Truths Revealed, T-Rexes and Time For Change

The word of the week is rejectamenta.

Sept 8 - Lassitude

I need to exercise more.

Don't get me wrong: my current work being only a fifteen-minute stroll away is a huge blessing, especially since I don't start until after 9am weekdays. I do stroll, not even leisurely, enough so that I work up a sweat some days from the effort.

Yet it's not the same as riding a bicycle 8km a day, five days a week( or more ), in terms of calories burned, though surprisingly it's fairly close when it comes to overall calories burned over time. If I were to cycle at 12-15kph on flat ground for the same time as I'd walk 5kph, I'd burn about the same number of calories. However, cycling as I did to Staples, I usually carried an additional 20kg of gear, as well as riding uphill and into the wind fairly often. So it felt like I was burning a lot more... and I probably was.

Also, I'm sitting down for the entirety of my day now and thankfully not lugging printers off top shelves. That again has added to my largesse, enough that I'm going to have to schedule at least one hour-long cycle-ride a week along varied terrain in order to 'make good' the level of health I had six months ago - which wasn't great, mind you, but it was better than I feel that I have right now. I'm no athlete, but I don't want to wake up and find that I've acquired a spare tire one morning without somehow noticing...

After the writing group tonight, I sallied on over to The Mint, where I enjoyed a few hours in the charming company of two young ladies and a plate of cheese, neither of which I've had a lot of in recent years. Topping off the unusually delightful night( which saw me home late indeed! )was my discovery of Phillip's Chocolate Porter, which sent my unrefined taste buds into paroxysms of delight. 

Yum!

Sept 9 - Once More Into The Breach!

I couldn't resist.

All day today, I had little snippets of Guardians of the Galaxy popping into my head, not helped at all by the fact that I'd discovered the soundtrack on YouTube. Mix some classic 70's songs with scifi and well, you've got me hooked - totally. So it was no surprise that I went home, puttered for a bit, met up with a friend for pizza at The Brickyard to catch up on his life( which is more interesting, by far, than mine )and then sidled next door to see Guardians... for the fourth time.

Much of the movie I spent with a ridiculous grin on my face, the same sort I can recall having when I watched Star Wars for the third or fourth time when I was very young. Just pure joy, being caught up in the world of the movie, enough so that the few flaws went sailing by with little regard by my mind.

Star Wars and Guardians, combined!

It was like being a kid again and I loved it!

Sheer delight, pure joy, simple fun... all that and more are what I've taken away from the experience of watching Guardians in the theatres( in 3D! )this summer. I like it more than The Avengers, which at the time I held as one of my favourite movies; sorry, guys, but GotG is up there permanently now!

I'll leave you with this animatronic Rocket Racoon, which made an appearance this week in Japan at a Guardians press conference. Prepare for the weirdness( and can anyone translate what he's saying? ):

Sept 10 - Habits

Do you know all of your habits?

There's a whole bunch, I'll bet, most of which you don't even notice, as they form the tapestry of your life - kind of like breathing, really: it's there, you do it, but it gets all awkward and gaspy when you pay too close attention. Yet they're there, noticeable in ways that you have to stop and really look for to find.

Take my squeaky shoe, for example: it's always the left one.

My manner of walking, for some reason, often makes shoes squeak after I've broken them in for a few months. I can't figure out if it's because I roll my heel or scuff it, or just put weight on the outside of my left foot more than my right. There's no visible evidence on my shoes; believe me, I've looked.

So I squeak.

This amused one of my old girlfriends no end, when we were walking in a long hallway at university way back further than I care to admit. It was long after class and there were few people about, in the huge long walkways of the main lecture halls. As we walked, my left shoe started to squeak... and wouldn't stop, no matter what I did: walking slow, rolling my shoe, walking on the ball of my foot - nothing worked. It was a farce, my taking a step, squeaking, and her laughing each time at the echoing sound.

Good times.

Bringing me back to habits: my shoe squeak is the result of an unconscious habit I have, a manner of walk that is 'me' more than anyone else. Even though I'm aware of it, I don't do much about it, as it's something trivial that only crops up every once in a while. Since it's trivial, I don't worry about it much; a little squeaking won't do me much harm and if it gets a few laughs, well... that's no bad thing, really.

Other habits? I'm pretty self-aware, so it's hard to say what's good and bad if I'm aware of them and actively weeding out the bad. Less sugar? Check. More exercise? Working on it. More vegetables and home-cooked meals? I'll get back to you on that one. I've definitely shed a lot of my negative-feedback loops, looking for the positive now in most things rather than finding the bad and worrying it, much akin to a dog with a favourite bone.

All in all, I think I'm doing well and there's always room for improvement; toss me a bone, here!

Sept 11 - Memories

You know what today is the anniversary of.

I'll forego mentioning much, save that it's a day one should never forget. Now that over a decade has passed( and then some )the memory's harshness is starting to fade, I think. I still remember where I was that day: at home in Port Dalhousie, hearing my mom's surprised cry as she watched her morning news on a Tuesday morning, which I had off. Staring at the unbelievable images, I couldn't but feel helpless: something was happening that no-one had any experience with, an event that would change the world... and not for the better, I think.

On a more positive note, Victoria has dinosaurs this week! Here's a peek:

The costume reminds me very much of a velociraptor prank that was filmed for Japanese television, which I may have mentioned a while back. It's the same design, using the actor's feet to prop up the dinosaur and freeing their hands to operate the puppet in a realistic way. I can just imagine one of these rampaging though a sci-fi convention, causing havoc and mayhem... on second thought, maybe that's not such a good idea, given the size of the crowds and the number of weapon-weilding cosplayers out there. Hoiw would you react to this if you saw it on the street in broad daylight:

Also: I wonder how many people you'd need to operate a brontosaurus, to scale?

Sept 12 - Blindsided

A friend told me the truth today, and it hurt, as some truths do.

It was about my novel, feedback that I needed to hear. It wasn't easy for them to tell me, either, but they did it the right way: it took them two weeks to work up to it and everything they told me was backed up by example and method. It's solid, honest feedback, the kind that many authors crave but cannot get, so I'd be a fool to ignore or misinterpret it.

However, it knocked me on my ass, almost literally, when I finished reading what he'd sent; the rug under my writing aspirations had been yanked, hard, and I stumbled around for a little while in a fog at home. I needed some air, to think on it all.

So I went for a walk.

I ended up at the Rooftop, where I lounged for an hour in the shade, nursing a beer and letting their chicken tacos settle my stomach's cramps, only part of which had to do with hunger. By the end of the meal, I felt better, though still disconcerted, so I left... and kept walking.

My feet took me downtown, which was full of tourists, being a Friday with several cruise ships in: crowds of people with smiles on their faces, taking pictures and peeking in store windows. While I felt my tension ease, it wasn't the tourists that kicked my brain out of its funk: it was the people working the crowd. Not the buskers, though there were quite a few of those, of varying talents and charm.

No, it was the people asking for change that brought me back.

In particular, one blind fellow sitting on a bench in front of a church, howled the same phrase over and over in a voice that cracked hoarsely on the last word: change. I'm not going to go into the subject of homelessness here in Victoria, of poverty in paradise; for today, I'll simply say that I needed to hear that word tonight, said exactly in that tone of voice.

I knew what he was saying, but that word rattled around in my head and finally snapped my funk. Change: I was afraid that all I'd done so far was for nothing, but when I thought  about it, that wasn't the issue here. No, I was so set and focused on my book that I wasn't able to see the flaws in my process and the feedback I've received so far hasn't really touched on them.

Thanks to the honest, accurate and timely feedback I received today, my book will be better. It has to change, to get better through more hard work and I think that's what set me off: seeing my 'long road' doubling in length and the end - being published - getting that much further away. Which is fine, if it means that what I put in front of agents is the best possible work I can produce, at my current level of experience. I need to KNOW about any flaws *I* can't see because I'm too close to my work; as Hemingway once said: "Kill your darlings." Meaning I can't be afraid to change what I've written, even all of it, if it means that what  results is a far better book.

It'll just take some more time, and that's one thing I have plenty of right now. Well, enough to spare, anyway, once I've landed a permanent job.

Still feeling in a bit of a funk when I got home, I turned to YouTube for some solace, searching through videos of scifi and fantasy until I stumbled across this one - it was perfect and just what I needed:

I've always liked the story in the Halo series and despite some hiccups, I truly enjoyed this hour-long 'movie' made up of the in-order cutscenes from the game. As mentioned in my novel's feedback, the characters themselves moved the story forward through their revealing dialogue and action, with less emphasis on the setting or backstory. My novel SHOULD do the same; HALO would be an empty, pointless shooter-only game if the Master Chief were silent among the gorgeous scifi scenery.

Again, exactly what I needed.

Sept 13 - Stabilizing

My world's somewhat more solid today, despite a lack of sleep.

My brain had time to assimilate the feedback-haymaker from yesterday, enough so that I was able to speak to my friend on the phone today coherently. He made sure to tell me that my writing wasn't bad; it just needed to do better and in different ways from what I'd been focusing on. As I mentioned earlier in this post, habits are hard things to spot and in one's writing, they can be huge problems: I may paint myself into a corner and not realize it until it's too late to do anything except start over.

Being civil about feedback, not taking it personally and giving oneself time to properly absorb it: these are all things that I've learned from my critique group sessions and those lessons stood me in good stead today on the phone. The visions of a total rewrite that had kept me up last night were dispelled, turning into the more-palatable, already-acknowledged need for a Fourth Draft to be written in 2015. The problems that I couldn't take time to fix in the Third Draft now have a BIG companion to work alongside, one that while daunting, I believe I can manage in the coming year.

Meaning I won't be submitting my first novel to anyone until at least the end of 2015.

That's the harsh truth: it's not ready, not where it could be or should be, not at the point where I can hand it over to an agent, look them in the eye and say "This is the best I can do without professionals getting a crack at it." Use what expression you will: youthful naiveté, going off half-cocked, blind optimism: some parts of each of those apply to me, or at least the me from last week before my friend had the courage to tell me to sit back down at my figurative desk and do some more work.

Writing's about many things. In my case, patience and perseverance must come to the fore, for me to take time to ferret out my bad habits and make them over into strengths. To take a book( and its sequels as yet unwritten )from a state I think is 'good' to 'fantastic' and beyond, enough so that my friends can't put it down, no matter what, no matter who they are and no matter what stories they prefer.

Then, and only then, I'll know that I've done my job, and done it well.

Sept 14 - Pebbles Rock!

Gasp -  I now own a smartwatch!

It's an odd circumstance that's come upon me,  one that made me blink with the timing, but hey: it's a great end result!

Perhaps you've heard me mention the Pebble before, the little Kickstarter-that-could from two years ago. A friend of mine was in on that and had one of the original batche's watches, which lately stopped working. To his delight, Pebble sent him back a NEW one in a box... but in the interim, he'd gone and fallen for a new LG smartwatch; such is the life of a g33k. 

So, I happily took it off his hands for a reasonable price and charged it all of yesterday. My initial impressions: it's not as big as I'd thought and I love the design: it's subtle and doesn't scream 'gadget' but rather seems like an ordinary - albeit techy - digital watch.

More on the Pebble later, as I get down to using it.

I took the afternoon to go down and see the 4th Annual Victoria Chalk Art Festival, held on a closed-off two-block section of Government St in downtown Victoria. Almost two dozen talented chalk artists were in attendance, many more than last year, with absolutely perfect weather this time around. Here are a couple of my favourite photos; you can find the rest online at this DropBox link:

For now, enjoy the chalk art! There were crowds of people, including quite a few tourists as there were several cruise ships in down. At times, it was hard to get a snapshot of some of the chalk images, due to the constant shadows being cast across them. The sunlight also made some of the images hard to frame, due to the contrast, but to the eye they were stunning, one and all. It was a wonderful event and I'm looking forward to it being even bigger next year, hopefully with even more 3D artists in attendance.

It should also be mentioned that I spent most of the day outside, nearly ten hours, which is almost unheard-of for me lately. While I do manage to get almost an hour each weekday( on my breaks )outside, it's not the same as simply closing the door to my apartment and leaving it behind; this weekend, it's almost seemed prison-like, which made me shudder. It was a stunning week, weather-wise: blue skies, mostly-hot( not scorching )temperatures and no clouds to speak of - if this is the new Fall here in the far West, I'll take it happily. 

The fresh air, sunshine and crowds of happy people did much to lift my mood, as did the time I spent simply relaxing. The weekend was a bad one for creativity, but ended up being one of the most relaxing I've spent in recent memory. Walking around or sitting on a patio people-watching is something I've not done for any length of time in a while and it felt quite good just to go with the flow and let my thoughts settle all on their own. 

Exactly what I needed. 

The next few weeks are going to full, working during the day and studying in the evenings until I know my Competencies cold. An interview or test could happen any time, so I have to buckle down and spend my off-hours wisely: right now, this long-term well-paying job is the foundation I need to (re-)build my novel into everything I hope it will become.