My Namesake

Daily writing prompt

Where did your name come from?

I don’t know why my parents thought I would turn out normal after they named me after my Uncle Larry. My reprobate Uncle Larry, who collected rents at his apartment building with a gun holster strapped to his thigh, the one of endless parties, the one who died when he neglected a perfectly curable skin cancer until it was too late. Why do you name a kid after someone like that?

I turned out a rebel in different ways. I went to college (the first person in my direct line to do so) and didn’t quit until I graduated with a PhD. This doesn’t sound like a rebellion, but I was a late baby boomer, and my mother practically begged me to come home and become a waitress, an acceptable job that could make a lot of money from tips. Mom finally gave up all hope of having a grandchild from me, a wise choice.

I went through these years with untreated bipolar disorder, and I was very sedate for someone with the malady. I didn’t abuse drugs; I gave up partying after a short stint of drinking with roommates; I didn’t get pregnant. I was, however, eccentric, and that hasn’t gone away since the medication.

This is what happens when you name someone after their crazy uncle.

What Motivates Me?

Daily writing prompt

What motivates you?

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I wish I could write an inspirational answer to this question, because it’s ripe for a motivation expert to make money from. Alas, I will not be inspirational, only honest.

I had a very productive summer on both the writing and the work fronts. I paced myself so that my work didn’t fall due at the last minute. From this, I learned what motivates me.

First, boredom motivates me. There’s only so much scrolling on the Internet I can stand without being bored. I don’t like being bored. I could have slept all that time, I suppose, because I don’t find sleep boring; however, day sleeping is not good for me. That left me with needing something to do, and work and writing helped.

Second, flow motivates me. I get flow from productive writing. Not so much from putting together classes; designing course sites and planning lessons doesn’t promote that seamless experience. I want to experience flow, so it’s motivating.

Third, blocking out time motivates me. I had whole days to waste all summer and work that I could do later. Instead, I told myself daily, “I will do three chapters first, then follow that up with writing time.” I put the less motivational classwork first. I scheduled everything in-between my intern visits (which broke up the monotony of having the same classwork daily).

There are some things, however, that I find so unmotivating that I avoid them. Housework is one of these things. I seem so overwhelmed trying to clean a cluttered house that I just break down. Our house is messy and cluttered as a result. Not dirty, just messy and cluttered. I think I will not be motivated for that until my husband and I decide to tackle the clutter together.

We can use the following professionally recommended strategies: 1) Break it down into smaller tasks; 2) Do the hardest stuff first; 3) Reward ourselves; 4) Quit if we’re not into the task after 15 minutes. That last part is the challenging one: I am never into housework. Is anyone?

I am obviously not a motivational expert, because I have not conquered my house. I hate the thought of the house taking away my precious writing time. So I hope my readers got something out of this anyhow.

A Rejection

I got a submission rejected yesterday. I knew I would, because it was a “first chapter” call, and I submitted my obviously genre fiction first chapter to an outfit likely looking for literary fiction. They let me down easy, of course.

Do I feel bad about it? Of course. I had fantasies about at least being longlisted, if not actually winning.

I’ve been rejected a lot. I suspect that much of the time, it’s because I have entered works into the realm of literary journals when I’m a genre writer; my stuff “doesn’t fit”. I’ve been told this. Much of the time, although I don’t like to admit it, my work probably doesn’t fit their quality standards either. I don’t know why I keep trying, except that one of my “doesn’t fit” stories got an honorable mention in a clearly literary contest.

I could take my rejections as not being “good enough”, or I could keep trying. I no longer query agents for my novels, instead choosing to self-publish. My reasons for this are less about rejections and more about the horror stories I’ve heard about traditional publishing these days. I go through periods of submitting on Submittable, and occasionally I get published. I’m not universally rejected, and nobody has begged me never to publish anything else again.

Rejections don’t spoil my flow time, nor do they destroy my inspirations. I do hope I get a major acceptance someday, because external validation is something I crave. But I’m still writing.

At the Risk of Sounding Repititous …

What do you enjoy most about writing?

My favorite thing about writing is getting totally absorbed in the process, a process called “flow”. I am a flow evangelist; I believe that everyone should find a flow activity. Flow contributes through well-being by engaging our brains in something outside ourselves.

Now that I got that out of the way, I will talk about other things I enjoy about writing. One of the biggest is watching my progress. When I was younger, I used a lot of adjectives, and my writing had a lot of “adjective noun, adjective noun” construction. This got a bit sing-songy. Now I write with just enough adjectives to get my point across, and not always paired with a noun directly. I used to use a lot of adverbs, with the same monotony of language. Now I use them sparingly and with more interesting nouns. I think this is an improvement; at least when I read my work over, it sounds better.

I enjoy watching my characters develop. It’s interesting how I have the bare idea of a character at the beginning, and once I start writing, their conversations flesh them out as a real character. I sometimes write conversations with them (which I call interrogations) to develop their characters and help me write.

But all of this comes back to the ability to sit and write, finding the words and going into an altered state where the words flow on the page and I lose track of time. It all goes back to flow.

A New Project!

I think I have a new project to write. I was going mad dealing with no motivation for writing more short stories, having written three this summer.

I will write the sequel to Kel and Brother Coyote Save the Universe, which is a serial novel on Kindle Vella. In Kel and Brother Coyote, the shipper for hire Kel Beemer gets hired by the monk Brother Coyote. She gives him three rules before agreeing to the hire — no passengers, no politics, and no restricted planets. Brother Coyote, however, breaks all three rules within fifteen minutes. They embark on an adventure that involves a plot to conquer a beauty planet, a psychic symbiont, and the two’s pasts intertwined.

The serial can be found here.

I’m not sure where I’m going to go with this, but I’m going on a writing retreat this weekend! I will spend my writing time hashing out the basic plot and other fine points; it looks like Broadway Coffee in Kansas City will be the venue.

Positive Emotions Then and Now

Daily writing prompt

What positive emotion do you feel most often?

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Fifteen years ago, I would have answered the question, “What positive emotion do you feel most often?” with elation. A perpetual high doesn’t make for a sustainable life, and in fact, I wavered between elation and despair (often in the same day). This was life with untreated bipolar disorder, fast cycling version.

Maybe because of the medication, and maybe because of getting older, my most common positive emotion is contentment. When I was younger, I thought of contentment as something inferior, as a curse that the fairy who didn’t get invited to the christening would cast on the poor baby^*.

Now I prefer contentment. It’s nice to not have to feel the extremes all the time. I do not get exhausted with my contentment as I did with my elation. The opposite of contentment on the spectrum is discontent, which is not a crippling feeling like despair.

I would not trade contentment for the overdose of elation ever again. I like small doses of elation, but I treasure the anchor of calm, peaceful emotion that is contentment.

^* This is a common trope in Western fairy tales in which a family presents a royal baby to the court at large in a christening (baptism) ceremony. The family invites all the witches/fairies/aunts save one. The uninvited one shows up anyhow and curses the baby. Sometimes the curse seems innocuous but causes a lot of harm, at times hilarious, to the child (for example, the child who could not tell a lie).

How Do I Plan? How Do You Plan?

Daily writing prompt

How do you plan your goals?

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I teach this topic in my resource management class. So when someone asks “How”, I’m going to have a complex and textbook answer.

The way people in general plan goals is to:

Derive a goal from their values
Clarify the goal (in terms of who, what, where, how, when, etc.)
Assess the resources needed (and whether they’re enough)
Make an auxiliary plan of where to get more resources (sometimes)
Develop standards (in terms of what success looks like)
Set a sequence of actions to guide the actions needed to carry out the implementation of the goal.

Do people really follow these steps? Unless we do everything without thinking, we do. The more complex and important the goal, the more obviously it looks like this. But these steps are more or less happening even if the goal is fixing a quick dinner. Think of following a recipe; the steps in the recipe follow this pattern. The person lays out standards — I need to add these ingredients in the right types and amounts. I have to follow a specific sequence of combining them — there’s my sequence of actions.

Plans at the spur of the moment may go through these steps quickly — think of deciding on the fly to go out to eat at a restaurant you’re passing by. You look at the menu costs; you check your pocket. Then you go in, knowing that the wait person will ask you if you want something to drink as they hand you a menu, then you will look over the menu and decide what you want, then you will tell the waitress. Standards and sequences.

Look at the step where resources are assessed. Not everyone looks at finding the resources if they don’t have them ready. Only people who are comfortable with change do that because it creates a new goal they perhaps haven’t counted on. People who are not comfortable with change stick with the goals they’ve always set, which we could call maintenance goals because they maintain a current way of life.

This is not the answer the prompt asked for. I was supposed to write how I personally set goals. But it answers the question. Other than this, what do you need to know?

The Calm Before the Storm, Fall Semester Edition

One week till the beginning of the semester meetings start, and I’m wearing pajamas that say “Pajamas All Day” on them. I think it’s a fitting tribute to the end of summer and the beginning of a busy fall semester.

To be honest, I worked on a class this morning. Honestly, I didn’t have to do the work until spring semester, but I worked on it. I am so ready for the semester to start that I have nothing left to do except maybe clean my office. Maybe.

I found two new coffee mugs for fall in my mailbox, and I think I know who got them for me (Shelly?) That was a pleasant surprise for beginning the semester.

I’m ahead for writing projects, having finished two books since March and gone through at least one editing pass on three. I have written three short stories over the summer. I’m looking for more inspiration for some stories that do not relate to the Hidden in Plain Sight universe. But today, I’m not looking too hard.

An Excerpt from My Latest Short Story

This is an excerpt from my latest short story, Simon and the Gift. It happens in the Hidden in Plain Sight universe, about 10 years after the novel I will be publishing on January 1, Reclaiming the Balance.

Simon Albee had never eaten of the Apples. He had rejected the ritual of belonging to Barn Swallows’ Dance, the collective he had become the sysop for many years ago. He had fought the Apocalypse with them, a low-key event for humanity to hang in the balance. Simon had almost died answering a call from InterSpace, where the Archetypes who could end the Apocalypse came from.
What made me change my mind? Simon thought of the years he watched the others with their Gifts, from animal empathy to spinning illusions. He knew why he didn’t choose to eat from the Trees. It wasn’t just that he didn’t trust things people referred to in capital letters.
He rejected the Gifts because he was afraid they would reject him.
I have always been weird. Neurodivergent was the official label these days; although that included people like Gideon, whose differences lay in the stability of his emotions. Simon’s differences were in how he dealt with the information flowing into him from all channels. He had come to terms with the sometimes overwhelming world, taking refuge in his office when he couldn’t take any more input.
Josh, the keeper of the Trees, had asked Simon earlier that week why he hadn’t gotten a Gift from the Trees. “I don’t like losing control,” Simon said, which was both true and a lie. He didn’t like losing control; he also didn’t see gaining a gift as losing control. A Gift was like any other new competence, and one worked to get better at it. But he, in his strangeness, would not get a Gift.
“I want to go in by myself,” Simon said to Josh as they stood at the edge of the food forest, an oasis of fruit trees and edible plants with a secret in the middle.
“We can arrange that.” Josh paused for a moment, and Simon wondered if he talked to the Trees in that moment of silence. The skeptic in him thought not.

As he walked through the trees toward the Garden, he heard a screech as a woodpecker flew overhead, then the clear, melodic note of a yellowthroat. Various birds chattered, and Simon wondered how anyone would think the orchard was silent.
Until he reached the clearing at the center, surrounded by the food forest. He had been there before, in the Garden with its two Trees, but only in a group. Once, the collective played an improvised concert in the Garden, and once or twice, they sought it in a group for solace. The place was as verdant, green upon green, as he remembered.
Now, the clearing stood in a stunning silence. He thought it glowed faintly, which he accepted without trying to explain. If he didn’t question, just accepted it in the way he accepted the noisy world, it didn’t disturb him. It just was.
He sat cross-legged in front of the Trees, thinking about how he didn’t move as easily as he did when he first arrived at the collective. It had been ten years, and he was almost forty. It was bound to happen. He stared at the Trees for some moments, capturing the improbability of ripe apples in May, one peculiarity of the space. One yellow and one red, hanging from branches as if waiting for him. That gave him goosebumps, because it was not rational. He dismissed it as another thing that just was.
He stood, slowly, and walked to the Trees. The ritual, which everyone at Barn Swallows’ Dance knew, was to pick one apple from each Tree and take a bite of each. One bite was all it took. He wondered if he would like the apples.
One apple in each hand. They seem on the small side, but they didn’t need to be large for one person. He sat back down with his back against one tree. He had forgotten, he realized, to ask the names of the Tree from Josh — their names always changed — and hoped that he didn’t spoil part of the ritual.
He took a pocketknife out of his pocket and peeled the yellow apple. From a young age, he had rejected apple peel; it was tough and had a bitter taste in his mouth. He took the peeled apple and cut it into slices, then took one bite. He remembered the first time he had eaten an apple; he was three years old. His parents despaired of him ever eating healthy food until they discovered he would eat apples without the peel. The apple tasted sweet and tart and juicy, and his teeth made a satisfying crunch as he bit into it. This yellow apple was that apple, that first apple.
He did the same with the second apple, the red one. The second apple reminded him of haroseth, the apples and honey and cinnamon of Passover. But then other things: it tasted the way mint smelled, and violets, with a touch of wood smoke. All things that he liked, but in odd combinations. He hugged to himself the experience.
Then, he took a deep breath.
He didn’t feel any different.

It’s a Weird Thing

What brings you peace?

I have a certain amount of anxiety that keeps me from getting peace. It particularly manifests itself when I’m in a car or when I lose something or my boss calls me to a meeting. It’s worse than it used to be because of a medication change.

I often pray to induce a sense of peace. The weird thing is that I consider myself at best nominally Christian. I don’t specify what God I’m praying to. I don’t believe in Hell or Heaven, I think intercessary prayer is actually confirmation bias; yet I pray to find the object or not get into a car accident. Yes, that makes me a hypocrite.

Or does it? As I said, I know if that item is not in the house, praying doesn’t bring it back there. It also doesn’t change the laws of physics. But it calms me down. It has a beneficial effect, even if only temporarily.

Every now and then I throw a “thank you” in God’s direction as well. But the good Christians do not believe I am a good Christian and I’m okay with that. Praying brings me peace when I’m in a panic.