 3D design hobbyist, though I kind of put these hobbies aside in the interest of work and building a home for my wife and our "kids", two dogs, two cats, and a gecko.

But you can't put your most cherished ideas away. They have a tendency of creeping back into your mind every now and again, and so I find myself pondering it again.

I want to make a village. A 3D village, photo-realistic, complete with peanut-butter-covered butter knives in the kitchens, to squashed pennies on train tracks. I want to have a regular postman running his routes, a sales clerk at the hardware store who frequents the bar too often, and a gate that was put on at an angle and has rusted through its springs.

This project is not new, by any means. I've got map sketches going back almost 10 years. I originally came up with the idea because at work we were doing 3D sets for an interactive Language software product, and Myst and similar games were all the rage at the time. I found Myst and Riven very compelling, and it occurred to me that maybe my writing projects were faltering because I was using the wrong medium. Perhaps it wasn't a novel I was trying to make. Perhaps it was an interactive virtual world!

Well, 10 years later, and I've learned a lot about 3D rendering, 3D programming, and all sorts of other things, but haven't made much progress yet on the actual original project itself.

So I'm going to give it a try again.

I'm buying some notebooks and some small pens.

I'm collecting URLs and books and article on civil engineering, city planning, small towns.

What I' d like to do is divorce the over-arching story I had in mind at first, and just focus on making a real, living, breathing village of about 1,000 or so citizens. Neighborhoods, broken fences, farms, etc.

Along the way, I'll develop a web site that will show it off, and encourage people to submit ideas, photographs, models, etc., to be incorporated into the village.

I'll keep progress on the project updated in these blogs. And now that I have a scanner, I can even begin posting some of the hand-written/-drawn elements I've already begun working on.