Monthly Archives: April 2012

Proportional motivation…

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If the last two days are any indication of how the rest of the warm months are going to go, it’s seems like it could be a very long summer. I have a working hypothesis that my level of motivation is directly proportional to the temperature. The further the temperature climbs past 70, the further my motivation to do anything indoors seems to suffer. Of course it doesn’t help that the thermostat in the office seems to be stuck on 80 degrees. Productivity after lunch? Forget it. Between the heat in the building and a full stomach, just managing to stay awake feels a bit like a full time job.

Eventually, I’m sure they’ll get around to switching over to air conditioning in this wonderful new billion dollar building. In the meantime it’s not fit for men nor beasts. If I seem more surly that usual, at least you’ll know why.

Pots and kettles…

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The fine men and women of the United States Congress have taken up GSA’s spendthrift ways as their cause du jour. Am I the only one who rolled their eyes about Congress calling out anyone for making bad decisions about how to spend taxpayer money? This is the same group of people who have failed to pass a budget for the government for the last three years and yet still managed to spend the country right up to the edge of oblivion.

If I were going to introduce the Government Oversight Committee to the GSA Administrator before their hearing, it would go something like this: Hello Pot, I’d like to introduce you to my good friend, Kettle. I think you’re going to get along nicely. You have so much in common.

Look, GSA screwed the pooch. They know it. You know it. I know it. Everyone and their brother knows it. But before we run of half cocked thinking how great it is that Congress is going to get to the root of the problem, let’s remember the bigger picture… that Congress is basically the Grandaddy of making piss poor spending decisions and the $800,000 conference in Las Vegas isn’t even a blip on the radar in terms of the volume of cash Congress can throw away in the blink of an eye.

As much as they’d love for GSA’s problems and the Secret Service hooker fiasco to deflect attention from their raging incompetence, let’s keep our eye on the ball out there, ok?

Morning…

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I try to block off weekend mornings to sit down and really focus on writing. It’s pretty much the only time of the week when I can get three or four hours uninterrupted to focus on a section that’s complicated or requires a lot of detail. Usually I can manage a couple of thousand words a day on Saturday and Sunday. Through the week, I’m lucky if I can squeeze in 500 somewhere between getting home from work, making dinner, and getting to bed at something like a reasonable hour. So yeah, I put a premium on my weekends not because I’m running off to some exciting locale, but because it’s when I feel like I’m doing my best work. In college, I did my best work in the dead of night. That’s when the words flowed best. Now that I’ve conditioned myself into a morning person, I guess the sweet spot has shifted too. That’s really not the point, though.

Today is Saturday and what I really want to be doing is sitting here taking a stab at the next chapter. Unfortunately, what I’m really doing is sitting here paying bills, cleaning up the balls of dirt, dust, and dog hair that are large enough to qualify as a third dog, and installing a new toilet seat (don’t ask). Today is pretty much catching up on all the stuff a normal person would have kept up with during the week. Me, not so much. I’m determined to pretend that I have a second full time career as a writer… and time slips away accordingly. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the basement and rummage around for a crescent wrench. Either this bolt’s coming off or the whole damned thing will shatter. Maybe I should go ahead and turn the water off while I’m down there.

If I don’t flood the house in the next hour and I can manage to get the grass cut in a reasonable amount of time, maybe, just maybe, I can salvage some quality time to write this afternoon… Just in time to get interrupted by dinner. Lord, no wonder people never finish writing their great American novel.

Explorer…

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Until the arrival of the new computers, the fact that many of us installed Firefox as our default web browser wasn’t quite officially sanctioned, but wasn’t banned either. I’d have still rather used Chrome, but that wasn’t even considered worthy of being an option. Now look, I’m all in favor of network security, but that doesn’t have to mean we get stuck using antiquated software – and yes, even a three year old browser feels antiquated after you’re use to using one of the other available options – you know, the ones that have been released in the current decade.

Hey, I’m super excited about getting a new computer. It’s swell that I can now unplug the machine and not have the battery die immediately. It’s just on this one little point of software where we’re having a real problem. I’m sure Internet Explorer works just fine for most people under most conditions, but on a machine that’s already bogged down with metric tons of security software and on a network that no one would call speedy under the best of conditions, IE pretty much adds insult to injury.

We’re a nation that prides itself on technological innovation, so please, for the love of God, his saints, and all things good and holy, can we find a way to look at the interwebs that doesn’t involve dragging out this old warhorse of a program? We’re seriously not doing ourselves any favors here. Don’t believe me? Go ahead and ask about the nine times I had to force quit Explorer before I went to lunch this morning.

And while you’re at it, can you please stop resetting my default homepage. I know our web address and I find it a lot less useful in my daily work than Google is. Sigh.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. North Korea. What on earth possesses us to go to the negotiating table with this backwards-assed country that’s more interested in lobbing missiles into the ocean that it is in feeding its own people or keeping its electricity flowing. If the Dear Leader wants to spend every spare dime he can scrape together on arms and armaments, it’s time we focus on nothing more than containing them north of the cease fire line. Eventually, the North Korean people are going to get tired of starving and essentially living in the 19th century. When they do, we should do everything possible to support them. In the meantime, we should stop throwing good money after bad.

2. Good ideas. I’m not opposed to having them, I just wish they would come along when I have time to do something with them rather than just scribbling them down and hoping to get back to them at some point.

3. People who can’t figure out the basics of using a toll booth. If you’re in the lane with the giant purple sign that says “EZPass Only”, there’s a pretty damned good bet that you’re going to need an EZPass to get through the gate. If you for some reason don’t have that wonderful little transponder, you’re going to be stuck in the lane waiting for someone to wander over from one of the booths that is designated for taking actual cash money. More importantly, the guy behind you in the big red truck is going to lose is bloody mind and have his blood pressure skyrocket into decidedly unsafe territory.

4. New computer day at the office. I’m totally excited to get a new PC for work. And then I realize it’s just as crippled by security software, blockers, scans, and bloatware as the computer I’m getting rid of. At least there are no scuffs on it and the battery seems to work. That’s something.

On notice…

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To the asshat who decided playing mailbox baseball with my mailbox was a good idea this morning, please consider yourself on notice. There’s a better than average chance that I’m older than you are. That translates into me being smarter, sneakier, and far, far more vindictive than you could possibly imagine. The first one was a freebie. Everything’s reattached, no harm, no foul. If I have to put it up a second time, I’ll be suspending my mail delivery and filling the box with concrete so that you’ll get that nice tingling feeling when you make contact. If I get lucky you’ll snap your wrist on it. If you think I won’t spend all night outside in the cold lurking in the shadows to find out who you are, well, then you’ve seriously underestimated your opponent. You shouldn’t be surprised if your car accidentally ends up sitting on the street somewhere in Camden, NJ.

Regards,

Jeff

Banging on the keyboard…

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I think it’s safe to say that among anyone who writes either professional or as a hobby, there’s a general consensus that first drafts suck. They suck badly. Reading the first cut makes you want to shred everything you’ve done, start again from a blank page, and get it right this time. Then you take a deep breath and remember that then that would be your first draft and it would still suck. The only way to get past the suck is to finish the first draft, even if you know it’s full of holes, inconsistencies, and dialog that reads like English is your second language. It’s a vicious cycle, I tell ya.

The fact is I’m nowhere close to even the draftiest of first drafts. What I’ve got are eight chapters more or less vaguely connected by the slightest strand of plot. With enough time and attention that might be just enough framework to build a halfway decent story. Because I’m nowhere patient enough to wait until I have 60-70,000 well sculpted words, I’m adjusting the target in order to declare victory in small doses.

In the Victorian era, novels were published in small segments and often appeared in magazines before the entire novel was printed as a standalone volume. Using the past as a guide, my new target is to craft a story in four or five major sections and release each serially as they reach a satisfactory level of “done-ness.” With e-publishing, that seems to be a perfectly common way of doing business. And let me tell you, 15,000 coherent words are a hell of a lot easier to string together than 60,000 of even the most rambling, nonsensical words you can imagine. It doesn’t hurt that you can sell each individual part of the serial as well as the final product – $.99 per segment, $2.99 for the whole, buy the set and save 25% off the serial issue price. Yeah, I think that’s the ticket.

Some writers, it seems, are blessed with inspiration. I’m not one of those lucky few, but what I lack in inspiration, I more than make up for with sheer determination to throw words against the page until they stick in some semblance of order. Just think of me as a million monkeys randomly banging away at the keyboard. Eventually I’m almost surely going to stumble my way into Shakespeare territory… although I’d settle for Suzanne Collins or Stephanie Meyer’s neighborhood, too.

A matter of perspective…

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Sometimes I go to lunch with some of the guys from the office. When they talk about leadership problems, playing favorites, and how hard it is to get promoted unless you’re part of the clique, I mostly lean back in my chair, cross my arms, and smile. I won’t go so far as saying I agree with every decision made around here, I know from firsthand experience how much worse it can be for a working stiff somewhere near the middle of the pack. I’ll nod at the appropriate intervals in feigned agreement, but on the inside I know that unless they have served in the Court of the The Boss Who Shall Not Be Named, even the worst of their stories falls somewhere inside the range of “eh, that’s not so bad.”

I didn’t realize it until quite recently, but my time in the Office of the Damned has completely recalibrated my sense of good and bad work experiences. What a normal person would call good is beyond my scale completely now. Bad falls somewhere in the range of what I think as acceptable. The entire bottom half of the scale is occupied by things I’ve only seen the TBWSNBN do. In almost ten months, even the worst days have never been close to dropping onto the bottom half of the scale. Destroying my ability to see “normal” bad situations as being actually bad might be the only good thing TBWSNBN did for me.

Sure, it’s warped my sense of reality probably beyond any hope of repair, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for not being the least bit bothered by what sends those around me into a red-eyed fury.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

The sounds they make…

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I was sitting on the deck last night enjoying a beverage, a book and letting the dogs do whatever they needed to do before locking up for the night. Around 10:00, I heard the neighbor’s screen door slam followed by a chorus of girly screams. If I sit quietly and don’t move too much I know they won’t see me through the hedge. Although the hedge provides great camouflage, it lacks the sound deadening qualities I’d really appreciate more of in foliage.

From across the driveway, I heard a rather insistent “daddy… daddy… daddy… daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy.” Each iteration raised in pitch just slightly until the end when I’m pretty sure only the dogs could make out the words. Sadly, his daughters’ attempt to get my neighbor’s undivided attention was less than successful. This led to a renewed chorus of “daddy look, daddy look, daddy look daddy look daddy look daddy look, look what I found look what I found look what I found look what I found look what I found daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy daddy.” It’s possible that my ears were bleeding by that point.

Still, even with ice picks in my ears I was able to make out the most dire of their words… “Ohhhhhh… I want to play with the doggies” followed by shrieking that would make even the most dedicated banshee pause in respect for such superior sound generation. The jig was up. With a whistle, the dogs came running and we beat a hasty retreat. An hour later, with the TV on and at least one dog snoring in my ear, I could still hear them next door. I don’t know if they were successful in their efforts to raise the dead.

I’m sure the neighbor girls are perfectly good as far as children go, but the sounds they make cut through my head like the proverbial hot knife through butter. Sure, saying that out loud probably makes me a bad person, but on the list of things I’ve done that make me a bad person, it’s not even on the first page. If nothing else, I’m a man who recognizes his own limitations. Honest to God, if I could get a waiver, I’d move into one of those gated 55-and-over communities and call it a day. A small island off the coast of St. Wherever would be better, but I’m willing to take baby steps.

Live from the basement…

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It’s only taken nine months to get this done, but I’m finally writing from the basement. It’s cool and is dark, and there are no annoying glares on the television screen. It’s possible that aside from cooking and sleeping and assorted other daily necessities, I may never leave again. That could be just because I’ve finally be reunited with my ratty old La-z-boy recliner. After collecting dust and dog hair for most of a year, I’m happy to say that it still fits like a glove… a fact that I proved by sleeping there for the better part of three hours after dinner last night.

I like to think there was something more exciting that basements and old furniture to this weekend, but unless you count yard work and early morning grocery shopping trips as excitement, that’s about as good as it gets. Now that the house is more or less how I want it (and I’ve made my peace with sticking around for a while), I suppose it’s getting to be about time to find something else to entertain myself with. Or I could just stick my nose in a book and continue ignoring whatever happens to be going on out there beyond the fence line. Yeah. It’s a pretty safe bet which one of those two things is going to happen.