Tuesday, September 6th: "I want the fire back."

State of the Me

So, almost the exact same thing happened today as yesterday... the difference being that I did sleep, but I woke up at six, was up for a few hours, then crashed and laid back down. Now that I've written that, I have to say it really wasn't the same thing at all. Yesterday's sleep-related shenanigans were the direct result of insomnia. Today's is probably just the result of having slept during the day yesterday. Hopefully I can either get off this kick soon, or ride it until it works.

News For Today

My mini-piphany for the week came to me yesterday and was refined today. One thing I've floundered on pretty consistently is how to make writing my job... how to do it every day, or at least consistently enough that I have a consistent output. And I've figured out it's pretty much a matter of a false dichotomy, where I'm either treating it as a 9-to-5/40-hour-a-week job or I'm not. Treating it as a job doesn't work for long, but any time I dial back the pressure the whole thing collapses anyway.

So here's the 90 degree turn in perspective I need: stop thinking of it as a job, start thinking of it as a career, a vocation. It's a refinement of the thoughts I expressed in this blog piece, in the middle of my little spring revival of earlier this year. "Write x chapters this week" is a job-goal. It's not enough to keep someone going in a career that demands as much involvement as a whole person as the creative arts.

Back at the beginning of MU, when I updated 5 times a week (4 in an off-week) it wasn't because I set that as a goal for myself. It was because I'd found a story that I wanted to tell that much. Passion drives; responsibility nags. Passion makes me feel good about succeeding where responsibility only makes me feel guilty about not.

Part of this shift in perception is why the last chapter underwent a shift when I was writing it. After the events of the past summer, it seemed important for me to address consent... clear, enthusiastic, assenting consent... in the context of Mackenzie's relationships. Tales of MU has never been intended to be a manual on Doing Things Right. When they were freshmen, literally and metaphorically, I wanted their relationship to be full of the same kinds of mistakes that freshmen make. Talks were talked more often than walks were walked. I still don't want it to be seen as a blueprint for anything, but I want to show that they're not freshmen anymore.

So what would have been a little sidenote in a chapter that would have served as a bridge over a longer period of time became the focus, and it's a chapter I feel good about.

Plans For Today

More reflective than reactive, I think. I know what happens in the next couple chapters of MU; I need to figure out what's going on in them if they're going to end up with more verve than verbiage. I'm also going to do some writing on the next chapter, but it may or may not produce anything I use.

Construction Post: Kin & Distant Relations

2:00-2:30: ~800 words
2:30-3:00: ~1400 words (+600)


( Spoilers )

Construction Post: TOMU 2-29

6:00-6:30 ~600 (+400)
6:30-7:00 ~950 (+350)
4:00-4:30 ~1400 (+450)
4:30-5:00 ~1750 (+350)
6:00-6:30 ~2250 (+500)


( Spoilers )

End of day wrap.

Okay, so... ~2,300 words today, and they're pretty good ones. I'm especially pleased with how the beginning of Kin and Distant Relations came together. I'm not throwing out the other things I'd written in my previous stabs at getting it going... one of the things I like about the approach I have now is that it gives me a place for them, a way of wrapping them up.

I have these wonderful characters of Dan and Del and Aidan Harris, and I have their general situation, but all of that is not a story, not even for my somewhat expansive definition thereof*. I started out back last spring with enough of a story to be getting on with, but a lot of the specifics crumbled after everything that happened over the summer.

What I have now is not the same story, I'm pretty sure, but it's the same characters. And it might even be a better story, because it's pretty dang good and I'm excited about it.

~2,300 words, in two hours of writing. I'm not going to try to break down how the rest of the day constituted "work" but it led to me writing 2,300 words I'm proud of and can use so let's not go second-guessing it.. There's a great comment on my last status post by Sumana Harihareswara, one of those rare and powerful human beings who along with popelizbet deserves the title of Functional Muse (it's not so much that she inspires art as she enables it).

She tweeted the same sentiment at around the same time, but the full quote loses something when foreshortened to 140 characters:

"So the trick is not being disciplined about work -- that is ineffective, exhausting, and dispiriting -- but being disciplined about the habit that tricks us into working."

Words to live by. And it gives me a happy feeling because that's what the bulk of my plan for the month is.

I'm not holding myself to a commitment to write a certain volume of entertaining prose, as much as I'm holding myself to a commitment to live my life in a way in which that will happen anyway.

---

*Sidenote: There's an excellent post here I've been meaning to link to, which looks at storytelling tropes from the angle of the U.S.-centric mindset... the tropes we inherited from Europe and developed on our own... being treated as "universals". One of my favorite parts is the calling out of the reduction of "story" to only include "stories about conflict/resolution", particularly where the resolution must be violent.

On jobs and spending.

88% of income growth since 2009 went to corporate profits, 1% went to employee wages.

To anyone who thinks that further tax breaks/benefits to large corporations would create jobs, let's put it this way: for every extra million dollars that corporate America gets, they pocket $880,000 and put $10,000 into salaries. $10,000. That's not even enough to add one full-time worker at minimum wage.

We want to pick on government spending as being an inefficient way of creating jobs? Giving a corporation a million dollars in taxpayer money so they can hire one minimum wage worker to work 26 hours a week doesn't sound very efficient to me.

Of course, if lowering taxes created jobs then we'd have record low unemployment right now to match our current low taxes, wouldn't we? But we don't, for the same reasons that so little of any money is being invested back into the working class. It doesn't directly benefit the people steering the ship to keep the crew fed or happy if they can figure out another way to keep the crew in line and the ship moving forward.

Supposedly enlightened self interest and the invisible hand of the free market are going to take care of this, but enlightened self-interest requires one to take a long view towards the point where the ship sinks from all the skimping you've done on essential maintenance or is destroyed in a mutiny. And the free market is a power vacuum like any other... it ceases to be free as soon as any one actor upon its stage is able to exert any more leverage or power than any other. There will always be regulations, it's just a question of how they're created and enforced.

There's always going to be some waste in government spending as there's waste in any human endeavor of an appreciable size, but when we cut spending, we're cutting jobs. We're firing public employees, we're canceling contracts with and purchases from private sector employers that require bodies in seats and boots on the ground. As a nation we've always been more comfortable with the notion of putting people to work than the (largely chimerical) idea of "government handouts", but when we hand corporations money in the form of tax cuts, rebates, and grants they have no particular incentive to do anything with that money but pocket it.

When the government spends money on their goods and services, they have to work for it... they have to produce something. And that means hiring people and paying them wages with the money.

Now is not the time for austerity measures. Now is not the time for further choking the lifeblood of the country. It's easy to think "if we're in debt, spending is bad." Believe me, it's a lesson I've had to learn in my day-to-day life. But I'm not the government of a large republic. I'm a private citizen. My personal economy isn't this big whole complex thing that has to keep moving to support millions of people, it's just a tiny little part of that system. Trying to run the government like I'd run my personal accounts makes as much sense as treating a corporation as a person. (Oh, wait.)

Basically, now is the time for patriotic citizens of the United States to stand up and say to our elected representatives, "Put our money to work. Put our people to work."

Superman Goes Back To His Roots (or, The Nerdiest Thing I've Written So Far)

So, DC's new Action Comics #1 comes out tomorrow... this is the comic that in its initial incarnation was Superman's first home in the publishing world. In DC's newly rebooted continuity, it's the home of Superman's "year one" stories, showing an inexperienced Young Man of Steel running (not flying) around Metropolis in a home-made outfit consisting of jeans and a t-shirt.

The "no tights, no flights" aspect of the project is sure to prompt comparisons to Smallville and his methods might call to mind the Reign-of-the-Supermen-era Eradicator, but I think it really is more about getting back to the character's roots... back to the age when he was more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound and that was considered to be impressive enough without flight or pushing celestial bodies around.

In fact, as I read these preview pages, what I'm reminded most of is Philip Wylie's Gladiator, the seminal work of the modern superhero genre... if you read it with no idea of the timing, you'd swear it was an early deconstruction of the Superman myth, but in fact it's the foundation of it. The surface resemblance between Wylie's protagonist of Hugo Danner and the original Golden Age Superman are so noticeable that when the Golden Age version of the character was removed from continuity in the Crisis on Infinite Earths, his adventures were retconned to have happened to Danner's son.

(Gladiator was in the public domain at this point.)

Hugo Danner as written was a tragic figure in a way that Superman is never likely to be even in a Grant Morrison book, but his attempts to use his powers for great justice have a lot in common with the hands-on, in-your-face style of Morrison's Young Superman.