Ann Regentin

Well...

2009-07-12T22:30:00.003-04:00

So it's Sunday night, and I'm just realizing that I don't have anything to say.

This is a little odd. Usually I have something.

Thing is, I've been busy. I had something for Helen that needed to be done by the weekend, and I started an ERWA essay. I'm also working on a book. Writing it, not reading it. And I was practicing. Tomorrow, I'm going to look at a gas grill. I've never been able to have a grill before.

My hands feel amazingly good right now. It's faintly possible that the new, and somewhat loopy, lupus meds might, just might, be working.

It's a loopy prescription because I have to go to a compounding pharmacy to get it. Thankfully, it's cheap, because Medicare Part D never covers this kind of thing.

The migraine drug is kinda-sorta working, which has made this weekend a little rough, but not as bad as it might have been. It's funny. I can sleep okay until I need to roll over, at which point the headache kind of spikes, and I have to wait until it settles down again to go back to sleep.

Having the boy home for the summer is fun but amazingly time-consuming.

I also have a bit of food for thought from Barbara Ehrenreich in the NYTimes.

The message from the affluent to the down-and-out: Neither we nor the government is going to do much to help you — and you better not help one another either. It’s every man (or woman or child) for himself.

From Bob Sutton's blog: wisdom and randomness

2009-07-08T22:26:00.002-04:00

I'm managing a Wednesday entry this week in spite of exhaustion. Having my kid home during the summer is turning out to be even more tiring than having him during the school year! Anyway...

This is from Bob Sutton's blog. Click the title of this entry to read the whole thing.

The lesson, or at least one lesson (there are dozens in this paragraph), is that there is a delicate balance between acting as if everything brand new and everything is the same as it ever was, and wise people find constructive ways to strike that balance. And the implication is also that, in many decisions we make, we are so biased by our past experience and cognitive biases that introducing more randomness (and perhaps naivete and ignorance than usual) rather than less might do the trick.

Posting through a meds fog

2009-07-03T17:55:00.005-04:00

Sometimes I think I would be better off if my disease wasn't treated, just because the meds required can seriously kick you in the head. Three medications that cause drowsiness! Three! Trying to concentrate through this crap is rough.

Now that that's out of my system...

My thought for the day is self-esteem.

I've come to hate the word. It's usually used when trying to make people live out our Horatio Alger fantasies. We want every disabled person to climb mountains, and blame it on low self-esteem when they don't.

It goes beyond that, though, and yes I'm still thinking about Fruits Basket. There's a character in it who is possessed by the spirit of the cat. According to the legend, the cat was tricked out of his place in the zodiac by the rat, and is a bit angry about it. In the manga, the person possessed by the cat has an alternate form, one that looks and smells like something rotting.

Over the centuries, the people possessed by the included animals have come to discriminate against the cat, even to the point of imprisoning him for life. They use him, sometimes openly and sometimes less so, as a kind of pivot point for their self-esteem. However bad they may have it, however difficult the curse may be to bear, nobody has it as bad as the cat.

Notice that it wasn't enough to let the cat just be what he was, to just have this revolting alternate form. They had to make a point of making his life hell, even incarcerating him for nothing more than being the cat.

I was thinking about this, both in terms of being disabled and being a sexual abuse survivor. In both cases, it hasn't been considered enough to simply let me be. The process of getting SSD is humiliating, and the amount is enough to live on only if you're ruthlessly frugal or have a second income source. Not too much second income! Or you won't get any benefits at all. The most common approach to a second income is the Department of Health and Human Services, and they're worse than the Social Security office in terms of making you feel like feces.

Being a sexual abuse survivor brings us into the Damaged Goods issue. What's essentially PSTD gets you labeled a psycho chick, good for nothing but easy sex, or even too crazy for sex at all. Healthy relationships? Don't make me laugh! Anything can be done to you without penalty, because you're no longer human, not because of any crime you've committed, but because of a crime committed against you. You're considered somehow damaged inside, that this even happened to you at all.

It's really not the crime itself, it's the idea that really bad things only happen to really bad people.

Either one, disability for sexual abuse, is like having an alternate form, one that repulses people, but the fact that there's more to it than that leads me to consider what it means to feel good about oneself.

There's a scene in Fruits Basket in which the man possessed by the spirit of the dog explains to the heroine just what the cat is to the rest of them, and how their relationship with the cat simultaneously lifts them up and drags them down. It's good, if you're going to be possessed, to not be the cat. That fact makes the possession maybe a little easier to take. After all, it could be worse. You could be him, shunned, scorned, and locked up for life.

But in order for the other twelve to see themselves as better, they have to make the cat worse beyond the simple fact of the alternate form, and that drags them down in ways that more than one character in the manga has to face up to.

It isn't just a manga phenomenon, though. I actually fall into three "cat" categories: disabled, sexual abuse survivor, and single mother, so I have a clear view from the inside. Mostly, I'm thankful that there are no legal penalties. I can live pretty much as I choose, within the limits of my means. I'm grateful for that, daily.

I've had to think about the self-esteem issue a lot, for obvious reasons, and while the "at least I'm not X" route is incredibly tempting, it's also dangerous. What happens if X suddenly rises above you?

For an example, I look once again to Oprah Winfrey, who takes enormous crap simply because she's the kind of person everybody is supposed to be able to look down on in this way. A fat black woman who was raped as a child? Come on! Under no circumstances is such a thing supposed to be a multi-billionaire in charge of one of the world's biggest media empires. So what do people do? Tear her down. She may be one of the most philanthropic celebrities we have, but she's not giving enough, or to the right causes. Her show sucks. Her magazine sucks. Her book recommendations suck. Whatever it is, no matter how well it does, it isn't really good enough, not because of the merits of the outcome but because of what she is.

The legal barriers are down, but the social barriers remain because when we look to build ourselves up, we look for those who are worse off than we are.

It's my objection, really, to Pollyanna, whose father said of crutches found in a Christmas barrel, "Well, at least we don't need those!" Or words to that affect. So what, you're supposed to feel good about yourself because you're not disabled or injured? Conversely, if you're disabled or injured, are you supposed to feel like crap about yourself? Or are you supposed to look for someone even lower on the totem pole than you are?

And then make an effort to see to it that they stay good and low, so that you can continue to feel good?

It's one of those things that, on the surface, seems beneficial but has unpleasant consequences down the line that can far outweigh the short-term advantages. It's an insecure place to be, for starters, since your up-ness is entirely dependent on someone else's down-ness. It puts you in a position of persistently being an ass to someone, just to show that you can, whether it's in the obvious form of physical abuse of someone not in a position to fight back, or in the more subtle form of passive discrimination, like avoiding someone from a different culture because you believe that the entire culture is beneath you.

There's also the fact that once you start playing this game, you become somebody else's one-down, and there's always the risk of them taking active steps to keep you down. This can range from verbal sneering to full-on violence, depending on the situation, but the unfortunate bottom line is that you'll never really be on top.

To return for a moment to Fruits Basket, they may have been better off than the cat, but those possessed by the twelve zodiac animals are still possessed. Hating and abusing the cat doesn't improve their lives in any material way, something figured out early on by about the last character you'd expect. Then again, he wants something very badly that hating the cat won't get him.

I'm not sure that's the only way out, though. It's certainly one way out, to want something that no position on the one-up/one-down ladder will get you, but I don't think it's the only way out. I think it's also possible to be honest-to-God happy about some parts of your life, like, even if your life were happening in a status vacuum, you'd be thrilled with this.

This is true of me. It's one reason why I'm taking the blasted meds. Parts of my life simply rock, and I want to be there for them as much as possible. I also want to find some way to work with the not-so-rockin' parts as best I can.

Some of you are probably thinking that the meditation practice I took up a few years ago has addled my brain. You would probably be right. That can have even stranger effects than the meds. But I've considered, from several angles, the possibility that one of my biggest barriers over the years is the idea that my cat-related issues disqualify me from really enjoying my life. By "enjoying my life", I do not mean in a getting everything I want sense, but in being okay with what happens, whatever that might be.

It's not karma when things go bad. It's not what we deserve when things go well, either. Life happens, the way the weather happens, without our agency because it's too big of a thing for us to control, and we cause pain when we try. Our attempts to force the natural course of events don't end well.

As I look around me, I wonder if being okay with that is one of the more perverse things you can come up with. I mean, be happy? With whatever's happening? When you're a disabled, meds-addled single mother who's sitting in what her son calls a "steroidal lawn chair" writing at 3:00 am with a dusty parrot preening itself on her left boob (since it's the highest available perch)?

Are you insane?

Fruits Basket: or How to Succeed in Publishing in Two Countries while Breaking Several Cardinal Rules of American Writing

2009-06-27T15:29:00.002-04:00

Several months ago, I had a conversation over coffee with Margaret Yang, in which I was wondering idly why manga was kicking our collective butts with readers, especially young readers.

My audience being Margaret, she said something to the effect of, "Why don't you read some and find out?"

I wanted to, but the shelf at the library was formidably large and I didn't know where to start. Enter, months later, fate in the form of Helen E. H. Madden, a manga fan who suggested Fruits Basket, a series that is changing the way I look at writing, possibly for good.

Fruits Basket is, very simply, an epic about acceptance, of both self and others. The stakes are small and personal. The story is both hilarious and sad, so sad that if you get through it dry-eyed, you should probably seek help, or maybe eye drops. I am, in short, hooked in a way I have not been hooked since before I worked for Gale Group.

I've had the feeling for a while that something was wrong with fiction. Working for Gale gave me an unpleasant ability to predict plot movement within the first few chapters, which rendered reading fiction a waste of time. Going through the process of getting published and understanding myself as a writer taught me the formulas, the structure that made things so easy for me to predict. It doesn't matter which genre you're looking at. It really is all the same stuff, and much of it is geared toward the kind of jaded you get when you have to wade through a mountain of books, most of them bad.

The thing about manga is that it's coming out of a completely different culture, one that doesn't operate by the same rules, and it's not just that the rules are different, it's how they're different. Manga is like any other genre. Some of it is better than others. I'm even reading one series that is, in my mind, much too short in part because it's following American conventions. I'm reading another series that degenerates at one point into a period of ever-stranger slapstick. But since Fruits Basket is generally considered outstanding, I'm going to use it as a kind of guide to create a set of anti-rules for writing. These are, in other words, reasons why it's kicking our rear.

1. Begin at the beginning. Forget about this in media res stuff, start when the story starts, and drag the beginning out as long as possible. Let the heroine and her friends just play around a little, with a few scenes that do almost nothing but elicit laughs. Don't introduce the villain directly until vol. 4. Do create an unusual situation or two, but don't present anything so serious that the stakes appear to be especially high.

2. Don't be afraid of a cliche or two. Maybe you'll turn them on their heads. Maybe you won't. Who cares? Because let's face it: bishounen princes are very sexy, and Cinderella is a cross-cultural story for a reason.

3. Include scenes that don't go anywhere in particular as well as subplots that have little or nothing to do with the main plot arc. Continue playing things for laughs.

4. Add characters. Lots of characters, to the point where there's a who's-who at the beginning of each book. After all, there are 12 animals in the Chinese Zodiac. Would be a shame to leave anyone out just because they don't do much! And they have friends, right? And family, too. And teachers, co-workers...

5. Make those characters go on long bouts of introspection, pages and pages where there's no action or dialogue, just an internal monologue, or possibly cryptic verbal monologues that cannot possibly be making any sense to the listener. Also give them plenty of room to interact in ways that stall the storyline for a good five or ten minutes worth of reading.

6. Create a sort of false end point. Solve the obvious problem at vol. 6, even though there are 17 more volumes to go.

To give you some idea how much of an end point this is, the anime ends here and it works.

Keep doing this. Repeatedly.

7. Make a big deal out of small things. No, the world will not end if the Sohma curse isn't lifted. Nothing in particular will happen. Most people would never know the difference, since one of the Sohmas has memory wiping abilities. Even the reader won't know the difference for quite a while, as things have been humming along dysfunctionally for a few hundred years. Write passionately about it anyway. Screw global issues, let's just go with the fate of a handful of people no one has ever heard of or ever will.

8. Drag the ending out. Waaaaay out. Like several chapters worth of ending dragging. Make sure we know the precise impact of the ending on every single character, even though the list is considerable.

Sounds great, huh? So what would you say if I said that I was riveted, that I fought through the mental confusion involved in reading right to left/top to bottom to get get the most out of those long monologues, that I have been laughing so hard I've startled my son, and that the floor next to my bed is still covered in books because there isn't enough room on the shelf?

I've had a theory for a while that between certain aspects of the publishing industry plus word processors that we might be editing out things that are necessary.

It goes back to what I said earlier about a jaded eye not being a true eye. A jaded eye isn't interested in simple, human interaction. It's interested in increasing stimulation. Random playfulness, lots of characters, slow-building stories, these things don't stimulate. A jaded ear will become impatient with them, and reject them.

Being an erotica writer has its problems, but it has an advantage built into it: eventually you figure out that there's a limit to what you can write about. Sex is, when boiled down to the essentials, pretty simple, even dull. There's tab A. There are slots B, C, and D, but what else is there? Not much, so unless you're willing to write about increasing levels of kink, you're going to run into a wall. That's the danger of becoming jaded. After a while, that kink increases to the point where it becomes a disconnection from reality.

Remaining connected or reconnecting means risking everything on a single card: talent. In order to write about something so old and obscure as the Sohma curse, in order to create a character like Tohru Honda and have her be a viable protagonist, in order to drag out the story in this fashion, there must be a ton of raw talent driving the work.

The rather humbling bottom line here is that there is no formula. You just have to be damned good at what you do, and that's intimidating, because I think every artist knows that while we can control our craft, we can't control our talent. We don't know how good we are until we try, so we scour through books and seminars trying to find some reassurance, some method or formula that will spin our straw into gold. Agents and editors, tired of sifting through piles of stuff that might or might not sell also look for formulas. On the writer end, we want to be assured of writing something that will get published. Agents and editors want to acquire something that will sell. Nobody wants to fail, not even once.

In other words, you write or acquire the non-erotic version of kink, playing things for maximum impact while stripping them of everything human.

And then something like Fruits Basket comes along, with all its apparent flaws, and reminds us that it's not that simple. Humanity is flawed. We laugh at stupid crap. We do nothing in particular, and yet look over those moment with joy later. We have to do things that have nothing to do with other things we've been doing. We reach out, fail, then reach out again. We do not save the world.

I'm so glad I ran into this story, even though I haven't cleaned my house in over a week. I haven't written much of anything. I've neglected Mabinogi. However, I've been reminded of what fiction can do. It can entertain, yes, and it can protest. I've mostly been writing protest. But it can do a lot more than that. It can remind us of why we're alive and what we're capable of, even when the world isn't ending.

A few years ago, I wrote a story called The Virgin Mary Cried Tears of Blood. In it, I put the last thing I could think of to write about in terms of the kinds of imperfections I specialized in. I've written a few things since, but not much because I realized at the time that there was really nowhere else sensible to go. I had exhausted that vein.

Would be nice if I could write that I'm all fired up to start again, but I'm not. I hate gambling. Relying on talent strikes me as another form of gambling.

But as I read Fruits Basket, I caught myself wondering, can I do this? Especially given that I don't have any drawing talent at all. But there are ways around that, or ways to get the point across using words alone. It's been done. Even the structures of sentences and paragraphs, the choice of words and how they're placed, these are all tools.

I'm just afraid that my muse sucks.

First Real Week of Summer

2009-06-24T22:17:00.002-04:00

Which means headless chicken behavior. My son is with me this time, and he has piano lessons and is an assistant swim instructor. I still have to schedule Japanese lessons, and starting next week, we'll be having a friend of his over regularly. No, he does not have a drivers license! He's still too young. So I'm a little busy.

I'm also a proud mama. He practiced on his own initiative today, and did very well with the little kids.

Fruits Basket and the Weeping Buddha

2009-06-21T18:23:00.002-04:00

No, I didn't spell that wrong. It's Fruits Basket, not Fruit Basket, and it's a manga series, or maybe a manga epic, as it goes to 23 volumes and shows sign of serious organization. I checked back in the earlier volumes, and found that she did, indeed, set some crucial things up from the beginning, and did it well, too.

I've been reading the way I did when I was in my teens, at the expense of everything absolutely non-essential. I've been reading in the car wash, reading while playing Mabinogi, even reading while walking down the street.

The difference is that I haven't been reading to escape. That hasn't worked for me lately. I can't even write to escape, which is a problem because that's a lot of why I write. A lot of my stories are best-case scenarios, things I wish would happen instead of what usually does, and that hasn't been working well for me lately.

Fruits Basket is reminding me of something that pretty much everyone who explores the question of happiness likes to forget: pain isn't the opposite of happiness. It's not even grief or sadness. The opposite of happiness is the inability to accept what's happening and what has happened. Combine that with a sort of mental self-flagellation, and you get the opposite of happiness.

Others have written at length about the "problem" of pain, as if pain is, indeed, a problem. It's not. Pain tells us that we're sick and need to rest, that we've got our foot stuck in something, that we've hit ourselves with the hammer and need to be more careful. Pain is the body's warning signal that something is wrong.

Does it work the same way with the mind?

How many times does depression boil down to chronic rejection and self-flagellation?

For me, at least, that's the definition of it. It boils down to me insisting that I should be hurting over something, or not hurting that bad, or whatever, anything but what's actually going on, and trying to punish myself out of it.

Around the time my husband and I separated for good, I went into what would be the last round of serious therapy. I got a lot done, which meant in part that I got a lot of crying done. I've compared divorce to pulling an abscessed tooth using a pair of pliers, a bathroom mirror, and a pint of Jim Beam. It's messy and hurts like hell, a situation that warranted crying even by my warped standards.

It's a lot harder when the situation falls into a category that my internal judge declares inadequate.

Enter the Weeping Buddha.

The stories behind the Weeping Buddha vary, but the sculpture doesn't, not by much anyway. It's a carving of a man curled up on himself with pain, weeping into his hands.

It's an interesting phenomenon, especially to those whose exposure to Buddhism is such that they think of enlightenment as a state of perpetual bliss, or even just composure. The concept of an enlightened being sobbing is strange.

But why should it be? Isn't pain part of the human condition? Aren't we supposed to hurt when we fall, so that we can learn to be more careful next time? Why should our minds be any different?

Which brings me back to Fruits Basket. There's a lot in there that reminds the reader of how painful life can be, and how cruel the usual platitudes are. Being yourself doesn't help much if you're not the sort of self most people like. Some people are cruel, getting their self-esteem from how much better they are than someone else, and defending that position by whatever means possible. The world, in other words, isn't a place that can be fixed by believing in yourself and being cheerful all the time.

And yet this series is one of the funniest things I've ever read. It's also one of the most loving, because the love isn't a matter of denial or pity.

Which sort of brings me to the Cat. I can relate to the Cat. My disability is very much like his dreaded true form, hideous and foul. People react to it in the same way they react to him, with pity, fear or disgust.

If you want to know what I'm talking about there, go read the books! Even if you don't normally read manga, it's worth picking this one up.

I've been running for a long time, trying to be someone I might have been had things been different. I'm exhausted, and I'm not any different.

I guess between Fruits Basket and the Weeping Buddha, I'm wondering if it's okay to face down the genuine God-awfulness of what people are capable of, plus my own general helplessness, and let myself go to the point of tears, even if I don't really have something to cry about. Because there's a lot in my life that's good, but when I'm fighting with myself over the right to feel sad or scared, I don't have a lot of space left to appreciate it.

Happy Birthday, Me!

2009-06-17T15:51:00.002-04:00

I'm 42 today.

Yes, I am celebrating, but as my mother put it when I talked to her yesterday, you can age and like it or age and not like it, but nothing will stop you from aging.

Paraphrased, but the gist is there and as far as I can tell, it's right on target.

Perfect happiness, according to St. Francis.

2009-06-13T10:02:00.001-04:00

Remember how I said I thought St. Francis had been dropped on his head? And that I was still reading Little Flowers? Well, they're fantastic meditation material, in part I think because of that dropped-on-the-head quality.

I read one recently in which St. Francis was defining happiness. This was interesting, because I've been working on that lately, on what it means to be happy. St. Francis's take?

Above all the graces and all the gifts of the Holy Spirit which Christ grants to his friends, is the grace of overcoming oneself, and accepting willingly, out of love for Christ, all suffering, injury, discomfort and contempt; for in all other gifts of God we cannot glory, seeing they proceed not from ourselves but from God, according to the words of the Apostle, `What hast thou that thou hast not received from God? and if thou hast received it, why dost thou glory as if thou hadst not received it?' But in the cross of tribulation and affliction we may glory, because, as the Apostle says again, `I will not glory save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.'

In other words, the key to happiness lies less in what's given to us or done to us than in how we handle it, and how we handle what life throws at us may, in fact, be the only thing we can ever take credit for. My writing talent, such as it is? God-given, or genetic, or however you want to look at it, but while I can hone craft and create space for inspiration, I can't make myself any more or less talented than I am. I can only develop it, or not.

Nor can I control events, not even other people's attitudes. In the example given by St. Francis (click the link in the title and scroll down to Chapter VIII), the saint describes a scenario in which he and his companion are beaten over a misunderstanding.

We do not give ourselves our gifts, or our deficits. We do not control people or events. We can control one thing and one thing only: how we respond to our lives. We do not reach a state of perfect joy by creating our lives according to our desires. That's not even possible.

You hear that over and over any time you start looking into the question of happiness. Interesting that the advice is so ancient.

Wish I had something intersting to say

2009-06-07T00:36:00.003-04:00

Wish I had something to say this week. Unfortunately, I don't much. I have a sinus infection, and it's been a busy week.

But a fun week. I think I've found us a Japanese tutor, I got to watch my son ride a horse for the first time, I spent some time wifi-ing in another city following a kid dentist appointment, I did a podcast recording with Nobilis Reed and Helen E. H. Madden, and we had a co-op pick-up. My PC's hard drive crashed, in the middle of said wifi-ing, and there's the family Ranma 1/2 binge. So it's no wonder that I haven't been up to much in terms of writing.

I've also been reading Little Flowers of St. Francis and have come to the conclusion that someone dropped the saint on his head when he was a baby. This doesn't make the book any less valuable, it's just something to keep in mind.

I think the most interesting part of the week was my son's riding lesson. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing, inspired by a flyer I got for a young lady whose prices were reasonable enough to indulge in a bit of "why not?"

My son's instructor turned out to be shorter than he was, and only a few years older, but one of those girls who has been on a horse since she was about five. Her horse was an older, smaller mare, just the thing for beginner lessons, especially beginner lessons for a young man whose only previous experience riding anything was a pony when he was four and a dog when he was somewhat older.

He did great. The horse was in a bit of a mood, as he was the last lesson of the day, but even still, he managed to guide her through the cones and even back her up a few times.

The interesting thing about it, from my point of view, was his post-mortem on the whole experience.

"They're so obedient. Even when the horse is in a pissy mood. And how do they sleep when they're walking? How is that even possible?"

Also,

"It's like driving."

"Dude, it's alive." (says I)

"It's like a vehicle that's alive."

He won't be continuing, as he sees no use in being able to ride. My son is a pragmatic sort. But it was a good day overall.

Which sort of brings me to a sideways insight into my parenting style: fling things at the wall/child to see what sticks. The list is extensive, and doesn't end here. After all, he has four more years of childhood...muahahahaha!

Sleep Deprivation

2009-06-04T16:20:00.000-04:00

The title of this entry links to an entry on Bob Sutton's blog regarding group performance and sleep deprivation.

Most of us chalk up a few near-misses in traffic, a loss of temper with our children, stupid work mistakes. What we don't realize is that our experiences are on a continuum with the Chernobyl disaster.

What's perhaps most interesting for writers is this:

Plenty of creative work has been done by sleep-deprived teams around here. But this all makes me wonder, has this happened DESPITE all that fatigue?

Worth considering.

Book Review: The Fire in Fiction, by Donald Maass

2009-05-31T15:58:00.000-04:00

I nearly didn't write this. I actually spent some time agonizing over it via telephone with Margaret, who loaned me the book. I haven't even been able to finish the book, but the process of deciding not to finish it was so thought-provoking that I decided to write it down.

I'm going to begin with a quote:

The more I see, the more I feel that novelists fall into two broad categories: those who desire to be published, and those whose passion it is to spin stories. I think of these as status seekers and storytellers.

I think you can guess which type he likes!

Some of his complaints are reasonable, mostly because writing attracts all kinds, and while some of those kinds might be good enough for New York, they're not going to be fun to work with.

This isn't constructive, though. The writers he doesn't like aren't going to be moved by it, and the attitude is annoying to others. No, he does not inspire me to write differently. It doesn't even inspire me to read his book. It inspires me to put it down and never work with him even if the opportunity presents itself, because nobody's connections and years in the industry are worth dealing with that kind of BS.

I read further, and was a further annoyed.

Examples pulled from books I've never heard of don't do much for me. It's made worse when the examples don't intrigue me.

Real storytellers focus on deadlines? I thought they were focused on writing stories. And how are they supposed to meet their deadlines if they don't give up their day job?

Anyone who writes a sentence that puts "not" after the verb loses me right there, as in "Storytellers look not to publishers..." I'm also loosing patience with the word "powerful", as in, "delivering powerful stories to their readers".
Status seekers, naturally, end up in the vanity ghetto known as the small presses. Print on demand and e-books are not mentioned.

I'd also like to add that I got published by doing the opposite of some of his advice. When a story is rejected, I look the whole thing over and turn it around, as fast as possible, on the grounds that while a rejection may indeed be because the story has a problem, it might also be because it really wasn't suitable for the publisher in question or they didn't have room for it.

I got a highly critical rejection slip on Second Sight shortly before it went to print. I also got a few slips apologizing that there was no room in the publisher's schedule for it. Mostly, I got "does not meet our needs at this time". Collect enough rejections, and you learn not to take them seriously.

The other things is that all you have to do is judge one contest, and you know that his dual characterization of writers is wrong. Some people are status-seekers and damned good writers. Some people are giving the story their best but lack something, whether it's practice, craft or even raw talent. Being willing and able to self-promote isn't necessarily status-seeking; a lot of agents and publishers tell us to do this. And some people can't write, can't tell stories, can't edit and can't self-promote, but will still submit a manuscript. I'm still scratching my head over that one.

While his advice may be solid for someone wanting to break into mainstream publishing, the question as to whether or not this is even desirable goes unasked. He assumes that all writers want New York agents and contracts with Doubleday.

Which brings me to an interesting nugget from his introduction: two thirds of (mainstream) book sales are branded. I knew branding had a lot of influence, but I didn't realize that it was that extensive, which gives one considerable pause regarding the big publishers.

By sheer dumb luck, I happened to catch a link on Twitter via Helen E. H. Madden about print on demand vs. mainstream publishing titles. To quote:

While the number of new and revised titles released by traditional production methods fell 3% in 2008 to 275,232, the number of on-demand and short run titles jumped a whopping 132% to 285,394. With the two numbers combined, total output increased by 38% to 560,626 books. This marks the first time that print-on-demand titles have topped traditional books in production numbers.

In the comments, someone suggested that the sales figures would show something different, in favor of traditional publishing, but several years experience of working in bookstores says otherwise. A printed title isn't a sold title, not in a bookstore anyway. A lot of books are returned or destroyed unsold. Putting the book in the store does not guarantee that someone will buy it. With print on demand, however, it's a different situation. Books aren't printed, for the most part, until after payment has gone through.

I don't know what the numbers would be if you added e-book sales and micropresses to POD before comparing them to traditional publishers, but the obvious conclusion is that the indies are now outrunning the old guard, and are responsible for an overall increase in book sales at a time when the traditional publishers claim that sales are falling.

Why?

One reason is the sheer volume of titles. The indies, e-books and POD presses can publish a lot of titles per year, and there are a lot of them. An awful lot. They can generate a mountain of books, especially since most of them take fewer risks per sale.

Another part of it, I think, is that those who work in publishing are suffering from something I'm suffering from, only worse. After a few years of reading non-stop while working on the What Do I Read Next database, I became too jaded to read fiction anymore. It's almost impossible to surprise me.

Notice that I didn't say I had high standards. I said I was jaded. There's a difference, and the great danger is confusing one for the other. High standards makes you a good critic and a good editor. Being jaded just gives you a taste for the extreme, and there's a difference between something that's good and something that's extreme.

As I wanted to say to Donald Maass at one point, self-loathing is not the same thing as self-awareness. I'd add that a bigger story isn't necessarily a better story, and size is no indication of substance.

I am, as I write, trying to finish The Fire in Fiction, but I'm more interested in a book called The View from a Monastery, written by a Benedictine monk about his calling, his order, and some of the more interesting characters he's lived with. It's loosely organized, plainly written, and deeply human, providing a wealth of insight into the nature of faith, community, fallibility and acceptance, as well as asking questions about the value of commitment, stability, structure and tradition.

I'm wondering if some of this can be brought into fiction, if I can create the same fascinated curiosity in a reader that Brother Benet Tvetden has created in me, if I can coax questions out of the reader with the same light, loving touch. The Fire in Fiction isn't going to help me with that. It's all about writing big stories, not small stories that ask big questions.

It kind of goes back to my post last week about trying to live with more depth. I want to write that way, too. Yes, I know I'm bucking the establishment, but remember those printing numbers? Plus e-books? The establishment is breaking down, and I think there are reasons for that. Not all readers are jaded. Most aren't. What appeals to a jaded ear will sound discordant to the rest of the world.

The changes in publishing allow writers to create pretty much anything. We can, if we want to, write vampire stories or biological weapon thrillers. Some are really good at it. They write them well, and feel good to see them on the shelves at our local Barnes and Noble. However, the market is now such that it can bear everything, not just whatever is going to ship the most copies to the store.

I think we should write that everything. I think those of us who don't think we have best-sellers in us should risk the possibility that we're anything from merely unmarketable to utter crap. Just because New York isn't taking certain risks doesn't mean that nobody should. They have their own limitations and restrictions. Those restrictions should be respected by those wanting to work with New York. They should not be taken as general writer gospel.

Okay, yeah, a lot of what gets out through the indies, POD and e-books will, indeed, be crap, but so what? Do mainstream publishers guarantee to filter out crappy books? And is anyone hurt by crappy books?

Or are people hurt by the fear of crappy books, specifically by the fear that their own book may be crappy?

You can always put a bad book down. That's really not a big deal. God knows I've done it enough times myself--and I've forgotten all about the authors in the process. Nobody ever made a fool of themselves because I didn't like their book.

That's how it goes with crappy books, but here's the thing. If a good book doesn't get out, nobody gets to read it. This is true regardless of how the book is published, and given the falling sales of books printed by mainstream publishers, not only is their ability to get books out suspect, so is their ability to judge what's good and what's not.

This is where I have no credentials. I haven't even tried to go mainstream, nor do I intend to, so this could easily come off as a lot of self-justifying excuses, not to mention sour grapes, a sort of "If nobody's going to play with me, then I'll just take my ball and go home."

That's why I wasn't sure if I wanted to write this, but it was Margaret, the Donald Maass fangirl, who talked me into it, and her argument went something like this:

"This is first-rate advice for someone who wants to go mainstream, but not everyone does. If it's not helpful for people like you, then it others should know."

More or less.

So that's why I decided to write this. The Fire in Fiction may be good for someone trying to break into New York. It's probably good. But is New York still the only game in town? Especially for those of us telling stories unlikely to get past the gatekeepers?

Because like it or not, erotica's still a ghetto. Getting my foot in the door in New York is unlikely unless I change genres and maybe start using a pseudonym, to distance myself from the pr0ns. There are also questions of focus and style. If I don't like it in what I read, I'm not interested in repeating it in what I write.

Keep in mind that my current reading material isn't the latest bestseller. It's a book about monks. I don't think it was ever a bestseller. So is there no room in this world for books about monks? Or for books by people inspired by books about monks?

Setting aside the fact that the inspiree writes erotica, which is not normally associated with monks. But I think you can see what I mean.

I once entertained visions of a mainstream publishing success. I think everyone does when they make the decision to try to take their stories public. In my case, it didn't last long. Between my genre and my health, as well as my domestic responsibilities, I'm unlikely to get a contract and would have to turn it down if it was offered. The terms would destroy me financially, and the logistics would put me in the hospital.

So I've chosen not to work with New York, which brings me to something else I'd like to say to Donald Maass: he has chosen to work with the status seekers. He signed them on, he represented them. Ranting at them in a book introduction isn't going to help.

I don't think The Fire in Fiction is totally wrong. We can learn a lot from other writers. We need to take risks. We need to take the reality of the industry into consideration when we decide what to do with what we write.

But I think that's where it stops. We need to choose, for ourselves, which stories inspire us. We need to decide for ourselves which risks we take. We also need to make up our own minds regarding where we fit into our industry as it's structured right now.

Publishing isn't changing. It has already changed. The dust just hasn't settled yet. The remnants of the old guard still exist, and going that route is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

It's just not the only route.

New Favorite Song

2009-05-27T13:05:00.000-04:00

So you have to put up with a little German. Broadens the mind, and all that. :)

The song is called Nie Wieder Liebeslieder, which translates loosely into No More Love Songs. Odd that it seems like perfectly reasonable work music! I've also figured out how to play it, which isn't easy given some of the chord changes.

I'm not going to try to translate the whole thing, just enough to give you some idea of what it's about.

Ich will hier weg,
I want to leave
denn du bist es schon.
Because you already have
Ohne mich
Without me
und ohne Diskussion.
and without discussion.
Seitdem fühle ich mich leer,
Since then, I feel empty
hör keine Platten mehr.
can't listen to records
Zieh den Stecker raus,
Pull the plug
doch das Radio geht aus.
throw the radio out, too.

No, I have not lost my mind!

2009-05-24T21:05:00.001-04:00

Imagine you are dying. You don't have six months to live, you have something more like fifteen to twenty years, but you're near the end when you should be only half-way there. There are no proven cures and few ways of managing your condition, many of which can do just as much damage as the disease itself.

Now imagine that you're broke. Not under the poverty line, but well under median, so there will be no traveling. You will not see the sights you always wanted to see or go on any adventures. In fact, assume that most of your income for the next several years is spoken for; you're a parent. By the time your child is out of college, you may very well be unable to live independently.

What would you do?

Anyone who knows me knows this isn't a hypothetical question. It's my life. And I'm asking it now to help explain what may seem to some like odd decisions.

The usual thing we think of when we realize that we're dying is that we'd like a bit more breadth in our lives. We'd like to travel, try new things, have new sex, or maybe more sex. We want to do all the things we haven't done yet. We want to broaden our lives.

That's not possible in most cases with chronic illness. I won't go to Europe. I won't hike through the mountains. My best hope for sex is one night stands with men who don't me well enough to know I'm disabled, or that miserable numbers game known as dating, and I'd far rather go without.

Given that breadth isn't an option, I've decided to live with the most possible depth. Okay, so I can't go anywhere, but I'm here now. What else is here? Ducks, obviously, and the indoor birds, and my kid, and a pile of projects, and... So there's a lot here to work with, if I'm willing to look below the surface.

There's also a need for structure. I know that without anything in particular to stop me, there are a few things I can do indefinitely that accomplish absolutely nothing. It's not just me, either, and there are various ways to cope.

Some people with no day job have a kind of "professional writer" schedule, where they write for X number of hours each day, or allocate days to writing, editing, PR, etc. I'm not sure I like that, in a large part because writing isn't all I do. I'm also a homeschooling mother. I maintain my standard of living through a kind of handy, crafty creativity. If the Frankenclarinet can be made to work, I'll be composing. So there's a lot going on, some of which is easily scheduled, and some of which depends on the condition of my body. Not wise to wake up achy and stick to a scheduled activity involving sharp implements!

My question moving forward is this: How can I best be of use between now and the point where I am no longer useful?

I originally tried to answer that by being economically viable, but that made several things worse and triggered some catastrophically bad decisions. Then I tried to be well, to fix as much of myself as I could. This, too, ended badly. Being able to pass for healthy, sane and normal when you're none of the above can have unpleasant consequences.

There's also the fact that there are a lot of things I need to simply let go of, even though they're chronic issues and sometimes pressing as well. I can't do anything about them. For me, at least, the old-fashioned approach of offering them up to God works, or maybe it's a matter of re-focusing on what I can, as opposed to what I can't. I'm not sure. What I do know is that there isn't really a secular context that works for me. I get tangled up in irrelevancies.

I've been spending an enormous amount of time, chronicled here to a great extent, in trying to refocus myself. One thing I will say about the process is that not only is it intense, it forces a complete re-evaluation of every aspect of life. I went into it knowing that, but I couldn't predict the end result. I don't think anyone can, which is why it's such a daunting thing to undertake.
The problem is that it worked. I can't say I'm feeling loads better, only that the good days are starting to catch up to the bad days, and I'm also able to understand how certain things work, even when I can't implement that understanding at that moment. What is most clear right now is that I'm nearing the end of my life, and not only will I never do certain things I always wanted to do, other things that have always been important to me are no longer possible and cannot be attempted again. Some opportunities come only once; you cannot go back.

If I'm to go forward without being suicidally depressed, I have to look at the world in a different way. If I'm going to consider the possibility that it's possible to be happy in this state, I have to reconsider the prerequisites for happiness. I have to challenge assumptions about life that are so ingrained in our thinking that we take them for granted, because I don't have much time left, and I do not want to waste what I have in regret.

So no, however odd some of my recent thoughts may be, I have not totally lost my mind!

In fact, it's entirely possible that I could find it any day now. I just can't figure out if I left it somewhere, or if it's fallen in between the couch cushions.

Steve Jobs on Creativity

2009-05-20T15:10:00.000-04:00

From Metacool, via Bob Sutton's blog:

Spring here

2009-05-17T14:55:00.004-04:00

Snapdragons, in memory of my grandmother. She grew these along the front walk, and I used to love making them "talk" when I was a kid.

Miniature roses.

More miniature roses. Can you tell I like these? They're pretty, prolific bloomers, and surprisingly hardy. What's not to like?

Mama duck and her little ones. This was taken through the screen, but if you leave the porch, she shoos her offspring into the water

Are Artists Unhappier?

2009-05-13T17:41:00.000-04:00

From Gretchen Rubin's blog: Are artists unhappier than regular people?

Discuss. Please. Because a kitchen accident has reduced me to just barely one stage above hunt and peck, so you all are going to have to write this one!

The Judge

2009-05-08T11:15:00.000-04:00

Remember how last week I was talking about the part of me that goes for the beans and rice? Well, there's a name for that part, too. We're going to call her the judge.

That's Cheri Huber's name for her, anyway, and that's as good a name as any.

She could also be called my inner drill sergeant. Her primary concern is winnowing out the good from the bad, and making sure I stick with the good, preferably in as regimented a way as possible.

On the surface, she sounds like a great plan. Who doesn't want to be good. In theory, obedience to the judge will result in a much more ordered, pleasant life.

In practice, she's a destructive pain in the rear. She's a hypercritical nit-picker who simply cannot leave well enough alone. After all, if you're interested in good and bad, there is no well enough. To quote a horrible line from a horrible movie, second place is first loser. Do it right, or don't do it.

She has a pile of truisms like that, and there are tasks I will leave undone rather than listen to them. It's just not worth it. Even worse, there's an element of self-righteous smugness to the judge that is unendurable. Doing things wrong is often more rewarding than doing them right, because doing them right leaves me in an unpleasant state of mind.

It's the pleasure in being right only because someone else is wrong, and I hate it. In such situations, I have a long history of walking away from the fight, and it's true internally as well. It's one thing to butt heads against an equal opponent, as in a chess game, literally or figuratively. But there is no healthy pleasure to be had in out-arguing a child, or being right when the other person lacks the information required to do the same.

Truthfully, I don't know how to convey this one. It's an emotional state I pegged as an unreliable guide a very long time ago, in much the same way I did with jealousy, and as far as I know, this one doesn't really have any name besides self-righteous smugness, and those words aren't strong enough. Unfortunately, it sneaks in through back doors. I'm a workaholic. Believe me when I say that the benefits of that have nothing to do with productivity!

There are reasons why I gave up writing for Lent.

When I was pregnant, I spent a fair amount of time and energy considering my own childhood, including what worked and what didn't, and what I kept running into was the fact that being hypercritical, perfectionist and punitive isn't very effective. It teaches children to avoid punishment, not to complete the task required of them. The trick to keeping my son in line was to make sure the reward to punishment ratio was around 5:1, so that he looked forward to completing the task rather than dreaded starting it.

That actually went pretty well, for the most part, until he hit his teens. Then I had another dilemma. The usual method of corralling teen behavior is to remove privileges, but it took me two seconds to realize that his privileges were all healthy pleasures. Why would I take away access to positive things? Especially at an age where negative, destructive pleasures abound?

Not even homeschooling can successfully shelter a kid from the stuff that can suck them under for a few years, and homeschooling doesn't alter adolescent brain development. At his age, his amygdala is growing faster than his frontal lobe, and his system is flooded with testosterone. This is NOT a good time of life to mess with his constructive fun, not the least of which because his self-control is so fragile that the discipline wars can escalate to a stage analogous to swatting a mosquito with a nuclear warhead.

The answer? A lot of understanding and patience, plus the same ratio as before, plus breaking up tasks into small, manageable bites, plus finding situations that provide him with the kind of structure and involvement he needs. It hasn't been easy, and that last bit is worth a blog post all to itself, but it seems to be getting us through a life stage that rivals toddlerhood for raw stress without bodily injury or property damage.

So why am I having such a hard time applying this to myself? Why listen to the judge at all?

Because the judge evolved to keep me out of trouble. The judge is a sort of mental parent, someone whose job it was to anticipate the needs of my real parents so that I could avoid punishment.

See? There it is. My desire to avoid punishment is often greater than my desire to complete a task, something I have put serious effort into not inflicting on my son. I could start offering rewards, but that's a frame of mind I'm trying to get out of entirely, the good/bad, punishment/reward approach that distracts us from the tasks at hand.

It's more than one kind of destructive, since what we think of as rewards are often things we deny ourselves. Sometimes we're being silly about that, but sometimes there's a good reason for it, and when we use a forbidden thing as a reward, we can fall into a situation in which we're making excuses to something we know is harmful.

If the Inner Child is a two-year-old, the judge appears to be a teenager. Teens have a strong, black and white morality that cuts no slack anywhere, not even for themselves. It's part of what makes them so difficult and so fragile, and part of what makes them vulnerable to the people who turn them into soldiers or prostitutes. They are easily convinced that an other is evil, or that they are.

So what to do?

Listening to the judge is along the same lines as listening to the Inner Child. They sometimes have important information for me, but that doesn't mean they are to be obeyed in all things. One would no more give a teen everything they ask for than a toddler. Once again, it requires that dreaded outer adult to sort things out, and it makes me wonder why it's considered so bad to grow up.

Or is it that we confuse The Judge with our adult self? Because if that's the case, we need to reconsider what it means to be an adult. The mercilessness of our teen years is something we're supposed to grow out of, and being stuck in it is just a different kind of immaturity, one left over from a time in life when we saw certain hierarchies for the first time and tried to claw our way as close to the top as we could get, knowing that we would never get there.

How do we get stuck in these stages? I'm not sure, only that we can, and that The Judge may be an even harder trap to avoid than the Inner Child. For one thing, like a teenager, it's less sympathetic. It's easy to imagine a small child as something that just needs a hug. Teenagers in a snit? Not so much.

Another problem is that The Judge makes it look very easy. Do X, and you're right. Do Y, and you're wrong. The simplicity of it is seductive, especially when we're confused.

It's also dangerous. Like toddlers, teens lack empathy and compassion, without which we can damage ourselves with our actions, as well as those around us.

However, in the process of laying out the extremes, The Judge shows us the ground we need to work in. It's never all, and it's never nothing, but understanding how all and nothing are defined gives me a starting point--somewhere in the middle.

Here again, it would be nice if this part of myself found a more constructive way to communicate!

A critical analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2

2009-05-06T16:03:00.000-04:00

Most (like all two!) of my readers are writers and also have some experience with video games, so I'm sharing a link to an analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2 that I think shows us some things the games can do that we can learn from.

I haven't played this. We have only one console, and it's the wrong one. I have, however, YouTubed it and other Metal Gear games.

What I know from other sources is that when MGS 2 was conceived, there was a problem. How to accurately present Snake as a noob? It's an issue that all series games need to sort out, and the Metal Gear games have done it by creating a variety of Snakes. MGS 3, set during the Cold War, features Naked Snake, the man Solid Snake was cloned from. MGS 4 puts an ailing, aging Solid Snake into a new environment with new technology.

MGS 2 created Raiden, a man who had reason to believe he was Snake but wasn't, a decision that was controversial among fans of the series but left a door open to play around with the interaction between gamer and character in new ways. Konami, thankfully, walked right through that door, and the link above is to a good analysis of how that worked and why. Contrary to some of the more dire predictions, the unmistakably bishonen Raiden didn't ruin the series. MGS 3 and 4 did just fine, and Raiden returned quite spectacularly in MGS 4.

Yup. I YouTubed that one, too. Epic, if physics-defying, cut scene.

What's the take-away for writers?

Unlike game developers, who can write the code but cannot decide how the result is used, we control every aspect of the reader's experience. Reading isn't interactive in the same way that video games are, and it's one of the reasons we're losing market share. Not everyone has the inclination to sit there for a few hours staring at a printed page and absorbing what they're given at face value. A lot of people need greater engagement.

So maybe we can consider ways in which to play with the "at face value" thing beyond the narrator speaking to the reader? Or beyond the unreliable narrator, who is, in his own way, just as annoying as Raiden when he thinks he's Snake?

I wrote about this once before when I was thinking about Easter Eggs, and I believe it's worth bringing up again.

We also need to consider the possibility that people find discomfort as much fun as comfort, if not more. How many of our favorite books are favorites because they rejected the standard assumptions and went in unexpected, and perhaps uncomfortable, directions?

It's important to keep in mind that Raiden doesn't get interesting until he gets to be himself, at which point he begins the transition into the part he best plays in the series: the powerful, elusive ally. Putting him front and center while he was in a kind of embryonic stage was an interesting thing to do, and an extremely difficult thing to do well. It's easier to point to literary failures at this than it is to point to successes.

I'd like to add that he's not the only character who starts out annoying and finishes strong. Emil Castagnier of Tales of Symphonia 2 begins as literally half a personality, and it's the cowardly, whiny half. It isn't until Emil's other half begins to gather strength that he becomes more likable, and that the positive aspects of the half we meet first begin to manifest.

My experience is that literature doesn't have much patience with this. A friend of mine (who is free to speak up if they want to!) recently got a critique of a novel in which the protagonist was called "adolescent", and not in a good way. Okay, well, guess what? The protagonist was an adolescent, and a sheltered one at that. The book is about him growing up. It's true that the guy is an annoying chump for a good deal of it, but he's not completely stupid, and the world-building and secondary characters will carry you through if you let them. By the end, it's not just that you want the guy to win, you know he can because you were there when he developed the skills he needs to do it.

In other words, it's easy to write Raiden as the Cyborg Ninja. Raiden the noobie, bishonen guy with the wiped memory? Not so much.

What's most striking about this critique, to me at least, is the examination of how Raiden interacts with the player. I keep thinking there must be a way to do this, or something equivalent, in writing, but I'm not sure how.

Inner Child

2009-05-03T15:17:00.003-04:00

I have met my inner child, and she is two.

She's concerned primarily with her own personal comfort, and doesn't notice much else. Any denial of impulse is considered punishment. So is a change in routine. She has no capacity to take the long view, and no ability to consider possible consequences of her own actions. There are sulks, tantrums, even metaphorical versions of kicking, hitting and biting. She isn't a sweet, joyful, creative little girl. She's a two-year-old.

This came out of a conversation with my aunt. Both of us, it seems, are a bit disturbed by the whole inner child thing, because when we took a close look, we didn't come up with anything creative, free-spirited or joyful. We came up with a two-year-old. Speaking as a mother, that life stage is more something to be endured than something to be enjoyed. Thankfully, with real children, it ends, but what about the inner child? Does she ever grow up?

Maybe she can, but I'm not sure how and I'm not finding much that will help. Most of the inner child stuff seems to think that the inner child is a more desirable state of mind than the outer adult, who is apparently damaged beyond repair by parental abuse, social conditioning and whatever else is the author's pet peeve.

The years between the ages of about 18 months to three are a difficult developmental stage. At this point, the child is no longer an infant, no longer something with needs so simple and immediate that they are easily and readily gratified. They've got this hunger thing down and even know how to feed themselves, but what do you do with an overwhelming desire for a big-kid bike? You can't have it, not safely, but you want it in the same way you once wanted food, and when it's withdrawn, you can't understand that you'll grow into it eventually. All you can see is that if you don't have it now, you'll never have it, ever, and the horror of it overflows into tears.

That entire life stage is marked by frustration, thwarted desire, and overwhelming emotion, and my observation when my son was that age was that it was harder on him than it was on me. He was encountering some hard truths for the first time in his life, not the least of which is that you can't have everything you want, and you can't shape the world to your liking. Eventually, they calm down about it, but the initial realization is quite a shock.

When I look inside myself for creativity and joy, it comes from my adult self. I grew up creative. I grew up making music, painting, drawing, writing, and playing Dungeons and Dragons. I also grew up with an excessive encouragement to "watch the donut, not the hole", a problem because life is full of holes. The point at the time, I think, was to get me to shut up about some things that really needed talking about, but a side effect was a life-long ability to see something positive in nearly anything.

I often wish I didn't have my inner child, since she's a bit of a saboteur. Push her too far, and she'll start pushing back, usually with the scorched earth tactics of the average toddler. Even worse, she's not always wrong. Sometimes my inner child can catch things that the donut-obsessed adult misses. Sometimes two-year-olds have a valid point.

Several years ago, an inner child-obsessed therapist admitted to me that the clients who spent the least time on the inner child exercises were the most functional. I understood this intuitively, which is why I was protesting the intense focus on the inner child, but it wasn't until I became a parent myself that I could even begin to articulate what I was seeing. Children aren't necessariliy more creative or joyful than adults, but they are immature, and immaturity isn't the most useful trait an adult can develop.

Adulthood has several perks, not the least of which is an enhanced, if still-imperfect, ability to postpone happiness and make decisions with an eye to the long term. There's also the little bit about having more control over the details of one's life.

It's in that control, however, where the inner child can mess you up. There's a reason why two-year-olds are not put in charge of the family food budget, and having one's inner child throw an internal tantrum in the grocery store can have unpleasant consequences. The problem is that she cannot and should not be ignored.

Take that grocery shopping. I have what I know is an excessively Spartan, punitive side to my personality that emerges when it comes to food. There are two primary issues: expense and weight. That part of me wants to keep the food budget manageable and the prednisone from completely taking over my body. A third, secondary, issue is the idea that my disease should be curable through diet. Making careful choices in the grocery store should kill all three birds with one stone.

Unfortunately, it often does this by getting really nasty about what goes into my grocery cart. No fresh fruit, because that's too expensive. Dried beans, however, are cheap and have a decent calorie to vitamin ratio, never mind that the effort-to-reward ratio on them is crap. To that judgmental side of me, that's the whole point. Self-denial is good, it's virtuous. I need more of it.

Too much of this kind of thinking, though, and the inner child lashes out with a package of cookies or even a cake. Self-denial may be good, but so is sugar, so take that!

My inner judge is partially right. My food budget needs to be kept reasonable, and while the prednisone is great for inflammation, too much weight isn't great for my arthritic hips and bad knees. Self-inflicted starvation isn't the answer. I need filling, fibery foods, and I also need vitamin-rich foods, to offset the nutritional havoc wreaked by the drug.

My inner child, however, is also partially right. Beans and rice isn't really healthy. It's punitive. In my case, it's a punishment for being disabled, broke, on prednisone and having to think about this stuff so carefully. There is also no medical evidence whatsoever that lupus is caused or cured by diet. My inner two-year-old is protesting against being punished for stuff she can't help, and that's not an unreasonable stance.

What do you do with a real two-year-old? You don't ignore them. You give them consistent limits, communication tools, as much positive reinforcement as possible, and a few sandbox areas of life, places where the boundaries are set up in such a fashion that they really can have everything they see. They need yesses as well as nos.

What to do with the inner two-year-old? Probably the same thing. It's true that if life ran according to the dictates of the inner judge, I'd spend a lot less on food, but other, necessary things would be missing, not the least of which is a sense of compassion. The judge runs seriously short in the hugs department. The inner child also raises some excellent questions, like where did we get the idea that the healthiest diet is the most restrictive and dull one? And where did we get the idea that eating a cookie is the equivalent of eating arsenic?

My inner child isn't creative. She's critical. She isn't joyful. She's a hedonist. She's also short on thing like patience and temper. I can easily understand how that therapist's clients might not do so well if they're spending a lot of time in that headspace.

However, strip away the negative expression, and you get some useful information, like diets are easier to stick to if they're tasty, nutritious and filling, routines are easier to stick to if they're intrinsically rewarding, and life itself is more pleasant if you learn to watch for pitfalls. The problem is digging through the tendency toward tantrums in order to reach the underlying message.

I need that message. One of the greatest strengths of my outer adult is creativity, followed only by resourcefulness. If there is solution available, she'll find it. If one doesn't exist, she'll invent it. With clear input from the inner child, she'd be a lot more effective than she is now.

It would really helpful, though, if my inner child learned to use her words!

Erotic needlework

2009-04-25T18:04:00.003-04:00

Click the title to visit the site of Orly Cogan, an artist who does the most overtly erotic needlework I've ever seen. In fact, it's the only erotic needlework I've ever seen, and it's not just erotic, it's sometimes thought-provoking.

Self-control

2009-04-25T18:00:00.000-04:00

I'm going through Cheri Huber's 30 day meditation and habit change retreat (Making a Change for Good) to break a habit I know is a disruption. One thing I can do to easily disrupt the habit is to move the computer so that it's inaccessible from my bed.

Why have I not done it already? Because I think I need to develop self-control.

Self-control has become a kind of fixation in this culture. People are obese because they lack self-control. They get pregnant unexpectedly because they lack self-control. Every social and psychological ill is laid at the feet of self-control.

Funny thing, though. It turns out that self-control has limits. According to an article in Psychology and Well-Being, our capacity for self-control isn't infinite. To quote the first two paragraphs:

As human beings, according to the authors of a recent research on the underlying brain mechanisms of self-control, we have limited resources to control ourselves, and all acts of control draw from this same source. Therefore, when using this resource in one domain, for example, keeping to a diet, we are more likely to run out of this resource in a different domain, like studying hard.

Once these resources are exhausted, our ability to control ourselves is diminished. In this depleted state, the dieter is more likely to eat chocolate, the student to watch TV.

This puts the whole self-control thing into a new light, doesn't it? The game becomes less a question of exerting self-control, and more of a question of setting priorities. Which is more important, the diet or the studying? I suppose if your goal is to be a trophy spouse, you might decide to focus on the diet, but otherwise, you'll be better off ditching the bathroom scale.

I know it looks like I'm obsessed with weight this week, but seriously, this one wasn't my example! Nor am I responsible for the bizarre collision between the Junkfood Science blog and my friend spilling her guts about her wretched excuse for a doctor. I'm just reporting.

Anyway, back to the real topic at hand, it not only made me reconsider where my computer is, but it's making me reconsider a lot of things. For the most part, I've approached problems from a self-control point of view, which might explain why certain things just don't get done. I'm already using my self-control allotment.

Which leads me to the question of how I can circumvent this. How can I get things done without overloading that circuit in my brain?

I have two thoughts. One of them is the kind of habit-related work I do during Lent or during these self-inflicted meditation retreats. In both cases, I'm trying to move certain behavior from the realm of self-control over into autopilot.

Another thing I think will be helpful is not getting medieval on myself when something slips. Again, from the source:

These results suggest notably, according to the authors, that if people, even temporarily, do not realize that they have lost control, they will be unable to stop or change their behavior on their own.

In other words, slips are normal, and perhaps the idea of putting a physical barrier between yourself and your bad habits is a good idea. I do it with my teenaged son, by putting the computer in a place where he can have no reasonable expectation of privacy. Why not do it myself, by putting the computer in a place where I have to think to reach it?

A third thing that I've heard of is what's known as inchworming. When a task looks too difficult, for any reason, break it up into smaller steps and do the steps one at a time. FlyLady's entire system is based on this. You're never supposed to clean up the whole house at once, just one area at a time on a rotating basis, even when you first start out. You don't try to wipe the slate clean, only your kitchen sink. Literally. Your only task on the first day is to shine the kitchen sink.

I'm going to make another aside here and say that I wish to heck she'd come up with an RSS feed for her reminders! I can use them, but I cannot use the mailbox clogging.

Anyway, back on topic yet again, the idea of physically removing the computer is starting to look better and better. It's kind of along the lines of the FlyLady reminders. It might look like a lack of self-control, but I'm starting to think it's really a lack of mental clutter. Removing as much as possible from the realm of self-control does the brain itself a favor by reserving resources for things that are really important.

It's interesting to look at the brain as limited. It's also interesting to look at structuring life in terms of how to work with the limitations. I have a lot of practice at this, in working with the disability. I have several systems and tweaks in place that help me conserve energy. I wonder how trying to conserve self-control will work out?

From Junkfood Science

2009-04-19T14:18:00.005-04:00

Click on the link above to read Sandy Szwarc's assessment of a recent CDC study on body type measurements as health risks.

The key points, quoted from Junkfood Science:

● The fractions of all-cause mortality associated at low levels of all the variables were similar and small, ranging from 0.3% to 2.5%.

● For intermediate levels of each body measure compared with the reference measurements, the associations with all causes of mortality were negative (-1.8% to -9%) — meaning, having higher than ideal numbers were associated with lower mortality — and the association with percentage body fat was only 0.1%.

● Finally, for the highest measurements — regardless of the anthropometric or body composition variable — there were no tenable correlations to excess mortality — they were all statistically weak, ranging from -1.7% to 1.5% compared to “ideal” numbers.

● Even comparing the different body measurements to each other “showed no significant differences between estimates of excess deaths for any pair of variables at any level.

She goes on to explain what makes up a sound, scientific study, the difference between a risk factor and a cause, and why having what society considers to be visible evidence of health in terms of body shape isn't real evidence of health.

To me, the creepiest thing is how the study doesn't appear to have gotten much press. Then again, studies like this rarely do, and I think that's far more of a health hazard than those extra five pounds. Here's why.

About a month ago, a good friend of mine went in for a routine physical. Before he even bothered to take a medical history, the doctor said two things point-blank: "You're obese." and "You're not going to like what you need to eat."

It isn't just that this is a terrible way to motivate someone to lose weight. It's that he didn't even bother to check to see whether she needed to or not. This woman's blood pressure is low, her cholesterol is normal, and her blood sugar is normal. She takes karate classes three times a week. Her diet isn't entirely sugar-free, but it's probably no worse than his, being that it's no worse than most people's and better than some.

No, he assumed that because she's an overweight, middle-aged housewife, she spends all of her time on the couch eating junk food and watching soap operas. The idea that active, homeschooling mothers who are always looking for ways to improve their family's nutrition without facing open revolt might come in a size large didn't occur to him. He let his assumptions interfere with his ability to provide medical care to his patient, not to mention letting them provide him with a license to be flagrantly nasty to another human being.

I cannot overstate my fury at this. Especially in light of this study, this insanity has got to stop, but how is it going to stop if nobody wants to publish the results of the study where normal people can read it?

And yes, I sent her a link. I also urged her to write the clinic to request a new doctor, with a detailed explaination of why as well as a copy of her lab results, and then to send a copy of the letter and her labs to the insurance company.

Shame and Fear

2009-04-18T11:41:00.003-04:00

Money is tight this month. My car needs $700+ worth of repairs, and it's not going to be easy to save it. Nonetheless, I found myself out shopping, a trip I had already put off for a week and was now in a rush to do.

Why put it off? Because when I thought about spending money, on anything at all, the voices in my head went nuts.

Now, by "voices", I don't mean alien creatures telling me about the Martian invasion of our electrical wiring. What I mean is a kind of verbal articulation of the emotional associations we have with whatever task we happen to be facing at the moment. It wasn't even voices so much as it was a sense that I was doing something wrong, and that something was spending money when I had a huge expense coming up.

The dumb thing was that by putting these purchases off, I was creating serious problems for myself. This stuff is needed this week. Some of it requires assembly, and time will be tight. This wasn't a new pair of expensive shoes, it was a friend's shower gift, my son's (modest) birthday gift, and some stuff for a class I teach, as well as a few stray groceries.

The responses to this, though, were strong, and profoundly negative in ways that are hard to sit still with and listen to. I find anger relatively easy to manage, as well as pain, not to mention grief, but some emotions are more difficult: specifically shame and fear. It says something about how they interact that it wasn't until the fear of putting the trip off any longer overrode the shame of spending money that I went out. Needless to say, it wasn't an easy trip!

I operate this way on a handful of things, and none of them go well. Even if I don't sit still long enough to let those emotions develop voices, they're incredibly unpleasant and hard to escape. I can reason my way through anger and comfort myself when I'm grieving or in pain, but shame and fear don't operate on reason, and they're impervious to comfort. They're not interested in reason or comfort. They're interested in results, dammit! Now!

They're the bullies of my internal world, now that I think about it.

Cheri Huber calls this sort of thing "the voices of self-hate", but I don't think they're really a kind of hate. I think they're a kind of defense mechanism. I think I'm trying to keep myself out of trouble. After all, I really do need to save as much as I can this month, and I also need to take care of those projects in a timely manner. Shame is trying to keep me from spending money, and fear is trying to make sure I get this stuff done. The problem is that the experience is so unpleasant that neither task is accomplished effectively. The problem is that shame and fear work, in a sort of haphazard fashion. The goals do, indeed, get met, if poorly.

Why use them, if they're so inefficient?

Shame and fear pack one heck of a punch. They feel powerful, even righteous, and we think of them as the things that keep us on the straight and narrow, mostly because we expend energy in avoiding them. This, of course, is why they have so much power. "Do what we want, and we'll go away!" is how they work. Personally, I will do almost anything to make them go away, and they know that.

There really isn't a shortcut here. At some point, we have to sit down with it all and figure out how to live with them. The impulse to make them go away is part of how they work, and while it seems dangerous and self-indulgent, even sociopathic, to go through life without shame and fear, at some point we have to ask ourselves what it is we want to do. Are we thinking about killing people? Burning things down? Doing anything genuinely destructive? No? Is the prices of a child's birthday gift or a new mother's shower gift worth this kind of headache?

I don't think so, which was what I was thinking as I got in the car to go home. I was also thinking that this was not going to be easy. Shame and fear are flexible. They can work anything into their agenda. Doing the dishes? Shame on you! That's not going to solve the problem--and, horrors, might even make it worse if a string of circumstances very similar to something that happened before happens again. Seriously, this is a set of responses that can talk me out of something as simple as doing the dishes, and not because it's being unreasonable. Doing the dishes has, in fact, caused problems in the past, which makes it a very easy target.

What it does is distract me from the fact that things like dishes are too-easy targets, that even when it was a bone of contention, it was an expression of an issue, not the issue itself. The dishes were a venue where something else was played out, issues of status and power, so while it's true that doing the dishes can become a loaded subject, it's also true that loading it is the real problem. Ironically, it was shame and fear with which they were loaded. Doing the dishes became painful--which, of course, was part of the point.

When you let them speak, give structure and shape to them, these associations can become almost comical to some people. I've heard various descriptions, ranging from frumpy old ladies to mice. Mine are not cute or funny. They're not even menacing. They're contemptuous and violent, not so much making threats as demonstrating their willingness to carry them out. Imagine being about two and facing down an armed, enraged weightlifter on cocaine. What shame and fear are best at is creating a kind of emotional paralysis in which nothing at all gets done. They smother the willingness to take risks in terror.

I still have to listen, though, because ignoring them doesn't make them go away. It just makes them louder.

I had a dream recently about thing beyond my control. Some of them were benign and even necessary, like the changes in my body from the prednisone. Yes, I look and feel weird to myself, but that drug is what keeps me on my feet and typing. In the grand scheme of things, the side effects are the least of my problems, even if they disfiguring. I also dreamed that a father I loved very much was dying of malicious neglect engineered by people who wanted his money, and nobody could stop it.

It wasn't a nightmare. Terrible things happen in this world, things that fear and shame can do nothing about, and that's the biggest lie they tell, that they're powerful and influential, that they are the only way to get people to behave in a civilized manner. The speak as if "fearless" and "shameless" are bad words because people are bad, and that being open to fear and shame will make you better than others.

The truth is that shame and fear are the tools of tyrants. It might be an external tyrant, like Adolph Hitler, or an internal one, like that sinking feeling you get when you blow your budget. It doesn't matter. Adolph Hitler only made Germany's problems worse, on a hitherto unimaginable scale, and feeling guilty about blowing your budget on a $20 birthday gift for a child doesn't make you virtuous. It makes you look like a stingy jerk, which, of course, triggers another round of shame. How dare you begrudge a child such a small thing! How dare you! And on and on it goes, with no foreseeable end.

I still have to listen to them, though, because ignoring them doesn't make them go away. I know because I've tried. The only thing I've come up with that works is to learn to live with them, not in obedience but in acceptance, and in such a way that they don't have any control over my behavior.

Easier said than done, I know.

From Gretchen Rubin's Blog

2009-04-14T16:51:00.002-04:00

Click the title of this post to read Gretchen Rubin's interview with Kevin Roose.

Some highlights:

What’s something you know now about happiness that you didn’t know when you were 18 years old?
Well, it wasn't that long ago – I'm only 21 now – but I think one of my major realizations has been that my happiness doesn't always have to depend on how busy I am. It used to be that I'd think of happiness as a timed goal – as in, "After I finish my manuscript, I'll be able to relax," or "When midterms are over, I'll finally get to have fun." But recently, I've been able to be happy even in the most hectic times, simply by prioritizing and taking breaks to do things I enjoy.

***

I'm a chronic perfectionist, so writing and re-writing my book was a fairly unhappy process at times. I'd spend an hour writing a paragraph, decide I hated it, and spend another hour rewriting it, only to realize later that it had been better the first time around. It was tough, but I eventually learned to silence my inner editor and allow myself to work even when I knew I wasn't feeling up to the task. Once, I put a post-it note above my computer that said, "Whatever It Is, Write Through It." Reading it was like getting a halftime pep talk from a football coach, but the nerdy version.

***

If you’re feeling blue, how do you give yourself a happiness boost? Or, like a “comfort food,” do you have a comfort activity? (mine is reading children’s books).

Three words: Wii Mario Kart. I know this might cement my status as an over-stimulated member of the Millennial generation, but what can I say? Playing video games makes me happy. Between releasing my book and keeping up with my schoolwork, my brain's circuits are on 24-hour overload. Being able to zone out, forget about work, and guide an animated mushroom around a racetrack filled with oversized Venus Fly Traps is about as relaxing as it gets.

Earning my Keep

2009-04-12T14:55:00.003-04:00

Lent is over. I can officially write again.

Truth is, I backslid a bit, but instead of going all self-punishment on it, I tried to pay attention to what was happening as I did it.

I had a lot to pay attention to, including some things I've taken for granted for a long time, one of which is guilt.

Part of it is living for so long on public assistance. My brief stints off it have been...well...brief, and as I get older, the odds of that happening again are slim. I might still get carded trying to buy beer (which, as someone explained to me, means I look under 35 to most people), but by body is actually significantly older than it should be. It has lupus arthritis, osteoarthritis, bursitis, bone spurs, neurological problems and internal organ issues as well. I'm probably a good twenty years older than my chronological age.

So ist es am Leben! Or, c'est la vie. However you prefer to say it.

St. Bernadette had a good way of deflecting this kind of criticism. She said that being sick was her work, and she had a good point. Whatever grousing people might do about people like me, none of them would trade places. Disability is no free ride.

Underneath that, though, is a sense that one's keep must always be earned, that we must be economically productive. I worked harder as a kid than most kids do today, doing things like bringing in hay, putting up food, cleaning the chicken coop and general farm labor, in part, I suspect, out of an old notion that a child's labor was a parental asset. It's something I have tried to reject in several ways, most notably my own parenting, and in doing so, I forgot that rejection often gives a thing strength. This notion has never left me, only changed ground. I can cut my kid some slack, but not myself, and I have squandered energy in various way in an attempt to get off disability for once and for all.

I say squandered, because over Lent, I've realized a few things and one is that writers need their day jobs. We need something to draw on, something to work with, or we run the risk of getting too lost in our own heads. As I can't get a day job, I'm going to put that energy into making the household run more smoothly, which in turn will make it run more frugally. There's a lot of slop built into the system, and most of it has to do with the fact that there's an element of guilt to it. The chronically ill aren't supposed to live well. An orderly household--as distinct from a spotless one!--is a luxury I'm not supposed to have access to.

I've also realized that one of the problems I've had with writing in the past few years is that I met my realistic goals and came to terms with the unrealistic ones. I went into writing with some specific notions in mind about what I wanted to accomplish. In the wake of those successes and failures, I was left with little reason to write.

What about writing for its own sake? This goes back to the notion of earning my keep: that hadn't seriously occurred to me. The impulse is certainly there, but the idea of doing something just to do it seemed like a waste of time, especially in light of my financial situation. Writing for the sake of writing was for other people, not for me.

So now what? I have an idea of how I'd like my house to run, and I've done some things over Lent to get that moving. I have the freezer, the food co-op, the baby plants, and one of the guitars on a stand where it's easily accessible. I have a food processor, too, which I've needed for years but not had space for. The last thing I need is a better double boiler.

I also have story ideas. I don't see them as being best-sellers, but as Nobilis pointed out, a best-selling novel would be a disaster for me. Even a contract with a traditional publisher would cause far more problems than it would solve. The best use of my time involves staying somewhat under the radar, which shouldn't be hard given that I'm very much a niche writer. Writing won't get me off SSD, but it can and does supplement it without creating problems. I even have a line on a possible return to music, although I'm feeling woefully inadequate to the task right now. We'll see!

The thing about Easter is that it's a reminder of the cycle of death and resurrection that has been a recurrent theme in human psychology long before people started telling stories about an empty cross. We long for the death of certain parts of ourselves, and our own rebirth as better people. That's why I like this season better than Christmas, and why Easter is more of a new year to me than New Year's Day.

The death this year, or at least the attempt, was the death of the impulse to change. It seems that I can't. I can learn new skills and adapt to new situations, but I cannot change, and I wonder why I keep thinking I should. Was a mistake made when I was born? Or is it okay to be exactly who and what I am?

The plan to divide my time consciously between the household, my child and writing seems obscenely self-indulgent, and yet I think the previous attitude was worse in terms of outcome. It was all about my own, personal power to change the world. And that can't be done. Every time someone has enough political power to start enacting their own agenda, things get ugly fast.

It's something I intend to keep in mind in the coming year, that my personal vision of how the world should be will never be what the world is, nor should it. The world in which I have a real job doesn't exist, because a world in which autoimmune disease doesn't exist isn't real. As far as what's fair is concerned, again, I don't think anyone who would pick at my lifestyle is willing to have my life. Wanna trade your sucky job for my sucky health? Thought not!

I think also that we have an obligation to do whatever it is we can, even if it's not what we think we're supposed to do, and we cannot create the outcome of our actions. That's why every spiritual tradition I know anything about says the same thing: focus on the most compassionate act possible in the present moment. They don't say to engineer every consequence of every action.

In therapy, I learned to think in terms of what I would have been had everything not happened as it did, to think of some part of myself as an untouched inner child. At this point, I'm considering what can happen given everything that has come before. What happens if I just follow the path in front of me, step by step, instead of trying to create the future?

We're in the grip of a cult of control. That's the only way I know to put it. We've got this collective conviction that we and we alone are responsible for our fate, and if something goes wrong, then we did something wrong. As applied to me, this has come in the form of criticisms of everything from my diet to my attitude. Lupus isn't a malfuction in a complex physical system. It's a Karmic punishment, a way of being lazy, a manifestation of some inner problem.

At first, I liked that approach because it gave me hope that someday, if I could press the right button, I'd be free of it. I reject that now. The idea that the only thing standing between us and heaven on earth is us, and that if we were just good enough we could personally make it happen, is absurd.

So is that sentence, but it's the best I could do!

No, there's a reason why heaven happens only when we die. It's not possible here. There are too many moving parts in life, and it isn't just that we can only control ourselves, it's that we can't have total control over any of it. No amount of wishful thinking will turn me into an airline pilot.

There's a lot of self-punishment built into my life. It usually kicks in when things seem a bit too comfortable or happy. It's not that I forget to do things or don't want to, it's that I stop seeing the point. Unfortunately, as anyone who has ever owned a car can tell you, it's easier and cheaper to maintain a system than it is to do damage control. It does its job, though. Every time I start getting some kind of system going, something comes in and says, "No. You're on SSD. You don't get that." Then things fall apart, I have to straighten them out and the cycle begins all over again.

But what am I punishing myself for? Being sick? Or being unable to wish myself well, whether through therapy, meditation, diet and exercise or medical treatment?

Still, it's very hard to drop a behavior that you or others label a "Good Person Behavior", and I tend to think I need to atone for the crime of being unable to earn my keep. This is especially true when I operate within a system that's designed to keep me at a certain level. The income rules goverining SSD couldn't do a better job of keeping the disabled unemployed if they tried, and one of the first things I thought at the time was that it was a form of punishment. Okay, fine, you think you can't work? Live in poverty for a while! That'll teach you! And I've just never learned my lesson, so I need to go stand in the corner with the dunce cap on until it sinks in.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to make this a happiness blog, not for people who have had it all and found it wanting, but for people who have never had a chance. Like me. And coming out of Lent, I'd like to say this: there is no inner child who was untouched by everything. There is only one child, and she grew up with all of it, lived through all of it, experienced everything that was done to her and learned from it. Some of the things she learned continue to be useful. Other things, not so much, but there is no shortcut to a place where it didn't happen and no one that it didn't happen to who is still me.

So if you can't somehow make it all go away, what do you do?

Begin where you are. Do what you can. The idea that this is inadequate causes far more problems than it solves.