Tag: writing

The Failure Mode of Vacation is Ennui

John Winkelman

Reading Material acquired in the week of July 4, 2021

I mean, I had a vacation, technically, back in the last full week of May, but I was still recovering from 2020 at the time, so it was more like attempting to reel myself back to myself after a year of dissociating. And the five weeks of work which followed were fairly stress-free, as far as work goes.

But the first week of my two-week vacation was kind of…I can’t really call it a waste of time, but I spent most of it binge-watching TV and playing video games, and staring at all the things in my life which require my attention, and for every single one of those tasks, I considered the work carefully, then said fuck it and went back to playing Diablo II.

I’m doing my best to not kick myself for wasting a week in which I could have been reading and writing. I did manage to spend some time out of doors, which did me a world of good, but the whole point of having time off was to be productive, and that I most surely was not.

However, even in the midst of this psychological malaise, there are some bright spots; to wit: four new bundles of words arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey in the past week.

First up is the latest issue of Pulphouse Magazine, to which I will one day submit a story, if I ever complete a short story.

The next three are the latest publications from Zombies Need Brains, from their recently-completed Kickstarter campaign – Derelict, When Worlds Collide, and The Modern Deity’s Guide to Surviving Humanity. This is the third of ZNB’s Kickstarters I have backed, and the first to which I have not submitted a story. 2020 was kind of a lousy year in that way.

In reading news, I finished Dalva and moved on to Harrison’s follow-up novel The Road Home. I hadn’t intended to spend my vacation re-reading old favorites, but that is where my mind is right now, and my life seems to be improved thereby.

I also finished Francisco Verso’s Nexhuman (Apex Book Company), which was quite good, and one of the very few “salvagepunk” novels I have read. In fact, the only other ones I can think of at the moment are the Bas-Lag trilogy by China Mieville.

In writing news, not much has changed, though I am putting together a list of upcoming calls for submission to themed anthologies. Maybe one of these will break me out of my funk.

IWSG, July 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

What would make you quit writing?

Short answer: Nothing or death.

Long answer: The heat death of the universe, were it to occur within the natural span of my life. Or something like that. I may take breaks now and again, but writing is what I do.

And for any of you who are dealing with a dry spell, remember: There is no such thing as a “former” writer; only a writer who is currently (and temporarily!) inactive. Writing (or whatever your passion may be) is the best of things, but sometimes the mundane world intrudes, and sometimes you just need a break. Barring an event which compromises you in such a way that you can no longer form thoughts in your head, you can still write. Writing is not a physical exercise; it is the creation of realities using the power of your mind, and as long as that faculty exists, you are still a writer. You need never put pen to paper or pixel to screen, and you are still a writer.

And should you lose the ability to create these realities, remember: the fact that you once wrote can never be taken away. Events are the only truly permanent things in the universe. The last copy of a book may be lost, but the fact that the book was ever written is forever a part of the history of the universe. Causality only happens in one direction. Manuscripts don’t burn.

 

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Halfway Through 2021

John Winkelman

Books which arrived in the week of June 27, 2021

For the first Independence Day weekend in the last decade, our block was not blown up by the obnoxious neighbor lighting off a thousand dollars of professional-grade fireworks in the middle of the street. I realize I may be jinxing the neighborhood by writing this in the early afternoon of July 4. After all, the day ain’t over yet.

To make up for the uninterrupted and quiet night, I had a bout of serious insomnia which had me sitting at the dining room table until 04:00, blearily browsing the internet in an attempt to get my head to quiet down. I was tired but not sleepy, which is a miserable state in which to find one’s self when there are no pressing issues the next morning and sleep should be abundantly available.

Two new bundles of words arrived in the past week. On the left is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine. On the right is the new delivery from And Other Stories, Keeping the House by Tice Cin, which according to the back cover blurb offers “…a fresh and funny take on the machinery of the North London Heroin Trade…” which I can only assume will create for me a sense of deja vu which will lead back to Trainspotting.

(Yes, I know, Keeping the House is set in London, England and Trainspotting is set in Edinburgh, Scotland.)

In reading news, I finished Jim Harrison‘s Dalva, and it was every bit as beautiful as the previous half-dozen times I have read it over the past 25 years. Harrison’s follow-up novel The Road Home is now sitting next to my bed, awaiting my attention. I picked up my copy of Dalva back around 1996 and it is falling apart. I think I will need to replace it before I read it again, and I don’t think it will be so easy to find another copy with a Russell Chatham cover which is in any sort of good condition.

I have just started Francesco Verso’s long novella or short novel Nexhuman, and so far it is really good! This was published by Apex Book Company and arrived a few months ago as part of my subscription to Apex’s catalog.

I also just started Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor by Virginia Eubanks, and only made it about five pages in before I was overcome with an incandescent rage at the state of the world. I have often said that sadism is the national pastime of the USA, and Eubanks is showing how sadism and racism, manifested as carceral capitalism and managed democracy, are actively embedded into the national psyche at a level not much removed from that of the weather or gravity. Currently I am about fifty pages in, and my mood has not improved.

Argh.

In writing news, now that we are in July, and I have some time off, I plan to get serious about my writing practice. Then again I have planned that every week since the beginning of the year and have only been partially successful.

A few walks in the woods and a few evenings on the Lake Michigan beaches may be what I need to clear space in my head.

Rainy Days are Good Days for Reading

John Winkelman

Reading material arriving in the week of June 20,2021

We have been dealing with a drought of sorts for the past month, and in the last couple of days the weather patterns have stepped up to correct that imbalance. The cooler air has been nice, though it has brought with it some extremely humid days, which have reminded me of early spring in New Orleans. And that has brought with it a specific melancholy, as I have not been to New Orleans since May of 2009, when my father died. I have promised my girlfriend that we will take trip down south one of these days so she can experience the city before it is permanently underwater.

Humid, stormy days dampen down the motivation to do much of anything, so even simple tasks are difficult, as if undertaken after a strenuous workout. And difficult tasks are, well, more difficult. And make necessary frequent naps.

One magazine and one book arrived here last week.

On the left is the latest issues of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the literary journal published by Small Beer Press, a company which consistently turns out some of the best writing by the best authors in the business.

On the right is Ron Hogan’s new book Our Endless and Proper Work, which I purchased on impulse after seeing it in one of John Scalzi‘s regular round-ups of the books and ARCs which arrive at his house every week. I admit I have not heard of Hogan, and that I purchased the book mostly because it was published by Belt Publishing, a company which also turns out excellent writing, centered around authors and cities in the Rust Belt region of the American Midwest. At a quick glance he appears to be quite a good writer, with good advice for writer.

In reading news, I finished both The Cybernetic Hypothesis and Son of a Liche. To clear my head, I have started re-reading Jim Harrison‘s magnificent Dalva, a book which I return to every few years when I need to reset my mind in a specific way.

Reading Harrison also helps to prime my mind for writing, and right now I need all the boosts I can find in order to get my head back into that space. Already the year is half over and I have not written any prose of substance since the first week of last November. More than six months, and though I have about three dozen new poems, that isn’t much to show for 200 days.

Time to get to work.

Restarting the Writing Habit

John Winkelman

Over the past two months my reading and writing habit has dwindled away to almost nothing. What free time I have, I tend to spend paying SimCity on my phone, instead of improving my craft. I have no specific reason for this change in behavior and routine, other than that, with my COVID shots, a certain tension released, and I think all of the stress and burnout which I had kept bottled up came to the surface and began to dissipate.

And that was exhausting.

But now we are in the beginning-to-middle of June and I have many things I wish to accomplish this year, writing-wise. I want to complete the first draft of the novel I started last year and abandoned in November. I want to start sending out poems for publication again. I want to polish up some short stories and send them out into the wild.

All of these goals take time, focus, and mental energy. And while I don’t have a lot of extra time in my days/weeks/months, I do have enough to do a fair amount of writing if I put my mind to it. I just have to put my mind to it.

There are also external factors. There always are. We are not perfectly spherical writers of uniform density in a vacuum. We are fragile and fallible. We are social animals, and those slings and arrows didn’t magically manifest out of nowhere. No matter how much we try to isolate ourselves from the world, the world still exists.

Behavior changes from higher energy expenditure to lower energy expenditure are a lot easier than going from low to high. But such changes follow the same framework. First get out of the habit of doing the old thing, then get into the habit of doing the new thing. This applies to any deliberate (-ish) change. Not doing a thing is not the same as doing something else.

So for me, in this circumstance, I am slowly getting out of the habit of not writing, and getting back into the habit of writing. To encourage this behavior I am transcribing the three dozen poems I wrote during National Poetry Month in April. I also plan to start actively taking notes on the books I am reading, as I am reading them, with the eventual goal of either posting the notes, or writing book reviews, or both. While these tasks are not the creative practice I wish to eventually return to, they are part of the craft of writing and use the same muscles.

Two months is not a lot of time as the crow lives, but it is enough time for atrophy and entropy to take their toll on unused neurons. I am 52, and almost certainly have more life behind me than I do ahead of me (although at least one close relative has lived to 99 years old…). While objective time is not moving any faster today than it did yesterday, I feel a subtle yet growing sense that time is a resource which is not to be squandered, and the sense of urgency I feel to get to work on things ironically saps my mental energy and makes it more difficult for me to get to work on things.

Thus the importance of habit and routine in this practice. I don’t need to be perfect, I just need to improve, or at least not backslide.

All of this takes work and attention.

Getting back into a habit is more work than maintaining the habit.

It’s Beginning to Look a Little Like Summer

John Winkelman

Books acquired in the week of May 30, 2020

The week off from work recharged my batteries somewhat, and I am back at my desk, writing and debugging code with a fresh sense of ennui. Seriously. The big take-away from my week off was the realization that I need more time off. Not that I have Things To Do (although I do), but I realize I am now fully in the emotional hangover stage of the last year (pandemic) and the last four years (Daddy-issues Donnie the mobbed-up white supremacist sexual predator in the White House). Because of the damage done, the world is still on a downward trajectory, but the angle for the moment is more gentle and may in the next few years level off at something which approaches stability, with a possibility of improving for whoever survives to 2030.

This was a good week for acquisitions for the Library at Winkelman Abbey.

First up is a pair of “best-of” anthologies I ordered from Coffin Bell right after they accepted my short story “Occupied Space.”  These books have been buried in the vaults of the USPS for months, and have finally made it to my doorstep. And they are beautiful! The editors at Coffin Bell produces some quality work, and I’m not just saying that because they published one of my stories.

On the right is the latest issue of The Paris Review. I really need to start reading these, or cancel my subscription.

In reading news, I am about 40 pages into The Cybernetic Hypothesis and already it is filling me with a subtle sense of dread. First published in France in September of 2001, the text feel prescient in the way in which it describes the ubiquity and inevitability of systems of control in all of the living spaces of the world. And as with everything else in the world, it is inevitable that such systems will be monetized. And twenty years later, these systems are so embedded in our cultures and societies that talking about them feels akin to talking about the weather.

I am a little over 100 pages in to The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and I absolutely love it. I will post more thoughts when I finish, probably around the middle of the month.

In writing news, I don’t have much to report. I jotted down a couple of story ideas, looking for ways I can write high-magic, secondary-world stories which deal with surveillance capitalism, cognitive capitalism, carceral capitalism, and the like. In other words, yeah, I probably need to narrow my focus a little.

The day is beautiful, slowly transitioning to scorching, and we have plans to cap my birthday weekend with oysters and Bloody Marys. Thank-you to everyone who posted birthday wishes on the various social media platforms. I have had a wonderful weekend.

52, or 2 x 2 x 13

John Winkelman

Me at 52

As of this morning, I have been out in the world for 52 years and a few hours. Actually I’m probably still asleep as this posts, as I usually schedule these things for the early hours of the morning, and this year my birthday falls on a Saturday. Of course I’m usually awake at 5:00, seven days a week thanks to the the two furry orange maniacs which have entered my life in the past year.

Poe and Pepper have been a constant source of attention and affection and stress relief in the COVID times. Zyra and I probably owe no small part of the health of our relationship to our cats, who have provided such entertainment while we endured the quarantine which is finally lifting.

Here at the beginning of June, most of the restrictions here in Michigan are lifted, and the remaining ones will likely be removed on July 1. One year and four months which changed the world in ways we will still be discovering a decade from now.

I have attempted in the past to write birthday posts, but being as close to my life as I am, it is difficult to form the necessary distance in order to write about it from the outside. The passage of time helps, but that means that I can only write about those events which have occurred between the bounding horizons of the moderately recent past, where subject slowly becomes object, and the event horizon of memory where I can no longer be sure the things I remember are the the things which happened, or things I invented to fill in the gaps. I am 52 years old. That’s a lot of lived experience, during much of which I wasn’t paying attention.

I have been with the same employer now for seven years. Ten, if you count my time at Cynergy before my current employer bought us, lock stock and barrel. Ten of my 22 years as a web developer. That is by far the longest I have been with a single employer. I have to say, as a middle-aged techie, stability is a Good Thing.

When I turned 51 I was nearing the middle of a crazy project which had me working second and third shift for two months, then a long and late first shift for two months. During springtime I was able to attend the martial arts class maybe twice. When we switched to first shift, which roughly coincided with the class moving to Wilcox Park after almost three months of meeting on Zoom, I felt my age. It has been a running theme among my tai chi classmates that, as we age, other people in our cohort seem so much older than we are. As I discovered, two months without regular sleep and regular exercise are all that stand between Us and Them.

With a more regular schedule I found more time to read and write and edit, and in October of 2020 one of my short stories was accepted for publication at Coffin Bell. The story was published in January 2021. This was a big deal for me, made even bigger by the fact that this was my first unsolicited piece of prose to be published. I have other publication credits, but they were solicited for specific publication. “Occupied Space” was the first to be rescued after being sent out into the wild.

I started my 51st year with profound sleep deprivation, an unemployed and injured girlfriend, extreme social anxiety, and a small orange cat. Here at the start of my 52nd year I am experiencing mild sleep deprivation, my girlfriend is busy starting her own company, I am vaccinated and therefore feel comfortable out in the world, and we have two small orange cats.

Oh: and in the past year Donald Trump, the conservative white supremacist sex predator, failed to be re-elected, like he has failed at everything else in his life except being a sexual predator and a white supremacist. I laugh out loud every time I pass a “Trump/Pence 2020” sign on my way to visit my parents. And since there is a lot of rural Michigan between here and there, I see a lot of those signs.

So 51 started low and improved steadily. If 52 continues the same trajectory the next year should be amazing.

IWSG, June 2021

John Winkelman

Welcome to the monthly Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. This month’s question is the following:

For how long do you shelve your first draft, before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?

This is a complicated question to answer. A quick look through my archive shows that I have well over a hundred poems, three dozen short stories, partial or complete drafts of five novels, and a score or more of creative nonfiction pieces, essays, and research projects, all awaiting my attention. These works range in age from a couple of days to over three decades.

How long I shelve a draft depends entirely on the time I have available to revisit previous work and the level of energy I have when I have the time. Time and emotional energy do not often coincide, so a first draft which I complete at a furious pace may sit on my drive untouched and gathering virtual dust for years.

To date, I have published one short story and three poems. I completed the final draft of the short story three years after I wrote the first draft. The poems were about two years old when I sent them out into the wild. I sent each piece out to at least half a dozen magazines before they were accepted, and in some cases I subjected the piece to another round of edits after a rejection.

I don’t think writing experience plays into the amount of time a piece stays on the shelf. I have been writing off and on for thirty years, and I therefore have some pieces which have been gathering dust for thirty years. And I am not the same person I was when I wrote some of those older pieces. And the world is not the same as it was when I wrote stories and poems in response to specific events and ripples in the zeitgeist. A politically charged poem which was objectively good but very of-the-moment may never see the light of day again, unless events repeat themselves, or at least rhyme closely enough that the poem is meaningful again.

Currently I am editing a short story which started its life as a chapter from a literary fiction book I wrote during NaNoWriMo 2018. Three or four other chapters in that book could work as standalone short stories. And I still intend to complete and revise the book, so the work I do on the short stories derived therefrom will in turn benefit the completed text somewhere down the road.

I consider a backlog of shelved work to be a sign of a healthy writing habit. If an old piece is not worth revisiting, it can be considered a storehouse of ideas and memories which can be pulled out and remixed to create something new. But it is important to reread your old work from time to time. Doing so can put you mind in a place similar to where it was when you first created the work. It can remind you of what was going on in your life when you wrote the piece. And when you reread you can see how much you have progressed as a writer from the day you first put those words on paper. You can be your own inspiration.

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A Week Off

John Winkelman

Books acquired in the week of May 23, 2021

I was on vacation for the past week which, thanks to COVID, meant I did largely what I do while working, except without the working part. I did take a good long walk on Monday, from my house near downtown Grand Rapids, all the way around Reed’s Lake and back home, with stops at Argos Book Shop and Common Ground Coffee House.

It was a good week for reading material here at the Library of Winkelman Abbey.

First on the list is the latest issue of Poetry Magazine, which is soothing balm on the brain after a hard day of writing code.

Next is Robert Kelly’s A Strange Market, published by Black Sparrow Press, which I picked up at Argos at the end of my long walk. I love the old Black Sparrow books, back when they were an independent publisher rather than an imprint. The rough covers are part of the appeal and the aesthetic.

Next is Obits. by Tess Liem, which I also picked up at Argos. I had never heard of Liem, but a quick and random read of a couple of the poems herein convinced me that this would be a good impulse purchase.

Next is Maze by J.M. McDermott, from my subscription to the catalog of Apex Book Company.

Next is Mohamed Kheir’s Slipping, translated by Robin Moger, from my subscription to Two Lines Press.

And finally volumes 1 and 2 of The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism. I picked up volume 3 when Zyra and I visited City Lights Books back in summer 2018 and, since I can’t abide incomplete sets, completing the collection seemed like a good birthday present for myself.

In reading news, I finished Arkady Martines’s A Memory Called Empire and it was wonderful! I don’t remember the last book I read which had such deep and subtle political intrigue. I appreciated Martine’s use of the narrow lens of the single viewpoint character (albeit with some branches due to a very specific technology central to the plot). This kept the sense that the machinations and machinery of empire are vast and a single person can only see a small fraction or a single facet of the whole. I will need to reconsider some of my own writing in light of the experience I gained in reading this books.

I also finished Darran Anderson’s absolutely magnificent creative nonfiction book Imaginary Cities. Anderson explores ideas and the mythology of cities, and how they live in our stories, dreams and imagination, rather than the hard numeric facts. This means that Neil Gaiman will be cited next to Le Corbusier, and the stories related by Marco Polo and Samuel Taylor Coleridge will be given equal weight to the news feeds of current and historical events. Every page of this book contains passages good for multiple writing prompts, and as with Martine’s book above, but for quite different reasons, I feel I need to revisit some of my own writing based on the influences herein.

With those two books complete, I am now reading The Cybernetic Hypothesis, written by the collective Tiqqun and published by Semiotext(e). And for fiction I just started The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow. I am not far enough into either to form an opinion, but I have read enough to be intrigued and to keep going.

In writing news, not much is happening. I am slowly transcribing the thirty poems I wrote in April, and much to my surprise some of them have promise. I will probably be working on this task for the next few week as I return to work and summer distracts me with the option of being outside and away from a computer. I also started editing a literary fiction short story I wrote a couple of years ago, as part of NaNoWriMo. I think I will have it in shape to send out before the end of summer, assuming my energy level and attention span return to what they were before I received my COVID vaccinations.

One day, having the time and mental capacity to write regularly will be such a regular part of my life that it will not be worth mentioning. But today is not that day.

Down Time

John Winkelman

Books for the week of May 16, 2021

After almost six months without a meaningful break, I am taking a week off of work. My vacation will run from Monday May 24 through Memorial Day. Ten days off. I haven’t had time off like this since, um, this past July. Sure, I had time off during the winter holidays, but that isn’t really down time as such.

Two books arrived at the Library of Winkelman Abbey this week.

On the left is the Situationist International Anthology, edited and translated by Ken Knabb of the Bureau of Public Secrets. I first became aware of this book back when I worked at the bookstore, in the early nineties. I’m pretty sure one of the clerks ordered it, and I think it stayed in the break room for a long time, eventually ending up on the remainder shelves and possibly “liberated” by someone some years later. Recently I was reading something online, as one does, and the Situationist International was mentioned, and that brought back the memories of the Anthology.

On the right is Worlds of Light and Darkness, an anthology of the best of Dreamforge and Space & Time magazines. A combined anthology is an interesting concept, and seems a good way to introduce readers of the one magazine to the writers in the other. Perhaps other small journals could take note of this book and produce their own collaborative collections.

In reading news, I am still slowly making my way through Imaginary Cities and A Memory Called Empire. I am enjoying both immensely, but life stresses this past month have taken the energy right out of me, and there are days where I can’t read more than a page or two without either falling asleep or losing my focus. I am in dire need of a reset, and I hope that the upcoming week off, in which I plan to walk a lot, visit the woods and dunes and beaches of West Michigan, and spend quality time with my girlfriend, will give me the space I need to recover.

In writing news, it is much the same as for reading. No mental energy to apply to anything except getting through the day. Again, I have high hopes but no plans for the next ten days. I could set goals, but if I didn’t meet those goals I would only feel, on my first day back to work, that I had wasted my vacation.

So I will write as I feel inspired to write, and not force myself to meet arbitrary goals and deadlines. I do that enough at work.