the last twenty minutes

First of all, it’s 2011, so I’m changing the font. Fuck yeah.

_

Turns out I wasn’t nearly as “over” my cold as I thought on NYE. Turns out that working that night from eight until four the next morning didn’t help. Casino hours… what are ya gonna do?

So I stumbled through the weekend of dealing cards and then slept Monday and Tuesday, literally. It’s Thursday and I almost feel mostly human again.

All that down time did let me finish watching the World Junior Hockey Championships though, so it wasn’t all bad. I just set my phone alarm to get up for the games and, in between, slept in medicated bliss. I was back on my feet yesterday though, running around, catching up on stuff, and ended up watching the final (Canada vs Russia) in a pub.

Canada lost in a monumental third period meltdown, going from a 3-0 lead at the start of the period to a final, dismal 5-3 loss, allowing five unanswered goals in what will surely go down as one of the greatest chokes of all time. I’ve mentioned before that I watch hockey now for the joy of the game and not to cheer the home team. Mostly. I was a little disappointed.

It was disappointing to watch the Canadian team blow the lead, but not world-ending. More disappointing was that it was a boring game to watch. Canada dominated for forty minutes, and then Russia dominated for twenty. There was very little of that exciting battle between two equals when they go toe to toe in the kind of display of skill and speed that makes hockey the fastest, most exciting game in the world. (Yes, I’m biased. My blog, I’m allowed.)

So I was less disappointed in the final score than I was in the fact that neither team came out to play a full sixty minutes of hockey.

That sounds uncharitable, and it kind of is. These are kids after all, every one of them nineteen or under and subsequently susceptible to vagaries of emotional vacillation tempestuous enough to sink the Titanic.

Nobody will ever know what exactly happened. It looked to me, though, like Canada spent the intermission between the second and the third imagining what the gold medals were going to feel like hanging around their necks, and then came out worried about not losing them. The Russian team, on the other hand, spent the intermission realizing that they had absolutely nothing to lose, and twenty minutes left to them to reach for the brass ring.

And that, I think, made all the difference.

The team that won yesterday didn’t play the whole game as well as they could have, but they played the most important part – the end. Life is like that, yeah? Not too many people manage to figure out their personal legend, to use a Paulo Coelho-ism, early enough to say they were able to play the whole game. I know a lot of people, like me, that didn’t figure that part out until later on.

Most of the time, we give up. We say that we made our choice and now we have to stick with it. We get fixated on the destination and lose sight of the journey, hung up on holding onto what we've got instead of risking it for the sake of the path. We have a career, families, kids, mortgages*, obligations, responsibilities, and we convince ourselves that personal legends have to come second to those things, because we’re used to lists and priorities that have to be linear.

News flash: They don’t have to be. You can love your kids and spouse and still love yourself and pursue whatever it is that makes your blood sing. And if you can, and if I can, then we all can.

When it comes down to it, how we start is less important than how we end. Lots of us have great ideas, brilliant starts, and then, somewhere in the middle, lose the thread. It’s a marathon, a journey, after all, and there’s lots of time to get distracted, or sidetracked, or bogged down. Win or lose, it truly is how we play the game, the effort we put in to the end.

I lucked out. I truly feel that I found my little bit of destiny to chase after, and I was in a pretty flexible personal position to make drastic changes in order to chase after that fucker. I get that it isn’t always appropriate to flip everything upside down in a life-inversion like I did in order to make changes, but there are always ways. I’m surrounded by amazing people, online and in the 3-D world, that are doing it, chasing personal legends, making it up as they go along, carving out a path through the jungle towards a mountaintop and a cave full of bliss.

They’re reaching for it as if there was nothing to lose, and I find it inspiring to see. It inspires me every day to get in the chair and finish stronger than I started, the skate to the buzzer. Because I have nothing to lose except me, and the only way to do that is to stop trying. Let me say that again: We have nothing to lose but ourselves, and the only way to do that is to stop trying.

I don’t usually do the question asking thing here, but I will today, because I’m truly interested in hearing your truth. What is it in your life that’s worth playing hard for right to final buzzer?

* The word mortgage finds its roots in the French. It literally means “death pledge”. Not surprisingly, they don’t use that particular phrase in French-speaking lands to describe contracts to buy houses. Go figure…

november

When I was eleven, the academic curriculum I was involved in at school was provided the opportunity to do a remarkable thing. Remarkable to us, in any case. We were allowed to make the big, dangerous walk across the street, through the sports fields, and into the giant halls of the Senior Secondary School to the confines of the band class so that we could participate in a unique grade seven music program. Through a quirk of fate and germs, I managed to miss the first visit. When I arrived in the second week, all of the really cool boy instruments – the trombones and trumpets, saxophones and tympanis, the lone guitar and drum kit – were taken.

I was left with the choice of clarinet or flute. The teacher said I had a good embouchure for flute (if @migroddy wanders through, maybe he can explain that concept in the comments), so that’s what I got. In time, I came to appreciate that placement – there are some really cute girls in the flute section – but at the time, just stumbling out of the blocks into pubescence with all of its sharp corners and early-adolescent contrasts, I did not feel lucky. I felt ripped off, like a cruel joke was being played on me. Like a giant “kick me” sign (to replace the one, only slightly smaller, that I already thought I possessed) had just been hung around my neck. I was not an enthusiastic student.

Three months later and heading towards the holiday break, I was facing my first test; about sixteen bars of simple melody that I could not complete on my best day. Not even close. My inadequacy was earned; I didn’t practice. The space between that band class and my closet space at school where I could hide the offending instrument, or home where I could hide it even better, was a bit of grade school social hell for me. Subsequently, I was on the road to failing said test, a probability that was, to me, as or more horrifying than the sentence of having to walk around in public with a flute case.

Not doing really well in school was not something I was comfortable with, in any subject. I was a nerd and proud of it. So with a few nights left before the test I suddenly came face to face with my desperation to excel and please my teachers, dug the flute out at home, and tried to practice.

It was dismal. When Mom now complains about tinnitus, I wonder whether that evening had something to do with it. I know that it didn’t, but still, I now know that nothing says “I love you” like a parent suffering through the early stages of music tutelage. After a whole fifteen minutes of trying and failing I was frustrated and ready to give up. I’d just quit the music program. I hated flute anyway, hated the snickers and the jokes and the insults. Mostly, to be honest, I hated not being better than the others. I hated standing out for the wrong reasons.

And then, for what was to be the first and last time, Mom made me keep trying. Like the one spanking I received, it had a profound effect. And like that one spanking, I’ve later wished she’d done it more. A lot more. I never really learned about how good discipline could be for you as a kid, but I wish sometimes that I’d had the opportunity to learn that lesson better, and younger.

But on that night, she was stern and strong and unwilling to equivocate on the subject of my practicing. As I got up to quit, she got in my face and made me sit back down. On that night, my fear of failure was confronted by that fierce motherly aspect, and my fear backed down.

I took my seat and tried again, her at my shoulder. And then I tried again because that time sounded as much like bird torture as the time before it. And again, and again, and again. It took another thirty minutes of really trying, of having no safe place to retreat to, of being stuck between a flute and a hardass, before the crux passage finally worked. Magically, my spasmodic fingers managed to function together and I made it through the bar of eighth notes and through to the finish. The only smile in the room bigger than mine was Mom’s.

Band and jazz band and orchestra ended up being extremely dependable and relatively easy A’s for me for the rest of my public school career. I was never exceptional, just a bit better than most, good enough for first flute but not enough to ever worry about a scholarship, and I was (sadly) okay with that. I learned to enjoy playing and being surrounded by girls even more. (A good embouchure is also useful for kissing.) All thanks to Mom and half an hour of not quitting.

But, as I said, it was a one-time lesson. I could have, should have, received that lesson many, many more times. But Mom got pretty busy with the boarders, and I was always too proud to ask or admit I needed it. So I coasted, and then floundered, and finally learned how to avoid challenges so as to avoid failure with an alacrity that bordered on evil genius.

It didn’t affect every part of my life, that aversion to risk, just the creative ones. Just the important ones. I did well in my chosen jobs, was successful when I went pack to school at 26 to re-educate following a motorcycle accident, and managed to get through most things looking like I sort of knew what I was doing. But I also didn’t really “complete” a lot of things. When the going got tough, I got going… the other way.

Through my thirties I was provided opportunities to learn lessons that I wish I’d learned in my teens. Somehow I managed to stumble into management positions, and where I was comfortable failing myself, I found I wasn’t comfortable at all failing the teams that depended on me. That sense of obligation or responsibility was the leverage my mind and heart needed to get over the hump and push through to completion, even when my legs wanted to go the other way.

Those lessons took a long time to learn though. I wrote the first draft of the prologue of the story I’m writing nearly fourteen years ago, got forty or so pages in, drew maps, and then abandoned it. I told myself it was just fantasy and not literary enough. I told myself that it was unrealistic to want to be a writer. I told myself that I was almost thirty and should start being a responsible adult. And they were all excuses.

At forty-three, I finally had enough confidence, frustration, angst, disillusionment, hope… whatever… to try again.

You know this part of the story if you’ve been reading along for a bit. (If not, search “life inversion” and catch up.) I quit again, but this time only the parts that were really bad for me – the corporate job, the consumerism, the stuff-accumulation, the pretending and pretension. I decided to put all my eggs in one basket, say “fuck it”, and write that goddamned novel I’d always said I was going to write.

I finished the bastard last Friday.

Well, not “finished” it in the sense that I’m ready to try to sell it just yet, but I finished a second draft. It’s close. There’s a bit of polishing, then the sharing with trusted and valued readers, then a final polish. But then, soon, only a couple months away now, I’ll be trying to find an agent.

When I typed the last word of the last chapter on Friday, it felt a bit like vindication. Not over anyone else. But over me. To me it felt like giving a big middle finger to the part of me that thought I’d never do it; to the voice that whispered in the dark that I was deluding myself; to the piece that was still convinced I was a fuck up. I felt like I was standing over that remnant, that vestigial quitter, on the field of battle, my foot on its corpse, sword in hand, screaming something primordial into the cold gloaming air. My own Barbaric Yawp.

It was how I’d felt, just that once as an eleven-year old, when Mom made me keep trying until I fucking got it, only better.

Some lessons, I suppose, take longer to learn than others. Mostly the important ones.

Epilogue: The mss is essentially done. Like I said, there’s a bit of polishing to do, but it’s pretty much complete at 180k words. I edited over 50k of them in the last month (my own sort-of NaNoWriMo), so thanks for hanging around while I took that break. Regular posts will now commence again. I’ll keep you updated.

P.S. I missed you all.

i have a confession

I’ve been more aware than usual lately that I tend to work my way around things obliquely before I actually tackle them head on. I allude to a lot of things for a long time until I screw up the courage, or find the right time, or my self-imposed defensive orbit just degrades to the point that I fall into the gravity well. Directly talking about writing -  that I write and that I want to be a writer, like for a living - is one of them.

It’s time I come clean.

I’ve talked about a bunch of other things that the life-inversion is about; how much I had grown to hate profit motives, consumerism, the systems of the world and politics, my addictions to stuff and appearances, and all the things that we use to anesthetize ourselves – that I used to anesthetize myself with for so long - and how I needed to make drastic changes in order to chase after a better me. All of those things are very true and close to my heart. But it was the story, the novel, that was the real reason. It was the thought of telling stories like my favorite authors told - stories that snuck past my defenses and made me think and aspire – that kept me up at night. It was the thought of the process of telling those stories and how it might help me grow and expand that made me smile at unexpected moments, like a jolt of pure joy. It was always about the stories.

The story, the one I’m trying to tell right now, is a giant, massive beast of an epic fantasy. The manuscript, as I work deep into the second draft, sits just a bit over 200,000 words, and it’s the first of the at least four volumes I believe it will take to tell the whole tale. This alone might make it a cumbersome thing to try to get published, and sometimes I wonder if I’ve written it this way, on this scale, to make it harder for myself. I do that sometimes, like exaggerating the dream of being a writer: I make it so big that I don’t have to worry about it ever being more than a dream because it’s so unrealistic.

But it is realistic. The story is alive to me. I think I’d read it and fall in love with the landscapes and cultures, the heroes and anti-heroes and complicated antagonists, their foibles and demons and dreams, and the messed up realities that they have to face and overcome to try to make things fit. I want it to work as a great story, one that people can escape into as a pure adventure. I want people to read and be there, and feel what the characters feel, and wish it would never end.

I also have hubristic aspirations. I want the story, the way I tell it, to work on more levels than just as a story. I desire it to be like my favorites, with nuances and insights and things below the surface worth digging for, things that come up for air between the plot lines and dialog, or that reveal themselves only through a process of erosion. I want it to measure up to the tales I loved - the genre and non-genre ones - that broke me open and made my world a bigger place and challenged me in tragic and beautiful ways to see the world exactly the way it is and still be a dreamer. To know the truth and still dream.

But I’m still afraid of that dream in fundamental ways too. It’s so precious to me, has been for so long, that the thought of trying and failing paralyzes me sometimes. I have a fear of failure and have had it for a long, long time. I fear that it will simply be not good enough to publish. Or worse, that I will not be sufficient to the aspiration; that I’ll betray my characters and fail to tell their stories properly. That I’ll let them and the story down. It’s the breathstopping fear of letting the story down that paralyzes me the most.

That’s a danger with dreams; sometimes they take on such mythic proportions that we’re afraid to approach them, afraid that we won’t be up to that challenge, and afraid that failing will mean we were never meant to own the dream in the first place. That’s my biggest fear by far.

Although I rarely remember my dreams, I do have this one recurring nightmare:

In the dream I’m sitting at the laptop and suddenly realize that I’m out of stories to tell. The well is dry and I have nothing left worth trying to say. The realization stuns me and I stop typing. And then the walls start to slowly, quietly crack and disintegrate as if they were made of sand the whole time and all it took was a puff of hesitation to bring the house down. I look down at my hands, at my palms, trying to figure out what went wrong, and the same thing starts to happen to my fingers, each digit first blurring and then softly blowing away from the tip down to the palm down to the wrist. And that’s about when I always wake up.

And then, in the dark, I realize that the truth is scarier: I haven’t even finished the first story, and I have nobody to lay that culpability on but myself.

I hate fear, and love it. I hate it when I let it slow me, and love it when I overcome it. I know that I cannot overcome it if it isn’t there, so I try to embrace it and be thankful for the opportunity it represents, but that’s hard too. One of my favorite storytellers, Frank Herbert, had some wonderful things to write about fear, and I remember them almost daily. And I remember that courage is feeling the fear and doing it anyway.

I have come to love this blog, but right now it’s also providing a lot of distraction; fun temptations full of writing bite-sized, pretty, thoughtful, ugly, silly things and receiving immediate feedback. I love where TOL has taken me, is taking me – the friends it’s introduced me to and the ways it’s made me stretch. But it’s in the way right now.

So I’m going to take a partial hiatus from thinkingoutloud-land. I think this means one post a week until V 2.0 of the manuscript is done, but I’m not making any promises.

I need to get obsessive and just finish it. As Sugar would say, I need to finally rip this second beating heart out of me. Because I write, I’m a writer, and there are stories to tell.

And I need to do it before my hands blow away.

It feels good to get that off my chest. Thanks for bearing witness.

****

To everyone that comes here and reads, whether you comment or not (but there’s a special place in my heart for those that join the discussion), both here and on FB, thank you. Just having you around, sharing your thoughts, means the world. Give me through the end of the year or so and we’ll see about getting back to our regularly scheduled programming.