Oddities

The Feast of Feeling

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

One commonality at the bottom of most hegemonic structures is a love of monotony. Folks who hunger for certain forms of normativity also seem to hanker for sameness–so long as it’s the sort of uniformity that suits their existing tastes. Growth (intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and otherwise), alas, only emerges in contexts of richness and complexity. It’s the challenge, the friction, the tension that prompts us to examine our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

I’m not going to dwell on politics on this fine Sunday morning, though it might seem as if I’m trending in that direction. What’s caught my attention these days instead are two shows I’ve been binging with my fiancee: one called Alan Cummings’ Paradise Homes and another called The Restoration Man. The premise of the former is simple: Alan Cummings roams around the globe, visiting folks who think they’ve landed on their version of paradise, at least in architectural terms. And the latter is equally straightforward: a feller by the name of George Clarke visits with folks who have acquired listed (read: historic) properties in Great Britain and chronicles their efforts to turn these distinctive choices into livable homes.

The palette of Paradise Homes is not expansive–one gets the feeling, based on both geography and luxury, that paradise, at least in earthly terms, costs a bundle. What’s delightful about the show, however, is the host’s receptivity to the vagaries of experience. Cummings is a showman, first and foremost, and he’s at his merriest when he’s allowed to poke around these domestic spaces unattended. In some private moments, however, the viewer is allowed to see him wrestling with the choices the homeowners have made, many of which don’t agree with his sensibilities. He can ooh and aah at a gorgeous view with the best of them, but I enjoy watching him most when he’s faced with the minimalism of a couple that purchased a French chateau or built a big, boxy house with great views in the middle of nowhere. It feels to me like the showrunners are sending him in blind, more often than not, and while he can’t personally come around to the aesthetics he meets with, he has enough natural empathy and sensitivity to appreciate that these slices of paradise are just right for the folks who inhabit them. In some ways that feels like an enormous concession, especially in our current historical moment, when so many folks are invested in trying to order the world around their own short-sighted sensibilities.

The Restoration Man has a much broader emotional and ethical range, I’d say, perhaps because the episodes unfold over months or even years. Clarke is an affable host, and he adapts to situations as he finds them, with a wide variety of humane skills and approaches. His abilities are most vividly on display in the second and third episode, as he engages with a) a couple that spent their life savings on a church they hoped to renovate (a hope that could be utterly upended by any number of considerations) and b) a couple that bought a windmill they hope will become a home in which the wife, stricken with cancer, can convalesce.

The former finds George bewildered, as the husband of the couple, Gareth, with virtually no building experience, tries to achieve the dream while his wife cares for their kids and takes on two jobs. It’s a high-risk proposition, as the couple spent their entire nest egg on a property that (if bodies are actually buried underneath it) might not be amenable to any kind of renovation whatsoever. As their story unfolds, George has to watch as the reckless, seemingly clueless Gareth tries to renovate on the cheap, an effort that nearly costs him his marriage along the way as his exasperated, overworked wife becomes more and more isolated. He’s often bemused, but he’s always supportive, and when Gareth manages to pull the rabbit out of the hat and arrives at a solid approximation of the family dream, George is effusive in his praise.

The latter episode is considerably more taxing, as an experienced builder is faced with a renovation of a property with a curious architectural footprint and a number of situational challenges. The builder, Clive, hopes to finish the renovation as quickly as possible, but as the episode unfolds we learn he’s fighting a losing battle–his wife, Jane, suffers several reversals over the course of her treatment, and Clive spends an equal amount of time on the reno site and at home, seeing to her care and well-being. I won’t spoil the episode for you, but I will note that it ends in tears, both for Clive and for George as well, who cannot help but sympathize with a man who so earnestly and wholeheartedly pursued a dream with someone else in mind. Taken together, the two episodes reveal a wide range of responses, with George exasperated and at times troubled by Gareth and more soulfully invested in Clive’s quest.

On the whole it’s a curiously rich diversion, with a wide range of human prospects, from the dogged builder who suffers a heart attack and gets back to work perhaps too quickly, to the dreamers who spent bundles on their properties and have been worn down by the effort to gain planning permission to renovate them (the low-key villains of the series are city planners and planning committees, who are exceedingly precious about these buildings that have been neglected for decades and are falling into ruin, who are content to set hurdle after hurdle before folks who are willing to sink tens of thousand of pounds into these restoration projects). Clarke is an altogether amiable host, though it took me a little time to warm to him. In the early going he’s seemingly focused on preserving the architectural souls of these historic homes, but by the end of his encounter with Clive seems equally intent on seeing to the welfare of the intrepid homeowners.

In a world that’s currently developing programs to determine if a given reader will like a new book based on its similarity to books they’ve already enjoyed, seeing two worldly and capable gents encounter and come to terms with life in all its involved, chaotic, and even nonsensical messiness is invigorating. It’s reassuring to see sophisticated, experienced folks sift through their thoughts, feelings, and beliefs intelligently, candidly, and circumspectly and concede to the realities of these situations rather than fixate on the expectations and ambitions they’d like to impose upon them. We’re still eagerly awaiting the return of the Juniors Edition of the Great British Baking Show, but this is heartening human fare in the interim.

The Dopamine Design

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

At times it’s helpful to remember that the mind is an incredibly sophisticated instrument that routinely falls for simple tricks. Neuroscience bears the point out more often than not.

Though I am a certified hypnotist, I am garbage at self-hypnosis. I am, however, perfectly capable of tricking myself by capitalizing on the gullibility of my inner jackass.

To wit, let’s take this summer’s weight loss plan, which had both salutary and cosmetic ambitions rolled into it. I started tracking my exercise and caloric intake in a document called Summer 2024 Fitness Plan, and it worked fairly well, especially in term of diagnosing patterns I am prone to. Most weeks I start out strong, but by Friday I am overtired and binge on snacks at game night. For most of September, however, I’ve fallen prey to a two-up/two-down pattern, regaining a couple pounds, losing them again, etc., which is a classic plateau pattern. While I lost 25 pounds all told, I’d like to lose another 25. So I needed a way to press past the current sticking point.

The trick, as it turns out? Filing away Summer 2024 Fitness Plan and creating a new document. That little trick has been aided and abetted by another layer of change. After losing 25 pounds, I realized my jeans no longer fit especially well. I ordered new jeans in a smaller waist size but, thanks to the competence for which Levi’s sales fulfillment is known, I received only one of four new pairs of jeans after a month-long wait. My monkey brain decided that my waist size must be the right size for the moment, given my continued commitment to my older jeans, which I think contributed to the plateau. I tightened my old belt to the seventh notch and settled into the fall semester with fairly baggy pants.

The trick for getting around that cognitive roadblock? Buying a new belt. In the new belt I find myself gradually shrinking, going from the second notch to the point at which the fourth is in reach in the span of about two weeks. It’s the sort of thing that can make me feel foolish if I think about it the wrong way.

I’ve been keeping that in mind in terms of plotting out my day-to-day agenda and designing Chancers (which, as always, can be found over here). In terms of my agenda, I try to map out only those tasks that will give me a wee jolt of dopamine to complete–tasks that are not routine or ongoing. Significantly, I know I must list them out in advance. While crossing out a completed task is satisfying, my monkey brain is not so simian as to be fooled by adding an item only to cross it off. Yesterday I submitted three stories for publication, which had been haunting my to-do list for a month, and I drafted a letter of recommendation for a student, which was an item added only last Wednesday. Crossing those items off my list gave me a wee dose of dopamine, but adding “Write the Chair about the Thing” only to cross it off an hour later was not enough to deceive me into feeling good.

I’ve been thinking out this particularly in terms of game design, given the tension I’m experiencing with two games these days. One is an ongoing phone game I play with my fiancee, and evidence that the game has begun to circle the drain is pretty compelling. It’s a puzzle-solving game, nothing too special, all told, but they’ve recently started making the puzzles purposely harder to solve in order to prompt players to spend a little money for extra moves and tools in order to get the dopamine payoff. It doesn’t come as much of a surprise that the Reddit board dedicated to the game is currently inundated with complaints about the dwindling player base.

On the other side of the continuum we have Elden Ring, which is the gold standard for dopamine dispensation in a dozen ways. We begin with the game’s notorious difficulty, which means that players can get a goodly dose of dopamine by defeating a significant boss monster. Additionally, there are routine rewards offered for casual success–runes, primarily, but also the chance to access new areas. Some of the rewards are predictable, with many significant enemies guaranteeing the player access to powerful rewards at the safe haven of the game, but the game also offers scads of random rewards, some with minuscule drop rates as low as .50%. I have played the game through multiple times, but it’s become a comfort game, since I know an hour spent with it will likely yield some new discovery or reward for decent play. I’m doing my best to implement the same design principle in Chancers, so that players have a bunch of different kinds of incentives to set out on adventures and take meaningful risks.

Today, alas, involves some drudgery, since I have to complete a couple of routine tasks to set me up to succeed tomorrow and Thursday, which will involve appointments with my doctor and my dentist for negligible bits of business (a follow-up on late summer bloodwork and a cleaning). I’m none too enthused about either prospect, but you can bet I’ll be glad to check them off my list as we head toward September’s end.

The Best of Intentions

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Today I’m caught at the crossroads where Project A, a novella, Project B, a table-top role-playing game, and Project C, a short story prospect that’s caught me somewhat by surprise, all meet. Project A is currently at a pause because I’m trying to decide just how grody I want it to be. Significantly, that grodiness has to hinge on the journey of the protagonist, who is not just a good person but a very good person, but who will be driven to introduce grodiness into the life of a particularly noxious antagonist. I have to decide how far that antagonist would need to go in order to spur our heroine into doing what I’ve imagined she’ll do. The TTRPG is on the docket du jour, as it will undergo a bit of alpha-testing this Wednesday in a class I’m taking on The Art of Gamecrafting with Eloy Lasanta of Third-Eye Games (an opportunity I’d highly recommend, and which I think will be on offer again next year). I’ve got a draft of a pretty expansive list of game skills in the folder for a game I’m designing, and I’ll need to trim it down and finalize it in order to round the next corner. The newer project, Project C, is one of those blindside delights, a short story inspired by a call for urban stories in the horror and dark fantasy genres. I’ve got the location and the premise already locked in, but the aboutness of the piece is still a little wriggly.

Though I routinely teach about the intentional fallacy in a few variations of our Intro to Lit class, the basic understanding that what a writer wants you to get out of a work of art doesn’t necessarily bind the reading or gaming experience, I think it’s still pretty important to have some sense of intention penciled in before one begins. If I’m going to guide a reader across a landscape reddened with blood, I want them to have some way of making sense of that expedition. I’m thinking about this keenly today, as this evening (while my partner is going to a play with friends) will likely involve the screening of a horror movie. I’m thinking about watching a movie from my backlog of educational viewing, probably Terrifier (2011) or something like it.

Broadly speaking, Terrifier isn’t my usual cup of tea. Though I have seen more than my fair share of gory flicks, I generally won’t watch movies where the aboutness of what occurs onscreen eludes me. This is at this juncture purely speculative on my part, though I’ve seen a glimpse of Terrifier‘s villain, Art the Clown, already in an anthology movie called All Hallow’s Eve. I had the same suspicion about Wolf Creek back in the day, and my guess was spot on in that case. The villain in that movie is a feller named Mick, who commits ghastly acts of violence for reasons I couldn’t entirely fathom. Back in that stretch of the 2000’s we had a spate of movies in that vein, though in many of them I could guess at some vestige of intention. In the case of Hostel, for example, there’s a dark critique of class privilege with some sidelong ironies about the mad rush to make films inexpensively in Central Europe. In Wolf Creek the point eluded me. There’s of course always a chance to pin down a transgression yields punishment motif in plenty of horror movies, but in the case of Wolf Creek it seemed a little more nihilistic. What I’ve seen of Art the Clown make me believe he might be a villain cut from the same cloth. The clips I’ve seen of the various Terrifiers depict Art as a kind of committed but frequently exasperated sadist, someone who inflicts torture on his victims and becomes increasingly frustrated as he runs out of ideas to make them suffer as much as possible before they perish. It makes for spectacular brutality and a chance to showcase some genuinely grisly special effects, as you might imagine, but I can’t quite pin down the purpose of it all. This tribute to Art the Clown in some ways pins down what I mean. The commentator explores an “Art the Clown as a modernized Michael Myers” analogy, but at about the 5:40 mark he offers us a quick gloss on the meanings of the various Halloween movies that center on the character of Michael–they are meditations on evil, on dreams and nightmares, on avoidance, and on intergenerational trauma. Perhaps with a bit of historical context I’ll be able to get a better feel for Art the Clown, but right now he just occurs to me as “a delivery system for hyper-violence,” as the commentator calls him. I’m genre-aware enough to get that that simplicity might be the point, that Art might be a commentary on our cultural need for simulation or excess and our futile fumblings for a sense of purpose behind acts of violence, but if that’s the case, the movies are still probably not for me.

I tend to think of horror as an especially ethical (if not always moral) genre, broadly speaking, one that has a great deal to say about the world we live in and about the things we do with and for and to one another. That’s how I usually try to write it, at any rate. But on some counts I’ll defer to my intuition, which currently tells me that there are some films I don’t actually have to watch (I’m looking at you, Cannibal Holocaust) to suss out the underlying intentions.

On Gratitude

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

When I’m feeling philosophical, which is more often than I’d care to admit, I find that I’m often inclined to dwell on the paradox of perspective. As a hypnotist I know how powerful even slight shifts in viewpoint can be, but that’s an easy position to adopt from a comfortable distance. I’m lucky in a number of generic neurotypical ways: I don’t suffer from anxiety or depression overmuch, I have an executive function that can attend to most of the business of life without much existential stickiness, and I have a shelf full of coping mechanisms that do a solid job of tiding me over when I take a hit or two. Even so, I have my Bouts of Misery and Woe that I can’t quite think or talk my way out of. This past week featured one.

It’s not hard to get stuck in the Swamp of Sadness, Artax-style, no matter what encouragement and support we have on hand. (That link is worth avoiding if you are habitually prone to woe.) And, as it turns out, academia is filthy with cynics. It’s sort of a tell that, even when we’re in the midst of what’s a fairly beige year, our private message board consists almost exclusively of minor grievances. I do my best to power-skim the more morose modes of media these days, for I know too many Swampfolk who will habitually sink down into the depths if given half a chance and do their best to pull at any hand that reaches for them. And don’t get me wrong–I know I can only do most of that skimming because I lucked into a bunch of unearned privileges by birth and happenstance. I can resist the siren song of the daily doomscroll because privilege lets me pick and choose what I’m ready and willing to feel deeply on any given morning.

Every now and again, however, I’ll chance upon some useful contrapuntal bitterness, a vivid depiction of the tendencies I think most of us are hard pressed to resist. It’s helpful to see them from the outside, as they’re miserable to live through. In those gloaming episodes it’s easy to look back on all the losses, snubs, failures, and disappointments that generally make up a life, to wish we’d done differently. That bitterness has a special quality, as it’s generally easy to tell when the sufferer wants support and encouragement or would rather indulge in a good wallow. There’s no reasoning or philosophizing our way out of those blue moods, alas. We just have to strap in and see them through.

When we’re being honest with ourselves (which the mischief-maker in me admittedly believes is not all that often), it’s hard not to look back and wish for a do-over or two (or a bajillion, as the case may be). I imagine I have a typical range of regrets: folks I might have been kinder to, wrongs I might have righted, folks I’ve lost touch with or simply lost interest in, opportunities lost. But when we’re both honest and clear-headed (which the psychologist in me admittedly believes is not all that often) we can generally find the gains that offset those losses. It never feels like a rose-colored, thoughtless optimism but rather a generous reckoning, a resistance to cynicism that arrives as something akin a measured, ethical realism. It’s one kind of folly to take for granted that everything is going to turn out well, turn out just as it should no matter what we do; it’s another kind of folly to take for granted that everything is going to shake out badly despite our best efforts, that misfortunes are awaiting us, some of them earned, some deserved. The truth or it all is somewhere in between, and it doesn’t call for concessions or surrender on our part so much as a readiness to reframe the lot of it–the ecstasies, miseries, and all the business in between.

This week has been a slog, and it would be easy to look forward and expect more sloggery, to anticipate all the less than pleasant things that dot my calendar. Once I start down that road, it’s equally easy to look backward as well, to reflect on all the mistakes I’ve made as I’ve worked my way down the road. But today I find myself strangely grateful, which has little to do with any of the successes or failures I’ve met with, any decisions I’ve made or avoided. Jejune though it might seem, it’s mostly a matter of seeing things clearly and fully, which tends to involve a great deal of effort, energy spent clearing obstructions out of the way so that I can catch a more panoramic picture.

I’ve learned enough to know that might all change by bedtime, of course. But for a moment, at least I think I can let myself work toward some things, hope for some things, and maybe even imagine that, in the grand cosmic balance, it might all turn out better than I expect.

Plausibility and Beyond

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

(Image adapted from Bogomil Mihaylov at Unsplash.com)

I am an engaging, effective hypnotist. How do I know that? Because when I hypnotize myself, usually with the assistance of a light and sound machine, that’s what I tell myself. I’ve repeated that mantra in my mind often, and as a result, it’s as good as true.

If you’ve visited the Abbey before, you’ll know I’m fascinated by the machinery of the mind to an alarming degree. A goodly chunk of the literary theory I regularly study focuses on the ways in which our worlds are constructed by our noggins, no matter what Samuel Johnson might say. When I teach rhetorical analysis in my composition classes, I tend to focus on how writing effectively creates its own readers, pinning them down with a series of linguistic invitations and solicitations in even the blandest modes of expository prose. Reread the first sentence here, and you’ll see what I mean. And of course in hypnosis, where the work of conveying suggestions centers on phrasing and framing, it’s easy to indulge the impulse to build whole worlds out of half-truths.

There’s something vaguely counterintuitive about it, but it’s ridiculously easy to spot in just about every facet of our lives. Ever met a critter who imagines themself as an underdog but comes to the table with just about every kind of cultural, educational, and economic advantage? They had to dream themselves into being, dealing all the cards that were stacked against them, all the opposition they faced and overcame. If you’re asked to imagine a dog, do you imagine some freakish ur-canine, or do you conjure up a vision of your pooch of choice? Ever tried to break a habit but–alas!–you’ve convinced yourself that it’s simply too ingrained in your days and ways to shake? It’s that sort of thing.When we have a little time for critical self-examination, a set of self-inflicted patterns we’ve built and installed rises up to the surface like a secret Braille code. We impose meanings on ourselves–stories on ourselves, by and large–to explain why we are who we are and why we do what we do.

One of the simplest formulations of the act occurs in our creative writing classes, where all of our faculty communicates in terms of states of being rather than doing. “You’re an ingenious writer,” we’ll say, and then proceed as though it were true. Because it is, like it or not. There’s no sublime act of creation or naming going on–we’re just acknowledging a state of affairs that the writer might not already recognize, and we’re acknowledging it in a distinctive way. Saying “your writing is ingenious,” as the youth are wont to note, hits a little different; saying “you write ingeniously” might feel nice, but it has a different vibe. When I hypnotize a client I’ll throw several variations on the same kind of idea at them, and before long they find themselves surrounded by a legion of affirmative identities they can’t escape.

I find that most of my writing consists of plausibility strings, strings I follow as far as I can go before tying them in to something wiggedy. The trick for me usually involves making sure the wiggedy thing is plausible, too, at least at some level. Take, for instance, the image above, the curlicue of a particularly photogenic cucumber tendril. Those tendrils, as gardeners know, operate a bit like ivy, allowing the plant to latch on to something stable and pull themselves up to get more leaves into the sun. I can use a simple, natural occurrence like that as a foundation for the depiction of flora that acts similarly, perhaps for some more sinister end, pulling other things down rather than trying to raise itself up. Press the notion a little further–maybe add size or sentience into the mix–and you’ve got yourself a manageable monster.

The catch here is that I have literally no idea what kind of plant that really is. I started out with a little fib, and that fib was already predicated on snatches of truth. I’ve watched enough Gardener’s World to know how ferns work, uncurling from similar spirals, but that’s my only semisolid frame of reference. I’ve seen enough cucumber plants to know they have tendrils, so that might be true or truthy, and I’ve seen how ivy clings. That’s about as far as I can stretch. But if it felt true enough to go on, it’s functionally true. No point in quibbling about it. Eventually the reader will be able to see the seams of what I’ve stitched together, but they can be hard to spot when you’re working with two balls of yarn dyed the same curious color from the get-go.

I’m terribly fond of this kind of thinking, which I tend to think of as one of the most accessibly modes of creativity. And whenever I suspect I might have stretched my plausibility strings too far, I remember who I am as a reader myself, someone who’s willing to follow that slender tether into the minotaur’s maze, sure I can find my way back out.

And if it happens to break when I’m deep down in the dark? So much the better.

The Disconnected Self

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

There’s something rather magical about social media, at least in its more rarefied forms. After I logged on to Facebook for the first time I reconnected with friends from high school in a matter of weeks, and (as a sort of legacy platform in many way) I’ve been able to watch some of my former students grow over time, earning terminal degrees, writing and publishing themselves, becoming parents. After I joined Twitter I was more readily able to give shape and scope to my writing career (at least on the creative side of things). I found a writing community, found calls for submissions more routinely, and was able to support emerging initiatives for LGBTQIA+ writers, for BIPOC writers, for subjects that always struck me as criminally uncovered. I occasionally made contact with creators I admire, even if only incidentally. And of course there has been news and The Discourse, all the stories out there in circulation that one gains access to when people on the scene of major events can fire their observations off into the aether.

The darker side, of course, has reared up with irritating frequency, no matter how aggressively I curated my feeds. Like most folks in These Uncertain Times I rise each day with a little more weight in the downwardly-dipping side of the scales, so a couple of bad stories or grim predictions about the future can be enough to send me off on a sour note. And to feed various appetites I found myself breaking things down and diversifying in spite of myself, curating some feeds for my work, others for my private life, and others for my many, many niche hobbies. The current state of affairs, which seems to involve little more than vindictiveness dressed with all the trappings of free speech has me consolidating some personae and closing down others. The theories about why a billionaire would so aggressively and publicly undermine the foundations of his reputation are fascinating, but ultimately I’d rather be playing or making games, writing fiction and poetry, and hanging out with my partner and friends. I’ve been keeping tabs on Discord more regularly, and I opened up a Mastodon account so that I can hopefully keep a hand in, as the Brits say, but it’s one of those moments of existential whiplash: I need to make an array of changes, and while it’s pretty easy to see what I need to move away from, it’s harder to figure out what I need to move toward.

What I’m ultimately trying to do is make change in the right spirit, which can be elusive even with a witching board. One of the bedrock facts of hypnosis is that it’s incredibly difficult to change anything you don’t actually want to change, so at least part of the problem is mustering the determination to live a bit differently. The good news for me, at least, is that I have ready reference to a positive example in my partner. She’s in the process of launching her own business, which is a heady, anxious, exciting time. It’s not hard to understand why all those mingled feelings are hard for her to manage, but each day she navigates that maze of possibilities and settles on excitement. There are plenty of concerns she has to entertain, plenty of considerations she has to take into account, but at day’s end what she holds onto is that excitement–the thrilling possibility of being her own boss for the first time, of earning for herself rather than someone who inherited enough money to buy an existing business or purchase a sizable share of an already-successful partnership, of doing the sort of affirmative, self-determined work that she’s wanted to do so long. It has me thinking of bigger projects, of more involved work, of stretching my legs a bit to see how fast I can move and how far I can go.

It is, alas, lurching, awkward movement, like exercise my body is unaccustomed to doing. But I can see the shape of change taking place, since one departure from the usual order of things usually catalyzes changes in other areas. I’m a creature of habit, and it’s amusing to see old habits falling like dominoes, ceding ground to experiments with new ways of doing things. Whether or not those changes will also yield new ways of being is always a little uncertain, but I have enough faith in the process today to hold me over.

A Deceptive Addendum

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Not long ago, in the waybackwhen, I posted about some of the ways I try to get myself sorted, especially when I’m shifting gears into a new season of stuff. I thought it would be worthwhile to add, however, a brief description of a habit inside the habit, one that tends to give my mental health a gentle upward nudge.

I’ve invariably got an array of to-do lists up and running, but of course some things fall through the cracks. Itemizing life in advance is a mug’s game, however nice that might be. At the end of any given week, however, it sometimes feels like I’ve seriously underachieved. While there’s a semi-healthy part of me that understand that life ought not be measured in feats and written proofs of my existential effectiveness, there’s a less noble component of my programming that likes to see a few items ticked off the ol’ checklist at week’s end.

And so I add them.

As a rule, if it’s something that requires a little foresight and an investment of time, even if I forgot to mention it while planning out my prospects, I’ll put it on the list of the week and cross it off retroactively. It makes for a decent reminder that I haven’t been as indolent as the checklist otherwise might suggest. Today, for example, I remembered in passing that I probably ought to wash my hoodies and long-sleeved shirts now that temperatures have dropped. It wasn’t something I originally planned to do, but it’s something that will make life easier for Future Me. By the same token, one of my tasks for early October involves identifying some clusters of readings for my composition classes. Yesterday I had a bit of spare time while my students huddled up for a peer review workshop, so I hunted some down there and then. When I got home I added both items to my list of Weekly Things and crossed them off.

On Sunday I’ll make a new list, but instead of looking back and imagining I managed just the bare minimum (lesson plans, paying the bills, etc.), I’ll actually have a more accurate reckoning of what I’ve done. It makes me a feel a bit better; if nothing else, it convinces me that I didn’t squander the week gone by. And, to a meaningful degree, it also raises the bar. Instead of having 8-12 accomplishments in my back pocket, I’ll come away with twenty or so, which persuades me that maybe I can be a little more active and ambitious when mapping out the weeks and months ahead.

I might not ever be a Man of Action, but it pays to be honest with myself about my daily activity–even if that involves adding something done to a to-do list after the fact.

Tales of the Unexpected

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

This morning I read one of those “Where do your ideas come from?” threads, which are always a delight. Some accounts are pointed and precise (“I had this experience, and Book X arose from that experience”), some are redolent of metaphysics (“I open myself up to the Higher Mind and let it fill my imagination”), and some are fraught with shenanigans (“I leave sugar cookies on my nightstand and the noggin goblins bring me ideas”). It can be an imaginative exercise in its own right, though I think if we’re being honest with ourselves–or at least when I’m being honest with myself–creative fecundity seems to abide by two principles.

The first (for me, at least) is The Ebb and Flow, which follows laws that can be at once understandable and utterly mysterious to us. We just started the semester here, for example, which means I’m doing my best to get my teaching off to a flying start, preparing and overpreparing for every eventuality I can think of. In my composition classes, for example, we’re just about midway through our planning for the first formal essay, and I’m already drafting materials for the second. It’s pretty pragmatic stuff, and it means that the creative currents, at least in terms of poetry and fiction, are running slowly at the moment. I think that’s a normal and natural part of the process: ebb and flow, drought and flood, feast and famine. Sometimes our minds are preoccupied by other things, so when we lower the bucket into that spring-fed mental well it comes back empty. There are plenty of tricks to get those currents moving once again, but in some cases it’s simpler to concede and adapt to the pattern of our creative lives. I generally try to get one or two more sizable projects up and running during the more flowing moments and hope that the current will carry me to the next generative stretch.

The second is more exasperating, at least for me, and sometimes seems more pernicious. I’d call it The Unexpected Guest, although in my creative life it’s something more akin to a series of serial visitors. I know some writers who conceive of a plan and go at it from start to finish, then edit and expand, rethink and revise with single-minded purpose. In contrast, I tend to be at the mercy of fleeting obsessions, with one impulse preoccupying me for a short while before cascading into the next. It’s exciting and delightful at one level–the cascades keep on going for as long as I chase those impulses–but pretty dang annoying at another. It takes real effort to take those waves without being bowled over, but that’s the only way I can see a project through from start to finish.

Close to the end of the summer, for instance, I started lining up the components of a poetry collection that suddenly emerged from the shadows, a theme I’d been unconsciously fleshing out for months but didn’t really recognize as a coherent whole until I had written and revised about four pieces. The moment the bigger picture crystallized, however, I was able to sit down and lay out the ideas for other poems that would belong to that collection…until the idea for a novella intruded. So I set the collection aside, figuring I could chip away at it poem by poem, and drew up an outline for the novella and started in. As I set down the first few pages I grew increasingly fond of my main character and got a much better handle on their motives and voice…and then an idea for a series of hypnosis recordings arrived. I think you get the point. Back in the day it was called the pressure of ideas; today we might call it hyperfixation, though in my case it’s a decidedly subclinical thing. I can interrupt the pattern anytime I like, though it involves an act of will on my part. And at times it’s difficult to commit to that intervention, because it always feels far better to have too many ideas than too few.

Over the next couple of days I hope to see those recordings through, as I’ve done too much preliminary planning to shrug off the possibility. Then it’s back to the novella, I think–until some new impulse rolls in and bowls me over.

Habits and Patterns

/ Bill W. / 1 Comment

Today is the first day of the fall semester, which means that I’m an absolute wreck.

It’s not that I’m especially nervous about heading back to the classroom or anything quite like that (though I’m naturally trying to figure out how I’d like to manage my own masking and COVID care, among other things). The jangly part for me is trying to dial in the shape my life will take–or ideally ought to take–over the next several months.

The summer was loosely scheduled, but the moving parts of each day were decidedly mechanical. I knew with perfect certainty what I’d be doing up until about noon on most days, and in the hours that followed before my partner came home from work I generally knew what I’d be up to. The bad news for me is that I didn’t plan any transitional time into the calendar: I knew I’d be reconsidering my course outlines to get ready for the term in August, but I didn’t brace myself for the temporal lurch that unsurprisingly arrived today. I wrapped up my summer plans on Friday, and today I’ve got to figure out the shape of my days and ways over the next four months or so. A weekend was not nearly enough time to get myself sorted.

Broadly speaking I’m cautiously optimistic about some big-picture prospects. Over the weekend I identified a change in tech that should allow me to dive into some recording ideas I’ve been planning for awhile, and I also came across a movie that perfectly captures the tone I’m aspiring to in both my novel and in the new novella project I started late in July. I feel pretty good about my teaching plans for the semester as well, as I’ve rejiggered many of the moving parts to make them more accessible and student-friendly. I tend to mistrust autonomic optimism, optimism as an unexamined habit of mind, but when enough moving parts align I try to ride out that trust.

To get my mind in some semblance of order–and to capitalize on these strange optimistic impulses–I’m leaning on some old tricks of the trade, which I thought I might pass along today. There’s nothing revolutionary about them, but they are often of use to me when I’m getting ready for change but haven’t quite decided what that change is going to look like.

The first step is broad-based itemization. It’s the kind of goal-setting most of us do when we’ve got longer-term prospects on the horizon. I lost thirty pounds over the summer, for instance, and I’d like to keep that momentum going. I’d like to finish off the draft of the novella. I’d like to figure out how to make better hypnosis recordings. It’s all chunky stuff, stuff that I’ll chip away at over the course of the coming weeks and months–big plot arcs rather than individual scenes.

The second step, then, is breaking apart my ambitions. I find few things more dispiriting than having a long, undifferentiated list of things to do that I can’t actually accomplish in any settled length of time. For me it feels like having a full cognitive inbox, an inbox stuffed with messages that I have no choice but to leave in the hopper. I know folks who regularly open up Outlook and find themselves starting at dozens or hundreds of emails. That’s far too many cathexes for my mind to manage, so I like to break actionable notions down into separate lists. At present, that means I’ve got Optional/Future projects in one (story ideas I’ve got in mind for various calls for submissions, for example, or revisions of older projects that have occurred to me), On-Deck/Ongoing items in another (like the draft of the novella, the refinement of my recording methods for hypnosis content, etc., all of which I’ll nibble at over weeks and months), and Week of August 29th prospects in the third, uppermost list. Those are all items I can reasonably tackle over the next couple of days, like buying a new USB cord or cleaning my computer desktop or getting my books for the term on the right shelf. They remind me that I’m making progress every day, and they keep me from fretting about those pending tasks that would haunt that uppermost list if I were less granular.

Step three is focusing on a) the known and b) the known bits of business that actually fall to me. Left to its own devices my brain can conjure up plenty of junk to worry about, though most of those conjurings belong to the realm of The Unknown. My partner, for example, plans to start up her own business in the coming months, and I intend to help her out in any way I can. But at this juncture I have only a fuzzy idea about what kind of help she might like, so fretting about it inevitably leads me to an array of dead ends. Likewise, I’ll be collaborating with a colleague on a course we’d like to get on the books in 2023 or 2024. Right now, however, the ball is in her court; we’ve got some ideas on the table, but not much progress can be made until we’re both ready to hunker down and get the syllabus written up. I could try to slap some flesh on the bones on my own, but all of that work could be pointless if we decide to move in a different direction. That project, then, gets dropped into the On-Deck file–it doesn’t need to crowd my brainspace right now.

Step four, given the divisions I’ve made, is tackling stuff on the first hop–getting junk done as soon as I’m able. The infinite business we call Adulthood involves the churning of tasks, clearing one item from the to-do list only to add another and another. The longer we leave those items pending, however, the more cognitive energy we expend, at least in my experience (hence the reference to cathexes above). Today I’m meant to blog, for example, so here I am blogging. As soon as I’ve finished the entry I’ll cross it off my list, and then I’ll tackle other items, one after another, until it’s time for me to head to campus. It’s not the sexiest state of affairs, but it will keep me from succumbing from that paralysis that comes with having too much junk to do and too little time to do it. Today could have easily become unmanageable, which would bode ill for the term, but I’m one paragraph away from completing this task and I’ve already got three tasks behind me. Not bad for 8:00am on a Monday, and at day’s end I’ll feel like I’ve made some progress–primarily because I actually have.

The fifth and last step on the day is anchoring the new habits, which I think is important to do any time I alter my routine, the mechanical pattern that shapes my day. It often feels like a cheap trick to me, but it’s really just a substantial, visible reminder of the difference I intend to instate. Right now, for example, I’m drinking from a different coffee mug, a mug unlike the one I used every day this summer. It seems like a trivial change, but every time I reach for it I’m reminded that what I’m doing today is not what I’ve been doing every day since May. Many folks I know consider themselves impulsive, spontaneous people, but I think there are generally underlying patterns–how we eat if not what we eat, how we actually dress ourselves if not what we’re wearing–that we tend to gloss over, some of the foundational habits we have learned to sublimate. Even a slight revision can be enough to remind us that things are a little different, enough to get some new way of living underway.

Practical Magics

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment
Image from NASA via Unsplash.com

I’ve been revisiting the manuscript for the novel over the past week, just skimming over a few pivotal scenes and trying to prioritize edits. I’ve got a handful of higher-order changes to make, and I think foremost among them will be adding proofs of the antagonist’s capabilities. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not terribly fond of endless escalation, page after page and scene after scene of misery that forecloses all chances for the protagonist to win the endgame (except one, naturally), but I do think it’s important to hammer out proportions at the level of overall ability. The antagonist almost always has an edge, usually at the level of ruthlessness; we expect traditional protagonists to care for others and perhaps even exercise restraint when push comes to shove. I’ve established ruthlessness in my villain, I think, but I also need to make clear that, as far as overall juice goes, she’s got plenty of power and wants a little more.

The catch, alas, is that I find power dynamics endlessly fascinating. As subject matter goes, it’s a rabbit hole I can easily tumble down if I’m not very, very careful.

I can’t say I’ve got an especially good handle on the topic, largely because it’s so elusive and pervasive, occurring in a wide variety of forms and shaped by countless contexts. It’s not hard for me to see that most every scholarly or creative prospect I take up falls somewhere on the graph where power and ethics intersect. My approach to education is meaningfully informed by power, from the implied consent that comes with enrollment in a class to the mechanics of grading to the design of assignments. Seemingly simple matters quickly get bound up in questions of preparation, access, and fairness. Hypnosis is knotted up in questions of power as well–how much power is the hypnotee handing over when they enter a hypnoidal state, for example, a question that is itself complicated by my use of hypnotee rather than subject and hypnoidal state rather than trance. It’s a realm of operations where people go in expecting to be manipulated, but only in ways the psyche can accept. I write on BDSM from time to time, as it is an area of inquiry and practice that attempts to make power dynamics transparent but at the same time involves a distinctive kind of ethical negotiation–no matter how participants talk it through, there’s a moment when conditions of possibility change. Games (both video and table-top) are fraught with questions of what players can do, how and why they do it, and the means by which they acquire power for the doing. And storytelling centers on the play of power at the level of knowing and knowledge, as the writer manages disclosure and the reader makes meaning from what they learn along the way, sometimes wresting control of the story away from the person doing the telling.

I could go on and on, which is perhaps why in my own storytelling I find it difficult to manage power with a light touch. And that catch itself comes with a catch, as power often operates on us invisibly, in ways we don’t always recognize until it’s too late. There’s no such thing as fair play when it comes to narrative, but the teller’s power only goes so far. The trick of telling, I think, is to arm the reader with all the information they need, and to trust that they are going to use that information as you intend. It’s a big swing and a big risk, but it’s one we have to accept if we expect magic to happen.