Oddities

A Quantum of Care

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Today is off to a rollicking start. I woke around 5:00, sipped my caffeinated pre-workout drink for 45 minutes, got showered and dressed, and headed in to the gym promptly at 7:00, only to learn that the activity center is on its late-start schedule. And lo! upon returning home I learned that our Fall Wellness Break (which I normally imagine as a single Monday off, a long weekend meant to sort out some imbalance in the Monday/Wednesday and Tuesday/Thursday class calendar) actually includes today as well. So I’m either going to make excellent use of this day off to work on Chancers like a rabid bandicoot, or I’m going to fritter the day away like an irresponsible lout.

The good news for me is that I mapped out a lesson plan for the day already, so I can just slide it over to Thursday and create a little extra leisure time for myself. The plan involves an extended meditation on the ethics of care in light of Mary Oliver’s American Primitive, though I’m going to need to backtrack a little bit to lay the groundwork for Olde Skool Ethics as well. This intersects with Chancers as well, so the tributaries ought to converge nicely in the Big River of Wandlessian philosophy. But let’s not get too far ahead of things because it’s a Zany Day Off.

In some ways I suspect that the ethics of care would gain more traction if folks didn’t so often stumble at the first step – attentiveness. It’s not colossal in the abstract, just a bit of preliminary recognition en route to response, but for many folks it’s A Whole Thing. It involves paying enough attention to catch what’s important to various folks in our wee spheres of activity and (and this is often the catch) remembering what it was we attended to. And memory tends to be chancy, inflected with all sorts of strangeness. Until we’ve burned a pattern in, it involves fresh acts of processing that we have to bring to bear on our thoughts and behavior time after time.

Three quick examples. When I first learned hypnosis, much of that education involved small gestural indications of suggestibility. Much of the language comes across as a simple formulation. “Can you imagine that?” or “Could you do that for me?”, and the hypnotist normally asks the hypnotee for some visible confirmation, often a smile. Out in the world, however, it doesn’t take long for most folks to recognize that a bit of sexism can affect that response set (as in “You’d be prettier if you smiled more,” which is something women hear on the semi-regular). So remembering to switch to nodding for confirmation that some direction has been heard and accepted in a hypnosis session can be huge.

The same premise also applies to names, deadnames, and pronouns, which can be colossal for how people conceive of themselves. One of my many intellectual defects is context-specific thinking, which generally means I’ll remember the most important details automatically in my usual spheres of operation but struggle with them in the wild. (Pronouns are seldom a stumbling block for most folks, since we seldom speak to others in the third person and can lean on I and You, but chosen names can be.) I ran into one of my transgender student at the pharmacy last week, for example, and I happily have several transgender and gender-fluid students in my classes this fall. For that reason it took me a moment to dredge up Casey’s name, though on campus, especially given the persistence of seating patterns, the act comes naturally. For me it’s a tiny thing, but for folks in the throes of identity work, it can be major. Every now and again I’ll come across a young man with what was once a gender-neutral name (a Leslie, a Robin, a Sidney), and in class they’ll often go by their middle names. Remembering it and using it in public contexts can be a crucial kind of affirmation for them, though I’m burning a brain cell to do it.

And that leads me to spooky season, which involves a generalized kind of memory. Part of it comes from the world of memes, which annually remind us that not every child comes equipped with the verbal, motor, or social skills to do Halloween in the traditional way. When the season rolls around I try to retrieve the memories that respond to that knowledge. In addition to candy we usually try to get treats with various tactile qualities here at the Abbey (gummy erasers, or sticky hands, or fuzzy little critters), and among them we’ll normally have some popular past favorites (fidget spinners and self-stimming bits go over very well, as it turns out). It’s only memory I have to call up once a year, though I know for some kids it might mean a lot more than it does to me. This fall I purposely/accidentally got a lot more Halloween loot than I intended, but it tends to keep well, and lord knows we’ve got plenty of hidey-holes here at Wrackwell.

The real trick of the day will likely involve pumpkin management. We’re not mad for pumpkins here, but my boo does love to have them around, especially as a kind of enrichment for her adoptive squirrels. The catch, alas, is that I want to make sure we have them on hand but don’t want to intrude on her quest to pick the perfect pumpkin. We’ll see how well I manage that balancing act in the next episode of Bill Tries to Do a Thing! In the meantime, however, let’s get back to building the Reputation chart for Chancers.

Vibe Chex

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

We just fired up the fall semester here at CMU, so we’re in that segment of the term when students and professors alike try to get a feel for their classes. Those vibes, however, are incredibly elusive in the first few days, as we’re all trying to get our sea legs.

One of the reasons I’m terribly fond of teaching textual and rhetorical analysis is that vibes can make for fairly reliable guides. As a genre, rhetorical analysis generally assumes that we are eminently rational creatures and think our way through every case logically, but most of us start with how things feel and then work our way toward articulating our thoughts about a thing. It can be a kind of deceptive, self-reflexive sort of processing, but it’s illuminating nevertheless.

Tuesday nights are Horror Movie Nights here at the Abbey, as my fiancee heads out to spend time with her friends and I’m left to amuse myself with a Panera salad and some delicacy that Shudder has on offer. Last night I double dipped, starting with I Am Lisa and then moving over to Black Friday to cap off the evening. In I Am Lisa, the vibes felt a bit off, so I fast-forwarded through a bunch of atmospheric aerial shots (one even-handed critique of the movie I might offer is that it felt a little padded, like content had been stretched here and there to reach an attractive runtime). The film is founded in a broad tropic pattern I tend to enjoy–the revenge flick in which the victims get what they deserve–so I was favorably disposed toward the movie from the preview. Alas, the vibes were off, and it took me a little processing time to reason my way toward that feeling.

The genre tends to have catharsis built in, so I often think of it as a lay-up. The screenplay I’ve been chipping away at for the past few months shares some of the same DNA. The catch with Lisa, however, is that the protagonist and her allies experience qualms about the revenge process that feel out of keeping with the spirit of the plot. In short, Lisa (and by implication, her family) is horribly wronged by a corrupt sheriff and her equally corrupt family; the sheriff’s daughter is a small-town drug dealer and a bully, and her son is the deputy and a bully himself. We get a clear sense that a pattern of obvious corruption has long been established and accepted in this little community; when Lisa falls prey to the sheriff and her friends, we start hankering for overdue retribution.

The movie, however, never seems to commit fully to letting the viewer enjoy it. Lisa is beaten, bloodied, and literally hauled out into the woods to be left for the wolves. Because genre, however, she manages to fend off a special sort of wolf before being rescued by a friendly woman who happens to be the sheriff’s sister–who susses out pretty quickly what happened to Lisa. At that point our feelings are already aligned; we know what we want to happen, and we kind of want to enjoy the justice of it. But Lisa and her bestie instead wrestle in very human ways with their ethical reservations about revenge. The patterning is reasonable–her vengeance plays out in about the order we’d expect, with the sheriff saved for last–and there are hints that the writer and director get it. Lisa, for example, defers her vengeance on the sheriff’s daughter, who catalyzed all the events in the film, because she’s in a drugged stupor and would not be able to appreciate what was happening to her. What eventually becomes of the sheriff is fitting but not quite satisfying. Lisa overplays her hand and winds up being an accomplice to the sheriff’s demise rather than the prime mover. We get what we want at the level of plot, but the vibes aren’t entirely satisfying. It’s not quite cathartic.

Black Friday is something of a puzzle, but it seems to know the overall vibe it’s after and eventually get there. In some ways it’s a riff on Slither, an alien zombie invasion coinciding with a Black Friday sale at a toy store. The cast includes horror heavyweights Bruce Campbell and Devon Sawa, both of whom turn in winning performances, and the supporting cast is better than serviceable. The zombie content is fine fun, with good special effects and brisk pacing, but right in the middle of the movie there’s a pause that calls into question a great deal of the surrounding activity. Campbell, as the regional manager, makes clear that he loves his job largely because of the feeling of consequence it affords him. One of the newer employees, Chris, is finally able to unload on the store manager and his colleagues in a fairly sustained critique of corporate culture. Special invective, however, is slung at Sawa, who plays Ken, the coolest guy in the store and the devoted father of two cute kids introduced at the start of the film–his motive for trying desperately to survive the zombie attack, unsurprisingly. At the end of the midsection Sawa gets leveled: Chris mocks him for his seeming commitment to being the coolest guy, the woman he apparently flirts with, Marnie, admits she doesn’t know him well enough to take his flirtation seriously, and even his commitment to his daughters is put under the microscope–as if Ken has some special claim to survival that the others don’t have. The idea of coworkers as family is detonated, and we had into the culmination of the zombie attack with a much clearer sense of what we want–the just victimization of the managerial set, the escape of Marnie (who the workers generally agree is too kindly for the store, and for whom the viewer receives enough evidence to arrive at the same judgment), and the redemption of Ken, who seemingly suffers a zombie bite and opts to fend for himself while his coworkers escape. The tone of the movie is nicely balanced, in that the ironic/comedic beats never undercut the imminent threat posed by the alien zombie horde. And we eventually get what we want and a hasty conclusion thereafter.

I generally start any given semester with a good feeling about how my classes are going to go, well before the classroom dynamics actually emerge. The semester feels really promising in prospect, with a goodly gaggle of new and familiar faces as well as an ongoing project, Chancers, to keep me reliably busy all term, so part of my job is to bring that vibe with me to the classroom and sustain it as well as I can.

The Fibber’s Club

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Taking a wee break from work this morning to reflect on, well, work.

One of the fascinating dynamics that invariably emerges in writing fiction is the sense that some events and behaviors–all of them squarely in the Land of Make-Believe, mind you–will feel untrue. It’s not just a question of representational verisimilitude, it’s a question of epistemology, of thinking about what we believe and why we believe it.

I am deep in the woods in the revision of my novel manuscript. I went over it once not long after it was drafted, and this summer, having identified a dreamy prospective publisher, I decided to go over it again. I finished a full revision of the text just a couple days ago, and it occurred to me that only one element was awry. Without getting too spoilery or gory, let’s say I needed to be more explicit about what happened to a particular corpse, which had vanished from the site of its corpsification.

Normally I wouldn’t reckon that detail as an especially big deal; it’s the sort of blank any reader might reasonably fill in. But in this case the detail, as I’d first rendered it, involved an untruth–not just a bit of deception, but an outright lie. And that character, in the relationship as I envision and depict it, would simply not lie to the person she lied to.

So today and tomorrow, rather than writing the synopsis I’ll need to send the piece off to my dream publisher, I’m going to go to need to go back over about 300 pages of prose to make sure every instance when that subject comes up aligns with a more truthful reckoning of the event.

It’s a pain in the butt, but it’s also, I think, as sign that I’m approaching the narrative properly. There are plenty of games one has to play in fiction, when secrets, deception, and lies are all human behaviors on the exam table, but by story’s end, readers need to come away with the feeling that the writer has played the games fairly.

I know the two primary areas I’ll need to address–two accounts of the same event by different characters–but revisiting the story as a whole will give me a little more peace of mind. (This morning I recalled, for example, a minor timeline discrepancy that will need to be sorted along the way.) It’s hard not to be obsessive about the little things this late in the game. As a reader I like the experience to be immersive, with no disruptions to break the spell of a story, so going a few extra miles to make sure the reader stays within the fiction. seems like a very small price to pay for a story I love.

Better Off Betwixt

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

One of the perils of creative work is that ideas, even excellent ideas, are plentiful. Every now and again I’ll come across an author on my social media feeds who’s received a direct-message pitch from a stranger: a devil’s bargain of a free, totally rad idea that the writer can write so long as the pitcher can be credited and ideally reimbursed in some form or fashion. The author, for their part, usually admits that they suffer from a glut of ideas, that if they were to write 18 hours a day for the next twentty years they would scarcely catch up with their current stock. It’s something of a pleasurable peril, I think, as most folks have spells when it feels like the brain has been squeezed dry. Those stretches are, I’m glad to report, invariably temporary, and mindful writers invariably have enough zesty projects to tide them over.

This, alas, explains my current lot, as my brain appears to be stuck in the generative gear. I’m actually pretty good in fixing my noggin on a single notion and seeing it through from start to finish, but I’m also not one to turn the Muses away if they come a-knocking. The big project I’m polishing off is the novel I wrote last fall. It is, I think, nearly there, by which I mean my obsessive tendencies are nearly ready to move on. I plan to give it one last editorial pass by the end of the month, a pass in which I’ll make one foundational change and also lop off a few thousand words to get it down to what I hope will be a more digestible length. After that, it’ll be time to search for representation and start pitching the manuscript hither and yon.

While I was working on the manuscript over the summer, I also finished off a novella, which is currently in the hands of a publisher. Novellas can usually be sent directly in response to open calls, so the process is a little bit different. I also found the length terribly congenial to my way of thinking, plotting, and writing, so my brain obliged me with a string of ideas in rapid succession. Two of the three might well represent a duology, which could make for a pretty palatable single volume of about 60,000 words. The other feels like a much more self-contained experience, and after a couple of false starts I’ve finally settled into the rhythm of that piece and have it properly underway.

While four sizable projects would represent a very full hopper, it’s important to remember that I’m also something of a jackass. I’m also writing a table-top role playing game, and as fate would have it an organizational impasse happened to coincide with the launch of Eloy Lasanta’s six-week course on The Art of Gamecrafting, a joint venture of GenCon and our own CMU Press. I accordingly signed on, which will hopefully help me whip all the bits and pieces into a testable beta version. I’ve gleaned a few key insights from the class already, and I’ve also nearly convinced myself that I need to learn a few more Adobe skills so I can start making fillable character sheets. I’ve done some game writing for the good folk over at Superhero Necromancer before, but this game is very much my own jam, one that’s been ripening in my mind for several months and has a couple dozen moving parts already committed to pixels. I think some of the difficulty I’ve experienced arises from the steady diet of Kickstarters and Patreons I keep an eye on. I’ve run afoul of something akin to a stretch-goal impulse, which means I’m having a tough time sifting out what absolutely needs to be in the core game and what ought to be reserved for addenda, extensions, and optional rules, many of which I already have in mind.

Given my commitments to my teaching, I reckon that’s more than enough projects on the docket, but along the way I’ve also fleshed out synopses for two screenplays. Those probably belong on the back burner of some other stovetop, but I certainly haven’t forgotten about them. And there’s that short story I hope to get done in time for an anthology call, as well as a few revisions and reworks of older story manuscripts I need to attend to. I’m mostly caught up with life stuff, happily (today I was going to get the updated COVID shot, but I decided that I didn’t want to squander an open writing day), so I figured I’d fire off this missive to the blog and then tuck in to one of the above. Like most writing types, I’m very content to have a storehouse replete with options and prospects. But by the end of the semester, with a little luck I’ll be able to pile up some words on the pallets and ship some stuff out.

Economies of Scale

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

This morning I took a little time to get my to-do list for the fall semester in order. It sounds like a small thing, and it certainly is, but it’s a great help in terms of simplifying and clarifying the things I’ve got to do and the things I’d like to accomplish.

The first section involves the simplest of tasks, the ones I can tackle in a matter of minutes. I like to think the cap on the time frame is about three hours. Some items are ridiculously brief but needful. Topping the list today is “Remind my partner to cancel her doctor’s appointment”; I’ve got to buy new socks and new shoes as well; and at the bottom of the uppermost list is “Prepare the discussion board area for the first essay workshop in ENG 101.” I’ll surely tackle every item today and add a few to tomorrow’s docket while I’m at it.

The second section involves the middle term, bits of business that will probably last several hours or take a couple of days. I plan to back up my computer files this week, for example, and flesh out my promotion file for 2026, which will involve looking back through old emails to chronicle my work as an academic advisor as well as my committee service. Nothing in this section is pressing, but it does help me to break down some of the chewier tasks I might otherwise avoid. The trickiest bit will be “Finalize combat mechanics for the tabletop RPG,” which might well belong to the third section but seems like a smaller, more manageable bit than “Finish drafting the whole flippin’ RPG.”

And the third section involves those items that have no certain end date in sight–lots of “Draft this story” and “Draft that screenplay” and “Write up that syllabus for the course you’d like to pitch.” Nothing in this section has an imminent deadline. Some of it is purely best-case scenario stuff, tackling whatever I’ve got the time to attend to. Putting it out there in the future gives me a little imaginative room to move and keeps my noggin from getting overcrowded. Overcrowding is a problem I’m prone to, but dividing things up by their likely time frames keeps my brain from feeling overclocked (trying to process too much stuff at the same time). When I’m feeling overclocked I tend to drift toward time-wasting activities that give me little hits of task-completion dopamine.

Acknowledging that last habit has been pretty helpful in terms of fiddling with my neurochemistry. I’ve been absorbed lately by some studies I’ve stumbled across on how good stories flood the skull with dopamine, cortisol, and oxytocin, rewarding the body for focusing attention, cooperating with the writer or teller, and getting to the narrative payoff. My subdivisions don’t yield quite the same payoff, of course, but they do help me get where I’m going and give me smallish rewards along the way. Like most existential revisions, there’s nothing groundbreaking about the change, but as I sit here happily tapping at the keys I get a little bit of anticipatory pleasure, both from getting a thing done (“Post to Worpress” is on the first list today) and from the clarity I know will come when the thing is in the rearview mirror and I can hit the strikethrough button to get it off the list. It deals with over-clocking and -crowding in one swell foop, and that, for me, is crucial for keeping the wheels a-turning.

Desserts

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment
(Kerry Noonan as Paula, center, from Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives)

If you’re like me–and my apologies if you are–you’ll remember where you were when Paula died.

I came late to Friday the 13th as a franchise, but even as a whelp I understood a few basic truths about the context of Camp Crystal Lake. Foremost among them was the catalyst offered to the viewer in the very beginning, way back when Mrs. Voorhees was our antagonist: negligent counseling will not be tolerated. That premise gets folded in to a wide variety of transgressions, sex and drug use foremost among them, but we are asked again and again to remember that wee Jason Voorhees died because those entrusted with his welfare were not paying attention.

It’s perhaps for that reason that Part VI felt like such a strange departure–though of course the fact that Jason had been reanimated Frankenstyle might have at least a little to do with it. For at this iteration of the camp we actually had perhaps the most responsible counselor the place would ever see: Paula, pictured above. And what becomes of her? She is murdered, and while most of the murdering occurs offscreen (save for a moment when her mostly- or wholly-dead self is chucked through a window and hauled back in), the aftermath suggests that Jason went a little wild with the killing, even for him. Most of the other deaths in the film are forthright affairs–efficient stabbings, skewerings, beheadings–but I remember seeing the entire interior of Paula’s cabin painted with her blood and wondering what was up. What made Jason single her out for the bonus round? The answer, I believe, is a bucket of nothing: it simply makes for a more spectacular reveal than just another dead body in a film that would see a dozen.

Murder–and I hope it goes without saying–is not a top-shelf problem-solving strategy. But in horror it often gets doled out in ethical proportion: those who deserve the worst fates typically get them, often in an ironic way that lays bare their awfulness. Part VI, however, seems to set aside that ethos, indulging in murder without much reference to that artificial–and I would say artful–standard. A little while after Paula is killed a kindly police officer dies right after trying to comfort an actual camper. So it seems pretty clear that we’re moving toward a new ethos, one that’s meant to offer the audience a different kind of satisfaction. And I’m not sure I’ll ever find it satisfying.

I still watch horror movies when I can (my partner isn’t a fan, so I sneak them in when she’s otherwise engaged), but I find that more and more films lean on a more elusive ethical vision of death that, while perhaps more realistic, seems far less poignant and meaningful. And there are some I find downright nihilistic; those I simply won’t watch. As a viewer I still need something of an ethical vision, even if it’s not a positive or redemptive one. If the point is that people die because people die–and if the writer and director seem to reserve especially cruel punishment for those who try to be good, or caring, or helpful–then I feel I might have better served by a book or a movie with something more substantive to say.

The Only Way Round

/ Bill W. / Leave a comment

Like most humans/humanoids, I go through fertile and fallow periods. For long stretches my head is intensely generative and creative, snatching up stuff from the aether and turning it into something substantive. Like most humans/humanoids, I’ve also found it challenging to navigate These Uncertain Timesâ„¢. Some days I’m grateful for the distraction of a pending obligation or project, but on others I struggle to muster the requisite energy to get even a little bit accomplished. Because I’m a high-functioning weirdo, however, I often have enough oomph to wake up and get what needs doing done.

One consequence of These Uncertain Timesâ„¢, however, has caught me by surprise: for the past three months or so I haven’t really daydreamed, haven’t really fantasized, haven’t really flexed any imaginative muscles in a conscious, purposeful way. I should probably qualify that a bit for clarity: I’ve planned and schemed and executed a few designs, but not much is happening on the ideational front. When I stare at the proverbial stucco, not much is going on. Nothing new intrudes and asks for my attention.

That might seem like a strange claim to make, but it’s one I’m confronting today. In sifting through my Big Folder of Percolating Projects I realized the latest new entry is dated September 24th. I spent much of the time between then and now chipping away at the novel, of course, but in the early part of the writing process my mind was routinely coming up with oddities that got stuck in my cognitive craw and that I jotted down for later use. These days, that’s not often true. It might be that I don’t see much on the horizon to look forward to in the near term, and it might be that my brain has exhausted most of its usual objects. Without a little challenge, change, or provocation, even the spiciest fodder can seem a little stale.

Because this is a writerly blog, however, I think it’s worthwhile to squint hard enough at those clouds to spot the silver lining: The Big Folder of Percolating Projects is a real thing, and at present I’ve got about sixteen fresh-ish ideas to work with and build on. I’ve got older notions foldered away here and there to tide me over as well, enough to ride out several months in the bunker. As a takeaway life lesson, then, my avuncular advice is to keep on hoarding and storing–to sock away plenty of stuff to work on when the Idea Fairies aren’t visiting quite as often as you like. The writing life involves more than a little patience as we see things through from start to finish, and if we find a few stray seeds when we’re tending to the old growth, it’s not a bad idea to pot them up, stow them in the hothouse, and see what’s sprouted when better weather comes around.