Personal

An Autumn's Repose

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Nights in West Michigan have grown consistently colder — in the 30s, usually — and most of the leaves have descended from their perches atop the now-barren canopy. Autumn’s full, glorious array reminds us to be prepared for the winter to come. A few weeks ago, I went for a walk in a county park and saw the transition up-close and personal: Bees going after every fading flower, greens turning into reds and yellows, squirrels building their stashes. All the little creatures, it seems, are fortifying themselves against the frigid desolation to come.
On Halloween day, I had my annual biometric screening. Most of the content — blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol, weight, BMI — met my expectations. No surprises. One measure, fasting glucose, caught me off guard. Not bad enough to freak out over, but not what I expected given that by all lights, I’m in better shape today than I was when I had my first assessment a full decade ago.
The thing about autumn is that the beauty of the landscape proves so charming that you aren’t forced to reflect on the clear lessons hidden beneath the surface. Instead, you repose quietly, enjoying the scenery or sipping the cider and relaxing in anticipation of the busy holiday season to come. So too with aging. We change styles and behaviors, but the danger that counts is the one locked deep within — we obsess about which sweater to wear but never think to check our biometric values. Like the parable of the grasshopper and the ant, at some point, the flurries will fly, and only the well-prepared will make it through. Wellness is a beast that requires daily diligence even in the warm summer sun, because if you come up short when a health blizzard hits … well, it is what it is. Now, then — some general updates, in no particular order.

  • Work continues to be busy. I just oriented my first official new hire as a department manager. Went smoothly. Our division is undergoing a significant restructuring, so it’s been “interesting times” around here in the fullest Confucian sense of the term.
  • It’s November, which means National Novel Writing Month. I’m again participating, and again hosting a write-in on Saturday mornings in downtown Grand Rapids. This year’s novel, should it be polished to the point of shopping, is literary fiction — a tale of a young wealthy man from a dog-eat-dog competitive social circle who, after he’s cut off from the family money, must develop his own life goals and set of morals while fending off the predation of his former friends, who now see a turn-about opportunity to further humiliate him. The meta-narrative of the story focuses on the main character’s investigation of the various classic sources of ethical meaning from the perspective of someone who’s working through a mash of antisocial and narcissistic personality disorders while drowning in a rich, hypermasculine peer group with similar tendencies. Given the language and very strong adult themes, if I ever publish it, it’ll be under a pseudonym. Probably my porn name, which actually makes a great author name, too.
  • The wrap-up activity after my conference took more out of me than I thought. I had to develop and compile surveys so I could issue continuing-education credits. That work, and the resulting time crunch, contributed to my inability to attend a much-anticipated Halloween party at PPQ’s house. CEs are time-consuming.
  • The election was … interesting. I volunteered a bit this year for the GOP, given my status as an elected precinct delegate. Did some door-to-door campaigning a few weeks ago for the MRP in eastern Kent County then spent seven hours as an election challenger in one of the busiest precincts in the City of Grand Rapids. Good experience, but it highlights how so much of the ground game is being run by very young people with very high self-regard who lack any substantive political experience.
  • The publishing company is humming along. We’re in the edit phase of our anthology and are actively looking toward starting a quarterly literary magazine in 2015. There’s much enthusiasm for that journal by several contributors, so I hold out hope that it’ll launch with sufficient love and nurturing.
  • The boy cat has started tunneling under my blankets at night to curl up next to me. It’s adorable. I get a little ball of fuzzy, purring warmth showing up at unexpected times.
  • Hard to believe, but Tony and I are closing in on our 200th podcast episode next month.

Personal

A Wee Bit of Catch-Up

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Wow. Six weeks without a post? Where does the time go?
Oh, wait. I know. I goes into the giant pile of crap I have to work on — a pile that’s grown so large that even my ironclad weekly routines fell by the wayside. At least Abbi noticed.
Here’s a quick recap, in no particular order.

  • It’s October 27. That means we’re a scant five days away from the start of National Novel Writing Month. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m working on a murder-mystery set in Grand Rapids. With cults, even. (Er, um, affinity groups … sorry, Lianne.) I’m hosting a weekly Saturday morning write-in in lovely downtown G-Rap. If you join NaNoWriMo and click on the Ottawa County/Grand Rapids forums, you can get the details.
  • Last week was spent in Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Exclusively downtown, this time. Tony and I flew out of DTW on the 17th and returned on the 20th. Our major adventure: The Vegas Internet Mafia Family Picnic, an annual community event hosted by the VegasTripping crowd and the Five Hundy by Midnight and Vegas Gang podcasts. We had a great time — stayed at The D Las Vegas and never even ventured onto the Strip. It helped that our good friends from Denton, Texas, were present to enliven the festivities. And we finally connected with some folks we heretofore had only known through The Twitter.
  • In early October I trekked to Louisville, Kentucky, for the annual educational conference of the National Association for Healthcare Quality. The conference was pretty good, and I networked with a lot of leaders in the industry. Met up with the Michigan delegation and spent some time getting a different take on how other organizations implement clinical improvement programs.
  • I do feel like the grim reaper at work. Dominoes three and four have fallen since my arrival. One guy is transferring to the I.T. department and another left to pursue a solo entrepreneurial project. Good for them both. Last week I had my annual review and it went well — best review I’ve had in 13 years with the company.
  • A contract client has been sending me several small but urgent projects that have thrown my schedule out of whack. I’m happy to do the work but, geez. Now y’all know why it’s been six weeks since my last blog entry.
  • I’m eagerly anticipating the coming holiday season. I’m taking two full weeks off at the Christmas holiday and I have a four-day weekend for Thanksgiving. Already planning the list of projects I’ll undertake on my 16 consecutive days off in December. Yay.
  • Looks like my dear PPQ is hosting a Halloween party next Saturday. I am already planning my costume.
  • One of my cats has taken to napping on me. It’s sweet, and fuzzy warm, but she only does it when I’m in my office, trying to type. Your words-per-minute plummet sharply when you have a pudgy orange ninja laying across your forearms.
  • I’m digging the cooler autumn air. It’s been getting into the 30s at night, so the blankets have come out.

OK, all for now. I’ll try to get back on the blogging wagon.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

NaNoWriMo ’12 — A Reflection

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This marked the second consecutive year I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month. The event — a 30-day voyage of creative writing — prods people to try long-form fiction. You “win” if you hit 50,000 words by 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 30.

Last year, I failed miserably; I may have hit 5,000 words in the month. The problem then was hubris: I figured long-form fiction couldn’t be that hard. So I arrived at a hybrid plot with no planning that, the more I thought about it, felt horribly confused. The artifice of a genre template obscured what ended up being the interesting kernel of a human-relationship story.

This year, I still didn’t “win” in the sense of hitting 50k — December rolled onto the calendar when I was at but 25k — but I am quite satisfied with how the month turned out. I approached the task with a bit more humility and did more pre-NaNo planning than last year, so I have a product that I can keep working on throughout the year.

Some highlights:

  • I plotted out a script that targeted at 90k words. The structure included 15 different chapters, each planned for about 6,000 words, with well-defined scenes in each and detailed notes about characters, scenes and even science associated with the plot. The goal was “modular writing” — I could have hit my private target if I did one 3,000-word scene per day.
  • I put this work entirely within Scrivener for Windows. I don’t think I could have even gotten close if I had tried a different platform like Word or even my beloved OneNote.
  • I actually stayed on track for the first week or so. Then the netbook passed on, and I tried using my tablet as a remote interface for Scrivener on my desktop at home, but that plan was much better in theory than in execution. I lost a week of progress fiddling with computers and ended up just buying a new laptop. I planned to get a Win 8 Pro tablet but … alas, nothing was on the market at the time.
  • I did lose 4,000-ish words at one point mid-month. I didn’t reset Scrivener’s aut0-save from 2 seconds to 120 seconds, thus creating version conflicts with SkyDrive. My own darn fault, because I did know better.
  • Writing with a group is great when the group is great. When the group is filled with adolescents off their Ritalin, progress correspondingly slows down. Thus, although I tried attending four write-ins per week, I skipped a few on occasion because of the dynamics of that group. The best one was probably the last one I attended, at Literary Life — just me, Brittany and the fireplace. Lots of progress.
  • Because this was a sci-fi novel, I spent a fair amount of time working through getting the science right. That included, for example, spending an hour going down the bunny hole of correctly calculating the force-of-impact of a grain of sand moving at 45 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum — and thus, indirectly, proving the residual value of high-school physics. Regardless, the slog through the first few chapters, when I had to carefully intersperse data about the universe without it sounding like a travelogue, proved more challenging than I hoped. Once I got past that introductory material, the pace of writing sped up and became much more fluid and fun.

I am going to keep going with this novel. I like the premise, and I’m growing fond of the characters. I’d like to hit my 90k marker. I’ve thought of this as the first installment of a trilogy, so we shall see. I’d like a completed novel that I can at the least circulate to agents for review and rejection.

NaNo sometimes gets grief from self-appointed literary types for giving people the impression that novel writing is easy and can be done in just 30 days. I think these critics miss the boat. The real value is that the process forces a writer to get a “zero draft” at least half-way complete, providing a framework for later enhancement and editing.

So. Will I participate next year? As Sarah Palin would say: “You betcha!”

Writing, Editing & Journalism

NaNoWriMo '12 — A Reflection

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This marked the second consecutive year I’ve participated in National Novel Writing Month. The event — a 30-day voyage of creative writing — prods people to try long-form fiction. You “win” if you hit 50,000 words by 11:59 p.m. on Nov. 30.
Last year, I failed miserably; I may have hit 5,000 words in the month. The problem then was hubris: I figured long-form fiction couldn’t be that hard. So I arrived at a hybrid plot with no planning that, the more I thought about it, felt horribly confused. The artifice of a genre template obscured what ended up being the interesting kernel of a human-relationship story.
This year, I still didn’t “win” in the sense of hitting 50k — December rolled onto the calendar when I was at but 25k — but I am quite satisfied with how the month turned out. I approached the task with a bit more humility and did more pre-NaNo planning than last year, so I have a product that I can keep working on throughout the year.
Some highlights:

  • I plotted out a script that targeted at 90k words. The structure included 15 different chapters, each planned for about 6,000 words, with well-defined scenes in each and detailed notes about characters, scenes and even science associated with the plot. The goal was “modular writing” — I could have hit my private target if I did one 3,000-word scene per day.
  • I put this work entirely within Scrivener for Windows. I don’t think I could have even gotten close if I had tried a different platform like Word or even my beloved OneNote.
  • I actually stayed on track for the first week or so. Then the netbook passed on, and I tried using my tablet as a remote interface for Scrivener on my desktop at home, but that plan was much better in theory than in execution. I lost a week of progress fiddling with computers and ended up just buying a new laptop. I planned to get a Win 8 Pro tablet but … alas, nothing was on the market at the time.
  • I did lose 4,000-ish words at one point mid-month. I didn’t reset Scrivener’s aut0-save from 2 seconds to 120 seconds, thus creating version conflicts with SkyDrive. My own darn fault, because I did know better.
  • Writing with a group is great when the group is great. When the group is filled with adolescents off their Ritalin, progress correspondingly slows down. Thus, although I tried attending four write-ins per week, I skipped a few on occasion because of the dynamics of that group. The best one was probably the last one I attended, at Literary Life — just me, Brittany and the fireplace. Lots of progress.
  • Because this was a sci-fi novel, I spent a fair amount of time working through getting the science right. That included, for example, spending an hour going down the bunny hole of correctly calculating the force-of-impact of a grain of sand moving at 45 percent of the speed of light in a vacuum — and thus, indirectly, proving the residual value of high-school physics. Regardless, the slog through the first few chapters, when I had to carefully intersperse data about the universe without it sounding like a travelogue, proved more challenging than I hoped. Once I got past that introductory material, the pace of writing sped up and became much more fluid and fun.

I am going to keep going with this novel. I like the premise, and I’m growing fond of the characters. I’d like to hit my 90k marker. I’ve thought of this as the first installment of a trilogy, so we shall see. I’d like a completed novel that I can at the least circulate to agents for review and rejection.
NaNo sometimes gets grief from self-appointed literary types for giving people the impression that novel writing is easy and can be done in just 30 days. I think these critics miss the boat. The real value is that the process forces a writer to get a “zero draft” at least half-way complete, providing a framework for later enhancement and editing.
So. Will I participate next year? As Sarah Palin would say: “You betcha!”

Personal, Politics & Culture, Writing, Editing & Journalism

Assorted Reflections and Updates

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Today’s excursion into pithy commentary:

  1. National Novel Writing Month has commenced. I’m stretching my legs a bit to write a sci-fi story. My goal is to have the science be accurate but in the background; I’m really aiming for a commentary on human social evolution that just happens to bet set forward in a non-archetypal future. NaNo requires 50k words. I’m aiming for 90k, because I’d like to brush up the first draft and possibly shop for an agent or publisher. High goals, but hey. Defecate or get off the pot; I’ve been meaning to write a novel for years so why not now?
  2. To that end, I’m not only participating in local write-ins this November, but I’m also hosting one. On Saturdays at the food court at 35 Michigan. We had the first one yesterday and a baker’s dozen attended. It was great. The Starbucks baristas were friendly, too.
  3. So just about every female I’ve seen under the age of 30 seems to be wearing skin-tight clothes (including, most frequently, black leggings) paired with boots that frequently rise above mid-calf. Fashion is one thing; lemming-like wardrobes is another. At least the cellulite brigade hasn’t hopped on the bandwagon yet.
  4. Many of the regular patrons at my local cigar shop are Freemasons. They’re a cheerful, civil lot. Apparently they’re barred from asking people to join up, but they’ve hinted that perhaps I could ask questions about joining up. Alas, the Catholic Church still considers Freemasonry a grave sin. I chatted up another regular about it — a local priest, as it happens — who was quite happy to share his (utterly orthodox) knowledge of the Vatican’s perspective, with an added challenge to “return the favor” by encouraging the masons to consider membership instead in the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Hmm.
  5. I refreshed my HP TouchPad to the latest release of CM9. Much improved over the version I had installed earlier this year. I also downloaded a desktop-sharing app that works flawlessly with my Win8 PC at home. Meaning, I can keep working on my novel in Scrivener on my tablet without any loss of data or continuity.
  6. Halloween was somewhat underwhelming. My office door was decorated on my behalf. I ended up doing last-minute NaNo planning with Brittany, Steve and PJ at Wealthy Street Bakery. Very helpful.
  7. The election looms. I’m planning on watching the returns with Tony in (of all places!) Southfield. He needs to fly to California early the next morning from DTW, so we’re going to watch early returns at Churchills’ cigar shop there and enjoy a fine dram of Scotch or two.  I’m cautiously optimistic that Romney will eke out a win, and I may be working Tuesday morning as a poll challenger at one of the most heavily Democratic precincts in West Michigan. Hmm.
  8. Speaking of the election, there’s been a lot of background noise about Nate Silver, the NYT blogger/prognosticator who’s been consistently “predicting” an Obama win. The whole situation annoys me. Look, as a full-fledged member of the American Statistical Association, I can say for certainty I know what Silver’s doing — he’s assessing the probability of a binary outcome, based on various undisclosed polls as inputs into his model. That’s fine. As a full-fledged member of the Society of Professional Journalists, I can say for certainty that if journalists could do stats American reporting would be of uniformly higher quality. That said, the fundamental problem with Silver’s analysis is that he’s basically got a garbage-in/garbage-out thing going. I don’t question what I understand his methodology to be; I do question the radical differences in polling that feeds his model. Polling in this cycle is all over the map. Throw crap in, you’ll get crap out, no matter how carefully you run your probability estimates. So a pox on everyone’s houses.
  9. Oh, and on top of it, American politics isn’t accustomed to a binary probability estimate for presidential elections. So moving in that direction, given that the inputs are more volatile than people give them credit for, seems like a misapplication of models. But hey, if Silver wants his 15 minutes of fame, he’s certainly earned it.
  10. I swapped out the stereo on my Jimmy a few weeks ago. The operation took longer than it should have — I needed to buy a wire harness — but I managed to get the job done without damaging anything. Yay, me.
  11. Tony I went on a brief casino trip a few weeks ago to Harrah’s Joliet and met Mark and Keren of the 360 Vegas podcast. An uproariously good time was had by all.
  12. Life at the hospital continues to pay lip service to the Chinese maxim about interesting times. I’m now officially a business analytics analyst in the Information Services team. The transition continues to unfold, so stay tuned.

November, already. Ugh. But hey — the holiday season’s a-comin’. Be glad, and rejoice.

Writing, Editing & Journalism

In the Beginning: #NaNoWriMo 2012

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In honor of National Novel Writing Month, permit me to share a short story of my own design.

In the Beginning …

… the writer created new heavens and a new earth. This new earth was without form and void, and blankness was upon the face of the writer’s notebook; and the Flash of Inspiration was moving over the face of the notebook. 

And the writer said, “Let there be a plot” and there was a plot. And the writer saw that it was good; and the writer separated the plot from other storylines. The writer called the plot Novel and other storylines he called Distractions. And there was drinking and then a hangover, the first day.

And the writer said, “Let there be a logical structure in the midst of the plot, and let it separate the plot from incoherent rambling.” And the writer developed an outline and separated the plot from the distractions not included in the plot. And it was so. And the writer called the outline Synopsis. And there were cigarettes and a nicotine buzz, the second day.

And the writer said, “Let the ideas within the plot be gathered together into a genre, and let the framework for the Novel appear.” And it was so. The writer identified his genre, and the frameworks for other genres he cast into the sea. And the writer saw that it was good. And the writer said, “Let the Novel put forth characters, protagonists advancing the plot and antagonists hindering it, each according to his archetype.” And it was so. The plot brought forth richly designed characters, protagonists advancing the plot and antagonists hindering it. And the writer saw that it was good. And there was leftover pizza and donuts, the third day.

And the writer said, “Let there be appropriate spacing in the plot of the Novel, to separate scene from scene; and let it be spaced for signs and for key points and for the passage of time, and let them provide a spatial and temporal organization to shine light upon the plot.” And it was so. And the writer made the two great spacers, the greater spacer to rule the passage of narrative time, and the lesser spacer to rule the physical relationships among characters; he made foreshadowing and flashbacks also. And the writer set them within the plot to illuminate the reader, and to separate scene from scene. And the writer saw that it was good. And there was No-Doze and burnt coffee, the fourth day.

And the writer said, “Let the Novel bring forth assorted secondary characters according to their usefulness to the plot, and let these various people help or hinder the protagonists and antagonists, and let them round out the plot with their distinct voices and development.” So the writer created a host of secondary characters, according to their usefulness to the plot, but without introducing so many that the writer derailed the plot. And the writer saw that it was good. And the writer blessed them, saying, “Be adventuresome and multiply and fill the gaping holes in the plot, and enrich the Novel’s backstory.” And there was an argument with the neglected significant other, the fifth day.

And the writer said, “Let the Novel bring forth subplots according to their usefulness: twists and turns and additional color to augment the main plot.” And it was so. And the writer made various subplots to advance the main plot through twists and turns. And the writer saw that it was good.

Then the writer said, “Let me make this Novel in my own image, after the stirrings of my own heart; and let my Novel be my own story and have pride of place in my life’s work.” So, the writer created the Novel in his own image, in the image of his own Id he created it; plot and characters and scenes, he created it. And the writer blessed it, and the writer said to it, “Be fruitful and multiply my bank account when I sell this Novel, and fill my wallet and claim crushing dominion over the Novels of all other writers.” And the writer said, “Behold, I have given you the entire month of November, and all the plot and subplots and characters and synopses to nourish you. And to this product of my heart and mind, I have given the breath of life, 2,000 words at a time.” And it was so. And the writer saw the Novel he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there were write-ins and panicked catch-up sessions, the sixth day.

Thus the Novel was finished, and all the host of novels finished for NaNoWriMo. And on the seventh day the writer finished his work that he had done. So the writer blessed December 1 and partied on it, because on this day the writer rested from all his labors.

And on December 2, the writer said, “Let there be rewrites ….”

 (c) Jason E. Gillikin, October 5, 2012