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perspective and clarity, clarity and perspective.

I did a hell of a lot of work over a few days to finish the first draft of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. I did three or four days in a row right around 2500 words, and then on the last night before Anne and I left for vacation, I did about 6900, so I could finish the draft. It comes in just over 61000 words, and once I’m done with cuts and rewrites, I think it’ll end up right around 60000.

I started the rewrite yesterday, mostly going over the first part of the story, seeing where I was clearing my throat, figuring out how I can smooth it out and lay the foundation that the rest of the story will build upon, and discovering that a lot of it holds up better than I expected it would, a year after I wrote it.

I made a few small cuts, added some stuff here and there and smoothed out a few places where I was clear in my head but not on the page. I decided this morning that I’m going to completely rewrite the first chapter, to better and more clearly define the geography of the story, and to better introduce all the characters. I’m glad I have the perspective on it that I do, now, because I can see the places where things make sense to me, but will be unclear to a reader unless I change them. I’ve spent so much time in the back third of the manuscript, this early part I’m working through now almost feels like a different book, which makes sense, because I didn’t know I was writing a novel when I started writing this novel.

So yesterday, I did twenty-one pages before I ran out of gas. Twenty-one pages doesn’t feel like a lot, but we all have to start somewhere, and I feel good about my progress.

I know I have a lot of work to do, and I’m looking forward to it. It’s going to be fun and challenging and stressful and cathartic to go back into this manuscript and polish up the parts that need it. The last bit is going to need more work than the rest, because it was all done in such a short amount of time, but I’m doing so much work on the beginning, getting so submerged in the natural current of the narrative, by the time I get to the end and do that work, it may not feel as clunky as it does right now. Does that make sense? I feel like I’m reading and rewriting someone else’s work right now, making it my own for the first time.

I look back on the last three weeks, the focus and discipline that I needed to stay on target and finish telling the story. I keep thinking that I should have just stuck with it back in 2017 when I gave up on doing anything, because of Shitler and my Depression being the worst it’s ever been since I got treatment and started taking better care of my mental health. I keep thinking that this book would be with readers right now, if I’d just kept working on it and finished it a year ago. But Anne pointed out that I needed that time away from it, so I could do the work I needed to do on myself, to be in the place I am now, so I could finish it.

She was right, and I probably (definitely) spent more time beating myself up about not writing than I actually spent writing. It seems so obvious when I look back on a year of little productivity now, with all this perspective and all this work actually done, that even when I was frustrated and not as productive as I wanted to be, I did the best that I could at that moment. I’m always telling kids to do the best they can do, and to be gentle with themselves about it, to acknowledge that what their best is will vary from day to day. I forgot to be awesome to myself, to give myself permission to accept that my best may not have been what I wanted it to be, but it was the best that I could do at that moment. For almost a year, I did the best I could do, and it wasn’t very much, because I hadn’t yet done the emotional and personal work that I needed to do so I could be more creatively productive. But once I did the work I needed to do, including some painful introspection and emotional therapy, I was able to do the work I wanted to do. And now that work is done (well, the first step is done, anyway). And I am proud of it.

Anne is away for a few days at C2E2. I had planned to spend this time I am home with just the dogs in Skyrim, but I feel so good and so excited about working on this rewrite, that instead of goofing off with my NPC friends and looking for power converters, I’m spending this time in a world that I created, in my own head, working on my own story, and then rewarding myself with some Skyrim at night when I’m done for the day.

I’m proud of myself, and I feel good about who I am, where I am right now in my life, and what I’m doing. It feels so good to be doing creative work that matters to me because I want to share it with the world

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i just finished the first draft of my first novel

It’s a fictional coming of age story, told in a memoir style. I ‘ve done about 12K words in the last few days, and wrote 6900 words on it today, so I could finish it before Anne and I go on a little vacation tomorrow. I’m going to let it sit and give myself some distance from it, so I can be clear-eyed and objective when I start the rewriting process next week.

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i tried turning it off and back on again.

A few months ago, the hardware in my iMac shit the bed one final time. Rather than replace it (Apple hardware is not that great, and certainly not designed to last), I decided to convert this epic Xidax gaming rig I have into my primary production machine.

It worked like a dream for a long time, and Windows 10 began to feel like a pretty decent OS, even if I missed some Mac OS UI features (hitting space to preview files, and easy keyboard screen shots were the two I missed the most.)

But about a week ago, something went wrong. Everything started slowing down like crazy, Chrome just quit working entirely, and even Firefox ran so slow, I felt like I was using a 386. So I used every bit of computer learning and troubleshooting I’ve picked up in thirty-five years of computer use, and I turned it off and back on again.

It wouldn’t start up.

So I booted from the DVD, and told it to repair the problem. That didn’t work.

So I attempted to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work.

So I formatted the drive that C: lived on, and tried to reinstall Windows. That didn’t work, and I lost a ton of media by mistake as a bonus (I have it backed up on a Seagate drive, but it’s still a pain in the ass to lose it).

I went to the Internet, and I downloaded a few Linux utility distros to check the hardware integrity on the machine. I booted from those CDs, ran their tools, and confirmed that everything was working correctly.

At this point, my lungs were aching for air.

I got super frustrated, because all the diagnostics I ran appeared to work, and every test told me that there wasn’t anything wrong. It just turns out that Windows won’t install, and it gives me the super helpful advice to check the install logs that I can’t read because when I boot from the Windows DVD, it won’t let me write to any of the mounted file systems.

So I’m moving my opinion dial from “Windows isn’t that bad” back to “Windows is awful garbage that is an affront to all good people in the world.”

Also, one kid seems to really love the Speedo Guy.

Spinning the dial was satisfying, but it didn’t give me a working OS that I could use to get my work done, so I grabbed the latest release of Debian Linux, and booted from the resulting live DVD. It felt familiar, and unlike my Windows nightmare, it Just Worked(tm). For longtime *nix users, especially the subset of us who started using Red Hat or Debian or Mandrake or whatever back in the late 90s, this reality — that Linux worked effortlessly and without any configuration hassles — will likely prove to be quite pleasing.

I wondered if there was a hardware problem that I hadn’t uncovered, maybe a failing HDD or something, and I decided that the best way to test it would be to attempt a Debian install.

About seventeen minutes later, I booted my machine from GRUB, and like a magical leprechaun, Debian just worked. I had to install a couple of drivers to get the most out of the graphics card, to get Flash and Java to go, and to update Chromium, but that was it.

I’m still annoyed with Windows and its lack of useful error messages, and I am confident that I’m not getting the most computing/processing/graphics/awesome power out of this epic machine, but I have an OS that is solid and stable, that is making it possible for me to do my work, browse the Internet, and read and send Email. There are some idiosyncrasies that I’m not crazy about, and there are a few mild frustrations (I can’t easily watch Netflix or Hulu because of stupid DRM issues, and some websites like Twitter are painfully slow), but I’m definitely turning my dial toward “Linux is awesome.”

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the focus is sharp in the city

I needed new headshots and publicity shots, so I asked my friend, Kaelen, to come over to Castle Wheaton and help me out. We took a few dozen pictures in a few different locations, and I’m super happy with what we got. Here’s one of them:

When we finished shooting for the day, I had a realization that probably means more to me than it will to anyone else, but since that’s never stopped me from writing about something before…

I hate having my picture taken. I feel like I have ugly teeth, my forehead is too big, and my eyes always reveal how deeply sad I am inside. If you wonder why I’m usually pulling a face in pictures, now you know why. It’s like my armor, I guess.

This started early one morning when I was seven or eight years-old. I had to have headshots taken for commercial casting agents, and my mom took me out of school one day to meet with a photographer she knew. I remember feeling like I was getting a free day off, because I didn’t have to go to school (I don’t know why we didn’t do this on a weekend. Or maybe we did and I don’t remember that part of the day correctly. It’s not the important part, which I’m getting to, anyway). On the way to wherever we were going, my mom drove us through a McDonald’s, and let me get an Egg McMuffin. This was a big deal for me, because my parents never got us fast food. So I remember getting that, a greasy hashbrown, and that concentrated orange juice that came in the plastic cup with a foil seal. I wasn’t allowed to eat in the car, so I kept my bag of fancy McDonald’s breakfast in my lap until we got to the park and met the photographer.

He made me uncomfortable right away. He was just too wound up, too excited, had way too much energy. I was so little, I didn’t know how to vocalize any of these feelings, and my parents were very much into me and my sister following rules, so I just behaved myself and sat down at a picnic table to eat. I can see and feel it now: it’s cool and a little damp, probably late Spring. The picnic table is made of wood, and someone has scratched their initials into the bench. I have carefully stabbed the straw through the foil top of my orange juice, and my hash brown is still in its little cardboard holder, sitting on the carefully unfolded bag that I’m using as a placemat. I have my Egg McMuffin in my hand, ready to eat it. The photographer grabs it out of my hand, takes a bite, spits the food out on the grass, and hands it back to me. “Okay!” He says, with terrifying enthusiasm, “act like you just took a big bite of this and you love it!” He begins taking photos.

I don’t remember anything else with any clarity. It was almost forty years ago, but I can still feel — right now I feel — how upset that made me. One of my overwhelming memories from being a kid actor is that I didn’t have a voice in my own life, and that I had to do what the adults around me wanted me to do. That guy, who I’m positive didn’t mean anything cruel and was just excited to get to work, snatching my breakfast away from me and turning it into a prop for a photo shoot I didn’t even want to be part of, perfectly encapsulated everything I ever felt about being a kid actor. For the next few hours, I had  to pose like an idiot, doing exaggerated expressions and changing my clothes a dozen times, because that’s how it worked in the late 70s.

Flash forward about four or five years. (My god I can’t believe it was only four or five years later, but that’s how fast the childhood that was stolen from me went by.) I’m in a studio with the other kids from Stand By Me. We’re posing for some publicity shots that will eventually make their way into teen magazines. I feel so awkward and uncomfortable. I am not cool like River, I am not famous like Corey, and I am not funny like Jerry. I am just sad and weird and self conscious and I want to be anywhere else.

Flash forward another year or so. I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I’m doing in my life. I’m at some party at Paramount, where I work every day on TNG. I’m only fourteen or maybe fifteen. There are no other kids my age there, and I feel sad and weird. I can’t relate to kids my own age because I never get to be around them, and I can’t relate to the adults I am always around, because I am a kid. I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do at this party where nobody is paying attention to me, when a photographer comes up and takes my picture. He doesn’t ask, he doesn’t give me a chance to get ready. He just calls my name and when I look up, he takes this shot, which of course goes into a teen magazine:

Maybe you don’t see it, but I can see how sad I am, even though I’m trying to do this smile thing I’ve settled upon where I don’t show my ugly teeth that I hate.

They say that the camera doesn’t lie, that the camera reveals what’s going on inside a person, and I think that’s accurate. In all these pictures of me from the 80s and 90s, you can see how weird and awkward I am, and I can see how much I wanted to be anywhere else. Maybe I didn’t like pictures because they made me feel so vulnerable, since I was forced to just be me, instead of putting on the mask of a character I was playing. Maybe I just didn’t want to pose for pictures because it was yet another thing that normal kids didn’t do, and I wanted to be a normal kid (for values of “normal” that I didn’t really understand, but heavily romanticized. Thanks, John Hughes).

Anyway. This is all context that, like I said, probably doesn’t matter to anyone who isn’t me. It is context that matters to me because the photos we took are only the second time in my life that I have asked someone to take my picture, because I wanted it taken. I realized that when we were finishing up, and it made me feel happy.

I love the pictures that we got, and I love that I’m at a place in my life, finally, that has allowed me to feel a little more comfortable in the camera’s eye.

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…and then Pete Townsend says, “Can anybody play the drums?”

I was thinking about reinstalling Rock Band again recently, but I decided that, even though I really loved playing it back in the day, I am at a point in my life where I would rather spend that time actually learning an instrument, instead. I have played bass guitar and ukulele in the past. I also played guitar in the way that every lame college dude does, which means I never learned any theory, but I memorized some guitar tabs and chords, and sort of faked my way through a few songs for friends who were either too polite or embarrassed to tell me how bad I was.

I was sort of thinking that doing it as a game would be fun, so I gave Rocksmith guitar a try, but after about two hours of different game modes, it’s not for me. It was like all the frustration of Rock Band or Guitar hero, but without any of the fun of pretending that I was a rock star. I may plug in my old bass guitar (which is now a vintage instrument because I’m old) and try that mode, but for now, I’m going to try something different.

I have always wanted to learn to play the drums, and I was pretty good at the Rock Band drums when we played all the time, so I decided to pick up a small, inexpensive, student kit, and use YouTube videos to master the basics. While I was shopping around about a week ago, there was a shiny little kit on sale at woot, and it had more pieces and cost less than the three piece kit I was looking it, so I bought it. It was delivered today.

I’ve been putting it together, which is really fun, but murder on my old hands and knuckle joints, so I took a break to write this dumb post about the new experimental hobby thingy I’m doing: Is it possible for a 45 year-old dude like me to learn how to play the drums, using only the resources available online?

I intend to find out. I’ll document the process here.