On the one hand, internet piracy is not a good thing, and copyright laws only go so far.  I don’t think legislating to prevent piracy is going to help.  The policies will have to be enforced consistently, and how to you police something as vast and anonymous as the internet?  More than likely by chipping away at freedom and privacy.  We’ve got enough of that in the real world.  Pirates will find ways to steal if that’s what they want to do.  And they do because the costs of music and movies can be prohibitive.  To some.  Personally, I’m willing and able to pay for my entertainment.  I want the artists that I like to keep making the art that I like.

It’s like this letter from Tom Dickins of The Jane Austen Argument.  Piracy is almost essential to keep independent artists like Tom going.  Piracy is actually what led me to TJAA in the first place.  Pirated copies of The Dresden Dolls’ albums and Amanda Palmer’s solo album led to following her career which led to actually purchasing Goes Down Under, falling in love with Bad Wine and Lemon Cake and then paying more than asking price for everything TJAA and Tom have put out since then.  And really, the only reason I’m not at their gigs all the time is because I live in the wrong fucking country.

I really think that I shouldn’t have to pay (much) to sample music I may or may not like.  That’s the only reason I ever downloaded songs way back when I did such things.  I’d grab a handful of tracks off an album I was considering purchasing, and if I liked what I heard, I’d (gasp!) go buy a fucking CD!  One of the things I love about Bandcamp is the ability to sample the tunes before laying out the dough.

Movies are a bit different, I think, and I’m not much of a movie buff.  In fact, I dislike most movies, and explosions can only save but so much.  Still, I don’t see why it can’t work the same way.  Watch a movie for free, really really like it and go buy the DVD/Blu-Ray/laser imprint to your brain!

Books?  Hmm.  Books?  Why the fuck would you pirate a book when libraries exist? I can’t read too long on a computer screen anyway.  But still.  See above.  It’s why I’ve got all of my Lulu books as free .pdfs.  Read it, like it, buy a physical copy.  Hate it?  The for fuck’s sake, you shouldn’t have to pay for it!

The thing that needs to be stopped or at least gotten under control is the idiots who steal someone’s hard work and try to profit from it.  I mean, this is such an ugly, pervasive and downright fucking rude thing to do.  It’s gone so far as to taint things like Etsy.  Seriously.  Go to Etsy and search for Harry Potter.  You think every single one of those sellers has been authorized to sell that shit?  I have a serious fucking problem with that.  Okay, I have a serious fucking problem with Harry Potter, but that’s a personal issue.  But again, how do you weed out the bad without choking off the good?  I don’t know.

Like I said, I really need to read up on these bills to see what they propose to do and how before I can really converse intelligently about them.  These are just some basic rambling thoughts.  Needed to write something as I prepare to go spend silly amounts of money for a couple hours of watching a hot chick beat the shit out of people.  I hope there are explosions, too.

Not those kind.

The kind with fire.

Boom.

I wasn’t feeling too great by the time I got home Friday night.  Not much of an appetite, a little queasy.  Stress and sinuses, I figured.  Well, by about 9:30, it was more than obvious that it was some kind of stomach bug.  I couldn’t keep down even the smallest sip of water.  I didn’t sleep much Friday night.  My skin felt raw.  My back hurt, and for a while, I was tempted to simply take my pillow into the bathroom to shorten the frequent trips.

Yesterday was spent sleeping, slowly sipping water, Gatorade and ginger ale, begrudgingly munching oyster crackers and wondering if I would ever get well.  I started running a very slight fever in the evening, but it didn’t last, doused with a cold pack, an Aleve and more Gatorade and oyster crackers.  After watching the San Francisco 49rs make Drew Brees and the Saints look like a terrified high school team, I crawled off to bed and slept.  For like twelve hours.  And stayed in bed for a couple more.

I feel way better today but still not well.  A little lightheaded, weak, sore, in bad need of a bath but feeding myself chicken noodle soup and of course more Gatorade.

I’m very glad I have a three day weekend.  I doubt very much I’d go to work tomorrow if I had to.  I may not go in on Tuesday.  Depends on how much I can recover by then.  Maybe I’ll stay home just on principal.  I haven’t been sick like this in a very long time, haven’t taken any sick time from work since last spring.

Needless to say any plans I had have been wiped out.  Maybe I’ll feel well enough later today or tomorrow to do a little bit of writing.  Laundry has to be done at some point or I won’t be going to work on Tuesday for lack of clean clothes.  I’m sure laundry is a reasonable excuse to stay home.

Work turned into something that’s probably unconstitutional.

I didn’t write a lot.

I didn’t read nearly as much as I usually do.

My grandfather passed away.

I topped it off working until shortly after midnight yesterday/this morning.

For these emotional blights on my year, fuck you, 2011.

I did, however, write 40 poems in April for National Poetry Month, which ended up in two chapbooks, the longer Oneiric Orienteering and the brief City of Rain.

I did finally finish a very long running series of stories (although I have yet to do much about putting them all together in one collection).

My early morning work days gave me some lovely photographs.

Two of my poems were accepted for the January issue of  The Blotter, which should be up soon.

I think the bad outweighs the good, simply because the bad’s been difficult. but maybe I needed the bad more than I needed the good.  Accomplishment is easy.  Slogging through hardship of any variety is not, hence the term.  It’s not easyship, after all.

We can all keep the cliches to ourselves.

So a heartfelt FUCK YOU to 2011.  Here’s to finding out if I can build on what I’ve come through the year with.

Part of the problem is having so many things in the queue. The other issue is that I don’t know which of them is worth the effort. The so-called language trilogy pretty much had me by the throat until China Mieville published Embassytown, doing lightyears better with a similar concept than I could manage if I had another thousand years to write.  Besides, I could never finish the last story. It ended up too loose, too many characters, too far from what I wanted it to be.  I also still ponder the time travel story that I was supposed to have finished for The Piker Press almost two years ago. That one got really complex, and although I have a pretty solid idea of how to handle it, I haven’t really thought much about the writing itself. And I still haven’t finished the formatting and editing of the collection of Jack’s stories.

I have excuses. Legitimate, if not good, excuses. But what excuse do I really have for not writing at all? I do keep a journal, but it quickly becomes a catalog of dull daily life and overly bleak emotional landscape. I’ve tried to meditate, but I can’t keep a clear, empty mind. Even when depression isn’t scattering my thoughts like dandelion fluff, I can’t stop the train of thoughts. I’d need guided meditation for that to work, so I write instead. What I don’t do is ignore the idea of storytelling. Not everything I write in my journal needs to be about something. It’s like I’ve forgotten how to use the damn thing and why I ever started keeping a journal in the first place.

I am, at least, writing something. Mostly poetry. I’ve always found poetry easier than fiction. I know that’s a debatable idea, but it’s true for me. Most of the time. When I’m writing at all.

Now I need to force myself to go out and get some errands done even though it’s cold and I hate cold and all I want to do is hibernate. Not sitting in the house all day is probably a good thing, despite the cold.

The trip home was everything I thought it would be, but I’m glad I went.  The kids kept me busy, and I had a lot of fun playing with them.  They loved having me there.  They even asked if I could stay an extra day.

It was exhausting, though.  Between playing with them and grieving, I’m drained.  I was supposed to go back to work today, but I got very little sleep Sunday night and didn’t really get a lot of rest during the day yesterday.  I’m sure work is insane right now.  I’m not up for it yet.  I don’t know if I will be tomorrow, but I’ll give it a shot.

Today is the first day I’ll be alone with my thoughts, aside from the drive up and back.  I think I need the time for the mental sorting out of stuff as well as physical rest.

Here’s a few seconds of the kids dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller.  I couldn’t get my camera to record more than a little  bit at a time.  I never use it that way, so I don’t know all the tricks.  But this short clip is a pretty good representation of the whole.

I’ve been waiting for that phone call for about a month now, prepared for it even longer.  Poppy’s health had been declining for a while.  I had hoped to go up there before he died to see him, but it didn’t work out.  For the best, probably.  He was only intermittently aware of his surroundings and the people who came to visit.  He might not have known I was there, and it might have been much harder for me to see him like that than I think.  He was 84.  It was time.

Despite the trazodone, I wasn’t sleeping well Monday night.  I woke up around one when it started raining hard, and it wasn’t easy getting back to sleep.  Then the phone rang at quarter to three.  I didn’t answer it, of course.  I was half asleep.  But I knew what it was.  Most of the time, phone calls at bizarre hours are wrong numbers.  Logically, I had no reason to think this was any different.  My mom tends to call my cell phone since we tend to not answer the land line.  By the time it stopped ringing, I was awake enough to try to convince myself to get up, check the messages, check my cell phone in case she tried to call that first, because I knew what the message was and knew I wouldn’t sleep if I didn’t either get the news or discover it was a wrong number.  But I didn’t get out of bed.  Somehow I fell asleep again.  When I checked my cell phone as I was getting ready for work, no missed calls, no messages.  But I wasn’t completely convinced.  I didn’t check the land line for messages.  My mom, as it turns out, isn’t even sure she left a message.

She called while I was at work, and of course, when I see her number pop up in the middle of the afternoon, I know what it is.  I left work.  Like I would have gotten anything done after that anyway.

I worked yesterday.  Somehow.  It was busy, so that helped cut out thinking time.  It was still weird.  People say weird things when you lose someone.  Not that I haven’t said those same weird things.  I’ve always felt strange on the delivery side of that kind of sympathy.  I think it’s more the language of it than the emotion.  You say to someone, “I’m sorry for your loss.”  How can you be?  You didn’t know my loved one.  His death means little to you.  But it’s expected that you’ll offer that condolence.  It’s rote.  It’s like saying good morning.  What’s worse is, “Let me know if I can do anything.”  Yeah, bring him back with complete mental clarity, give me time to say in person I love you, good bye, then simply let him fall asleep knowing he’s loved, knowing we’ll all be okay and that life was good and death is just the natural conclusion.  Of course, I can’t say that.  I say thanks, I’m okay.  I appreciate the sentiment, but there’s a massive disconnect between the words and the situation.  But I’m probably over thinking it because I’m me and that’s what I do.

This is the first time since I left home in 1997 that I’ve made this trip solo.  It’s going to be weird.  It’s going to be hard.  But it’s also going to be good.  My nieces and nephew were at my mom’s house when I called her Tuesday night.  They cheered when she told them I was coming.  How can I not smile at that?

Self portait, 1659, Rembrandt van Rijn

The North Carolina Art Museum is currently exhibiting a large collection of Rembrandt (and pseudo-Rembrandt) paintings under the collective title Rembrandt in America.  The focus of the exhibit is on the history of collecting Rembrandt’s works in the US and the difficulty of proper attribution of some of the works.  So of course being the kind of nerd I am, I had to go see.

I was less interested in the collecting history than I was in simply seeing Rembrandt’s work up close.  Not a huge fan of his work, but there’s no denying his talent and skill.  I can certainly admire what he accomplished, commercially as well as artistically.  I was also fascinated by the attribution issue, and I thought the exhibit did a nice job of pointing out differences, similarities and reasons for the misattributions.  (Although there was one painting in particular, The Feast of Esther, that I don’t know how could ever have been thought to be Rembrandt.  I mean, really.  Colors!  Rembrandt’s palette was uniformly muted to my, admittedly uneducated, eye.)

I came away from the exhibit with more appreciation for Rembrandt and a great love for the detail and personality he was able to put into formal portraits.  I especially adore the wrinkles around the eyes.  I’m drawn to eyes anyway, and details like that just enhance what I like about eyes.  Take the self portrait above.  You can’t see it in the tiny little flattened out image, but the eyes are fantastic.

I also left with thoughts on the presentation of art in general.  I love museums of all kinds, and I prefer art to be public access rather than holed up in private collections, although I own enough small pieces of original art to understand the desire to collect.  I don’t know that if I came across a Picasso or something, I would feel right keeping it to myself.  Not to denigrate her work, but Alison Overton is not Picasso.  So maybe that makes a difference.

Anyway, that wasn’t my point.  I didn’t have any problem with how the Rembrandt stuff was presented, and I can even forgive them for not focusing on the art itself.  What I took issue with was the assembly line feel.  You could either rent a prerecorded audio guide or download an MP3 of the guide.  I did neither.  I probably will snag the download at some point and listen just to put order to what I saw.  But I disliked that everyone basically lined up and moved along the exhibit just like they were being told to by the audio guide.  I sort of followed the line, but I wandered because if something caught my eye, I went and looked at it.  The guided tour is fine, but it was constricting.  Obviously, if you’re interested in the history of an artist’s work, you sort of want that timeline to follow.  I didn’t like the shoehorning of the crowd.  Maybe I just didn’t like the crowd.  Maybe it’s just because I’m creatively inclined.  (I always hesitate to call myself an artist for whatever reason.)  A responsible curator should absolutely hang work in a sensible way.  There’s nothing wrong with such a structured exhibit.  The sense of being bound to that structure was unpleasant, however.

So we’re force feeding art now?  Line ‘em up, move ‘em in, move ‘em out.  Really?  Whatever the purpose of the exhibit, the purpose of displaying art at all is not to cookie cutter people’s perceptions of it.  Let’s say I want to create a collection of my photos on Flickr based on color.  Here’s a red, a green, a blue, whatever.  I can curate the order; I can write up a little tour guide, but I can’t dictate the way a viewer wanders the collection.  Why should I?  Even if a million people all like the same thing, there are just as many reasons for their liking that thing.

Rembrandt in America is a scholar’s exhibit, really, and an excellent one, but for pure appreciation of a master’s work, skip the history lesson and wander.  Knowledge is fine, but wisdom is only gained when you move away from the lesson.

Minerva, 1635, Rembrandt van Rijn

There’s very little banging around in my brain right now simply because I haven’t got the brain power to spare.  My creativity is like a back up battery to the main power source.  When the main power source is drained, I’ve got nothing left to draw on but the reserve of creative energy.  That’s fine.  When I can replenish both the main and reserve.  That’s been next to impossible lately.  My reading has slowed way down since August or so.  Writing is a bit of a joke at the moment.  I can deal with less reading.  Not writing is killing me.

Ray Bradbury wrote, “If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate, and you would begin to die, act crazy or both.”   It’s fucking true.  And I am going to have that tattooed on my shoulder before the end of next year.

I’ve written a couple poems today.  One I’m pleased with, the other not so much right now.  I was going to go to the library but stopped by a used bookstore instead and left with five books for $18.  So I just dropped off the library book.  I had planned on walking around a little park not far from the library.  I found it but couldn’t seem to locate an entrance.  It was overcast by the time I got there.  The light wouldn’t have been good for photos.  Next time.

The best part of the day so far?  Grabbing lunch from Noodles & Co.  Southwest chili mac n’ cheese.  Mmm.

And now it’s starting to feel like nap time.

Let’s talk about something else for a minute or two.  Go and read this blog post by my writer friend and co-worker, Carrie.

Done?  Okay.  Now.  Let’s answer the question “As a writer, is it possible to write without expectations?????” (I’d leave a comment on Carrie’s blog if I could be sure my comments would be brief.  They won’t be.)

First of all, the answer is a resounding Fuck Yes!  It’s absolutely possible and is in fact absolutely fucking critical to write without expectations.

If you expect your book to be a bestseller or your poem to win a prize, you’re not only defeating the purpose of writing, you’re stomping the purpose of writing into the mud, beating it with a hammer and defecating on its bloody corpse.  The act of writing requires you to put aside your expectations and just fucking write.  Expectations are paralyzing.  If you manage to overcome the paralysis, you’ve poisoned your work.  This is exactly why I had such a difficult time finishing Red Light.  I expected a certain flow of events; I expected a certain reaction from readers (yes, Sand, I expected to make you cry.); I expected the story to follow the dictates I’d set for it six years ago when Jack Runner first appeared, was killed and immediately informed me that he wasn’t going to stand for that.

But all that meant was that I was fishing for a reaction.  I wasn’t listening to the story, and I couldn’t get it out.  Only when I stopped expecting anything from it was I able to get the story done.  While it turned out completely different than I thought it would, it worked.

Having commercial expectations for your work is no different.  You cannot write the perfect poem or book the moment you sit down to write it.  I don’t think that even upon publication and gaining number one bestseller status that a writer believes his work is perfect and perfectly finished.  Why else are there so many “author’s preferred text” editions?  Okay, well, that’s a dirty marketing trick, but it’s still material that the author thinks enhances the book in some way, inclusion of the darlings that Stephen King recommends killing, scenes and lines that maybe don’t work in the work as a whole but are nonetheless precious.  This is no different than expecting your kid to be a straight A student or at least consistently above average.  What happens when the kid has to tackle a subject he just can’t grasp?  It’s unrealistic to expect a kid to excel in everything, and it’s devastating to the kid to fail.  I do speak from experience on that matter.  I was supposed to be a straight A student, but I couldn’t run a mile (asthma) and I couldn’t comprehend math in any incarnation.  You have to let the story be true to itself.  Push it too far, and it will break.

This doesn’t mean you should write with no intention of writing the best you can, but to get the story down, to put the words in order and let them really work, you have to get out of the way, and that includes ditching your expectations.  Editing, revision, polishing — all that comes later.  You can expect success or failure or anonymous mediocrity then.  Write first.

Second of all … second of all?  There was a first of all, so there should be a second.  There was.  I don’t know what I thought it was supposed to be.  If I were being a careful writer, I’d go back and edit that, but this is a blog, and I don’t give a fuck.  Anyway.

Students are always told, “Know your audience and write for them.”  While this is generally helpful (kids’ books are not the same as adults’ books), it can be a burden inasmuch as it’s not the audience that’s important.  Not at the genesis of a piece of writing.  I’m one of those writers who believes that writers should write for themselves first.  I write the stories and poems I want to read.  I have never ever expected anyone else to get anything out of my work.  Every time I send a story or poem to Piker Press, I’m filled with dread.  What if this thing is truly awful and doesn’t work on any level?  Well, what of it?  I can either revise until it is fit for public consumption or withdraw it.  That’s happened a couple times.  The very first version of Transmission was about 2000 words, and while it wasn’t bad, it didn’t quite make an interesting story.  The published version is either the fourth or fifth draft.  Another story simply could not be made into a good story without being untrue to what the purpose of it was.  After briefly struggling to revise it, I decided it was better left unpublished.  I’ve treated events in that story as cannon in Jack’s universe, but honestly, it works better unsaid.  What I expected, audiencewise, of both those stories was completely not the case.  Had I stuck to my expectations for Transmission, I doubt the rest would have ever happened.

On the other hand, don’t expect the worst for your writing either.  If you submit a poem for a contest and expect to lose, you’ll eventually stop bothering.  This is a major problem for me.  I’ve come to expect failure, not because I think my writing sucks (it doesn’t, I know that, but my lack of self esteem doesn’t believe that), but because I was told over and over and came to believe that success at what I wanted to do was impossible.  The expectation fostered impotency.  Not only could I not attempting submitting my work, I could, at times, barely write.  That’s no better than having lofty expectations and constantly being disappointed.  Both can make you stop writing.  Then you slowly become not a writer, and that’s no good to anyone.

It’s hard not to have expectations of either stunning success or abject failure.  It’s hard to be realistic about you and your writing are capable of.  But in order to find out, you really do have to put all those expectations aside and write.  Write the best fucking story or poem or essay you possibly can.  Save being critical for the next draft.  Expect to have to revise, expect to be rejected, but also expect to, at some point, be accepted.

Of course, this is only my personal philosophy about expectations.  This won’t work for every writer.  Some are probably driven by the expectation of success.  Maybe they’ve got a point to prove to someone or to themselves.  Points or not, the writing still needs to come first.  If the writing is good enough, the point will prove itself.

Every week at work gets harder.  I reach a breaking point, move past it and somehow rebound.  We all have the same conversations every day.  Supervisors and managers say, “We know it sucks.  We’re trying to fix it.  Be patient.”  No, you’re not trying to fix it.  You’re trying to come up with ways to fix it.  The solutions should be apparent at this point, and the changes need to be implemented now.  Not in February or March.  It’ll be too late then.  I’m trying now to take joy in small victories.  I made a discovery and from that discovery, figured something out.  Sadly, it means more work for me, but it also means I have answers I didn’t have a week ago.  But the powers that be are hoovering up small, struggling banks like mad without, seemingly, thinking of the back end.  It’s simple math really.  Even I can figure it out.  If you double the size of something but don’t double the size of the staff needed to maintain it, you’ve got a problem.

I’ve written all but one of the poems that were chewing on my brain.  That last is still chewing.  My brain is apparently rather chewy.  It has a rhythm and internal melody I can’t seem to follow beyond two lines.  I’ll have to just write them down and see if I can find what it wants from there.  The accompanying writing about poetry got done.  Well, the rough-rough draft.  0th draft.  It needs to be fleshed out and structured a bit better, but the ideas are on paper, and that’s a start.  I have more writing about poetry to do.

Last Sunday, I made an attempt at the experiment I’ve been wanting to do.  Equipment issues.  Audacity either couldn’t or wouldn’t recognize the headset mic when plugged into the jacks, but plugged in via USB, no problem.  Now to find a moment to do a test recording.

The first part of Red Light, the last in the long running series of stories, is up in the Piker Press this week.  Cover story, with accompanying cover art by me.  I’m really pleased with the story.  I want to do a long blog about the series but not before the final part runs at the end of the month.  I’m still working on formatting all 13 stories for a Lulu book.  By which I mean I haven’t actually opened that document for about three weeks.  I’d hoped to have it done by now, but oh well.  I meant to have it done last December, but I couldn’t get Red Light done until I stopped trying to force it to follow a path that was no longer valid.  I’ve been writing stories and poems for about 25 years now.  You’d think I know better.  Most of the time I do.  Sometimes, though, I still think I know better than the story does.  I never do.

Today is laundry day and clothes shopping day and pick up meds day and other assorted things day.  One more cup of coffee now and a few moments to try to listen to that stubborn poem.