You can't really move forward until you come clean. So eventually I knew I had to just throw it out there.
I maintained the fiction for a long time, mostly because I was embarrassed, and partly because the falsehood had a kernel of truth behind it, just enough to salve my struggling conscience. My then-wife even went along with it, even as she never let me forget the truth. But I thought I could just outrun it in time, so I kept it up, and repeated it over and over, till I almost had myself believing it.
Till one day a few years ago, while it ate at me mercilessly, I decided to out myself in a game of Two Truths and a Lie, right in front of a room full of coworkers, my boss among them.
Make three statements about yourself, one of them a lie, and the other participants had to guess which one was the falsehood. The more outlandish the truths, the more likely you could fool them. Everyone else had taken their turn, and the room was focused on me.
"I was an Eagle Scout in my teens." Number one.
"I've never travelled off the continent of North America." Number two.
"I flunked out of university." Number three.
They didn't get it correct. They all guessed option three, but it was actually the secret I had hidden for so very long, and now I had admitted it. My terrible shame, one that didn't mesh with anyone's opinion of me. I was the smart one, the one who could seemingly answer almost any question thrown at me, the one who could easily finish a crossword puzzle, the one with the expansive vocabulary, the one people said should be a teacher...and I was actually a failed student.
And once I had bared my soul, I realized it didn't make a whit of difference in the way anyone thought about me. No one's opinion of me soured. If anything, it seemed to add to my character, to the mystery about me. "How could he know all this stuff when he didn't even finish uni?" they would say when I left the room.
Oh, I don't really know a lot. My studies at the local community college before I moved away from home were varied: I took classes in almost every subject, and so my knowledge is broad but not terribly deep. Jack of all trades, master of none, or so the saying goes. I love to learn, though, and so when something takes my interest I investigate for more. I have found it to be a good asset for small talk, and it often gives me the ability to ask pertinent questions of people who know more on a subject than I...and increase my knowledge. I say, never be afraid to admit you don't know something, because people may illuminate you on the topic...and then you actually do know.
I fancy myself a "collector of interesting facts" and this propensity has lead to an ability to make people think I am much smarter than I am.
But admitting the truth on this failed venture at a university degree allowed me to finally start setting goals (actually trying to fulfill those goals would be another matter entirely, mind you). I carved myself a niche in the industry in which I found myself working, and I get to use my creative and teaching skills within it. It isn't where I really feel I want to end up, but it is a resting place while I have finally gotten moving on those goals, which don't feel so very far away now.
I just finished polishing up a story, a novelette with the uninspired title "The Tree". Once I settle on a new title for it as 2011 dawns, I'll be submitting it to anthologies. And re-writing my NaNoWriMo book is next.
2011 is going to be just awesome.
Friday, December 31, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
An Ode To The Common Cold
mucus mucus go away
and come back some other day
when I have less work to do
or when I've bought more soft tissue
Snot, snot, there's quite a lot
blow your nose till it glows
red and sore go to the store
for more meds you feel so dead
damn this cold I'd sell my soul
for less congestion here's the question
what can I take to end this ache?
Monday, December 27, 2010
A Lesson Learned
I am an aspiring writer.
There...I said it. That's an enormous weight off my shoulders, you can be assured.
My good friend (and newly published novelist) Kevin Breaux sent me a link to a website in mid-October that I investigated and then pondered for a good week and a half before saying, "Damn it all, you unambitious sonuvabitch, just do it!" So two days before I would need to start on a daunting test of self-achievement, I registered as a participant in NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month. The idea? To write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 calendar days of November. Kevin, already a published graphic artist and short story writer, had been encouraging me to WRITE and SUBMIT almost constantly for two years, and while I had spurts of creativity in which I was able to put my ideas down on paper, I only completed one story in all this time, and it was never at a point where I was satisfied enough with it to make it a submission for publication.
But allow me to be very honest here: I was actually afraid to submit it. I didn't really understand why, not consciously, until NaNoWriMo had ended at midnight on December 1, and I realized I had a 53,000 word manuscript on my hard drive.
I have started to write many novels in my life. The was the epic fantasy that ripped off many elements of Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, which I had started in high school in 1991, and even included dialogue from1986's Transformers: The Movie word for freakin' word. There was the story of myself as a paleontologist turned adrenaline-junkie vigilante called the Red Man, from my college years, which was accompanied by a few character sketches and a logo. There was another epic fantasy which I started to write during a long and creativity-sapping marriage, that had an overly complicated plot and a main character that I had created for a Wizard magazine contest, accompanied by maps and unique units of measurement to make everything as authentic as possible. There was the pseudo-memoir about my life before and after the dissolution of my marriage. Many others mingled throughout, with graphic novels begun here and there, and there is one trait that all these works share:
I didn't finish a single damn one of them. Not one.
So you can imagine my sense of accomplishment when, on November 28, 2010, I clicked a button in Microsoft Word and a tool in the program reported back that my document contained 50,136 words. The book wasn't quite done, and I took a day of rest before writing another 3,000 words on the last day to wrap up the story. I felt great, and even more awesome feelings manifested after I wasted a lot of paper at work by printing out my manuscript. Holding it in my hand, rough first draft though it was...I can't quite articulate how amazing it was.
So here's what I learned from NaNoWriMo: be disciplined, and don't edit on the fly.
My two biggest obstacles to writing, finally unmasked! I always needed to be in the mood to write, to create, and that cannot happen if one is to actually produce anything substantial. This one I had always been aware of on some level, but the contest gave me a hard deadline, and I followed some advice I had read on the website to prevent giving up, and I told everyone I knew that I was doing it. I wasn't going to embarass myself by being a quitter.
The second lesson I learned though was potentially the most important one, and an obstacle that actually contributed to the other issue. I have always wanted my first draft to be my last draft, and the process of editing as you write, of trying to make sure all the details are perfectly consistent, it really slows you down. For me, it would slow me down so much that it took all the joy out of the creative process! If you don't love writing, you sure as hell aren't going to keep it up.
So write the story. Just get it out of your system, and then go back and re-write the story to make everything fit properly. And then re-write it again to polish it nice and shiny. And then edit for grammar and spelling.
NaNoWriMo opened my eyes to a new way of writing, because I would never have finished it had I stuck to my old methods. As work continues on my manuscript, one that I hope will see someday see bookshelves, I'm holding this lesson tight to the vest.
For anyone interested, please see Kevin's author blog here, and support a new writer by following the Amazon links on his site to purchase his fantasy novel Soul Born.
There...I said it. That's an enormous weight off my shoulders, you can be assured.
My good friend (and newly published novelist) Kevin Breaux sent me a link to a website in mid-October that I investigated and then pondered for a good week and a half before saying, "Damn it all, you unambitious sonuvabitch, just do it!" So two days before I would need to start on a daunting test of self-achievement, I registered as a participant in NaNoWriMo, also known as National Novel Writing Month. The idea? To write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 calendar days of November. Kevin, already a published graphic artist and short story writer, had been encouraging me to WRITE and SUBMIT almost constantly for two years, and while I had spurts of creativity in which I was able to put my ideas down on paper, I only completed one story in all this time, and it was never at a point where I was satisfied enough with it to make it a submission for publication.
But allow me to be very honest here: I was actually afraid to submit it. I didn't really understand why, not consciously, until NaNoWriMo had ended at midnight on December 1, and I realized I had a 53,000 word manuscript on my hard drive.
I have started to write many novels in my life. The was the epic fantasy that ripped off many elements of Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time, which I had started in high school in 1991, and even included dialogue from1986's Transformers: The Movie word for freakin' word. There was the story of myself as a paleontologist turned adrenaline-junkie vigilante called the Red Man, from my college years, which was accompanied by a few character sketches and a logo. There was another epic fantasy which I started to write during a long and creativity-sapping marriage, that had an overly complicated plot and a main character that I had created for a Wizard magazine contest, accompanied by maps and unique units of measurement to make everything as authentic as possible. There was the pseudo-memoir about my life before and after the dissolution of my marriage. Many others mingled throughout, with graphic novels begun here and there, and there is one trait that all these works share:
I didn't finish a single damn one of them. Not one.
So you can imagine my sense of accomplishment when, on November 28, 2010, I clicked a button in Microsoft Word and a tool in the program reported back that my document contained 50,136 words. The book wasn't quite done, and I took a day of rest before writing another 3,000 words on the last day to wrap up the story. I felt great, and even more awesome feelings manifested after I wasted a lot of paper at work by printing out my manuscript. Holding it in my hand, rough first draft though it was...I can't quite articulate how amazing it was.
So here's what I learned from NaNoWriMo: be disciplined, and don't edit on the fly.
My two biggest obstacles to writing, finally unmasked! I always needed to be in the mood to write, to create, and that cannot happen if one is to actually produce anything substantial. This one I had always been aware of on some level, but the contest gave me a hard deadline, and I followed some advice I had read on the website to prevent giving up, and I told everyone I knew that I was doing it. I wasn't going to embarass myself by being a quitter.
The second lesson I learned though was potentially the most important one, and an obstacle that actually contributed to the other issue. I have always wanted my first draft to be my last draft, and the process of editing as you write, of trying to make sure all the details are perfectly consistent, it really slows you down. For me, it would slow me down so much that it took all the joy out of the creative process! If you don't love writing, you sure as hell aren't going to keep it up.
So write the story. Just get it out of your system, and then go back and re-write the story to make everything fit properly. And then re-write it again to polish it nice and shiny. And then edit for grammar and spelling.
NaNoWriMo opened my eyes to a new way of writing, because I would never have finished it had I stuck to my old methods. As work continues on my manuscript, one that I hope will see someday see bookshelves, I'm holding this lesson tight to the vest.
For anyone interested, please see Kevin's author blog here, and support a new writer by following the Amazon links on his site to purchase his fantasy novel Soul Born.
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