Sometimes you know exactly what's wrong with you, and it doesn't make any bit of difference...

Did you ever feel like you were trapped in an endless cycle, doomed to repeat it over and over again, regardless of the lessons that you think you learned along the way?  Like your existence was a whirlpool, with the sky always clearly in view, but no matter how hard you swim you are just getting lower and lower?  Have you ever realized that you had fallen in utter complacency, and that in doing so you were preparing to throw away everything you hold as important in your life?

A lot of people don't understand what it really means to feel depressed, because a lot of people have never really felt it before for any extended amount of time.  I go through cycles of it on a somewhat regular basis, and liken it most often to drowning.  You can kick to the surface and get another gulp of air, but you know there's not much time before your lungs will be burning again, and it feels like there is absolutely nothing you'll be able to do about it.  You watch everyone around you just going on, getting up every day and doing their thing.  You wonder if they feel trapped, if they feel desperate, if they ever feel the crushing weight of complete despair pressing down on their chest...

Is depression a form of insanity?  I just recalled that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.  If so, I must be insane.  I repeat my mistakes constantly, and every time I do I say to myself "I've learned my lesson, I understand now; I'll do things different from here on out".  And For a little while, I manage it.  Inevitably, I fall back into my same habits, the same patterns.

What do I want?  I want to be able to spend my time expressing myself, flexing the creative muscles that have been in my brain for as long as I can remember.  I want to be able to work during the day and return to my family afterwards not with anger or frustration or sorrow carried over from my day, but with joy and excitement.  I want to be able to look at the mountains as the sun rises over them and say "I wonder what's on the other side?" and then go find out.

I want to stop hurting the people that I love and finally bring them the happiness that they so much deserve to feel.  I want them to know that they never have to be the outlet for whatever negative energy I've managed to build up, because they should never face the brunt of my unhappiness with myself and my own failings.  I want to wake up in the morning with energy and zeal and get out of bed eager to get to work.  All the beauty and kindness and love that life can hold - I want to feel all of it, and I want to share it freely with everyone I know, and everyone I don't know.

I'm tired of feeling the way that I do.  Tired of making excuses to myself and my loved ones.  I am tired of allowing myself to fall into the same cycles endlessly.  Because that's what depression seems to do.  It punches you in the gut and laughs at your misery, and when you finally recover it seems to have gone away.  You grow complacent, not realizing that it never went anywhere at all.  It's just biding its time, waiting for the moment when you most think you've defeated it.  Then it punches you in the kidney, and laughs even harder.

I believe that we are responsible for our own fate.  We all have choices through our lives, we all have decisions to make that will forever shape who we are and where we go.  I never wanted to hide behind anything, I never wanted to hold myself back so significantly, to cripple my own growth.  But that's all I've managed to do.  I've stagnated as a person.  I've let depression take me over and manipulate me to the detriment of everything in my life.

No more.  I've said this before, so many times.  I've meant it, so many times.  The cycle needs to be broken, if not for my sake, then for that of my family and friends, for everyone I know and care about.  For too long, I've let myself sit still just because I was sad that I wasn't moving forward, not realizing that each was fueling the other.  That cycle, man, that damned cycle.  My wife and kids deserve better of me.  I deserve better of myself.

I lost it somewhere...

I don't really believe in the term "use it or lose it" as an absolute.  When we have become familiar with a task, we retain it.  Certainly, going for a long period without practice can have set backs, but in my experience the knowledge always resurfaces after a little while. 

Unfortunately, I deal with this quite often when it comes to creative endeavors.  I allow myself, as I must have said in at least one other post on this very blog (and cannot now be bothered to read for it), to become distracted by things that I ultimately find were a waste of my time.  Caught up in video games or watching television, or just laying on the floor, staring at the carpet while slowly falling asleep...

When I have these lapses - which is, to maintain the track record of honesty, just about all the time - it is writing and drawing that fall by the wayside.  Now, to be clear, drawing is little more than a hobby.  I don't expect that it's anything I'll ever make a living from, and I am fine with that.  I still enjoy doing it from time to time, and I have put money into supplies because I take pleasure from it.  I don't think I'm very good, and I'm usually all right with it.  I'll go weeks or sometimes months between drawing spurts, and there's always a little bit of a hill to crest in getting back into it.

Writing, on the other hand, is what I've been telling myself I want to do for years.  Somewhere around twelve, to be as precise as my spotty memory can be.  I think that I have talent for it, and I think also that at some point along the road I have honed that talent into some semblance of legitimate skill.  It is one of the few things that I do that I actually have a bit of confidence in.  And, over and over again, I fall out of the habit of doing it.  And every time I do it, no matter if its for weeks or months, there's always that same hill to climb to get back into the swing.

Occasionally, inspiration strikes when I am still at the base of the hill, and my writing muscles bulge with supernatural strength borne of a creative spirit in full swing.  They tense like springs and then launch me over that hill, and as I pass I tell the hill exactly what it can do with itself.

But the majority of the time, it's much more difficult than that.  I always get back into my flow eventually, but these breaks undermine my confidence.  They make me second-guess myself, and I think they also draw my focus away from what I feel should matter in my writing.  I've never lost the skill by not using it, but it certainly develops a thick, rusty coating.  And when I'm chipping away at that rust, and flakes are flying, I'm bound to get some in my hair.

I really hate getting stuff like that in my hair.

Eventually, I hope that I can overcome the issues that I impose on myself.  I'll happily share advice on how to manage that with all the world when that day comes, because I know I'm not the only one that struggles in this way.  I'm trying to get back into writing again, as I've decided to take part in a short story anthology that's being...I suppose sponsored is the right term?...by an RPG podcast I have listened to regularly for the last several years called Fear the Boot ( http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/ ).  I'll have more details on that as details are finalized; as of now the deadline for final drafts is sometime in June or July.

The writing has been hard.  I have ideas aplenty; they rattle around in my head and bounce off one another, and entire scenes and pieces of dialogue sprout from the fertile soil of my mind (which is probably not soil at all, but that varying degree of insanity that any creative person seems required to possess).  I know what needs to happen for this story.  I've seen almost every part of it in my mind's eye, I know that one I want to catch.  I even think I know the message my subconscious intended for it in conceiving the idea.

But getting that onto paper?

Well, shit...isn't that what writing is?  It might do me good to rethink my aspirations.

...but, then again, I'm lazy.  I'll just keep at it.

Also, you should check out Hrodebert O'Glendale's blog that he recently started up - especially if you are a fan of poetry in general.  http://hr0debert.blogspot.com

Dwarf Renaissance

Of the many hundreds of thousands of topics I have carefully laid out over years of consideration and research (and the subsequently forgotten about entirely), one of the more recent was the matter of originality in the genre of fantasy. I approached it from numerous angles, tried to tackle differing aspects of it…and I have failed in every attempt to write that post to my satisfaction.

Yet inspiration has come anew thanks to a pair of recent purchases.  My wife bought me The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey on DVD and I bought The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey Chronicles, a book that contains a sampling of the myriad conceptual and design art that went into giving the movie its look and feel.  Both of these have a strong emphasis on dwarves, as is to be expected.  At a glance, they are your typical, ho-hum fantasy dwarves; stubborn, irritable, miners and blacksmiths. 

Upon closer examination, however, it is clear that the dwarves of this movie extend well beyond any stereotypes or tropes.  Presented for us is a people with rich history and culture, with a unique sense of art and style and an aesthetic the details of which are rarely, if ever, captured in film.  The amount of thought and consideration put into every piece of costume, equipment, and backdrop is staggering, and anyone interested in working on a creative piece that delves into fantasy would do well to pay some attention.

New life has been breathed into a race that has, in many settings and for many consumers, grown rather stale.  I don’t want to argue the movie versus the book, mind you; I have my opinions on both and thoroughly enjoy them for slightly differing reasons.  Rather, I would like to boldly suggest that originality is not necessarily the pinnacle of writing or art that it is often depicted as (at least in certain aspects).

In any work of fiction or film, setting is an important aspect.  I believe this is even more so in the realms of speculative fiction, and many a piece has been doomed by presenting a setting so similar to what is expected in the genre that it is, in the eyes of jaded consumers, indistinguishable from the pack.  Elves, dwarves, humans – we’ve seen these before – toss in orcs and goblins or some other monstrous race and the standard for most fantasy has been met.  Elves are artsy and aloof and better than everyone else, dwarves are stubborn and greedy and excellent craftsmen, and humans are…well, I suppose one of the only common themes is that humans are whatever they need to be to fit the story.

At any rate, these preconceived notions, formed by exposure to “mainstream” fantasy media, serve a valuable purpose: the very use of the word elf or dwarf immediately conjures an image into one’s mind, painting a picture without having to waste a lot of time in description.  At its worst, it is simply laziness on the part of the creator, riding on these stereotypes and thereby leaving their world and its people hollow.  But, when used properly, they are a powerful tool to connect quickly and deeply with the consumer.

The key, I feel, is not necessarily in utter originality.  Let’s be honest: it’s not really possible to be entirely original.  There is no idea that any of us have that someone else hasn’t already had, whether or not they followed through with it.  The secret is not in the idea itself, but in the presentation.  In the case of dwarves (and specifically the dwarves of Middle Earth), the stereotypes the have served in so many cases to make dwarves boring have been expanded upon, further explained, and down-played.

The richness of dwarf culture presented in The Hobbit turns them into something real and gives us insight into a race that is similar to ours, but is nonetheless not quite human.  We see, in the brief history lessons provided by Bilbo and Balin, dwarf merchants and ladies, craftspeople of all kinds, a people who lived well and took pride in their accomplishments.  We see, too, what was taken from them, and can mourn for all that has been lost.

It is my argument, then, that a richness of culture can make any of these “traditional post-Tolkien modern” fantasy peoples seem new, even when those core traits, those stereotypes, are still present.  Focus on the details and the presentation, on making a people seem real and giving them a sense of depth, and even what may have seemed boring at the surface becomes rich and wondrous again. 

This is especially true in the case of individual characters.  In the example of the film version of The Hobbit, you have a company of thirteen dwarves, each of whom has a unique look and (at least implied) personality, all while maintaining a general sense of dwarfiness (or a level of dwarfitude, whichever term you prefer).  We can see that not all dwarves are dour individuals, that though they have some common traits they are still a diverse bunch.  Just like humans.

If God is in the details, then anyone who endeavors to create a rich, vibrant, and believable world of fantasy should heed them.  Whenever we create, whether it is entirely in our head or not, we are partaking in a small act of something like divinity.  Certainly, any work can be bogged-down by details.  I would argue that fantasy fiction is especially susceptible to this.  But the proper selection of description can make the difference between a story that is just more of the same and one that inspires the imagination and brings the person reading or watching into a different world for a little while. 

I was going to say something, but maybe it's another...

I would like to open by apologizing to my legions of loyal followers for how long it has been since last I made a post on this blog. I have disappointed all of you, and it was never my intention to let down tens of millions of people. The last week and a half has been busy, stressful, and crummy (to put it mildly). Four out of five people in this household are sick, including myself, and there are a number of other factors that have delayed this.

Originally, I had begun writing a post that touched quite honestly on the bouts I have with depression (while it hasn't been clinically diagnosed, what else would I call it?) and what causes them.  I have, in uncharacteristic fashion, backed down from that for a simple reason: it also deals with my current job.

I haven't followed the matter as much as I should, but as far as I know, there are no laws in place to protect our privacy from our employers.  Likewise, there are no laws to protect us from our employers using information they obtain on blogs, websites, forums, or social media.  The preceding statements may not be the truth, but I will not retract them.  Nor will I do any research on them.  Because I am going to move on to a random snippet that occurred to me for no real reason the other day.

Crazy circle people
Are hanging round my door
Don't what they want
But I don't want them here no more

In my head, it is spoken in the voice of an old-timey blues singer.  Nice and gritty.

I keep a notebook nearby throughout my work day, and when little things like that come to me, I try to write them down.  One of them (a little rhyme that sounded like it'd be spoken by sailors or fishermen) even turned into a short story.  Taken in little doses, they may well sound like the nonsensical ramblings of a madman.  I'm not inclined to disagree with that.

Inspiration comes, for me, in fleeting notions that blast across my mind and are gone if I don't act quickly enough.  When it hits, and I act, I can produce an almost obscene amount of material.  When it's out of town (which is almost all the time), I tend to lack to motivation to produce anything.  I've already touched on my continuing struggles against myself, and all I do is manage to frustrate myself when I ignore that call to create.

Some ideas - and I hope they are the really good ones - simply linger, nagging at the edges of my conscious mind, requesting my attention in soft, polite tones.  The longer I ignore them, the louder they become.  Unfortunately, if I wait to long, they just leave.  Probably figuring nobody's home, or that nobody will answer the door because they are avoiding debt collectors.

I have too often ignored these ideas, these stories-in-waiting, and it always bugs me for a long time afterward.  There are several short stories that could turn out rather nicely, if I can just give them the time and attention they deserve.  All of them blossomed from some small idea that might have seemed insignificant.  Some of them from real-life influences.  There's one idea that has burned in my brain for at least a year, probably more, that I feel could be either a novel or a graphic novel.  And more recently, there's an idea for a novel or series of novels that has quite caught my attention and demanded brainstorming.

Without getting into the details (which should be obvious, considering how vague I was with my "examples" above), I would like to present this: inspiration is all around you.  Perhaps that is a given, perhaps you already know it, but I wanted to say it anyway.  Our everyday lives, no matter how mundane, are full of little kernels of information, stray thoughts, minor occurrences; all of these have the potential to become a great story (or song, or painting, and so on).

People - at least those in the United States - tend to get so caught up in everything they think they need to be doing that they often miss things that have been in front of them the whole time.  It only takes a tiny bit of effort to break out of that and start seeing the world around you for what it could be: an endless source of joy and inspiration.  Take a moment to enjoy the smell of fresh-cut grass, or the way the clouds roll across the sky, or how the sunlight kisses the mountains in the morning.  You don't have anything to lose.

Of Mice and Motivation

As something of a part-time, would be, aspiring amateur writer, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I should be writing.  This of course doesn’t involve any actual writing, and only rarely does it touch on thoughts about content, story, and character.  Mostly, it’s a feeling that I have wasted a lot of time doing meaningless things when all my mind really wants is to express itself through creative means.

I’d like to be honest on this matter.  I am a life-long procrastinator.  Almost without exclusion, I do everything at the last possible moment.  In school, this amounted to projects and reports being hastily completed the night before they were due (often after having had weeks to work on them) and homework often being done on the morning of the day it was supposed to be turned in.  Now, it usually means that I am almost entirely incapable of getting gifts and birthday cards any sooner than the day before the occasion.

I also suffer from a huge motivational deficit; I am not one of those self-motivated individuals that simply gets things done.  I am not much of a doer.  I understand that these are, in actuality, two different problems.  But I think it’s also quite clear that in my case, as I would guess it is in most cases, they compound to make one large problem.

Lack of motivation leads to easy distraction; video games, random articles on the internet that I’m not really interested in, online forums, video games, occasionally interesting television shows, video games are all common sources of distraction that detract from what I feel that I should be doing. 

My struggles with this have been ongoing for somewhere around nine years (which happens to coincide with the time I got out of school and started working full time).  Before that, I didn’t have much problem writing.  Granted, everything that I wrote was likely cliché and poorly done, but I was writing, and I was enjoying myself with it.

I know that I’m not the only one dealing with this problem.  There are countless others out there who face similar difficulties.  It’s a mixture of flaws in my personality that have made if very difficult for me to do anything for myself, to do what I enjoy doing and work towards it as a career.  I wish that I had an easy way to get around it, or that there was some kind of cure.

I do manage to write from time to time (and this blog gives me a way to write that I haven’t really tried before – it serves a purpose even if nobody reads it), and I have completed some of the dozens of stories that I’ve started or thought about.  One short story was for a very small literary magazine run by a couple of professors at a community college.  I wrote all 4,000 or so words, complete with editing and corrections, in one day.  That happened to be the day before the submission deadline.

How do I break past this, though?  What has worked for me in the past?  My wife has been the biggest help, even though it frustrates her to have to do it all the time.  She gives me some rather strong kicks in the ass to get me focused, and her pushing works more often than my own does.  For a little while, I was even getting myself to write regularly, but I don’t think that time counts (I was off work on injury and thus my greatest source of motivation-killer was nullified).

All that I can say is that you have to keep at it.  It’s the same advice that most all professional artists have given at some point, be they writers, painters, musicians, or what have you.  You really do have to work at something all the time if you want to attain it, and I don’t think most people can find real happiness unless they are doing something they love.  For some of us, it’s hard, that’s all. 

I’ve had to ask myself numerous times if my lack of motivation simply means that I don’t want to write like I think I do.  I wonder if I should just give up.  But what else would I do?  There’s nothing else that I can think of that sounds like something I could spend the rest of my life doing.  So I’ll keep trying, and keep working against my own flaws.

I suppose, if there’s a point to all this (and it didn’t get lost somewhere above), it’s that each of us is our own worst enemy.  Whether it’s the harshness of the internal critic, that voice of our deepest insecurities, or our bad habits and character flaws, none of us can accomplish anything meaningful without first striking some kind of inner balance.  I’m still struggling, but I’ve not lost hope.  There’s no great success story here, no life-changing advice.  Only the truth as I understand it.  I’m still on the road, and it’s long and hard for me.

The important thing is to not give up.

Whimsical Wamblings

Now that I have, on a whim, decided to start this blog, I find it very difficult to remember all the things I thought I had to say. They likely weren’t very original things, nor overly clever. Rarely are any of my opinions well thought out, and I don’t typically care whether or not I offend anyone.

 Is it all just a symptom of the information age? The internet quite readily brings out the worst in people, it seems, granting them layers of anonymity to hide behind from where they can lob grenades of biased, fiery opinions and derogatory insults. Anyone can feel like a badass on a message board or playing an online game.

It’s easy to talk shit to someone when you never have to look them in the eye to do it. Easy to be rude or hurtful when you never have to deal with any of the consequences, when the conversation – or confrontation – is over the moment you close the window. We have managed to take the single greatest tool in our history for connecting with fellow human beings and remove almost all semblance of humanity from it.

I myself don’t entirely understand how it has become so easy for so many people to forget (or just not care) that there are real human beings with thoughts and emotions sitting on the other end, right behind the screen names or gamer tags or what have you. The internet has allowed a mass dehumanization of our fellows, and I think that as a society – at least in America – we are paying for it.

I suppose this has gone somewhat off-topic of my original topic, which was that I don’t have a topic. Please see the blog’s title for questions.

We live in an age that is filled with wonder we’ve all been desensitized to; the possibilities are unlimited. When have ideas ever been so accessible, so easily distributed? Anyone can create, and now that creation can be delivered directly to consumers, potentially to millions of people from all around the world. That should be amazing to us, but it’s just another detail, something that we have accepted without any thought as to the implications of that fact.

In part, that’s why I’ve started this blog. I don’t expect to reach millions of people. Don’t expect to have my thoughts read by hundreds of thousands, or thousands, or even hundreds. Dozens, maybe. But that’s enough, isn’t it? If something I write here can make even one person stop and think, help them to consider something from a different angle...well, then I’ve touched the wider world and made some kind of mark on it.

The way the world used to work – the traditional models and methods of publication, marketing, and distribution – doesn’t really apply anymore. In effect, we have been given the opportunity to cut out that middle man. The one telling us that we can’t have that happen in our story, that you can’t say that in the lyrics of your song, that you can’t show that in your movie. Creative control is shifting almost entirely to the producers of these works, for better or worse, and it is now directly up to the consumer to decide if it is worthwhile or not.

I think it’s quite an exciting time. I can allow my imagination to run wild (and it sometimes wanders to the potential downfall of corporate America, an entity (see: THEM) that I have come to loathe) and just put it out there for anyone who cares to see it. I can present my opinions, my perspectives, my ideas, to the wider world and have meaningful discussions. I can forge friendships with people who live thousands of miles away.

So what it all comes down to is this: I’m going to use this platform to say whatever it is I might feel like saying at whatever moment I feel like saying it, and you’re welcome to read it (or not read it). Agree with me, disagree with me, love me or hate me or be totally indifferent towards me, whatever you like. But I’m going to attempt to keep a degree of humanity involved here. I’m going to attempt to operate with a respect for you, the reader, as a fellow human being struggling to stay alive and get ahead in this messed up little world of ours.