Saalon Muyo

Sufjan Stevens, whose album Come On! Feel The Illinoise! is one of my absolute favorite chinks of music, released a Christmas album a few years back. It was a collection of EPs he’d put together as Christmas cards, and was a mix of traditional songs, odd takes on traditional melodies and original holiday numbers.  About half of the collection is either repetitive or unexciting, but some of the tracks are really, truly incredible.

My favorite – and, ok, my favorite is different from year to year – is probably “Sister Winter”. There’s something about the way it moves through emotions; it starts morose, becomes hopeful, and finally breaks out into joy and celebration. Just like the season itself, “Sister Winter” is a mix of happiness and pain wrapped in the chill of winter.

Enjoy.

(And ignore the boring winter slideshow. There isn’t an official video. Just listen to the song.)

Despite what some people try to tell me, starting something sucks. I hate it. It’s trench warfare. It’s charging the machine guns through mustard gas. No, that’s a rubbish metaphor. It’s nothing like that.

Starting is not knowing where you’re headed or how to get there. Starting is knowing the only way home is through an impassable forest, only you don’t know where the forest is or if there actually is a forest.

All the energy and excitement I’ve got from feeling really confident about a novel idea? That energy wants somewhere to go. It wants a page and it wants to put words on that page immediately. Which I can’t let it can’t do, because, at that point, I haven’t a clue what I’m writing. If I took all the New Fun Starting energy and turned it loose on the page, I’d wash out after a few moronic, vapid pages and decide I’d been wrong, so wrong, so utterly wrong about the whole idea.

Which is what happened to Mimesis last November, when I wrote a thousand or so words before getting lost and giving up.  At least, by last year, I’d come to know myself well enough to realize it wasn’t the story’s fault, but mine. I didn’t know the story, and I needed to step back and figure out what I was missing. I still had to start. I needed to suss out what I was writing, which meant…

…ahh, see? Meant what? That’s where I am, now. Should I start with character backgrounds? Whose? Or should I start with something else? An outline? Another outline? What?  Starting is working in a vacuum, making guesses and hoping I end up fumbling over something. It’s arbitrary decisions and dead ends.

If I can get past that, there’s momentum. There’s weight behind me. The weight of my choices, of the characters’ decisions, of everything, pushing me to the next step. There’s a gravitational pull given off by the collective mass of what’s come before. A lot of people feel like the middle of things is where the slogging begins. Maybe they’re right, but slogging means I’ve found the forrest. Means there is a forest. Means there is a way home.

First I have to start.

And, no, I don’t like starting things. Not at all.

Whoever set things (i.e. Life, The Universe and Everything) in motion didn’t take that into consideration. So, start I must. Start I will. Starting, I am.

I spent the weekend digging hard into Mimesis. I’d been spinning my wheels for weeks, pecking out paragraphs on thematic intentions and mythological background. Finally, I realized I should just open up a page and start rattling off the backstory for one of my main characters. Frustration over my lack of momentum broke down the fear of making bad decisions, I think. I went into the weekend expecting more wheel spinning, but all at once: wham wham wham!

That was the sound of a bunch of stuff hitting my brain at once.

In case that was unclear.

Had I really convinced myself I was ready to write Mimesis last year? The things I figured out this weekend weren’t just detail. The story was straight up empty without them. Meaningless. That thought planted a little seed of fear: How can I trust myself when I think I’m ready this time?  The answer is: I can’t, and I have to let myself walk into another false start if that’s what I need, but not take a year to figure out why I needed it.

I’ll ride this particular roller coaster a few more times before I get anywhere near writing. The clicking-up-the-hill part never gets less stressful, but thankfully, neither does the race downhill get any less exhilarating. This last weekend was great. If I can keep the great going for a few more, I might be able to start writing and know what it is I’m talking about. Until then, I’d best keep faith that the forest is out there, waiting for me to find it and get lost in its depths.

I certainly didn’t see that coming.

Last Friday morning, it all went to crap. Our site – the big, ticket selling one and not the new, not ticket selling one – started having problems. Bad problems. Can’t sell ticket problems. For a ticket selling website, you might call that kind of thing a critical problem. We were up and down for most of the day, and couldn’t figure out why we were suddenly having problems when things had been going well for so long. It quieted down over the weekend, but Monday, the problems came back with a vengeance.

Monday night found me angry, depressed and feeling hopeless. I might have had a bit of a breakdown on the couch that night before going to bed. Might have. Not saying I did. Tuesday was slightly better, if only because I’d gone slightly numb to the stress and was starting to get a handle on what was going wrong. It still didn’t stop me from maybe, possibly, emotionally shutting down for a bit on Tuesday night at the hockey game and freaking Erin out. Perhaps. Maybe. Not saying that happened.

Wednesday I came in, soundtrack to Tron: Legacy pouring into my brain through earbuds, with a plan. I think the plan might have worked.

Things have been better since Wednesday morning. I’m still not convinced everything is solved, but I certainly have a handle on the main problem and my fixes got us through a really busy day of sales. So, maybe, possibly, crisis averted.

The awesome thing about a week of unmanageable stress is the time immediately following, when you aren’t actually stressed anymore but don’t remember a thing about what your life was like before you were going out of your mind. What was I doing? Was I working on something? Was that day I was sitting on the couch losing my mind really only four days ago? It hasn’t been an entire month of me freaking out?

Considering this all came on the heels of my little writer-crisis, I think this adds up to about a week and a half of me feeling like a bloody lunatic.

So here’s what I’m asking. To the universe.

Can I take the weekend off? Just the weekend. I’d really appreciate it.

Thanks. You’re the best. I especially dig what you’re doing with supernovae. Those things are sick.

XOXO, Eric.

Wednesday night, I was watching one of my favorite shows. The writer’s name came on screen and I realized, God, I know that person. I knew them years ago, haven’t seen them since, and there they are, writing on a show I watch. I’m struggling to get someone to publish a single stupid thing I’ve written and there they are, writing a show I’m watching. I felt the confidence crack, just a bit. It was a small thing, but that’s always how they start.

When I felt my confidence shake, I did the only thing I know to do. I put my head down and worked. I talked through my ideas for Mimesis with Rachel and started work on real backgrounds for my my characters. For the night, it helped. It felt like I’d gotten past it.  Unfortunately, when my confidence cracks, it’s not so simple. I think I’m getting past it by marching on, but the faults get bigger while I’m not looking.

I got home from work, knowing I had plans and wouldn’t get anything done. No work to do, no way to brush the crisis under the rug. I felt the self doubt finally get its claws in me. It starts, as it often does, with wasting time, wasting life, being lazy, then moves on to not as good as you need to be, not as good as you think you are, not very good at all. The ultimate destination is well known territory. Doesn’t matter how good, doesn’t matter what you do, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.

Some of it’s absolutely the truth. Most is just the wailing of unbalanced brain chemicals. The rest…I don’t know.

When I graduated college, I struggled to find my first programming job. I’d finished my degree at an online school, and I could see them writing me off as soon as it came up. Sometimes, I didn’t have to notice it, because they outright told me that I’d gotten my degree from a craphole. I was paying off the remains of my student loans – thankfully, not that large – on a degree that wasn’t getting me anything. I was taking jobs and getting paid for things I could have done without the degree.  Worse, they weren’t entirely wrong. I had gaps in my knowledge, I lacked experience and I was behind every other person my age in the field.

wasting time, not good enough, doesn’t matter what you do

I got lucky. I was working somewhere when an internal developer position opened up, and having my foot in the door was enough to get them to take a chance on me.  All at once, it was on me.

See, my confidence is screwy. Like I always tell people, I don’t lack confidence in myself. I just don’t have much confidence that people see what I see in myself. Unfortunately, after a pile of rejections, it turns into a doom loop. They don’t see what I see becomes maybe what I see isn’t there becomes I suck. Being thrown into a job I lacked the skills and experience to actually do was, thus, a step up. Crazy, I know, but going from not good enough, no opportunity to not good enough, have to do it anyway, right now meant it really was about what I could do, and not what someone else thought I could do.

Now that I’m back at that point, only now with an oft-rejected novel, I try to remind myself how low I felt in the year before my first coder job. Logically it helps, but these crises aren’t entirely about logic. They’re about trying to sustain an image of yourself in absence of feedback. Which means I wrestle with the logical side of it until the illogical, chemical, emotional wave hits, breaks me down, and passes.

This isn’t one of those posts with a message, or a lesson, or a statement of how I’m stronger than this and will succeed. Who knows if I’ll succeed. Survive? Yes. Persevere? Sure, as long as I can, hopefully as long as I have to. Beyond that, I don’t know. Sometimes you don’t give up because you believe. Sometimes you don’t give up because you know you’re too stupid to know whether you should believe or not, so you’d better keep going anyway. Today, I’m there. That’s good enough. It’s got to be.

As you may have heard, I’m going to be driving myself a tiny bit nuts next year if everything goes to plan.  One concern is that I let this blog fall back into the netherverse as the stress mounts.  I don’t want that to happen. I like this space, and it’s good for me. It’s a place to experiment. The stakes aren’t as high here as they are in something you need to eventually publish, and if you end up in a dead end mid-post, it’s not such a big deal. Plus, if I’m going to be self publishing, the blog will have to be a part of how I get the word out. Keeping things going here would be wise.

To that end, two things.

1. Schedules! - Starting next week, I’m restricting myself to three posts a week, probably Monday-Wednesday-Friday. If I have a funny video or something, I might put that up, but as for writing a post, if I have two ideas over the weekend, they’re getting slotted into the MWF schedule so I don’t end up with a bunch of crap over a week or two of inspiration and then nothing for a month.
2. Topics! - Is there anything about which you’d like to see me write? Write about more often? Less often? Anything in the past you particularly liked of which you’d like to see more? Sometimes, what spouts out is going to come out of whatever I’m doing. If the webseries happens, I can assure you production madness will be here. Same goes if I self publish. But otherwise, anything you’d like? I’m not afraid to beg for inspiration.

I’m not going to be able to write anything on the next novel until I get some serious notebooking done on it, so in the meantime, my plan is the use the blog to keep my output respectable. Hopefully that means getting a touch ahead of the posting schedule, so that I can ignore blogwriting for a week or two when I have to. We’ll see how that works.

Oh, and as a thank you for reading, check out the totally awesome and strange opening to Paranoia Agent.

It felt like I’d watched a lot more movies this month, but I think that’s because I watched all but one of these in the last week and a half. Another last minute save, I guess. Thanks to Melanie for suggesting The Blues Brothers, and to everyone for shouting, “I want my $2!” while I watched Better Off Dead.

Rio Bravo - The most enjoyable John Wayne movie I’ve seen, and the only one I didn’t outright dislike him in. It helps that the awesome Leigh Brackett wrote the screenplay, and that Howard Hawks directed it. We’ve all seen at least one variation on this particular siege story. Law men have captured a dangerous criminal, and must hold out against his vengeful friends’ assault. For me, it was Assault on Precinct 13, but you might have seen Rio Lobo or El Dorado or Ghosts of Mars instead. I’ve never been the biggest fan of westerns, but this was a really solid film. Not great. Not one of the classic Leone or Eastwood films, but really good. The closing gunfight is really well staged, and isn’t that one of the reasons you watch a Western, anyway?

This Is Spinal Tap - It’s funny, right? Was I supposed to be surprised? I’ve seen most of the modern Christopher Guest mockumentaries, and at first glance I’d say that Spinal Tap isn’t quite as refined as Waiting For Guffman or Best In Show, but you can see why this stuck around. Like most comedies, it’s hard to say how good it is without seeing it a few more times. The good ones always get funnier and the bad ones decidedly do not. I’d guess this one gets funnier.

The Blues Brothers - Yeah, there are a lot of classic comedies I haven’t seen. This is one of the ones that got people really riled when I admitted to having not seen it. Some movies with that much hype just collapse under the weight of it all. The Blues Brothers was just awesome, though. John Landis is a director whose late career disappearance confuses me, since he seemed able to handle any genre thrown at him. He’s at the top of his game with this, and manages to make a two and a half hour comedy packed with cameos and musical numbers buzz along like it’s the simplest thing in the world to pull off. There isn’t a thing wrong with the movie. Not the jokes, or the music, or the direction. A perfectly cast, insane, musical romp. Man, did losing Belushi so early suck.

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three - When the remake came out, I figured I’d get around to seeing the original eventually. My uncle started nudging me into it sooner than I expected, so when it showed up on Instant Watch I figured I’d take the opportunity to check it out. I’ve always had an affection for really simple, stripped down movies that can work their premises for everything they’re worth. It’s why Die Hard and The Warriors and Assault on Precinct 13 are such gems. They don’t mistake being complex with being compelling. Pelham is one of those movies, with a really simple premise that it uses just right. It’s not a classic, exactly, but it’s perfect at doing what it wants to do. Walter Matthau puts in a great performance, and the villains seems canny and competent enough to actually succeed. Like I said, this movie hits a sweet spot for me, so your mileage may vary.

Better Off Dead - A while back I watched Say Anything and figured I should see the other John Cusack teen film everyone goes on about. I wasn’t expecting how weird this movie turned out to be. When there’s a scene with a dancing claymation hamburger playing Van Halen on a guitar and it’s no stranger than anything else int he film, you’ve got yourself a doozy. I really wish there’d been more Cusack in this (he spends most of the movie looking vacant and depressed), but there were some great moments. The gold-jacketed Japanese kids giving Howard Cosell-esque commentary was particularly awesome. Plus, now I know what people are talking about when they shout about wanting their $2. Weird. But fun weird.

McCabe and Mrs. Miller  - One day I’m going to run out of Robert Altman movies to watch, and it’s going to suck. This is Roger Ebert’s favorite of his – he calls the movie perfect, in fact – and it’s easy to see why. It’s a quiet and sad film, a western with the trappings of the genre but an entirely different soul. Warren Beatty’s performance walks a perfect line between a competent businessman and conman in over his head. When things start to go wrong, it’s proper, classical tragedy; his failure is born out of his own failings, not because the creaking gears of the plot are rolling over him. This isn’t an easy movie to recommend, but I really loved this movie. No one shot group dialogue scenes as naturally as Altman, and few directors could shoot a world so bleak without making it uninviting.