Sometimes I spend my allotted writing time (and lately, I’ve had to allot it with a sledgehammer to get it to fit into my schedule, it seems) not writing.  At first this seems like a violation of everything anybody that tells you about writing says.

But here’s the thing: 99-plus percent of writers, if they have any hope of seeing there work on a site or publication that they themselves didn’t create, have to also be semi-professional editors.

Wouldn’t we all just love to crank out mega-word after mega-word of first draft copy, and have our own personal slave-editor tidy up behind us as we go rampaging through the literary world?  Or at least be awesome enough that editors should be begging you to go through your work?

Well, to be honest with you, sometimes I find editing fun.  No, really: stuff that I cranked out in a first-draft may only be part of the way there, and sometimes in the second read, or even the fifth, that eureka moment hits that makes an okay story special.  As long as you don’t mind murdering your darlings (and I always edit on a saved copy, so really I’m only murdering the disturbingly similar doppelgangers of my darlings) and you leave your mind open to the many other directions your story can go, you can sometimes even get a greater rush on an edit than on a first draft.  At least, I do.

So what I’ve been doing lately is going through some of my older work.  Back when I didn’t know what I was doing, and thought a story had to have a gee-whiz concept or an ending with such a pronounced twist that it gave you whiplash, I came up with some really awesome concepts.  No, I’m not sharing them with you, and here’s why: now that I’m a more developed writer, who tries to pay attention to the characters and the senses, some of these could become good stories.  But they won’t if I don’t rediscover them, pull them out of the ash-bin, so to speak, and wipe them off to take a look.

I gave another read to a story based on the first one I tried to sell (to friggin’ Asimov’s, of all places—what the hell was I thinking?) after I’d given it a treatment as a  better-developed writer.  It was close, but some passages just dragged like a patch of bare concrete when you’re trying to bumper-ski an icy street in the winter.  I highlighted them, and plan to excise the rotten tissue until I get to healthy substrate before grafting something new in.  And, of course, sometimes a graft can take off on its own: I may end up with an entirely different story.

But, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

Yeah, you know…the first time I heard the term I thought:

But this is a series I’m watching on National Geographic (thank you, Cogeco, for making this available on super-basic cable).  Today’s episode began with a retired couple that lives in a complex they’ve fabricated out of shipping containers, that have socked away 25 tons of food, and have set up school-bus platformed ‘bug-out’ vehicles so they can retreat if their compound comes under siege.

Now, I have bought some bullion metal.  I have some rice and beans and a decent amount of salt on hand.  And I’ve got a decent idea about what wild plants are edible.  But I’m not full-out wacko about this stuff.  I have just enough to make sure that my family will make it through the uncertain several weeks that could follow a major change in the order of things on this planet.  We certainly haven’t altered our lifestyle for something that only may happen, which is what these folks are doing.

I give society about an 80-20 chance of continuing on just fine even if the economic crisis in Europe continues on, or China can’t keep us all propped up, or whatever.  Sure, an asteroid could come out of nowhere and plow into our planet, but it hasn’t for a century or so, and a really big one hasn’t for tens of millions of years.  So it probably won’t tomorrow.  Or the day after.

The point is: it’s an interesting topic to engage your brain on.  But you still have a life to live—one that to this point hasn’t been beset by a catastrophe of global proportions.

The concept that disturbs me the most about preppers is that, should the ‘blessed event’ befall us, they view everyone else—that generally includes you and me—as a threat.  More specifically, as a starved, desperate horde bent on taking away everything they’ve spent their lives on storing away.  And they most likely took to Aesop’s grasshopper-and-ant fable a little too enthusiastically as children. 

Yeah, you’re going to catch one in the center of the forehead if you wander anywhere near their stockpile.  Even if you were doing fine and just wanted to see who else had managed to get through that dicey first few days of whatever crises actually happened.

Aren’t people just jerks?

How I see a cataclysmic event occurring—provided it’s not an asteroid strike on the scale of the Permian extinction, or the one that most likely wiped out the dinosaurs—is that society as a whole takes a step back, but on average people, who are naturally driven to be social with each other, will still maintain a connection to each other.  Such contacts may be riddled with paranoia, but they’ll still occur because, dagnabbit, we still need to talk to other people.

So stick that in your dry-cellar among your canned food and crates of ammo.

Congratulations, Kentuckians…well, the half that aren’t Louisville fans, at least.

I remember when Nebraska won the football national championship after the 1994 season.  I was living in Omaha at the time, and folks gathered at 72nd and Dodge, kinda the center-of-town crossroads, and whooped it up.  One intrepid fan even climbed one of the stoplight poles.

Kinda like this guy.  Only without the extra violence.

And I guess that’s where I’m headed with this post: what the hell is wrong with people?

I’m not complaining: a great deal of my material is based on how otherwise regular people cross lines most of us manage not to cross.  Thing is: once you’re in a mob of like-minded people, it seems less like a hard-edged line, and more of a fuzzy suggestion.

And, no, it’s not a ‘hick’ phenomenon, either, though Kentucky and West Virginia seem to be the cradle of the whole ‘burning couch’ thing.  Some otherwise ‘sophisticated, urbane’ cities seem no better.  Even in “polite” countries.

Okay, with the exception of the occasional ‘we lost’ riot (Vancouver, 2011), most of the violence seems to stem from the winning side.  I remember watching the Orange Bowl the year before that championship game, when a buddy punched a hole in his wall.  Yet, losing seems to be met with a short-term burst of black, putrid hate that blows by in the amount of time it takes a guy to say his favorite four-letter word.  Then it’s followed by a collapse into a bleak wad of despair.

Celebration, on the other hand, taps into that little shred of manic behavior we all have bottled up in us.  It’s not a fight-or-flight mechanism, yet it seems to be a cousin. 

I think it stems from the same frightening space in the brain and adrenal glands that houses the mechanisms we used to need to fight for our lives.  Most of us, thankfully, will never be involved in a fight to the death.  If you’re male, you’ve gotten a little taste of that in the wrestling around boys do when they’re unsupervised.  Otherwise, pop in Saving Private Ryan and do a Scene Select to where Adam Goldberg and Steamboat Willie have that knife fight near the end. 

If you’re locked up with someone (or something) that’s trying to kill you, and you win, you just might be prone to doing something crazy.  The body is overclocked, and muscles demand the ability to burn off all those panic-released chemicals so they don’t go to waste.  Kinda like how nobody likes to be buzzed with nobody around and nothing to do.  So, you dance around.  You whoop it up.  Or, if you’re not sure whether or not another assailant is waiting just outside the door, you look to engage your next target as quickly as possible.

Of course, couches don’t fight back.  Neither do overturned cars.  Then, I suppose, mob mentality takes over.  When you see others violating a social norm, you think: well, alrighty then.  When am I going to get another chance?

Just remember, buddy, as you prepare to release that last tiny tether of sanity: the camera’s rolling.

So I was on a flight from Montreal to Toronto tonight. The guy in the seat next to me drives up from Buffalo to YYZ because it's a bigger airport than what they have down there.  Which I found humorous, since a crap-ton of Canadians drive to Buffalo and fly out of there because it’s cheaper.  Goes to show you how many vacation travelers are in Canada and how many business travelers are in the US, I guess.

Upon landing, Air Canada informed us our gate was connected to a corridor being used for a US arrival.  So we couldn’t get off the plane.  See, technically the US arrival made the corridor linking their gate to Customs—one shared by our gate—temporarily US soil.  Until they got the flight unloaded, we had to wait on our plane.

In Canada.

But I suppose I should be grateful.  Would I have enjoyed telling Canadian customs that I was entering their country a second time without ever leaving it?

Once the 'murrican flight got emptied out, airport staff extended one of those Tens-a-Barrier belts across an intersecting corridor, and—voila—the hallway was once more incorporated into Canada.

All this free give-and-take of territory between the two countries makes me think the whole mess with the San Juan Islands was easily avoidable.

Poking around my website, I see that the last of my Old Thoughts posts, which contains my blog before I decided to give it the GoDaddy Treatment, was put up on March 19, 2010. 

My, how things have changed.

My March 18th post was from the state speech meet—I discussed high school stand-up comedy, and lamented that neither of my high school kids had made it.  Not so this year!  My Senior daughter qualified for this year’s state meet, which is Thursday.  Wish her luck, everyone.

Recently, I’ve taken a break from reading fiction—I know, I know, you’re supposed to read what you write, but dammit, I needed a break—and pulled a book called I Killed off my shelf.  It’s chock full of stories comedians tell each other, about coming up through the ranks, about horrid gigs as unknowns; nearly getting killed (comedians seem to attract crazy the way my carpet attracts black sock lint); or tiny islands of zen in an otherwise chaotic existence.  Reading my old posts reminds me that there are some similarities between these road stories and the stories writers can tell each other, if we were all that gabby.

Awkward, silent bombs of gigs in front of twelve surly people?  Try being an unknown and scheduling a book signing.  There’s a chain in the center of the US called Hastings Entertainment, and they’re absolutely great to work with.  However, they’re still in business because they’ve taken all the brick-and-mortar stuff that the internet has killed – Blockbuster, Borders, the Record Store—and smushed them together under one roof.  They get a lot of foot traffic, but when they see a writer at his table, smiling sweetly behind a stack of his books, their heads are immediately jerked to the music/movies side of the store like an invisible poltergeist of Joe Louis delivered a right cross.

Nearly getting killed?  Okay, they’ve got me there.  But sometimes the emails, blogs, and message boards flame so all-caps intensely that I have to don asbestos gloves to type back.  And, you know, there was that dude at our writers’ group that brought in a story about killing everyone in the room…always pays to be the nice guy, y’know.

So, I wonder: how many people give up on their blogs before two years is up?  And, where does a two-year-old blog rank on the bell-curve of blog longevity?  Anybody have stats for me?  I’d love to see.

Last week the weather was amazing in Nebraska.  This week, I’m in Canada, and that weather has lazily meandered its way east so I can catch it some more.  Here it is, technically still winter in Canada (though, I suppose, many Canadians would argue Toronto is hardly representative) and I went for a walk in a tee-shirt and shorts today.

Winter is hard on people.  I’ve written other posts about how people seem to grouse at each other more often in January and February than any other time of the year.  It shuts down some folks, while others wished they were shut down.  I added a generous ladle of travel/time-zone discombobulation to my already thin cold-and-darkness tolerance.  That made last week that much sweeter. 

Nine days ago I was in what I like to term ‘burnout management mode’.  Others may call it ‘slacking’.  Fine, so I’ve been a nancy-boy and just needed motivation.  Everyone has their down periods.  But the unusually early warm spell has things coming back to life.  I don’t know why, but I need it more this winter than normal.  Strange, given the fact that it’s been a very mild winter.

Maybe the severity of the winter isn’t what triggers all this.  It might just be the fact that it is winter… and in order for our bodies to fully enjoy the onset of spring, they have to get a little down beforehand.

An email inquiry from my friend Jon had me thinking about the sequel to Stunted.  So much so, that I’ve been back and rereading it.  It’s the first time I’ve set my eyes on the work since I put it online over a year ago…so, naturally, I spotted a couple of typos.

And no, I’m not going to tell you where they are.  If you’re OCD-oriented toward the printed word like I am (something that made the addition of Canadian English more difficult than it had to be) they’ll jump out at you.

Then, on a flight from Omaha to Toronto (no, a direct route doesn’t exist, but a man can dream, correct?) I read this piece by Anne Trubek in Wired.  The gist of it is: why bother with correct spelling? 

I suspect that question has been asked regularly in the pair of centuries that we Anglophones have been finicky about precision in our spelling.  And she makes a number of cogent, valid points.  As have others who question the Websteresque authoritarianism that jams the little components of our language into a seemingly endless and random collection of rules.

Well, dammit: I like having to spell correctly.

First of all, I’m generally good at it.  My progeny appear to be even more adept: two daughters have qualified for the state spelling bee (Daughter #3 narrowly missing a trip to Washington due to fantoccini—what the hell an Italian word I’ve never heard prior to that day, the name of something decidedly more Continental European than American, was doing in the Judges’ sadistic bag of tricks that day still escapes me) as well as a son who placed in the county bee and has a shot to go to state this year.  I dump that excess of backstory on you just so you know I’m not giving you an unbiased opinion.  Still, I’m giving you a valid one.

What—You Wanna Kill the First “R”?

Science Fiction writers—Varley comes to mind, but I remember a number of others—have depicted a future where people are illiterate, because machines are voice activated and newspapers are dead, while talking head news delivery is not.  Sometimes, as I sit in an airport before a flight, I get the feeling that future is closer than we think.  Lifting the rules of spelling would certainly be a larger step in an illiterate future than many of the technologies that have gotten us halfway there.

A lot of you probably won’t miss it.  Okay, maybe not you, who put enough of a hole in your day to read a blog instead of watching people take nut-shots on YouTube.  But you know people who wouldn’t miss reading.  That’s all well and good for them…until they step up to the ATM and, instead of reading ‘please enter your PIN’ on the screen, a soothing female voice (which sounds uncannily like one of Gene Rodenberry’s mistresses) says it out loud.  There’s something you want strangers to overhear.  Take it a step further and say that the adult of the future is a little dodgy on whether 6 or 9 is the upside-down one, and has to say their PIN out loud.

Another time when reading is indispensable is legal crap.  Come on: are you really going to buy a home, or car, or agree to the Terms and Conditions of the WiFi connection you’re leeching that day, and expect to have to listen to all the wheretofores and inasmuches before they let you sign?

And don’t even get me started on takeoff and landing.  I guess my futures all lean more dystopian than utopian, because I don’t ever foresee them getting rid of the stupid requirement to power down all electronic devices for the half-hour before you’re in the air and the half-hour before you’re back on the ground.  Means two-thirds of a Detroit to Toronto leg is blacked out, incidentally.

Correct Really is Faster

Okay, we’ve all seen, either on Facebook or in an Email, the text where they d3l1b3rat3ly 9arb13 th3 t3xt to show how resilient the brain is in picking up the writer’s intended word.  It’s a neat trick, but come on:  are you really going to want to read a whole book like that?  English is so full of synonyms, homonyms, similarly-spelled words, and all of my favorite examples of how important punctuation is:

The brain picks the words up more quickly, however, when it doesn’t have to kick in all that fancy higher-order processing.  And reading a book is the refreshing activity it should be, not something that kicks your ass mentally and makes you want to flip on the TV for a break.

Admit It: It Just Works Better

We all regularly read things that confuse us.  And things where we pretty quickly pick up what the writer intended even though he obviously didn’t intend it.  Even the most ‘free and easy’ people when it comes to spelling have to get annoyed when they see certain common misspellings.

It’s a Good Way For You to Differentiate Yourself

If we’re to believe everything the news tells us, it’s harder to get a job nowadays.  You need that extra edge over the competition.  If the competition takes a lackadaisical attitude toward spelling, it’s their loss.  Upper hand?  You betcha.

But I’m Not a Good Speller, You Jerk.  So Tough Noogies.

Yeah, I get it—spelling is hard for those whose brains aren’t wired for it, the way phone conversations are very difficult for me.  Take heart—there are tons of technological assists available to you now!

Oh, crap.  You’re in trouble.