What's In Your Box-Trolley?

Okay, so guys. You know that one friend you have? The one whose life would be five million percent better if they would just listen to you and [dump that worthless mofo / see a therapist / try the diet or program that changed your life / etc]?

Let me be that friend for a moment. And let me confess: I don't mean to be obstinate or ungrateful. It's just that even if your advice or solution is absolutely correct, I can't make the leap from where I am to where you want me to go. The gap is too big, and I can't see the other side from here.

So if you really, really, super-actually want to help me (your hapless hypothetical friend), here is what you can do: create a space where I can get completely outside this mess of mine, even if only for a day or two - a place where I can rest, catch my breath, and clear my mind. You see my problem so clearly, because you're *outside* it. If you love me, please help me get outside of it too - and then listen to me when I tell you what's really going on in there.

Kathryn McClatchy did exactly that for me this weekend, and it has remade me. I have known for YEARS that I needed help - delegation skills, an assistant, etc. - but have never made any meaningful progress in getting things off my plate. So finally, in a breakdown moment of frustration and despair, I booked her for a two-day intervention at a little cabin in Granbury... and oh my gouda.

She let me dump my entire to-do list in her lap, and then patiently sorted through it with me. She didn't tell me that I had to use a certain program or hire a certain person. She didn't arrive with a pre-fab holy-grail solution in mind. She just asked every good question in the book, and helped me build a system around the brain and workstyle and habits I already have. And I have never felt so helped or so overwhelmingly *heard*.

This here is a photo I took while I was walking the neighborhood around the cabin, and I hope it will serve as a helpful reminder: y'all, build your system to accommodate your nature, and not the other way around.

And if you could use some help with that, holler. I know just the lady you need to talk to.

Failing and Flailing

Real question: is computer ADHD a thing? Because I feel like a really pretty almost-together person in real life, and then as soon as I open up my laptop to do some work, everything turns into a giant digital shitblizzard.

What was I supposed to be doing? Which of these emails do I answer first? (Which of these inboxes do I even look at first?) Oh damn it, that interview was due a week ago... and there are all these texts... and I forgot to reply to that nice message because Facebook Messenger already marked it as read (I HATE that). And maybe I should just make like I never even got those last ten emails, because they're a month old already and I feel so guilty.

I hate it, y'all. I hate doing bad. I hate feeling bad. Somebody please tell me how to stop failing at pixels. Or at least tell me I'm not the only one.

A Jetlagged Confession

Things I have done in the past 72 hours:

--taken a shower at a train station (it was lovely, BTW)
--slept on the floor of LaGuardia Airport (it was the opposite of lovely)
--kicked off my first class on LitReactor
--had a collective two-day enthusigasm with 50 of my new best friends at GIFCon - Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations
--enjoyed the best little writers’ conference in Texas, courtesy of the North East Texas Writers' Organization
--signed my first gas station autograph

Things I have not done in the past 72 hours:
--literally any of the things I was supposed to do.

I HATE to admit this, but I need help, y’all. I don’t want to give up the globetrotting I love so much, but I also can’t keep disappointing the people who are waiting on me. (Or being constantly either gone or exhausted, which isn’t fair to that very good man of mine.)

So here is my ask, friendly friends: do we know anybody I might could hire to ride herd on my various email inboxes? It’d be a part-time gig, natch. I would really love to work with somebody you know and trust, who’s done the admin thing before and could maybe train me on how to delegate things. I have never wanted to be one of those people who has *people*, but something’s gotta give.

The Happy Human Game

Well, 2017 is officially in the bag, which means my time spreadsheet for the year is all finished. Final count: average 66 hours worked per week for the past year. Highest was 96.5 hours in one week (the Tornado Alley Tour) and the lowest was 41.5 (the week before Thanksgiving, for some reason).
Y’all, I am not proud of that. I spent a whole lot of that time being wired to the moon and miserable, and not following through on promises I made to people I really care about. I AM proud of the things I accomplished in that time (more on that in the next couple of days) – but I do not want to die of stress and fat. 

So I’m going to start doing things differently – and maybe this will be useful for some of you guys too. This year, instead of making resolutions, I made a new spreadsheet. I’m calling it my Happy Human game, since that's what I'm trying to become. I listed all the stuff I want to make a habit of in 2018, and assigned each one a points value. There’s 365 points possible – funny how that worked out – and for January, I want to see if I can get 50 points a day. I’ll see about ratcheting that up to 100 in February if it goes well, and maybe tinker with point values as certain things get easier.

Anyway, if you want to try making your own Happy Human game, you can download mine and mess with it. (Please do change the entries around; the things there are the things I personally tend to struggle with, and I'm sure yours will be different.) Here is the link!

You might also like to check out Habitica, if this kind of thing sounds appealing - it's a similar idea, but rendered as an actual, playable game, and I've heard good things about it.

Regardless: good luck out there, guys. The year won't stay pristine for long, but I've loved seeing all the can-do-itude on my feed today, and I am so looking forward to meeting your bad-ass future-self!

Sharing the Work

Y'all. Realness. It is 9:15AM on January 1st, and I am used UP. I've had about twelve hours of sleep in the past three days, I'm still all raw and leaky from going serotonin supersaiyan yesterday, and there is a toxic, pit-of-my-stomach sickening amount of work waiting for me. I seriously do not know how it is all going to get done.

But if you are like me, and if today feels less like a fresh start than a really messy middle - take heart, y'all. Have courage, and some protein. Today is traditionally about resolving to do things better and differently, to make positive changes – but maybe it would also be healthy to make it a day of forgiving yourself and letting go of some old ambitions that don't fit right now.
Maybe you are not the person who will sit down and make that perfect Pinterest-worthy scrapbook of family memories. Wouldn't it feel good to put that project back in the water and let it float on downstream - give someone else a chance to find it and pick it up? Would it be enough to keep on taking the pictures, without feeling obliged to curate and arrange them?

Maybe you are not currently in a place to start a fantastic new eating plan and take up a gym habit, even though you really want to capture the traditional New Year's momentum to start getting down to a healthy weight. Would it be okay to return that vision to the ocean of possibilities and be ready to receive it again when it washes back up on shore? Is there a smaller, more sustainable way you can start doing a daily kindness for your body in the meantime?

Donald Maass said a really excellent thing at the Writer Unboxed conference I attended in November. It was the morning after the election, and a lot of us were feeling terribly raw and anxious. He said, "We have work to do – all of us. And we will do that work."

I've thought about that a lot in the past two months. And to me the operative word is "we". Sometimes it feels like we are stuffing our shirts with these work-stones, these task-eggs, until we're so overfull that two fall out for every one we bend over to pick up. We are the first and often only person we delegate to. We see a thing that needs to be done and automatically stoop to undertake it, without necessarily asking whether we are really the best person for the job. We take so much on ourselves, because we either don't trust or can't bring ourselves to impose upon the people around us. We hoard the eggs until they rot, not trusting our fellow-humans to keep from trampling them otherwise.

And I think we would be a whole lot happier if we got better at choosing and sorting our eggs. Some to keep and incubate ourselves - some to give away or trade with a neighbor - some to put back down on the ground and walk away from, trusting their place in the order of creation.

So before I load my nest with one more "I really seriously have to", I hereby resolve to ask:
1. Is this really, objectively a thing that needs to be done? Who will be hurt if it isn't done?
2. Am I the best person to do it? Who is better-equipped to tackle this?
3. Do I need to do it right now? What is the consequence if I put this away and re-examine it next week, next month, next year?

I would really like to get better at answering those questions - because if I weren't so busy trying to keep my own eggs from dropping or spoiling, I would have more time to help other people hatch theirs. That would free them up to help me and others too. We might expend just as much effort as we did before - but we could do it so much more joyfully. We could enjoy each other's company during the work we do together, and relish the special tasks we dive into alone.

The man is right, y'all. We have WORK to do. But more importantly, WE have work to do.

So if you've got as dauntingly long a row to hoe as we do, please make it your resolution to speak up: a mule and a plow can do wonderful things together – but first you have to get them the same side of the fence.

A Different Kind of Call Goes Out

Okay, so you know the “this is my 2AM phone call” post from a few months back?

This is not that. This is not an emergency or a crisis or a disaster. This is a state-of-my-union address, and... let’s say a casting call.

Today is June 27th. Six months exactly until Dreams of the Eaten comes out. And the almost-perfect halfway point of 2016.

This is how I've spent my time this year, in hours.

I’ve worked hard this year, and with good results. So far, I have:

1. Started a “secret” coalition of DFW-area writers groups. We have seventeen in the fold so far, with more still to add – and we are beginning to do great things.
2. Begun a new program for the DFW Writers Workshop, called the Writers Bloc – a fledgling once-per-month education and social group, free and open to the public. It’s still a work in progress, but we’ve had great response so far.
3. Taught at my first paid gig – a writers retreat – and been invited to another one (which is going to be awesome - you should come!)
4. Led a three-month "speakers workshop" to prepare new instructors to teach at DFWcon 2016 - which is always one of the highlights of my year
5. Started teaching for the Writers Path at SMU here in Dallas. I’m having such a good time – this is one of my proudest professional accomplishments to date.
6. Helped Kristen stay in her house. (Actually, you-all have done that – I’m just banging the gong)
7. Initiated a partnership with the Dallas County Community College District - too early and still too tentative to call a win, but one that has the potential to change the entire DFW literary scene
8. Started teaching my own one-day writing workshops – irregularly, but to great enthusiasm
9. Formed a crew of convention ambassadors from the DFW Writers Workshop – a bad-ass panelist posse if there ever was one
10. Finished the edits for Dreams of the Eaten... almost.

And I haven't even gotten rolling yet. I haven't even started putting together the fan-swag and writer-merch I want to sell - still want to create a booth-sharing con-going author-coalition - am determined to get this "Page it Forward" free first chapters project off the ground.

You notice, though, how many of those list items up there start with the word “started,” “begun”, etc. – and the one “finished” thing isn’t even finished yet.

And what I’ve learned in the first half of 2016 is that I’m not going to make it through the second if I keep this up. I’m pushing hard because these are things I want to do for a living – things I want to spend my life doing. And if I’m going to stay in the game for the next 30 or 40 or 50 years (and I plan to!), I need my health. My friends. My marriage. All of which have been back-burnered for months now – none of which can afford to stay there.

This is not my to-do list.
This is one of my ten to-do lists.

But the other thing I learned, while we were making the big push for Kristen, is that it's not always a selfish thing to ask for help. Sometimes it's the hardest, bravest, kindest, most generous thing you can do - for yourself and for the people you're asking.

So this is me, taking the plunge, asking for help. Here in approximate order of urgency are the things I need.

1. A digital me. A carnival barker – promoter – cyber-bard – whatever you want to call it. I am an organizer, teacher, motivator, and thoroughly analog human. I am not a promoter or an e-socializer. I need someone who can tweet, face, blog, and email so that the rest of the world can find out about these great deeds-in-progress. Maybe two someones (one for my books, and one for my writer-doings). And I’m happy to pay for that, but I don’t want to dig up some rando out of the phone book. I would much rather work with somebody who’s already drunk the Kool-Aid – who’s as excited about this stuff as I am. (You can buy a person’s time, y’all, but enthusiasm is a priceless, unsellable treasure.)
   
   
2. Book reviews. The kind you write yourself, on Amazon and Goodreads, and the kind book bloggers write on their websites. This is the one kind of promotion I can't (ethically) buy or barter for myself. Getting Sixes past the 50-review mark on Amazon would be terrific. Getting Medicine to 25 would be fantastic. And getting *any* book blogger of size to pick up this series would be unutterably wonderful.
   



Stockpiling pre-orders for this one would be good too.

3. Speaking opportunities. I want to be on your podcast, at your conference, in your bookstore. Anything that involves speaking out loud, in real time (in person or online) is 100% my jam - and travel and expense may not be the barriers you think they are. Hit me up. Connect me. We’ll figure it out.
   
4. Press. Publicity. Especially the kind that doesn't involve me having to sit down and gin up a 1,000-word blog post on my own initiative. (I can do those. I will do those - especially if your name is the Mary Sue, io9, John Scalzi, or Cracked. But they take a lot out of me, and I don't have the juice to do guest posts on the regular anymore.) If you can do the chronicling, I will provide all the insightful, hilarious, Textacular content you can handle.
   



To date, I have not been on TV. But I've definitely been near TV.

5. An artist - one who has enjoyed my books. Again, I will happily pay for time and talent - but it would be really great to have enthusiasm come pre-installed.
   
6. Website help - especially someone who knows their way around a shopping cart. (And Shawn, Jonathan: thank you so much for putting yourselves forward for the Droughtworld website. I'm absolutely going to take you up on it. This bat-signal is for the events/workshops side of things.)
   
7. Classroom/workshop spaces in DFW. They need to be suitable for video presentations (I can provide all the A/V equipment), ideally able to seat up to 25, available nights and weekends, and - here is the critical part - okay with me accepting money on the premises. I'm happy to give a percentage of what I make - so if you have an office or big back room that's going unused after-hours and want to see if we can help each other out, please hit me up.
   
8. An A/V pro in DFW. Someone we can hire to help us to create professional-quality recordings of our Writers Bloc classes (one Saturday a month in Irving.)

Yeah, I know - it's a hell of a list. And the delicious irony of all this communal ruckus-raising I've been doing over the past couple years is that I've surrounded myself with people who are as driven as I am - who are stretching themselves to the max to chase their own dreams. It makes for a fantastic friends-circle, but doesn't leave any of us with much room to help each other out.

So for all of you wonderful people who would walk through fire and brimstone for me if only you could find five spare minutes to fire up the coals - don't worry. And don't let your chronic altruism sucker you into overcommitting yourself. I need your friendship more than anything on this list - and in that, you've already given me a great gift.

Including but not limited to the gift of shenanigans.

But if you do see something here that gets your inner overachiever all fired up ("Ooh! Me! Pick me!"), and you genuinely do have the bandwidth for it - please let me know. Here or email (tex at thetexfiles.com) or smoke signals or a brick through my front window. And when you do, let me know how this will fit into your bigger picture - because so often we can do for each other what we can't do for ourselves, and I would love to be part of your success, too.


My name is Alexander Hamilton
And there’s a million things I haven’t done
But just you wait - just you wait...

Running Up the Down Escalator

All I can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was the first night of DFWcon, and there was nothing but a downward escalator standing between me and the party upstairs. Who's going to let a little workout get between them and cake?

Here's a little-known fact about escalators, though: they don't stand still. And when you get about three-quarters of the way up and your thighs catch wise to your cardio-treachery, your oxygen-starved brain starts thinking, "hey, that's all right - I'll just rest for a second."

And that's when true cost of your little escalark becomes clear.

It wasn't pretty, but I made it. #noregrets

That's about where I am these days. I've been charging hard up the stairs for a couple months now, and I'm so ruinously tired - but I'm not there yet, and there's no quitting without losing the progress I've made so far.

I got Kristen's Patreon launched, but still need to find another $450/month to cover her bases.

I did DFWcon - maybe better to say that DFWcon did me - but still need to turn that momentum into finally, actually running my own classes.

I got the Writers Bloc started (with a whole lot of help from my partner in organizational crime), but still need to find it a permanent home, and a new set of speakers for the summer.

I turned in Dreams of the Eaten, but still need to revise it, clean it up, and add the various bells and whistles (map, index, etc) before the end of the month.

I made this great plan to promote it when it comes out at Christmas, but none of that is going to mean bupkis if I don't actually start submitting, applying, and travel-planning pronto.

(And if you're wondering what in the hell is the Writers Bloc, or since when Eaten got a release date, that is because I am doing a lousy job of promoting any of this.)

And man, you guys. I am just so tired. It's mostly happy-tired, of course. None of these projects are disasters or tragedies; I threw myself at all of them voluntarily, and so far they're all bearing fruit.

I just miss the other parts of life. Cooking and going for walks and catching up with my friends. Doing things with the Dude. Sleeping through the night. Some things really are backsliding down the escalator - diet, physical therapy, all that good stuff - and I really need to pick them back up before they hit bottom.

So I'm sitting here at 4:30 on a Sunday morning, eating a reheated cheeseburger and writing this tiny little testament to the overclocked life. No, it's not healthy. No, it's not long-term sustainable. But there's party-cake waiting upstairs, and damn it, I'm going to get me some. Onward and upward, y'all.

You don't find your calling. You fight for it.

Preaching in the Dark - a DFWcon Epiphany

Ah, you guys. What can I say about DFWcon that I haven't already said?  It's the highlight of my year, the filling of my well, the thing that convinces me that yes, I can and should do all those other, scarier things.

But here is a thought that might be relevant to you, whether or not you went to the conference, whether or not you're even a writer.

See, I did a great class with Laura Maisano on Saturday, called Prose P90X.  It went swimmingly - we filled up the whole room, and got loads of compliments. We were a great team!

Look at all those shining faces!

But then I had to rush off to do a solo class, The Comma Sutra, in a different part of the building.  It was on the main stage of the theater - big lights, black curtains, the whole nine yards.  I was flattered they booked me there - obviously the Powers That Be expected that I could fill a significant chunk of the seats.

Here's the thing, though: because the class started exactly when extra pitch sessions went on sale, I didn't get nearly that kind of turnout.  When it came time to start, there were only maybe twenty people scattered through that huge, cavernous room.  More than that, the bright stage lights meant I couldn't see them, and the distance meant that unless they hollered right at me, I couldn't hear them either.  It felt like teaching a class at the bottom of an empty swimming pool at midnight.

Meanwhile, photographic evidence suggests that it LOOKED
like some kind of xenopornographic TED talk.
(Big thanks to Amber Draeger for the photos!)

That was a really hard thing.  My entire schtick relies on being able to see people's faces, to hear when they laugh and notice when they're confused or annoyed or distracted.  (This is one reason I'm comparatively crap at social media - my super-empathy powers don't work when there's an Internet between your face and mine.)  And let me tell you - it is SUPER awkward telling grammatically-instructive alien sex jokes when all you hear is silence.

But I kept at it, and kept soliciting questions, and started getting substantial answers, so I knew there were at least a few people who were out there and wanted to talk to me. By the time we finished, it had stopped being a sermon and become a true discussion, which is what I love best.

Well, imagine my surprise when I finished and stepped aside, and saw that the room had filled up.  People must have been trickling in during that hour, coming in ones and twos as they finished buying their extra pitch sessions and headed up to catch the class.  I don't know how many were there at the end, but I got over sixty names on my email sheets - and that's just the ones who cared enough to stand in line and sign up to get the PDF slides.

Image blurred to protect their identities.

And of course, the happy denouement: I got some great compliments on the class, and found wonderful mentions of it on Twitter. I even got this amazing email, which has been lighting up my life for three days straight now:

I'm sorry, but this morning I didn't know who you were.

Then you showed up on a panel and made some great comments.

Then I saw you at lunch and you were having SUCH a great time.

So when I checked my after-lunch class selections and saw your name, I altered my initial choice to take in P90X.

Wow... Great information, delivered fast and entertainingly.

So here I am in the balcony, listening to Comma Sutra. (Excellent!) But mostly I'm wondering: who the Hell are you and where did you come from? You're a freak of nature, and we need more.

Thanks for sharing yourself. You make it a better - and smarter - world.

And thanks for making my conference!

And maybe this doesn't make for a riveting anecdote, but like... that hour summed up my entire year to date.  I've spent so much time out and about over the past few months, striving like the dickens to be seen and get known. It's fun and I genuinely love doing it - being out in the real world with real people lights me up like nothing else! - but there are so many nights when I flop into a Motel 6 bed, utterly spent, and stare up into the darkness wondering what the hell I'm playing at. When you're promoting yourself, you're not really helping other people, and not really creating anything new, either - you're just trying to shine a spotlight on something you've already done, which people may or may not even notice, let alone care about. And most of the time, you can't tell if it's working.

And I know that's not just me, and not just book-promotion. Every facet of writing is like that sometimes. Shoot, LIFE is like that sometimes.  My mom said that about raising kids - you know, how you spend your whole entire day exhausting yourself, and at the end of it, you can't see that you've accomplished anything, because the house and the kids and your life look exactly like they did when you got up that morning.  My dad would say the same thing about his job, too: how he was so happy to mow the lawn on the weekend, because it was a measurable thing with a definable, visible, guaranteed result - not at all like the nebulous phone calls and vague paper-pushing that made up the rest of the week.

The red days are my out-of-town days - which are usually interspersed with oh-god-I'm-wasting-my-life nights.

So I guess what I'm saying, to myself as much as to you-all, is that at some point, we're all just preaching in the dark. It's a hard thing to do - to stick to your guns, to resist the urge to stop and check for approval, to trust that what you're doing is noticed and needed (or will be), even when nobody is there to tell you so.  It requires you to be truly self-sustaining, which is so, so much harder than it sounds.

But I hope you'll keep at it, whatever 'it' may be - and I believe that if you do it well enough, for long enough, you will eventually start getting those pingbacks, seeing the fruits of your labor.  Maybe you'll fill up the metaphorical room, and maybe you won't - but statistically speaking, there is almost-certainly somebody out there who's waiting to hear EXACTLY what you have to say... and you can't know that until and unless you have the courage to stay the course and say it.

All right - sermon over.  Go forth and preach, y'all - and if you have time, holler some encouragement to the people in your life who are doing likewise. Yours might be the only voice they can hear.

Three Tips For Using Social Media to Achieve Your Dreams and Destroy Your Enemies

Y'know, being sociable is tough stuff when you're a writer, not least because we hear so many mixed messages. For example,

• Keep a presence on Twitter, Facebook, etc. – but don't spam, and don't expect them to sell books.
• Be real and honest – but don't be negative, political, or confrontational.
• Build your platform (you're nothing without your platform!) – but really you should focus on writing the next book.

And needless to say, some of us are more peppy and amiable than others.  As my legendary literary lifemate "Evil" Dan Bensen says,

"I feel like the girl in Glee who's crying in the corner. 'I just want to tell everyone how stupid they are. Why do they hate me?'"

But until you can execute your cunning master-plan to crush the New World Order under your jack-booted heel, you probably will have to get along and play nice... for now.  So here are a few best practices we've come up with between us.

This is what we call "phase two."

1. Measure Your Efforts

You know, back when I was doing Biggest-Loser boot camp, they used to harass us about showing up for monthly fitness tests.  The refrain was, "If you don't measure what you're doing, you are watering a telephone pole and hoping it will grow."

Easy to do for sit-ups and mile times!  But for writing, it's one of the most simple-yet-incredibly-difficult things about the whole endeavor.  You wrote five blog posts this month – but are they any good?  You have 2,000 Twitter followers – but what does that actually get you?  Your website got 300 hits today – but were any of them from actual humans?

So maybe we have to look beyond the easy pre-packaged measurements we're given by online accounts, and look for hidden metrics.  When you tweet about some new thing on your website, how much of a traffic bump do you get?  How many people reply or retweet?  Is it more at certain times of day, or when you include an image? 

Of course, not all measuring is good measuring. You could count every crossed T and dotted I in your manuscript without it having a lick of relevance .  Which is why it's so important to...

2.  Know What You're After

As in, what do you expect to get out of what you're doing?

For example, reading out loud for 15 minutes each week, to a group of ten different randomly-sorted people each time, is not a great way for me to get holistic feedback on my novel-length work.  But I still get immense value out of reading at the DFW Writers Workshop, because I meet SO many great writers there, a few of which become my dedicated critique partners and close friends.

And, as Dan says about doing likewise on online forums,

"There's some real utility out of the stuff people have critiqued. And it has stirred my idea-pot pretty reliably (one big conversation=one interesting new idea). I also think (hope) I'm priming the pump and getting some good karma for when I really need help. But managing Tumblr/Twitter/et al is time-consuming and it generates ZERO visits to my webpage. I guess I just need to come to terms with that and accept that I'm doing research and making contacts, not managing fans."

Or to put it another way: you can't know the value of your efforts without measuring them in some way, and you can't know how to measure them until you know specifically what you're trying to achieve.

3. Double-Dip Shamelessly

Look, you're a busy budding supervillain. You don't have time to putz around.  And you already know that great writing is all about 'and'.  That scene needs to further the plot AND explain backstory.  The dialogue needs to convey information AND reveal character.  The description should give the reader a sense of place AND say something about the person describing it.

It's the same thing for your online presence.  The Facebook discussion you sunk an hour into - could you screencap or paraphrase it for Tumblr?  The pictures you took for your novel research - could some of them go on Pinterest or Instagram?  The epic email exchange you had with your evil counterpart - would that make a good double-blog post?

Well, this half of it sure was fun!  Head over to Dan's The Kingdoms of Evil to complete your journey to the Dark Side enlightenment!


Just because I hate everybody doesn't mean they have to hate me too.

How Not to Finish

You guys.  I seriously have no idea about this blog.  Has it turned into some kind of bi-monthly zen koan with pony pictures, now?  Should I rename it from "The Tex Files" to "Tex's Pithy Navelgazing Emo Jams?"  I don't know.  TAKE WHAT I GIVE YOU AND LIKE IT.

Okay, but seriously.  We're still less than a week past New Year's, which means y'all are all probably still freshly resolved.  Not gonna eat the donuts!  Not gonna smoke the smokes!  Not gonna finish things!

Yeah, you heard me.  See, it's like this: I spent the weekend having a nice little staycation at an Undisclosed Location, and while I was there, I did PHENOMENAL amounts of nothing.  Let me tell you, it was a rigorous, back-breaking regimen of zilch, nada, and bupkis.

Not to be confused with Blanko, Nawt, and Bupkus, et al.

Anyway, but there was a puzzle.  I did a puzzle.  Well, sort of.  It was one of those things that sounded SO FUN in my head, and I was so excited to finally do something *completely* self-indulgent and unproductive, and it was, and I did!  For about an hour, and then the next day for a couple of hours, and then a couple more.  At the end of five hours, this is all I had:

No, you don't get to see the picture. My Lisa Frank fetish is mine alone.

I know what you're thinking: "Oh Christ, please, not a puzzle metaphor." 

Nothing like that, I promise (cuz if you want heavy-handed literary analogies, you'll have to buy my books).  It could just as easily have been a ship in a bottle or a stained glass painting or a macrame dickey.  Anyway, I started to realize that finishing was going to take way longer than I thought.  And I was only there for the weekend.  And there was no way I was going to get it all done without turning idle fun into serious work, and how silly would that have been?

But here's the thing: the prospect of crumbling it up and putting it away was seriously, irrationally daunting.  Maybe this is only because - while I am a master-class partier, socializer, and all-purpose enjoyer of things - I am horribly out of practice at solitary and deliberate fun-having.  Maybe this next bit will be as massively obvious to you as... as a massively obvious thing.  I hope it is!

But I doubt I'm the only one who's forgotten how not to finish things.  And it occurs to me that all our moral programming - well, all of mine, anyway - has been geared towards Achievement, Accomplishment, Commitment.  Clean your plate.  Finish what you start.  Go the extra mile.  Just do it.  Growing up, we are taught that the worst thing you can be is a quitter.  Look, even the Tick says so, and he's basically the soul of America:

Seriously, don't.

And I guess it's good that we get the message, because you sure do need that grit and git'r done to learn what hard work and accomplishments feel like, and grow a foundation for your self-esteem, and become a self-motivated person and all of that. 

But like... you know, as we grow up and take on heavier loads - hella college, serious jobs, home-havership, parenting, etc. - that soft, wholesome coal gets compressed into this harder, sharper edge, doesn't it?  We share around all these tips and tricks for maximizing your efficiency, and figure out innovative new ways to choreograph our days around the almighty to-do list, and write splashy horseshit magazine articles about how you can do a whole workout in seven minutes or get almost-as-good-as a whole night's sleep if you nap for exactly 18.3 minutes, like Homer Simpson compressing five pounds of spaghetti into one handy little granola bar and then downing it in a bite.  It's productivity porn, and just like actual porn, it leaves us exhausted, addicted, and unable to enjoy the real thing.  

In other words, we learn to always finish whatever we start (which leaves a lot of us terrified to start, and a lot more ashamed of not failing to finish), because we've let ourselves believe that any time spent on an unfinished thing is time wasted, and anyone who doesn't finish things is a gormless flake, and anything finished is an achievement - even if all we got out of it was the grim satisfaction of finally having the damn thing done.  (For the try/fail version of this vicious mentality, go read Hyperbole and a Half's This is Why I'll Never Be an Adult.)

Isn't it grand, though, the way little kids live?  Wouldn't it be nice to have that back again - to remember how to leave food on your plate, and how to stop watching a movie or reading a book or building a Lego-castle when you aren't having fun anymore, and not even worry about whether or when you might go back to it?  I kind of want to find my way back there again - to enjoy the actual doing, not just the having-done, and to finish just the important things, not ALL of the things.

Anyway, so that's my New Year's resolution: this year, I'm going to practice not finishing.  In fact, I'm going to stop writing this right now, and go play with my kitty.


Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing, and it was everything that I thought it could be.

What You Give Up

Still alive!  Still deep in the trenches.  Going to write one hell of a "what I learned" post about my freshman year of publishing someday, but for now I got my hands full with the actual learning.  Suffice to say that I'm doing a pretty good job of holding my hair back while I cry glitter and barf rainbows, and I wouldn't trade places with anybody else in the world.

But my good buddy S.E. Dee put a blog post up this week, about how hard it is to keep going when your grip slips and suddenly the rock that is your story is rolling all the way back down the hill you've been sweating so hard to climb. 

When you’ve slipped up so bad, like so bad that whole chapters are getting demolished, characters obliterated and whole landscapes changed, moving forward is scary.

And boy ain't that the truth!  Here I think is the real beast of this whole writing gig: when you're in the trenches, your only objective metric for progress is your word count - and so often that goes right out the window.  Because you're ripping the stitches out of everything you wrote yesterday and the day before, or because you have to stop and do research, or because you're making yourself nuts trying to map out the exact distance from the Empire of Exposition to the Kingdom of Kickass and figuring out all the names of the twenty-seven elite Masters of Midge-Slapping. It is really hard to feel like a Real Writer when everything you've worked so hard on is slipping through your fingers like so much shitty, ungrateful sand.

So here's a list that I keep to look back at whenever I get frustrated or feel like I'm writing garbage:

• TV
• DnD sessions
• video games
• leisure reading
• regular blogging (including this year's A to Z challenge)
• friend emails
• social media in general
• cooking
• cake decorating
• critique group meetings

That up there is what I've stopped doing in order to make time to write.  Some of those things are on temporary hiatus (I NEED to catch up on my emails and my to-read pile, let me tell you), while others I gave up years ago. 

"Wow, Tex," you may say, "that makes you look like a really miserable, boring, un-fun person.  That doesn't sound healthy at all." 

"Sure," I'd tell you, "but you don't see what's not on there.  Going out to eat with my friends and making wedding invitations with my sister and having epic slap-fights with my cat while blasting 'The Bridge of Khazad-Dum' in the background.  The essentials are still getting done."

So here's my point.  You might spend hours doing homework without adding a word to your manuscript.  You might flush your whole manuscript and start over again.  You might stare at your keyboard until beads of blood appear on your forehead, praying for a good idea or a swift death.  But no matter what you do for your writing, you are by definition giving up something else to do it.  The words you write today might be gone tomorrow - but the hour of TV you didn't watch will stay unwatched. You spent your time on writing instead, literally bought and paid for your work with an hour or or three hours or ten hours or whatever... and as the Beanie Baby craze proved to us lo these many years ago, anything somebody is willing to pay for has value.  Even if you don't always love it.

And that's it.  That is my deep thought for the month; I hope you enjoyed it.  So what's on your list?

A Word About Perseverance

You know what's rough about this whole creative life-of-the-mind schtick?

...well, objectively speaking, not a hell of a lot.  Having the education and financial security to angst into my laptop about my deathless prose is a pretty sweet deal.

But I tell you what: if you wanna lose a hundred pounds or win a triathlon or bulk up and bench-press your car, there is no shortage of inspiring pictures out there to keep you motivated.  Jillian Michaels on your fridge!  Usain Bolt by the bathroom mirror!  Mr. Universe on the ceiling above your weight bench!  (One of the vaseline-slathered beefcake ones, not the poor bastard with the RealDoll girlfriend from Serenity.)

A little tougher to do that if you're trying to write a novel or cut an album or master the ancient art of erotic clowning.  Like, you can paper your house with pictures of famous people in your field, but at the end of the day, the quality of your efforts can't be visually measured - and that makes visual motivation harder to arrange.

Anyway, today is the first day of NaNoWriMo, and as good a day as any to celebrate the relentless nose-to-grindstoning of creative folks in every field.  So here's my contribution to our collective motivational poster-pool.

 

This is the keyboard I've used for the last eight years of my writing apprenticeship. 

The grooves are from my fingernails.

Did I mention that my first novel was called The Nine Mnemonics of the N'mmmnerian Nunnery?  

Anyway: keep at it, arty people, whatever your art may be.  And remember: there is nothing standing between you and success but years of thankless unrelenting toil!


It's going to take you awhile.

Listing to Port

You know, I feel really bad that I haven't updated here more often.  I'm so full of thoughts - oh, happy reader, if only you could taste a delectable full-bodied slice of my gray matter today! - and yet having so dang much trouble with follow-through.

Actually, a better way to say it is this: I feel like half of my brain is burning out from overuse, and the other half is rotting.  I knew it was getting bad when I found myself suddenly, desperately excited at the prospect of teaching GMAT math.  Or hell, ANY math.  My 10th-grade tutoring student whipped out her geometry homework this week, and it was like someone had offered me - dare I say that deadly four-letter C-word? - cake.

Meanwhile, the right side of my brain is busy failing at two blogs, four social media accounts, six email addresses, a line-editing project, and writing the first draft of one whopping big manuscript that really, positively needs to be done by Christmas.

To be clear: these are all TERRIFIC problems to have, and I'm grateful for every one of them.  It's just that collectively, they do end up with me sitting at my computer, begging myself to do something - anything! - but mostly staring at the dried sneeze-speckles on the screen in vacant fascination.

Dramatic re-enactment, starring my nephew, Pete.

Actually, I think this is a small part of the reason why I am so dang excited for WorldCon this week.  Hanging out with people in real-time is such a joy, you know?  Yes, it wears you out in its own peculiar way, but what a relief to only have four seconds to draft your response, instead of letting that blinking cursor leer at you for hours, or a whole entire weekend, while you attempt to compose the reply which will stand forever as a testament to your craft and thoughtfulness, or embarrassing lack thereof.

Dear Grandma,

Thank you so much for the Precious Moments figurine.  I'll think of you every time I see this adorable club-footed cherub, and remember to make my monthly donation to the Tow-Headed Caucasian Children's Fund.  Can't wait to see you at Kitschmas!

And no, it's not like every tweet and post and 3AM drunken gmail missive has to be some Ozymandian monument for the ages - but every one of them is explicitly meant to be noticed by somebody (especially when you are now in the business of being noticed by as many people as possible!), so why wouldn't you want them to look their best?  Especially once people have seen what your best really looks like.  From then on, they'll know in a heartbeat if you show up with anything less.

My God, is this what it's like to feel incapable of leaving the house without makeup?  Shall I never again browse the aisles of the Internet in my social sweatpants?

Well, perhaps not today.

And so I continue overclocking my frontal lobe, wallowing in problems that I am absolutely delighted to have, cultivating perfectionism at the expense of promptness, and wishing like the dickens that I weren't always, constantly, CONTINUALLY keeping at least one person waiting on me for something or other.

Sorry about that, y'all.  C'est la belle vie.  But if anyone needs any help with solving simultaneous equations or calculating probability, I am prepared to render aid with positively blistering vigor.  In the meantime, bring on WorldCon!

Psst.  Your participles are showing, dear.

The Unbearable Likeness of Beans

See, my sister and I each got a bean plant as a present from our mom in January.  They're "magic beans", like you can order from a catalogue, that have a little message branded onto the seed pod.  Don't judge us.

So we each set up our plants on our respective windowsills, watered them, the whole nine yards.  (Though given that we're talking about bean plant maintenance, that should maybe be "the whole two inches.")  Eight weeks later, here they are:

 

Yeah, you can probably guess which one is mine.  (Though I will have you know that I do own an identical armadillo statue, and it is being used for God's intended purpose, which is the holding of a souvenir beer bottle.  I said don't judge us, dammit.)

As you can see, my pathetic plant has pasted itself to the glass, consumed by solar frustration.  Hers sprawls out in an orgiastic display of chlorophilia, wantonly flashing its under-leaves like a celebutante stepping out of a Bentley.

And I've had a hard time looking at these little life-forms, because they keep reminding me of what I could have, should be, must get to doing.  "Look," they say to me in their tiny leguminous voices, "it's not rocket science.  If you put it in the sun, it will grow.  The longer you leave it there, the quicker it will happen.  If it's not in the sun, it's in the shade - there's no such thing as in-between."

I know, right - big talk from somebody whose major life goal apparently involves seducing the paper towels.

So anyway, there I was, my magic bean a flaccid symbol for my every personal failing.

Then I had a great chat with Jenny Martin (who's awesome enough that she probably shouldn't be talking to me, but does anyway.)  Read INTERN's Real Actual Hilary's "Writing is A Job Like Any Other, and Other Angry Ghosts."  Followed that up with an e-mail from a friend of mine, who is making a veritable Charge of the Light Brigade against a whole slew of health problems and striving like the dickens for standard human functionality.  Got to thinking some more.

I don't blame my plant for not growing.  It's living in a second-floor apartment with no east-west windows, so of course it's not getting enough light.

And yet it's so hard to forgive ourselves likewise.  There's this notion that since everyone has the same number of hours in a day, we all have an equal opportunity to get things accomplished.  We seem not to account for the fact that our little window-shelves don't all face the same way, that hours in a day aren't the same as daylight hours, that we aren't all issued identical quantities of fruitful, useable, potentially productive time.

So I've decided:  I will continue to feel bad when I waste my own personal daylight - when I have the time and energy and choose to squander it on Nothing Especially.

But I will not be guilted by other people's success, and I will make damn sure that I don't get haughty about mine.  All we can guarantee is that seasons do change, for better and for worse, and the success we've had to date says as much about the conditions we grew it in as it does about us personally.

Plus, you don't want to be the cheap tart flashing your axillary buds at every passing poinsettia, because oh my God, gauche.


The human bean is not a vegetable.