Monthly Archives: August 2019

I’m not sure there’s a captain on this ship…

But if there is, could somebody please tell me where we’re going?

Sometimes, despite your best intentions, things just don’t work out the way you hoped. It’s just the way life works, and you have to be able to roll with the punches. This is one of the reasons I’ve always loved boxing (a passion I’ve struggled with as I have gotten older).

Here’s the analogy: To me, a fighter with a perfect record is just that – an incredibly skilled boxer who has never been beaten.

But this fighter is not necessarily a champion.

Let me explain. In order to be a champion, IMHO, you first must have been knocked down and seriously hurt, then either gotten back up to win, or, if the fighter lost, take their defeat graciously and learn from it – ultimately coming back to win again.

In other words – you are measured by your ability to be knocked down and get back up. It is only then that you may be called a champion.

You must show yourself and others what you are made of. If you have never been beaten, then you’ve never been tested.

Remember that when things go wrong.

“The worst idea with full support will always beat the best idea with no support.”

– Del Close

Sometimes (not always – I’m not a masochist), I like seeing how fast and efficiently I can work in impossibly accelerated situations in the ER. Mind you, you’re always working quickly and efficiently – but I’m talking about handling crushing amounts of patients in a short period of time.

The situations where you’re juggling so many tasks at once, while examining and assessing multiple patients at the same time, tests your ability to churn through medical care and still remain safe. This shit isn’t for the faint of heart, and it’s definitely not for neophytes.

Although these scenarios often happen in the lower acuity areas – the ones whose sole purpose is to treat as many people as possible in the shortest amount of time, in order to keep things flowing – it’s still plenty dangerous. You’re dealing with people’s lives here – mistakes can have extremely negative repercussions, and people can get hurt very quickly.

Still, it’s nice to know you can do it. When things start to get brutal, don’t complain and fold – rise to the demand and show you’re in your element.

Yeah, it was that kind of day.

Last night I had a dream that I went to work and found my ER locked and shuttered. “Closed for Business” said the sign pasted to the front door. Underneath this declaration was the explanation: “Due to lack of staff.”

WTF!? I thought as I woke up in a cold sweat.

Whatever that means, it doesn’t sound good.

I just finished my newest short story as a final first draft – in other words, it’s an edited and proofed complete version with the caveat that I may edit it further – I just need some time away so I can come back and read it fresh later. I’m posting it as a record of where it stands at this point in time.

This one was harder than my previous stories for several reasons. First, it involves children, and I am not an expert in childhood developmental stages. When you are writing from the viewpoint of a child, it can be hard to pin down how complex their thinking is at any given age simply because some kids are going to be much smarter than others. There is also the issue that life will sometimes force them to know things that they shouldn’t know at their age.

Another issue I struggled with, and will probably require revision, is that I had a hard time keeping the word count down to what’s acceptable for a short story. I’m already at 9,300 words – which is pushing it for length – and it really needs more exposition for character development. The timeline may also need to be expanded… I’m not yet sure.

Regardless, I love it. It’s a really cool story that developed in unexpected ways. If anyone reads it, I hope they enjoy it as much as I did writing it.

My wife, who proofs my stuff, always says I shouldn’t be concerned with length, that it should just be as long as needed to tell the story. Intuitively this makes perfect sense, the problem is that many publications won’t accept short stories over a certain length.

Then there is also the issue with writing content that will be difficult for some readers to process (i.e. make them want to tune out). I have pretty specific thoughts about that, but again, I need to give it some time before I decide whether to change anything. I have already had an essay turned down for publication for content that was too hard-hitting and graphic. The thing is – life is hard-hitting and graphic. I understand that for many people some topics are just too uncomfortable, but hey – life doesn’t give a shit whether you’re uncomfortable or not. And here’s another news flash: You can’t fix a problem if you won’t fully acknowledge it.

The essay that was rejected for publication was about death, and this story involves child abuse – obviously both difficult topics – which of course is the very thing that makes them interesting to write about. In the case of the latter, I feel like skirting around the specific abuse is not really acknowledging what the victim went through – it’s not honoring their pain, if that makes any sense. I think it sends the wrong message, as if what happened to them was so wrong it should remain unnameable, which would only seem to reinforce their shame.

In reality, I believe that by failing to frankly acknowledge the specific acts of abuse, you are not “protecting the child,” because the child has already gone through this horror. No, what really appears to be happening is that adults are trying to protect themselves from having to acknowledge what human beings are capable of inflicting on children. And let’s be clear: I’m an ER nurse – I can tell you from experience that this shit goes on all the time.

Anyway, enough of my rambling – let’s get on with the show!

1. Ask yourself how can I provide the maximum value in whatever situation is causing you discomfort.
2. Remind yourself it’s not always about you.
3. Detach yourself personally from the shitstorm and just try to help someone else.
4. Keep doing this until things get better.
5. Wait for things to get shitty again.
6. Rinse and repeat.

Just finished my fifth short story! OMG – does that feel good:)

This one really could be a novel, but I’m not quite ready to write one yet. I feel like I need to get a few more short stories under my belt – I’m definitely getting better with each one.

There’s a lot of elements at play when you’re writing – the story of course is the main thing. But I love learning how to tell it through the mechanics of language – first, second or third person? Sentence structure? Dialog? Linear or nonlinear use of time? Hyphen, comma, or perhaps semicolon? Character development? Finding a voice for each character?

Here’s another cool thing I’ve discovered: Sometimes the story isn’t about what you originally thought it was about. Like in this one, I started out thinking the focus would be on one thing, but by the time I was through it turned out to be something else entirely. The characters kind of showed me what it was really about as I wrote it.

It turns out that it’s about children, something I know fuck-all about. I just listened to what they told me – seriously, I’m not kidding.

I’ve been thinking about Ray Harryhausen and the way he created his art, which was highly unusual at the time. Film by nature is a collaborative medium – the idea of creating most of a motion picture in your workshop essentially by yourself just makes no sense – especially in the 1950’s-60’s before computers. On top of that, he wasn’t just creating special FX, he was creating whole worlds and inventing creatures who lived in them. If you read much about him, two things quickly become apparent.

1. That he worked alone.
2. That what he created had no corollary in the real world.

This has some obvious parallels to making music today. For the sake of argument, let’s say that there are essentially two ways to make and record music (in reality they often blend together, but not always). The first is that you get a group of musicians in a room and record them. Until the 1980’s, this is how all music was made (notwithstanding a few very rare outliers).

With the advent of computer technology in the late 1980’s, artists began to assemble records by programming, often working alone. This has only become more pronounced as time went on. But these two approaches obviously yield very different results.

Early on, musician/programmers sought to make sequenced music sound like real players (a generalization, but bear with me). The thought was that “real” music was made by humans playing live, together and in real time, in a room somewhere. But I would argue that’s false, and Ray Harryhausen‘s work provides a useful metaphor.

He didn’t attempt to make stop-motion animation look real, it would have been impossible anyway. So instead he simply used it as a tool to create things that never could have existed in reality, adding to their otherworldly power.

I think this is the clue to creating music with computer technology – not to try and recreate reality, rather, to invent a new reality.