The Other Side

I take a deep breath.
I close my eyes.
I stop thinking.

Everything is darkness. There's no sound, there's no smell, and there's no taste. I can feel nothing. My senses are shut down. This is a place where I can relax. This is a stopping point but it is also a starting point. This is where I can really think.

I have to stay in control. I can't let too many thoughts in at once. I have to pace myself and do this one thought at a time. Where do I go from here? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Sometimes I let my mind loose to wander where it will.

They say that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I think that I have read enough about this to know that this law is based very much on their definition of "thing." They, meaning the scientists, operate mostly in the physical world. This place where I am is not in the physical world. This is the space where my thoughts dwell. How fast does a thought travel? Where does it come from and where does it go to? They may have answers for this as far as the study of brainwaves and all that jazz, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I don't think that their place and my place are the same things. If I see myself sitting on a plain with nothing to see in all directions but the sky above and the grass below and then a moment later I am surrounded by stars, planets, and inky blackness, then what just happenned? Did I move? Did the places move? If I can discard them and then bring them back are they not real? I think that real and not real are relative. If it's real to me, then it doesn't really matter if it's real to anyone else.

This is my place. It can be whatever I wish it to be whenever I wish it to be. This is where I am when I read. This is where I am when I write. This place has no beginning and no end. It is neither empty nor full but it can be both. It is always a clean slate but also always a masterpiece. My job is to take the things here and move them to a piece of paper. It is not an easy thing to do. Sometimes this place seems like a million movies all chopped into little bits a few seconds long and then playing at random. It's hard to make sense. It takes a huge amount of effort to slow it down, keep things in order, and keep them under control. The irony is that to keep it interesting there cannot be too much control.

So there's the rub. I live in this world and my creative side lives in the other. Reading and writing are the only two things that I've found that can join the two halves. I used to think that this was just entertainment. Now I believe that this is the bridge between the part of me that I use every day and the part of me that I've been ignoring for way too long now. I think this is the part of me that I've been missing. It's the part of me that I need in order to do work that I believe in.

If it had been a snake it would have bit me.

Oh, the tangled webs...

I wrote a story awhile back about a boy. In my minds eye, the last we saw of him he was walking into a forrest that may or may not exist. I liked him. I think that wherever he went he's probably doing something interesting. I didn't really plan for his story to go any farther than it did. I think that in this case my plans might not matter.

Today I wrote an outline for a story as an assignment for a writing course I am taking. There was a different young person in this story. Originally it was a boy in the fifth grade but in this case I think I'm going to change him into a her. Just like that. That's not really the point though. The point is that in some way these two separate stories just decided to attach themselves to each other. This little girl was just given a thing, anonymously, for her birthday that allows her to look into what the previously mentioned character is doing. They're connected in some way. I'm going to have to see if I can get them to tell me now. What I do know is that there is at least one other character, an adult I'm fairly certain, that is connected to both kids. He may be good, he may be bad, I'm not sure about that yet either.

That's the start of the web. What's interesting is that lots and lots, maybe hundreds, of stories and pieces for stories that I've got filed away in my head are starting to pop up after years of disuse. They're making themselves known again and trying to attach themselves to each other in any way that they can. Some of these combinations are a little bit rediculous but sometimes they turn into interesting situations. Some of them, I think, might even be useful.

I don't think I'm going to divulge too much of this madness here because, as it doesn't really make sense to me yet, it's probably not going to make a whole lot of sense to anyone else. It's time for some organizing which is something that I've always been pretty bad about. Stream of conciousness writing doesn't work all the time. It would be nice if it did.

So, I have voices in my head. Some of them are accompanied by all the things that make a person except for existence in reality. Some of these people are also accompanied by situations and places that don't exist. It realy is a fun game.

Not all people who hear voices are crazy. Some of us are just authors. I've got loads of things on top of voices in there and I'm pretty sure that I'm still sane. Mostly anyway.

I also make countertops out of rocks.

For Andy

When I was in the seventh grade the best friend I'd ever had up to that point died. I've never told his story.

I met Andy McAuley within the first few days of the sixth grade. He and his family had just moved from Jacksonville, Florida and so he was the new kid in class. I don’t remember what it was that brought us together at first. That was the year that Pogs were a big deal so maybe our first encounter was playing Pogs together during break time. I know that like me, he was not liked by the popular kids and so we may have been thrown together for that reason. Regardless of how it happened, all I remember is that it was just this connection that formed almost instantly. I remember we sat together at lunch with our other two friends, also outcasts, named William and Eric. That year for my birthday the only two people I invited to my party were Andy and Eric. I used to have a picture of it that would pop up every now and then.

That was about the time that girls started to become interesting. Andy was better with the girls than I was. He had a very natural look about him. His hair was dirty blonde and came down to his ears. His skin was always tanned and he smiled a lot. The girls always thought he was pretty. I was the better student. That was also the year that my reading addiction really started to kick in. Andy never had much patience for reading. I don’t remember much else about our time in school. What I remember most was the summer after sixth grade.

That summer it seemed like almost every night I stayed over at his house or he stayed over at mine. If it was nice enough we camped out in the back yard and if not he had bunk beds in his room. I remember we used to write on the underside of the top bunk. During the day we would scrounge up change to go to the grocery store and buy water balloons so we could have water balloon fights. We used to walk down a dirt road near his house and shoot old beer cans, bottles, and birds with our BB guns. Don’t worry, we never killed anything. We also both had slingshots and we’d play with those when we ran out of BBs but our aim was much worse with them. Sometimes we went fishing at the lake in the park. There was a lot of construction going on in our neighborhood back then so we played in the unfinished houses when the workers went home.

I loved eating dinner at his house. His mom cooked a lot and when she didn’t we just made Ramen Noodles. I loved them back then. His mom used to make French Dip sandwiches for us all the time. Those were the first, and still the best, that I’ve ever had. I don’t remember what his mom’s job was but his dad was a retired helicopter pilot. I don’t think I ever saw his dad at home that the man wasn’t taking apart some gun, cleaning it, and putting it back together. In fact, I never saw a gun at that house; I only saw pieces of them. I always thought he was a nice man but he didn’t talk much. Andy had an older sister named Carolyn. She was in the ninth grade at the time. She was also a very nice girl and I got the impression that she was also kind of a loner.

The most interesting thing about that house was the animals. I don’t remember anymore how many there were but I do remember a lot of them. They had one room that was full to bursting with bird cages full of songbirds. They all had names and I knew them all. They had a pond in the backyard with 8 turtles in it. I used to know their names too. They had two dogs, both boxers, and an iguana which I later inherited. Those things are horrible pets by the way. In the living room there lived what I could tell the prized pet of the family which was a kind of Macaw I think. This was a really excellent bird. It used to whistle the tune from the Andy Griffith Show. Whenever someone started laughing it would start laughing too. At the crack of dawn, every morning, it would start to beat it’s beak against the wall until someone came to feed it. It was incredibly loud. It was one of the smartest animals I’ve ever seen.

Towards the end of the summer his family decided to move to Nacogdoches, Texas. I can’t remember why. They left only a few weeks before the seventh grade started and we made all sorts of deals about how we’d write and we’d visit each other the next summer. We did write a few letters at first and I sent him a birthday card with twenty dollars in it. A week or two later, I’m not sure anymore how long it was, his mother called my parents and told them that Andy had died of an extremely rare blood disease. One night he woke up with bruises and didn’t know where they had come from. Not long after that he had died. I can’t imagine how his family felt when they got my birthday card for Andy in the mail.

This experience had a big impact on me surprisingly I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. Today I saw a movie that reminded me. Andy was a good friend. At a time in my life when most kids seemed to be mean just because they could get away with it we always had each other. He wasn’t perfect but neither was I. We spent the summer together. We had fun together. We got in trouble together. For one year he was as close to me as anyone, other than family, had ever been. It’s hard for a 13 year old to lose that without warning. I still wonder about his mom, dad, and sister once in awhile. His sister should be 27 or so about now. The last time I saw her she was 15. It doesn’t seem like it’s been that long.

Life just doesn’t seem fair sometimes. He was a good person. I miss him.

One Billion

Thats BILLION, with a B. A big fat B. That I am honestly happy to say is how much J.K. Rowling is worth these days. For those of you living under a rock, this is the woman who writes the Harry Potter books. This is a woman who less than 20 years ago was apparently living on wellfare. This is a woman who has not even published her 7th book yet. That's right, she has written five books. Just five. Thats somewhere around 167 million dollars per book. Granted there were movies and all sorts of other things that she got paid for but it was the books that made all that other stuff possible. An average author pumps out a book a year. Six years of work. One billion dollars. Granted, it's not about the money. I'm just glad to see that literature can still make that kind of money. People still read. This woman is a phenomenon, an incredible writer, and one of my heroes. Way to go J.K!

On another note, I am 24 years old today. That's almost a quarter of a century. It's been a good 24 years. I'm looking forward to all the ones coming up. The next few years should be very interesting.

For all of you who are interested, my writing course is going well. I just finished the first week and completed two writing assignments. These were sort of getting to know you type assignments but in some ways rather enlightening. I've made some good progress in understanding and getting past some of the issues that have been holding me back for the past few years. I've gotten some very positive feedback too. That always helps.

Here's a little story to describe my current writing position.

For the past three years it seems like I've been sitting in a room that was dark and empty of everything but me. I was left only with my thoughts. I had good ideas for writing. They would pop out of my head and fly around the room with the type of energy all new ideas seem to have but as they kept bouncing off of walls, floor, and ceiling they began to get tired. They needed to escape, to run free, but they couldn't even find a chink in my walls to squeeze through. I sat on the floor and watched these ideas, one by one, tire themselves out and drop to the floor. There they lay, drying out and shriveling up until I could no longer bear to look at them. This happened often enough so that I would try to stop creating them. I couldn't stand to watch them die. They lay there on the cold stone floor looking at me with such scrutiny and distaste. They seemed to constantly ask why I would be so cruel as to create them, these partial unfinished beings, only to lock them in a box and watch them suffocate. I think I was suffocating with them. Now there is light in my dark little cell. The mortar began to crumble out of the cracks a few months back and since then a window to the outside world has openned up. It gets bigger every day. Soon the walls will crumble, the ceiling will fall in, and the earth will reclaim this sad little floor I've been sitting on. The wind will blow all of my dead little stories away. They'll scatter all across the little valley outside my window and decompose back to where they came from. In time they'll be reborn, pure, in a way that they never were when I forced them together from mismatched bits and pieces. Their life will be stronger. It will be free. Once the hole in this wall gets a little bigger I'll be able to squeeze out of it and go wherever I want. There will be no limits. Maybe every now and then I'll come back to look at my sad little box, or what remains of it, just to remind myself of what I've inflicted on myself in the past. This is where I am now. I can see the light.

Also, on another subject, the honeybees have all been dying. I don't know if no one has noticed or if no one really cares but this seems like a bad omen to me. Doesn't it? They seem to be responsible for quite a lot of pollinating and things of that nature. I'm fairly certain that there are a lot of plants that need these services in order to propagate. They scary part is that so far as I've heard, they can't figure out why it's happening. Apparently it's not just a few either. Hives, by the hundreds, that were thriving a few months ago are dead. Most of the bees are not even around. Most of them are just gone. I only heard one little story about this on NPR a month or so ago and I've only heard someone else mention it once. Does this seem like a pretty bad thing to anyone else? If anyone has heard anything else about this I'd like to know. Drop me a line.

As always, thanks for reading.
Have an excellent weekend.

Quick Note

I hope you've noticed that I have a few new little gizmos on my website. I do realize that the ones to the right both look the same but one is supposed to show all the visitors I've ever had (from this point on) and the other one is only supposed the visitors for the current day. The daily one may turn out to be a little dull of I don't get many hits per day so if it's no fun then I'll delete that one. Hopefully they'll both be cool so I can leave them both on. The other cool new toy is a new map down at the bottom that I think may turn out to be a little cooler than the old one. We'll see. Hope you all like it!

Taking the Plunge

As of today I am enrolled in a creative writing course. That's right; I am willingly subjecting myself to the review of other people. This will be the first course I have ever taken that is devoted to the trade of writing. Beyond assignments from Literature teachers in school I have never written anything that did not come from some spur of the moment desire for a release. This is the first step, I believe, in getting past all of the previously mentioned stigmas and barriers I've created to shield myself. Well, maybe this blog was the first. This class will be the second. What made me decide to take this particular course was its name. It's called The Fear of Writing. How appropriate is that?

I have yet to get an assignment. I send the request to take the course. I was accepted. I filled out a form about myself, my goals, and what's stopping me. So far so good. I'm very interested to see what comes of this. Just the act of signing up has gotten me thinking about what sort of other courses I could take or what other avenues I could pursue that would get me a little further down the road towards being a published author. Who knows, it may happen yet.

This is also the first class I have taken in three years or so that was not required of me. The last few years of college were devoted to courses required for graduation and it has been over a year since I graduated. My degree was in accounting which is about as far as you can get from what I'm trying to do now. There is very little creativity involved in that career so far as I can tell. Regardless, I am excited to be taking a class of my own choosing once again. The last three or four classes that I took out of pure interest were archaeology and anthropology courses in college. At the time I didn't realize why they interested me so much but now I think I do. They are much more closely related to a career in writing than accounting ever was. The study of people is incredibly interesting. I've been doing it my whole life without realizing it. Whether alive or dead, you can learn a lot about people by what they surround themselves with. If the people are alive, you can learn even more by watching how they interact with their surroundings and with other people. I study these things without realizing it. I've always done this. Be quiet. Observe. People will tell you anything you want to know without ever saying a word to you.

When I was young I used this type of perception to figure out how to change other people's perception of me. In elementary school I was never the cool kid. I didn't want to be. I didn't like how those people treated each other or anyone else. I made friends with the other kids like me not because it was a last resort but because they were people who also refused to change themselves in order to be accepted. So we watched the cool kids. We learned.

When it came time to pick a middle school I chose one on the other side of town, one where I would be relatively unknown. I knew that this would be the best way to shed the preconceived perceptions of all the people I had gone to school with for the past six years. I had an extensively thought out plan. I would not change my personality, but I would not make the same mistakes that I had early on in elementary school. Children look for the quiet kid, the easy target, to vent their frustrations on. Adults do this too, but that is a whole different story. If you are that quiet kid then you only have two options. You can either take what they dish, all the time, or you can find a way to deflect their attentions elsewhere. This is not a hard thing to do but for a young person it can be terrifying. The only way to not be the target is to not be worth the trouble.

Only a week or so into competitive athletics a ritual had begun in the locker room. Ten or so of the aggressive kids would pick a target, a quiet shy kid, and one of them would pick a fight with him. It was a very natural way for kids to develop a hierarchy amongst themselves. I knew my turn was coming because if you didn't participate with the aggressive kids, you became one of the targets. Most of these confrontations consisted of pushing weaker kids into lockers for ten or so minutes until the bell for the next class started. Pushing back did no good; it only escalated the aggressive ones testosterone to the level of punching. It was what they wanted. My turn came. One guy cornered me in the locker room. I told him to leave me alone. He told me he had heard me talking bad about him. This was the ruse that they used to start the fight. I told him to go away. Meanwhile the other kids gathered in a semicircle around, cutting off escape, and getting ready for the show. At this point there is no turning back; there is only one simple choice. Be a target from this point on, or put a stop to it right here. I made the wrong choice in elementary school and I wasn't going to do that again. As soon as the other kid pushed me the first time I punched him. Right in the eye. Hard enough to give him a black eye. He fell, the bell rang, and everyone left to go to the next class.

This did a few things for me. First, I became too much trouble to be the easy target. Second, I gained the respect of every 12 year old in the locker room. Most importantly, it made them leave me alone. That's all it took. Never again was I a target. The kid I hit eventually became a friend. Adults work in very similar ways. You cannot hit them without getting sued, but you don't need to. The point of all of this is not to advocate hitting, but to realize that an understanding of basic psychology can tell you a lot about how to understand motives. It can teach you how to manipulate them.

This is what writers do. We create people and then find out how they tick. We put them in tough situations to see how they'll react. It has to be believable. Writers have to understand that every decision a character makes will depend greatly on every key event that took place in that character's life up to that point. If a character does something beyond the realm of believability then the reader will stop caring. Just like that. The psychology of the characters affects the psychology of the reader. Kids love Harry Potter because every one of them can relate to at least one character in those stories. Adults love it because they remember being able to relate in the same way.

So my psychology is this. I'm in a situation where I know what I want to do but I fear it. I have a long row to hoe but I know that it is something I need to do. So I'm going to learn how. I think I have a pretty good understanding of the basics but for what I intend to do I need to understand a lot more than that. Classes are no longer about getting my ticket punched; they are about learning how to accomplish the tasks I've set for myself. I read. I write. I will be a novelist.