Saalon Muyo

I’m a bad learner unless I have a goal. I never properly learned programming until I had a job, and some projects, at which I didn’t want to fail. Writing? Set a real deadline for myself, or I might as well embrace those empty pages. And physical activity? Working out and stuff? Ha! Ha ha ha. Ha.

I don’t run unless I’m running towards.

I had a great fall, what with that zombie 5k obstacle course thing looming large. Not wanting to beclown myself on a muddy track packed with Walking Dead nerds and people dressed as Team Rocket from Pokemon, I ran regularly and often until I got myself up to a respectable-only-to-me 13 minute mile. As soon as it passed? Hello, couch!

It was time to do myself a favor and give myself a goal. Employing some epic Google-fu (one skill in which I have no doubt: my ability to search), I found this. Ok, so a flat 5K run along a river is nowhere near as cool as running with the bulls zombies, but it is a goal, and it’s far enough away that I have a chance to get myself back into shape. I paid the registration fee as soon as I found it. No, losing $25 by not going to this won’t kill me, but the ego-pain of failing to get ready for a measly 5K river run in April should be enough to do the trick.

I need to thank Mels for this, actually, because in suggesting this truly torturous looking obstacle course that’s clearly beyond me, she prodded me into doing something I’d been putting off. If anyone’s got anything along those lines – preferably ones that don’t require me to climb things and give myself a mid-course panic attack – feel free to clue me in. I might need to challenge myself a little more after a leisurely run up and down a beautiful river. Or I might chicken out, like I did with Mels’ climbing death race. You never can tell.

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.

Imagine a line. At one end – say, far off to your right – the line starts to blur and fade.  Out there is where all the awesome, elite programmers live.  Now take a good, long sprint back down the line, past the midpoint and off to your left.  Not all the way, just a bit. If I’m being honest with myself, I’m at my desk near that point on the line.  Away from the elite and the great and the specialized, near most of the rest of the people who are hacking out a living in this field.  What I’m saying is I’m not a great programmer.  I’m good, but I’m not great.

Except in one area: I’m as good a troubleshooter as anyone I know.  Oh, yeah, ok, there are ones better than me out there.  Lots, probably.  But when it comes to narrowing in on a problem, finding a hidden glitch, I’m pretty great when I put my mind to it. Before the rancid smell of ego overwhelms you, though, let me say one more thing: it’s not because I’m anything special.  It’s not knowledge or ability or intelligence. It’s just that most everyone else handcuffs themselves before they begin.

When something breaks, before you really start trying to understand why, your brain flashes up as good a model of what’s going on as it can manage. It makes a lot of assumptions to do this, things that you’re pretty sure are true, so that you have something to work with.  If an application is locking up every time you try to print, your brain dredges up any facts it can about how the application prints.  It never has enough facts, though, so assumptions form a sort of cartilage between the facts to hold the skeleton of the model together.  Then things go wrong.

Your model is screwed up, I promise you. You’ve missed something, or misunderstood something, or just plain gotten it all backwards.  That’s fine. You needed a starting place, and if you start staking out the really awful ones, you get a sense of the shape of the real problem.  Only people start to get confused over what was a fact and what was an assumption, and if one of those assumptions are wrong, and that assumption is connected to what’s kicking your application in the shin, you’ve effectively lost your way out of the maze.

At some point when you’re solving a really gnarly issue, you’ll hit a wall.  You’ve tried everything sane, you’ve exhausted the rational options and you’ve still gone nowhere.  That’s when you need to take a knife to your assumptions – even the ones that just have to be true, the ones that really should be facts – and start hacking.   Mere Smith blogged about screenwriting yesterday, and repeated one of the most useful lessons in fiction: Kill your darlings. Today, your assumptions are your your darlings, and they need to bleed.

This sounds obvious, right? You’re thinking I’m not really saying anything useful.  I get it. This is really obvious advice.  It’s just that almost no one takes it. Even, and especially, really smart people who know their crap.

I had a problem today when we were trying to deploy the most recent version of the website.  It was dying when trying to generate the spiriting for our images (something about which I understand almost nothing) and rolling back.  But why?  What was dying?

./smartsprites.sh: 8: java: not found

I read this yesterday, after an awful day involving low speed car wrecks and a hundred obnoxious technical problems, and I just thought, “Crap, something is wrong with this sprite garbage that I don’t understand.”  And, since it was the end of the day, I told myself I’d look at it with an awake brain tomorrow and went home.  I got in this morning, looked at the actual shell script that was failing and realized I’d been a moron.  There’s nothing wrong with the sprites.  It’s telling me what’s wrong right there.  It can’t find java.  It’s trying to call a command, and that command just plain doesn’t exist.

And here’s where the confusion sets in.  You think:

1. I’ve deployed this site 40 times before this.  We’ve never had a problem with java.
2. Nothing has been deleted or changed on the server.
3. Maybe the java command is failing and I’m just misunderstanding the error. Because…
4. I know for a fact that Java is installed.

Only you don’t.  In your bleary-eyed death march the day before, you switched from using Web Server 1 as your deploy target to Web Server 2, which used to just pick up the changes you deployed to 1.  Java is installed: on Web Server 1.  You don’t know crap about what’s installed on 2, because it never mattered until today.

When I brought my sysadmin over to say, “We don’t have java installed on Web Server 2,” he pushed back.

“Of course Java’s installed. It’s installed on every machine.”

This goes back and forth for about a minute.  This is what I mean when I say smart people let their assumptions become shackles.  We’ve got an error. The error says JAVA NOT FOUND and nothing else. You really, really feel like java was installed.  So something is incorrect. Either the error is wrong, or your assumption is off.  Most people, at this point, go with their assumption and test something else.  But it doesn’t cost you anything but a little time to prove it.  Make a run at the problem like you’re totally wrong about this one thing and see what happens.  Either you’re proven right (“Ha! Told you Java was installed!”) or you’re proven wrong and you just won a little bit of the future.

In this case, I had to log into the server and type “java” at the command prompt to prove it wasn’t installed.  If I hadn’t had such an easy way to test that, we’d have been arguing for a lot longer.  Assumptions do their best to keep you from doing things you feel are a waste of time.  It can’t be that, so testing it out would be a massive waste of time.  But when you’re lost in the swamp, you have to stop worrying about wasting time and you have to start hacking down weeds.  Any weeds you can see, even the ones you really suspect will just lead to a dead end.  You left efficiency behind when you got stuck with this problem.  Now you need to be mercenary and be will to turn your knife on anything that might be in your way.

Don’t be afraid to be scattershot. Don’t be afraid to try out things that can’t possibly be the issue.  Eliminate every option.  Remove all possibilities.  Improbable isn’t good enough. Prove it impossible, or mark it as a potential problem.  Don’t feel bad about stabbing your assumptions.  They’re usually asking for it.

I can’t say that it’s time to end the death penalty, because that time came and passed a while ago.  Any remaining moral justification for the death penalty slipped away when we started looking at DNA and proving that some of the people we’d killed weren’t actually guilty. I don’t know how someone learns – without any doubt –  that our justice system kills innocent people and just looks away without it twisting up their guts. Apparently they do it pretty easily.

At the least, we need to stop talking about the death penalty in terms of whether it’s justified if when someone does something bad enough. We should be past the point where our debate is if there are, in theory, people that deserve capital punishment. As Will Munny said, “Deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”

The question, if you want to keep seeing people executed, is simple: Now that you know that innocent people are going to die, how many innocents does the state need to kill before it becomes too much?

This isn’t a rhetorical question.  What’s the number? What percentage? Where’s the threshold where you say, “Now it’s too much,” and ask for it to end? Because this is the question, and it’s the only one.  I realize you think certain crimes deserve death. I disagree, but I’ll give that to you. You think people deserve to die for some crimes.  But how many innocent lives is punishment worth?

You should be able to look me in the eye and tell me that if 10 of the 46 people we killed last year were innocent, it still would’ve been worth it. Otherwise, the moral ground you’re pretending to stand on is just bullshit.

Is there some kind of guidebook for getting back into a project you’ve set down for a while? Because my process feels a lot like redoing great vast chunks of it just to remind myself what the hell I was doing 6 months ago when I thought the thing sounded like a good idea.

As I try to get myself back to putting things on a page that are not written in some non-human language, the current worst part is penetrating the ever-widening wall of fear that springs up between you and something you haven’t looked at in a few hours.  The days where I can alt-tab to Scrivener and see that, yes, there are words from a story I half-abandoned are far enough apart.  Don’t ask me how often I manage to verify those words form English sentences.

But, hey, I hit a milestone, right? Today I’m avoiding looking at it by writing a rubbish blog post. Progress, people.

Because the only thing worse than fad diet evangelists are the people who don’t understand what allergies are.

I have a simple rule when it comes to evaluating diets. If it tells you to completely cut out a food source, it is wrong.*  Maybe we need to eat less of something – in the case of meat, probably a lot less of it – but we’re not dealing with this level of nuance. We’re talking about completely cutting out legumes, or every drop of dairy, or all cereal grains.

Watching otherwise intelligent people fall into goofy diets and become hardcore evangelists has been sort of fascinating. Like people who’ve suddenly found religion, it’s not enough that that they’ve subscribed to a shiny, new theory of life. They need to bring it up as often as possible, alternating between rubbing their superiority in your face and trying to pull you into the fold.

The newest kid at the dance is something called the Paleo Diet. It’s an impressive feat of pseudoscience, weaving together a poorly understood version of evolutionary science with outright anthropological lies to advocate for a diet that resembles that of our caveman ancestors.  All fad diets grate on me, but Paleo’s scientific pretensions make it especially obnoxious. At least Atkins stuck with promising weight loss.

And, really, if you strip away the evolutionary nonsense, Paleo is nothing new. Stop eating carbohydrates! Eat more meat (but, y’know, also fruits and vegetables, too)! Bread is the source of all evil, and the price of apostasy is Type 2 Diabetes!

Another good way of telling that a diet is crap is a dearth of peer reviewed scientific studies on it. If the only research you can find is on websites with the name of the diet in the url, you should start to feel uneasy.  So should the fact that what little research there is has been narrowly focused on things that probably don’t concern you.  You know, like when the only available clinical trials talk about the effect of Paleo vs. the standard Diabetes diet in Type 2 Diabetes patients. Or when the same study admits things like, “A limitation of the study is the small size of the study population. This prevents the conclusions from resulting in nutritional recommendations for patients with type 2 diabetes.”  If a website promotes research with caveats like that in it as proof of something, they probably only read the headline.

Not that science matters to evangelists.  That the NHS thinks a study is insufficiently scientific is not a problem; it’s proof. Proof of the truth being suppressed, of the persecution quotient of your fringe belief being reached.  So what if only a few doctors think the diet sounds like a good idea? The rest are just part of the establishment. The anti-caveman establishment.

I submit to you that if you are on one of these diets and have lost weight, it is the fact that you are paying attention to what you are eating that’s causing the weight loss.  Further, there are plenty of unhealthy things you can do to lose weight.  No matter how many studies come out that say that the immediate exclusion of all carbohydrates will cause rapid weight loss, the diet still isn’t healthy.  What state your body will be in ten years down the road is far more important than the twenty pounds you dropped last month.

But you know what? Ultimately, what you do to you body is your concern. If cooking for you weren’t such a fiasco, or if your every mention of food didn’t somehow include a plug to your awesome fad diet, I probably wouldn’t care at all.

So, here’s a deal: I’ll try not to tell you what a sham your diet is if you don’t complain that you can’t eat anything at my party.

* I’ve always felt vegetarianism is a special case. Like most diets, if you aren’t rigorous you can deprive your body of essental nutrients. But people have been surviving as vegetarians for thousands of years. It’s not fair to call it a fad diet. It’s also healthier than the default American diet of a pile of meat for every meal, even if it goes too far in the other direction.

It’s something I always tell myself. There are long stretches, even, when I manage to pull it off. Then it falls apart again, probably just when I need to keep moving.  It’s why, for all the progress I’ve made, I don’t have to show for it what I want.

Here we are again, then.  Looking at the last four months and seeing very, very little to show for it that wasn’t my day job.  I’d guess I wrote maybe – maybe – 10,000 words in that time.  Even my blog has sat fallow.  Blog posts are just a bandaid to feeling bad about not writing enough, I realize,  but at least it’s something.  At least it’s not just a pile of code that isn’t yours and you can’t even really show to anyone.

I have a finished novel.  I have a pretty good finished novel. And it needs to get published.  That means I need to send out more query letters, and not wait 8 months before sending out the next batch.  That needs to start this weekend.

I have, maybe, a quarter of a new novel.  It’s going to need heavy revision when the time comes, but at present, the word count is just shy of 60,000.  Considering Broken Magic was around 75,000 in total, that’s not a bad start.  I need to write more of that, and I need to write it faster.

And I need to write other things when I hit a wall on the current novel.  Short stories. Novellas (oh, yeah, I have one of those finished that I stopped sending out after one rejection letter).  Another novel.  Anything.  Anything at all.

Because if I’m serious about this writing thing, I need to stop screwing around, no matter how good a procrastinator I am.

Now, let’s see how much good saying this out loud does me.

I get into arguments a lot. This is not shock to any of you, I know.

Monday morning, as I sit waiting for the dryer repair man to show up and tell me he’ll just need to come back with a different part the next week, I saw that the good folks at Planet Money had posted a link about President Obama’s plan to expand Pell Grant funding.  Without delay, me and my Recession Club friend JL got into a running firefight over it.  It’s what we do.  It’s fun.

Apparently, Laura Conoway at Planet Money found our debate amusing. So amusing, that she gave us a challenge: write a 500 word essay each defending our sides.  Do that, she said, and they’d post our debate on their blog.

How could I turn something like that down.

Today, the debate went live.  JL’s essay can be found here, and my essay can be found here.  Enjoy, if you dare.