A Writer’s Horror Story

I watched an excellent documentary this evening.  It was called Neil Gaiman: Dream Dangerously and it surprised me by telling more about my favorite writer than I already knew. It reminded me of why I want to be a writer. It was a magical collection of serendipitous moments, interviews, and the odd anecdote.

It reminded me that I needed to acquire the Sandman collections and read them from start to finish. It reminded me of the bittersweet story of Terry Pratchett mentoring Neil. We got to see a few clips from an interview with Terry before he passed.

But mostly it reminded me that if you believe strongly enough that you are normal and everyone else is strange, keep doing the things that you love to do in spite of the odds of success, and are incredibly lucky, you can make a career doing the things that you love.

I must admit that my career thus far has been fairly charmed. I have been able to turn my passion for computers and programming into a decent living. I am still having fun doing it. Ah,  you can hear it can’t you? The eminent “But” hanging in the air waiting to be said.

But, one charmed career isn’t enough. I long for the second career as a writer. I am training for it like a runner trains for a marathon. I’ve got my eye out for a good coach but in the mean time I’m putting my butt in the chair every day and writing. The only way to get good at something is to do it a lot.

My photography teacher in college, Chuck Swedlund, told us to buy a hundred foot reel of black and white film and put it in the freezer. That keeps it from going bad as quickly. Then hand load rolls of 35mm film and shoot lots and lots of pictures. The only way to become a great photographer was to practice and the only way to practice was to take lots of pictures.

Neil also reminded me of something that I’ve always known but quickly forget if I don’t constantly remind myself of. Your life is the palate from which you draw the material with which you paint your stories. If you don’t live your life large, do new things, meet new people, you will run out of things to write about.

That is one of my secret fears, running out of things to write about. I haven’t yet and when I’m not feeling the pressure of a deadline I can think of dozens of ideas to write about. But when I’m sitting here, staring at the blank page, trying to will my fingers to move, working on calming my mind so that I can hear that tiny voice that is waiting to tell its story, I have to struggle to stifle the panic that waits just below the surface. “What if I really have run out of things to write?”

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Long Live Rock!

I heard today that Rock is dead. It made me pause and think. What would inspire anyone to come to that conclusion? Indeed, we have lost many good rockers in recent years. Some might say we’ve lost all of the original generation of rockers but that is not the point, even when it is true.

Is Classical music dead because all the original Classical composers are long dead? Just because Mozart can not play it for us himself, are his compositions any less brilliant. Which is not to say there are no Neo Classical composers of note. The form is alive and well as far as I can see.

And what about Blues? Is Blues dead as well? All the original Bluesmen are long dead. We are well into the second century of Blues and it seems to me that it is still going strong. B.B. King may be dead but Robert Cray is still belting out the Blues.

Then there is Jazz, Music Hall, Light Opera, Stage Musical, all with their own personality and style. They live on because they still speak to the heart and souls of the people that love them.

These genres have a life of there own. Just because the originators are gone doesn’t diminish the appeal to people of a like mind and spirit. Music transcends time and generational boundaries. It survives cultural evolution and fusion.

As long as teenagers are filled with angst, there will be Rock & Roll. As long as young lovers are convinced that they are unique and no one has ever felt the way they do, there will be Rock & Roll. As long as they feel invincible and immortal, there will be Rock & Roll,

We still have giants of Rock among us. There is Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, and Paul McCartney.  Ian Anderson, Rod Stewart, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash. Even when these greats die out, their music will live on and inspire generation after generation of Rock musicians to come.

Rock isn’t dead and as one famous lyric proclaims “Rock will never die. Long live Rock!”

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

First Party of Summer

It is evening. It has been dark for a couple of hours and the heat of the day is finally dispersing. There is a breath of a breeze blowing in off the water. The crickets are chirping. There is a murmur of voices from a party across the inlet. Occasionally a fish jumps and makes a splashing sound out from the shore. Everyone has a beer and a pipe is making the rounds.

A small brown dog with shaggy hair lays at his master’s feet, eyes alert, searching the faces for a clue about what comes next. Someone, a big guy called Jim, stands up and crushes his beer can against his forehead. He throws it in the trash can next to the cooler and pops the top on another.

A car pulls into the driveway at the top of the hill. A little later a big man wearing a vest and a cowboy hat and carrying a guitar case comes down the path. He opens the case and pulls out a guitar and slings the strap over his head. There are choruses of greetings as he walks over to the cooler and digs around for a beer.

He pops the top on the beer, takes a deep draught and sets it on top of a post for safe keeping. He strums the strings and adjusts one slightly. Then he begins playing an exquisite Django Reinhardt number with fingers that seem to fly across the fretboard. The crickets stop their chorus to listen. The voices from across the water have subsided as well. The fireflies blink in rhythm to the music.

He finishes the piece with a run of chords that climb the neck all the way to the sounding box. As the last chord rings and fades into silence he takes another drink from his beer. After a moment of stunned silence everyone claps and cheers and implore him to play another. He politely declines.

He puts the guitar back in its case and grabs the pipe as it comes past. The crickets have started singing again and someone has started telling a story. It is an anticlimax after the guitar performance. The guitarist is surrounded by a small group of impressed women all vying for his attention.

Several of the guys are seeing who can spit the farthest. Several couples have faded into the shadows for quiet conversations of their own. The dog comes over to greet the guitarist. He is the first person other than his master that the dog recognizes. The guitarist squats to pet the dog and scratch behind his ears.

The moon has risen over the lake. The water is calm as a mirror. The guitarist has gotten his guitar out and is strumming it quietly leaning back against one of the girls that was talking to him earlier. She is rubbing his shoulders. The fire crackles in the pit. Several people are roasting marshmallows. Deep in the trees an owl adds its voice to the symphony of the evening.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Quo Vadis?

I have a handful of folks that read this blog on a fairly regular basis. I appreciate them. I’d feel a little bit funny if I thought that I was the only one that read what I write. I have been honing my writing skills lately. I’ve set a target length of five hundred words per post. I don’t always write that much. I’m either too tired to think or I’ve said everything that I have to say on the subject.

I’ve also made a point to give each post a careful once over to check for malformed sentences and other things that just don’t make sense. The spell checker does a pretty good job of verifying that the words that I use are in fact spelled like an existing word but it can’t tell me whether the words that I use actually mean.

I have been intending to write a post to put back for some night when I don’t have time or inspiration to write a post. I understand that editors of publications often do that with feature articles. I haven’t done it yet. There is something motivating about knowing that the deadline is approaching and I have to produce a blog post or else break my streak of how many days in a row I’ve written and posted one.

I also keep intending to make a list of potential topics for posts. I haven’t done it yet but I will get around to it eventually. All of these things help make it easier for me to focus on becoming a better writer. That is the goal of this blog.

Eventually I hope to write things for publication, short stories, novels, non-fiction articles and books, creative non-fiction, as I learned it is called from a local free lance editor. The more I write, the better I get at it.

I’ve started seeking out writers groups online. I joined Scribophile a while back but I am so strapped for time that I haven’t actually participated in the critique activities. They have a procedure where you earn points by reading and critiquing other people’s writing and then you can spend those points to post something of your own to have it critiqued.

I also joined a couple of writer’s support groups on Facebook. One is called The 10 Minute Novelist and specializes in collecting suggestion about how to fit writing opportunities into your otherwise already over-full schedule. I need to spend some time participating in that forum as well.

The other group that I joined on Facebook is a blogger support group. I hope they can help me improve the quality of this blog and maybe even suggest some ways to find more people that are interested in reading it.

I don’t expect to derive any income from this blog, at least no direct income. I don’t think much of selling advertising or reviewing products for hire. I might collect some of my posts into a book form to publish in a different form sometime. I’ll have to write enough posts that are actually worthy of such treatment before I need to worry about that.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Retirement is Such a Misnomer

I had the pleasure of wishing a colleague good luck on his retirement. He has forty years in with the company and is retiring at the end of the month. He made some kind of self deprecating joke about not being good for anything any more and being put out to pasture.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. This man has been a key player on his team at work. He not only got twice as much work done as any of his peers, he also anticipated tasks that were going to arise before management or his peers. even knew there was a need for them. He is a consummate engineer.

I answered that it wasn’t that he was being put out to pasture but rather that he was taking an opportunity to get some of the things that he has been wanting to do some day done. He admitted to having an automotive project that has been sitting in his garage for fifteen years. Then he hinted that he might be back as a consultant in a little while.

I understand his situation. I have stories and tutorials to write, music to compose, instruments to master, and a family that needs more attention than they have been getting lately. I want to record music, make videos, write programs, paint pictures, and write poetry. I want to learn to sing. I have a good ear but no vocal training, at least none since I was fifteen in high school choir.

I read an article today that said that learning like a child can help keep your brain younger, They haven’t made any assertions yet, only published their research and mused about what it might indicate. In particular, they are talking about learning lots of general skills as opposed. to specialized, expert skills like we have traditionally expected older people to focus their attention on cultivating.

It turns out that the broader, open minded, learning skills outside of one’s comfort zone type of learning actually stimulated brain elasticity. Once it had been pointed out to me, I could see that this was true in my case anyway. It left me thinking about what other general skills that I wanted. to add to my repertory in the interest of keeping my mind in shape.

So it seems I am doomed to a lifetime full of learning new skills and challenging my comfort zone. Well you can throw me into that briar patch. That’s where I was born and raised and I had no intention of doing anything else, even if I read ten articles that said it was bad for me.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Changes

In one way or another, the last couple of blogs have been about change. The pace of change in the world is accelerating at an exponential rate. This is hard for the human mind to adapt to. It is at the heart of much of the problems that we are struggling with in the modern world.

Many people want things to go back to the way they used to be. That is not going to happen. We can’t put that genie back in the bottle. All we can do is to try to shape these changes so that they yield positive consequences.

Shaping change isn’t easy. It will require us to keep our minds open. We will have to embrace lifelong learning. We will have to push the boundaries of our comfort zones. We will have to keep our minds flexible. This will require us to keep using them. Stretching them. Learning new skills and new subjects. And keeping our bodies active can help with our mental flexibility too.

We can make the change be for the better. We will have to keep our minds and hearts focused on the world that we want to create.  And we will have to change as well. That is the biggest challenge. But it will be worth the effort.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

One More Time…

Hold on, this is going to be another mind bender.

A number of people have proposed that the world we live in is just a high resolution computer simulation. The argument sometimes goes, any civilization just slightly more advanced than we are now would be capable of creating such a simulation. Then follows a bunch of probabilistic hand waving which demonstrates that if they could, it’s likely that they have done so and consequently, as they say in poker games, if you can’t spot the sucker, you ARE the sucker. In other words, if we haven’t created such a simulation, the probability is high that this is a simulation.

So, assuming for a moment that this is the case, the next question is why? That too has been widely speculated upon. Some assert that the simulation is a tool for exploring simpler times. Others contend that it is a laboratory for studying the operation of complex societies. And others say that there is no reason beyond seeing what will happen.

I’ve got a new suggestion. What if this is a simulation where an advanced civilization is attempting to work out a benign solution to the problem of what happens to all the people when an AI takes over the world. Or maybe it is an AI that is conducting the research. Or maybe we have already ruined the environment and living in this simulated environment is the only way we have of experiencing a world outside of the claustrophobic little survival tanks we have been forced to live in. There’s a twist to the premise of The Matrix for you.

I find myself pondering these possibilities more lately. The world around me seems to make less and less sense to me. The probability of an apocalyptic scenario looms large. And the real danger is from a direction that has only recently occurred to me. As wealth gets more and more concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, and production efficiency keeps getting higher and higher, who is going to have the money to consume the products that the rich produce? You can’t eat wealth. You can only drive one car at a time, whether it is a Hundai or a Lamborghini. There is a limit to how much wealth can change your situation. And some things no amount of money can buy.

We live in a world of plenty. All of our traditional economic models were created with the assumption of scarcity and a zero sum game. The current economic game is anything but zero sum. The only thing keeping the world economy together is the shaky confidence that it will hold together, in short faith. We saw in 1927 what happens when enough people loose faith in our economic institutions at the same time. Frankly, it scares the hell out of me.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

The Power of Exponential Growth

Technological advancement is happening at an exponential rate. What does that mean from a practical standpoint? Take computer capability as an example. Computer capability can be boiled down, in a very simplistic sort of way, to the number of transistors that you can fit on a chip of a particular size. This is in part because every binary digit (or bit) takes at least one transistor to store a one or a zero.

Rather early in the development of microcomputers, Gordon Moore made the observation that the number of transistors in a given circuit doubles every eighteen months. This pattern has been observed for the past forty five years or so. It is no great feat to extrapolate from there to see how it will in all probability project on into the future for a good many more years.

Some observers have voiced fears that we will hit the wall beyond which we will not be able to fit any more transistors onto such a compact area. The laws of physics are going to draw a line beyond which we can’t continue to improve a circuit in a particular way. This has, in fact, already happened. We were able to discover new ways to increase the density of the circuits on the chip. One way was to organize them into smaller circuits or cores that had a small number of lines through which to communicate with each other and the outside world. Another,  largely unexplored tactic will be to build the circuits up vertically off the surface of the chip. This should also help solve the problem of removing heat from the chip.

Taken more generally, exponential advancements will mean that the number of and kinds of magical technological devices will double at a regular interval much like Moore’s law predicts for transistor densities. You might think that such rapid change would be mind boggling and might even cause adverse reactions in people. The fact is, the change is gradual enough that we mostly don’t even notice.

Think back ten years. In 2007 122 million cell phones were sold. In 2016 1495 million cell phones were sold. That is over 12 times growth in sales in less than ten years. There is a principle called Metcalfe’s law that the connectivity in a network increases proportionally to the square of the number of devices. So imagine how much more connected we are when there are twelve times more phones sold each year. That doesn’t even address the question of how many phones are already deployed and how many of the phones sold were to first time buyers of cell phones.

The same growth trends are happening across the board in scientific and technological fields. I have personal experience of at least two distinct eras in my field of computer programming in the forty years that my career spans. And when I think about it, it is probably more like four or five eras. And they keep coming closer together. I’m afraid I’ll get whiplash trying to keep up.

Just thought I’d try to get some of these ideas down so that I can think about them. I’ve been reading about exponential growth for a number of years now but it has only begun to truly boggle my mind the last couple of years.

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Pie in the Sky is Certainly Sweet Watching

I discovered a British series that appeals to me today. It is called Pie in the Sky and it starred Richard Griffiths, the actor that played Harry Potter’s uncle in the Harry Potter movies. In the show, Griffiths plays Henry Crabbe, a policeman for 25 years who is looking forward to retirement so that he can realize his dream of opening a gourmet restaurant. Crabbe has a talent for cooking that does not go unappreciated by his colleagues on the force.

Crabbe’s boss joined the force at the same time as Henry but while Henry concentrated on doing outstanding police work, his boss concentrated on the political side of things and worked himself up in the ranks of the force often on the back of Henry’s hard work. When faced with the prospect of losing his star detective to retirement, his boss figures out a way to coerce Henry to continue to help him solve the hard cases.

Henry has the eye for details of all great detectives with an ample helping of stubbornness that is the hallmark of effective people in any profession. He may not be as flashy as Sherlock Holmes, or Poirot, but he is amazing in his quiet attention to the behavioral patterns that point to the solutions to his cases. He is not one to accept the first potential solution that arrises without vetting it completely. And it is his persistence in pursuing the truth that keeps us glued to our seats until the credits roll.

The acting is brilliant, the characters are well rounded, the writing is pitch perfect. It is as much a treat to watch as I imagine it must be to eat one of Henry Crabbe’s gourmet creations. Henry Crabbe is a character of great integrity and huge heart. Do yourself a favor and check him out if you get a chance (I watch him on Acorn TV, a bargain subscription for any Anglophile.)

Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.