Category: Writing

  • Covid Blues, But My Wife Rocks

    Just going to brag about my wife for a second…

    She was hired today, for a fulltime job with benefits. She busted her ass and found a job in the middle of a pandemic. It has made life easier for all of us, and we can take a little breath of relief. Maybe only for a second, but it feels like the first breath we have been able to take in five months. I’m very proud of of this amazing woman.

    It has been such a insane and unpredictable nine months for us. From leaving California, and reestablishing ourselves back in New York, only to have Covid pull the rug from out from everyone. There was no way to predict any of this.

    To be honest, I never thought there really would be a pandemic. From the way the world treated SARs and Ebola, even N1H1, it just seemed to me that the we knew how to work together and fight a contagious disease. I really felt like science and logic were winning over ignorance. Little did I know that stupid is stronger than I thought.

    And with all of this, how will we tell this story of disease? That is the question I keep hearing from my artist friends… if we survive. How will this affect the way we tell stories, and how we share this common experience? Only time will tell.

  • Steal That Time to Write

    Last night I was able to get about 500+ words done on the novel. (My goal is 1,000 words a day, but that might be too ambitious.) I had to steal moments to get it done while I was making dinner. The brussel sprouts were sautéing, and I added a paragraph; that sort of thing. It was very scattered, but I am trying to finish a first draft; it doesn’t have to be perfect.

    It reminded me a conversation I had with a playwright friend of mine about setting aside time to write. He is a married father of two, both kids under 10. He is a stay at home dad, but that position does not afford him any additional time to write, as any stay at home parent would tell you.

    What my friend told me was that before kids, he wrote anytime he felt like it. Now, as a stay at home parent, he had moved into a system of taking notes when an idea hit him, and then having to find the time in his schedule to write out the idea. He actually felt it made him a better writer. As he told me, he might only have one hour to work a day, so he knew that if wanted to get his idea accomplished, he had to focus and use every minute of that hour.

    Not that I am at that point, but I am beginning to find this to be solid advice.

  • Need to Stay Focused

    I do have issues with staying focused when I should be working.

    Case in point…

    So, I have been sitting here on the couch as the kid watches her afternoon cartoons. This is an hour that I can get a blog completed and even get some work done in the novel. It’s in the schedule, and we all know that is what I do for this hour.

    Now, what I have been doing is reading up on Hamilton’s home, The Grange. I went by it the other day when I was walking the dog, and when I opened up my computer to work, The Grange popped into my head.

    Well, I thought, I could take a minute to look it up real quick. I mean, I did hear that where The Grange house is today is not the original location. I wonder if I could find a map that showed where the original location was.

    Sure enough, I did.

    But that made me wonder if I could find a map that showed the plot of land that Hamilton used to own. That was a little tougher to find, and to be honest, I never really found what I was looking for but I did find a map of upper Manhattan that had the house circled.

    And that’s when I saw that my hour had slipped by and I hadn’t written a blog or worked on the novel.

    Oops…

  • Well-Read and Books on the Shelf

    Okay, one last thought that I had about the FaceBook argument. That guy kept asking me what conservative media I read, and I knew full well that it was a set-up question. No matter how many sources I named, he would say he read more, and hence was an expert, and thus my opinion was uninformed and invalid. I knew better than to play that game, but it did make me think about at what point does a person cross the threshold and become “well read?”

    There is the Malcom Gladwell rule/guideline of 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert. Does that apply to reading? Not reading up on a subject, because if you spent 10,000 reading about plumbing, you might not be an expert, but you would, or at least should, be very knowledgeable on the subject. But if you spent 10,000 hours reading, anything and everything, does that makes you an expert at reading?

    I don’t know where I was going with that…

    Being well read.

    Anyway…

    With all of the news interviews in people’s homes, the performance space in demand clearly has been a wall of books in an office setting. That is the “classic” sign of a well-read person. Some offices are a little too conspicuously clean and well organized, like the books are never touched. The offices I have enjoyed looking at are the ones where the books and papers are sort of stacked all over the place. Those are usually the offices of research doctors, and I want to believe that they just threw their books on the shelf when they are done reading it.

    I can admit that, since moving back from California, I only have about half of my books in the apartment, with the other half still in storage. We have one wall in the apartment that all the housed books live on. They are in no order, and just got thrown up there. It’s not author ordered, or even in some sort style of size of book color. We just them up there with the plan of coming back and put some order to it. That was seven months ago.

  • New Lease on Social Media Life

    I think I’m detoxing from FaceBook right now.

    As the handful of you know, I got it an online argument with a friend on FaceBook about voting and the Postal Service. I posted on here what I had said to the guy, and I knew full well that after the last post I was done with it, but he would post something trying to egg me on in some way. But I was done, I had said my peace, and I didn’t want to play anymore. To hold to that commitment, I couldn’t go back on FaceBook, read his response, and then, basically, state the vicious cycle all over again.

    So, I haven’t been on FaceBook for two days now.

    I have no idea what is going on in people’s lives, and I think I am okay with that. The pandemic has given me too much free time, and I have wasted a great deal of it looking online to see how other people were using their time, and most of them appeared to be very productive. (I know everyone lies on the internet.) It created a feeling in me that I wasn’t doing enough, which wasn’t helpful, and in and return, I let myself get discouraged making it more difficult to motivate myself. But I know fully that I was letting this happen, and choosing to be discouraged.

    And also, in strange way, getting my dander up about an issue, taking time to think out my response, and being honest that I am passionate about something that affects others, did make me feel more connected to the world. I’m not saying that I’m about to turn into a social media activist, because action in the real world is needed, not posting on a feed, but I need to get off my ass and help out in this world again.