So this is a pic of my new office!

I’m sure you’re thinking the same thing I am. Here we have a near-inescapable reminder of an old joke:

Patient: I’m a tepee! I’m a wigwam! I’m a tepee! I’m a wigwam!

Psychiatrist: Ah, I see your problem. You’re obviously two tents.

Though, to be fair, I’m only showing you one tent. Not that I don’t have many others, and a hammock that works well for backpacking in treed-but-not-flat places like Southeast Alaska. But this is the one I’ve been setting up in the back yard.

Why would I do such a thing, you ask? Well. Because reasons. (Bonus: I’ve written large chunks of three novels on that particular folding table. Maybe that’s relevant…?)

More specifically, the shared-office space I thought I had paid for weeks ago (“for which weeks ago I thought I had paid”?) has apparently gone goofy on me. Multiple delays. It’s for safety’s sake, of course, and who could argue with that? Not I. Hell, I barely argue at all. I mean, I got myself ordained online, in more than one place, but one of them was the Church of the Latter-Day Dude. Yes: I am a Dudeist minister. So that tells you something. (Someday I might tell you about how I used an online “doctorate” from a similar establishment as proof of an advanced education, in order to become a foster parent, not that I was at all sure it mattered either way to begin with–I mean, my intentions were either pure or at least amusing to me at the time, so it was all okay in the end.)

But then. I mean. Am I trying to work/think/write at home? Sometimes. At Panera Bread, where they foolishly offered me all the coffee I can drink for $9/month, and the employees/management are both congenial and interesting? Sometimes. How about just in the car, then? I’ve tried that too.

I have kids. I love them. They love me. It’s all quite horribly awesome. Examples, all from the last two days:

1. Dad! Can you set up my new hard drive in my Chromebook? Depends. Maybe. This is because you want to be a rapper on YouTube, right? Yes! Okay then. Sure. Where’s your Chromebook? (BTW this actually means swapping out the lame 16GB hard drive it came with, putting in a 512GB birthday present, and installing Linux on that to create a usable laptop.) Uh…it’s not charged right now. So? I mean it’s dead. And I don’t know where the charger is. Why don’t you get back to me on that? Okay!
2. Dad! My keyboard doesn’t work! What does that mean? Um, the “D” key doesn’t work. This is what you get for being such a gamer. I know. Can you fix it? Not really. So here are your options: get a new keyboard for your laptop–and just so you know, the last time I tried that I went through three of them before I found a replacement that actually worked–or you could try an external keyboard. I really, really want it to work. Okay. [1.5 hours of research ensues; kid spent $34 and borrowed my mechanical (“It’s so loud!“) keyboard in the interim.] Hey Dad, I can’t find a USB power source. Please, please don’t do that! Please plug my very nice keyboard into the very nice computer instead. Oh yeah! [smacks forehead] What was I thinking? I, um, really couldn’t say.
3. Dad! Do you have gloves we can borrow? It’s summer. Why the @!#$%…? It’s so we can do pull-ups from the tree! Uh. First off, that tree you’re talking about (I’d asked more questions) is actually on the neighbor’s property. Second, that limb you’re talking about is quite thoroughly dead. I’m not saying it wouldn’t be fun to try it and see what happens, but… So what can we do? Well, two thoughts: either get some nylon straps, or some chain. We can use those on the trees that are actually on our property. Cheap either way, too. We have some hand-dinguses we can attach to those, and you can even adjust the height with the carabiners so it’s right for whichever of you is using it. Cool! Or, you know, you could use the bar and resistance bands we bought last month and achieve pretty much the same thing. Oh yeah! We forgot about those! Okay then.
4. Dad! Can you take me to the store? Sure.
5. @!&$%! Language!
6. Come help me! There’s some @!#$% bots on my @#!$% @$$! Grammar!
7. Bedtime! Seriously, Dad? Again? Give it a rest. (Yeah, that one was my fault, and I tend to shout it out at random times. I don’t know why. For some reason it makes me happy.)
8. Dad! Can we get one of those pull-up bars that fit in a door frame? Um, maybe. If you want to spend the money. Do you want that, or nylon straps, or chain? Or do you just want to use the bar and resistance bands we talked about an hour ago? Oh yeah! Um, right. Let me know.
9. Dad! Can we go to the river tomorrow? Sure!

So maybe my overall position/stance/attitude makes sense. And maybe it doesn’t. Thing is…I don’t mind the summer-ish heat. I’ve always enjoyed temperature extremes more than others find reasonable. But the sunlight? With a laptop’s screen? So I spent a few hours figuring out how to use my 2012 Kindle Paperwhite as a secondary display. It works really well, and it’s easy to do (now), but figuring it all out was a bit of a…well, not a challenge…an enjoyable exercise in frustration, maybe. Something like that. Anyway, as I said, it works now. The E-ink screen is very good even in direct sunlight. And, since I’m connecting via Wi-Fi, I can even wander around the backyard (the microphone also works via Wi-Fi) while I dictate. If I want to. Now that it’s set up. When there’s time.

Meanwhile, there are the other things I “need” to do soon:

1. My 1970 convertible VW Beetle? It needs new CV joints. I mean, probably. Kind of hard to narrow down the problem. But that might be it. It’s not terribly hard to replace them. I just need to do it. When? Soon…?
2. We have a batch of mead fermenting. It’s more than ready to go into a secondary fermenter. My wife and I both prefer “dry” wines/mead to the stuff you can typically buy, so it probably makes sense that we’re making our own. We’re going to split the current project into two batches: plain and grapefruit. Which just means putting some grapefruit peel, wrapped in cheesecloth, into the fermenter. (Fancy word for “Mason jar” btw.) So, when will we deal with transferring that, and so forth? Soon, right?
3. The AC in our truck isn’t working. I don’t use it anyway. My wife does. I noticed, at Walmart the other day, that coolant is really inexpensive. Maybe I need an adapter? Or maybe I don’t. Either way, the actual “fix” will probably only take a little bit of time. When will I do that, again?
4. There was that one time when it was raining. And that guy ran into our Prius while we were stopped at a red light. And I could fix that with some Bondo and some paint. When…?
5. Speaking of the Prius, does it actually need more air in the driver-side rear tire? Or did the “Slime” screw up the tire-pressure sensor? I mean. It’s probably one of those. Not a lot of options. So when will I check?
6. Also, how the @#!% did all that trash end up in our vehicles? I didn’t do it. So, kids, really…?
7. Um, hey, guys? Did you notice that none of the above was about making money? I mean, some of it will save some cash compared to other options, but shouldn’t I really do something relevant to one of our various small businesses…?

Yeah, well. That’s how it goes.

What I’m getting at: seriously, I want to get some more stuff published, if only to my own website. And I will. But it’s hard to know when the stars will align. Not tomorrow, because we’re going to the river (and that will be fun!).

Soon?

Oh, the title? A manager-guy at Panera Bread asked me for a recommendation for a science fiction book for a newbie. He mostly reads biographies. I figured To Your Scattered Bodies Go by Philip Jose Farmer would be a good choice: lots of historical figures, and a damn good book in the bargain.

But he can’t get that book from his local library. Any suggestions?

The post To Your Scattered Projects Go! first appeared on Caveat Lector.

I gotta ask: any of you ever watch a show called Glee? I did, with my family. All of it. It was sometimes fun, but it certainly took a while to get through. I mean, not that I wanted to do it any faster. But…

Oh yeah. The reason I asked. Because there was this glee club…they called themselves “New Directions.”

Come on. High school kids? Really? And nobody on the show ever said “Nude Erections” instead? Or thought about it? Or complained about the name? Not even once? (“Shut up, Dad!” said my kids….)

Okay, never mind. Maybe it was just me after all. Moving on.

I have some stuff to publish. Some new things. A bunch of old things. Lots of it is going to be on this website. Some of it is going to available on online retailers. ‘Cause, see, some of it will actually be, no-foolin’, exclusive to the site. Like, maybe almost all short stories? I don’t see the point of putting them up elsewhere. But it’d be fun to give people a way to read them if they want to.

I mean: look, I’m an indie kind of guy. Not that I set out to be that way, really. I just wanted to write. So, starting back in 2005, I sent out over two hundred query letters to agents. Lots of them were actual snail-mail letters. Expensive. Time-consuming…it took me about a year and a half to do all that. Kind of hard, to keep doing it over and over.

You know how many agents asked to read one of my novels? Ever? One. Then she suddenly left the agency, and I never heard anything from them beyond that.

So, for a long time…it really didn’t matter how good my stuff was. Or wasn’t. Nobody saw it but family and friends. I kind of got used to that. It wasn’t so bad. Though…how much did I write? Not a lot.

Along the way I figured out that I mostly wrote to explore new ideas and perspectives. Part of why I can’t plan/outline fiction is that, if I could, I’d have no internally-motivating reason to write a given story in the first place. Stuff gets weird on me, though…I wrote a story about a time-traveling ant from the future, with a dark sort of sense of humor, here in our world to defend/promote his own timeline against agents of other species/civilizations. Then I threw in a bunch of magic and the second half of the story is sort of a homage to Lord Dunsany. With gratuitous political commentary. Did that make sense, as a story? Not really. I loved it. It was fun to write. Also fun to read afterward. For, uh, me. Otherwise, well, not even my mom (Hi, Mom!) liked that one.

I also enjoyed the one I wrote after reading a tweet saying something like “You don’t read many stories about lost goldfish finding their way home.” So that got mixed up in my head with this idea of a gorilla, in a zoo, haunted by the spirit of Walmart. I started typing, suddenly there were two kids complaining about old technology, and a story happened. Sort of dystopian science fiction, I guess. Great fun! For me. For anyone else? Not so much. Okay, maybe two other people in the world, but I’m pretty sure they haven’t read it even though it’d be perfect for them. Too bad!

But, okay, in spite of myself, I have tried to learn about writing along the way. Giving people complete stories, maybe even paying attention to genre boundaries. I do have a series of stories about a teenage wizard for hire. Sort of. That’s reasonable enough, right? Another about a middle-aged man who thinks he’s a normal guy living in a suddenly post-apocalyptic world, though he has no idea what actually happened to the world…only to realize it’s all a malicious sort of imposed misunderstanding and the world in general is doing fine–but, you know, he himself has become a zombie. So there’s that. It’s almost in a genre! And my novels, while possibly a bit odd, aren’t totally unreadable. I think.

(But OTOH there’s a bunch of stuff that exists only because I wanted to play with some idea or other, and it ended when I stopped wanting to go further, and that may or may not be the greatest way ever to create a story to entertain other people who may not be similarly entranced, or for a similar length of time/words/story even if they do decide to come along for the ride to begin with.)

I have a point? Maybe. I only barely care about sending fiction out for other people’s eyes at this point. I think it’d be neat to make some money…but I’m not willing to spend a lot of time or money on advertising, marketing, promotion, book covers, ritual sacrifices, artful interpretive dances, and the like. That sounds like a horrible job. I don’t want it. If it came with a guaranteed paycheck, vs. participation in a semi-lottery, I might consider it. I mean, there was a period in the past when I made money from my fiction. Did it last forever? Nope. Does it mean I know how to make it happen again? Nope. The world and I have both moved on, and not necessarily in the same set of directions. Even if I suddenly started getting paid for fiction, I wouldn’t trust it to last. So how hard can I really expect myself to work in this area? Not very, I’m afraid.

Similarly, though it’d be easier to just put the stuff in one place (Kindle Unlimited on Amazon?), that idea just irritates the God out of me–as my grandmother used to put it. So I’m going to focus on my own site first and foremost. Then, yeah, for much of my fiction anyway, all the retailers. Or at least all of them I can reach without much hassle. Smashwords and D2D are going to handle that for me, is what I’m saying. Plus I have this grandfathered-in publishing account at Google Play, so I can put stuff there. But that’s about it. (Though I did read something recently about them opening that back up to indies sometime soon, or recently? Maybe? I don’t remember the details. Didn’t care a whole lot, I guess.)

Since at this point there’s next to no built-in demand for my fiction out in the world, most of it will be free. At least on non-Amazon sites, since the ‘Zon is occasionally annoying about that, but in most places. Maybe people will post reviews. Maybe they’ll read about the (“EXCLUSIVE!”) content on my site, and come get some of that. Maybe a few of them will buy stuff. Maybe they’ll tell me fun stories of their own. Maybe it’ll turn into something. We’ll see.

So, that’s one new direction. Another: I paid for access to some shared office space this month. Not that the $9/month coffee at Panera Bread was a horrible deal or anything, but after an hour or two I start to feel awkward about occupying a table that theoretically could be used by somebody spending a bit more. (I do tip, so that’s something.) (Also, lately, there haven’t been too many other customers.) (But still.) (Yeah, but they serve absolutely nothing I’m willing to eat, so they can’t reasonably expect–) (Shh. People.) (Okay. Got it. Moving on.)

Oh, I’m also going camping for a couple of days. By myself. I may type or dictate something or other. Not sure yet. Leaving tomorrow, sometime.

And this email, for those of you getting this post via email, is coming from a different place. Different email service provider, I mean to say. I was kind of rolling my own, using software called Sendy, sending via a service from Rackspace called Mailgun…and frankly it wasn’t working very well. Lots of glitches. A lot of people didn’t get my email, one way or another.

Not that I think that’s a crisis for anyone involved. It clearly isn’t. But, anyway, it’s something else that’s changed lately.

I’m not sure how any of this will work out. But, hell, who ever knows stuff like that?

Meanwhile.

Have fun out there!

The post New Directions? first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Yo! I totally stole that title. Because I liked it.

Smee:
I’ve just had an apostrophe.

Captain Hook:
I think you mean an epiphany.

Smee:
No… lightning has just struck my brain.

Captain Hook:
Well, that must hurt.

Yup. No doubt.

Also I kind of grabbed the title from another source, maybe. More about that later. What I’m getting at is that I’ve had two(2) potentially significant, life-changing, universe-expanding random thoughts lately. To which I attached significance. And in both cases they were mostly inspired by other people! I knew there was a reason for all these damn monkeys.

First, in chronological order: Chuck Pezeshki. Fascinating guy. I’ve had a lot of thoughts of my own regarding system(s) design, most of which boil down to distributed > centralized. For all kinds of things. And, yeah, I mostly almost actually mean ALL kinds.

So what Chuck did was tres kewl. He (for me) reframed that notion as “empathy,” which for my $$ is a better term on multiple levels. He has tons more to say, and it’s pretty much exploding my head right now. I started here, via a semi-random recommendation via a Twitter account I had set up (maybe more about that later too…but, nope, it turned out I didn’t include that stuff). Then Chuck suggested this post to me, which of course spoke to me more directly. Though it might have been even more apropos if I’d played, or at least seen, a game called Mario Kart. And here’s a reading list. What I’m going to say now, before I callously abandon the topic: this is a paradigm shift of the first magnitude.

AND I really hope I can help him publish his book. Seriously, I’d say more, but there’s this notion-detritus in my head right now & I think I can probably do a better job of describing it all later.

Okay then. Moving on.

Then there’s Becca Syme. I’ve enjoyed her books. She has this “Question the Premise” thing going that appeals to me. Sadly, or so I thought, she’s had her cognition kidnapped by this ridiculous Gallup “CliftonStrengths” groupthinkly morass. I read her stuff, watched some videos, and sighed a little. More than once. Yes, okay, these guys claim they have “science” behind their sales pitch. Kind of yawn-worthy on that front, honestly. But the interesting part for me boiled down to three ideas:

1. We have, via experience/practice, trained our minds to process information of various sorts in specific ways.
2. These ways are not all the same between individuals. Thus, different people have different preferred/specialized/optimized modes of operation on multiple levels.
3. It’s more productive to focus on what we already do well than to attempt to address weaknesses.

That last is especially interesting. Lean into strengths? Hmm. We learn faster by doing that than by focusing on ideas/processes that are essentially alien to us? Okay. Might or might not be true. But it’s an interesting idea. Obvious value to it, if it works. If not, not.

Now, does that mean that the various “themes” Gallup identifies/espouses have any particular objective value? Nope. Is there any reason to believe their classification of people will apply across problem domains? Not that I can see.

So  I sat on all that. Until yesterday, when I bit the bullet and (via a discount, I admit) took their test. And my mind started blowing up in all-new ways. Except that they weren’t new.

Bit of background: there are 34 “themes” in this scheme. They’re kind of listed in order for each person, based on blah blah a process blah whatever. In principle, to the extent you buy it, they’re giving info about what sort of processing/perception/action/reaction might in theory exist, and in any/some of which each test-taker might excel.

Yeah. Sounds kind of like voodoo to me too, except that vudu at least involves sacrificing animals and kewl ritual-dingi. Maybe zombies!

But anyway, as I said, I took their test. Here are my TOP FIVE STRENGTHS (bc nothing is a weakness in this world):

1. Learner
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Learner theme have a great desire to learn and want to continuously improve. In particular, the process of learning, rather than the outcome, excites them.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Chances are good that you yearn to know a lot. It makes little sense to you to skim through a book and read only the highlights. You delve more deeply into intriguing subjects than most people do. You love to gather all kinds of information. This explains why you take time to grasp ideas that appear in print. Driven by your talents, you usually equate education — formal and informal — with understanding more about something today than you understood about it yesterday. By nature, you desire to acquire additional knowledge and gain new skills. Why? You are naturally curious. You often work alone to commit information to memory. You probably have a solitary place where you can practice your art, craft, sport, or science. Because of your strengths, you channel your efforts into the task at hand. You persevere until you have gained the knowledge and skills needed to attain a goal. You can toil for many hours to secure your objective. You probably work hardest and most productively at a particular time of day. Instinctively, you are an individual performer. You typically welcome opportunities to acquire knowledge and ponder ideas on your own. You often seek and find solitary places where you can think without being distracted by people or noise.
2. Ideation
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Driven by your talents, you bring new thoughts to most discussions and meetings. Your reputation for innovative thinking explains why you are recruited by groups. You derive satisfaction from mental activity. You recognize when you are especially creative. By nature, you frequently opt to systematically study various subjects, rules, processes, mechanisms, or programs when you work alone. In your opinion, having the freedom to decide how to approach a project is one of the advantages of being an individual contributor. Because of your strengths, you usually find novel and fresh ways to do things. People turn to you when they find themselves struggling to generate ideas. It’s very likely that you favor conversations where information, facts, or data are considered objectively — that is, emotions do not distort the truth. You pose questions, evaluate answers, and figure out how things work. Reducing an idea, theory, or process to its most basic parts provides you with many insights. You are likely to archive — that is, preserve — your discoveries so you can use them later. Instinctively, you welcome opportunities to understand people one by one. You carefully examine each person’s strengths, shortcomings, character, choice of friends, interests, goals, and history. This enables you to draw conclusions and make judgments about individuals.
3. Strategic
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Instinctively, you might enjoy a group problem-solving technique that involves the spontaneous contribution of ideas from all participants. When you have acquired specialized skills or possess specific knowledge, perhaps you can suggest alternative solutions for certain issues. Now and then, your expertise excites your own or others’ imaginations. Maybe this occurs when you are encouraged to think what will be possible weeks, months, or even years from today. By nature, you pay close attention to what is going on around you. You listen. You quiz people. You read. You probably take notes on key points. As you accumulate lots of information, you disregard what is unrelated, and pay heed to what is really important. The more you reflect on what you know, the more problems begin to reveal themselves, and eventually solutions start taking shape in your mind. Finally, given the situation, you select the best plan from your list of options. Driven by your talents, you may be viewed by some people as an innovative and original thinker. Perhaps your ability to generate options causes others to see there is more than one way to attain an objective. Now and then, you help certain individuals select the best alternative after having weighed the pros and cons in light of prevailing circumstances or available resources. Chances are good that you may generate numerous ways to enhance, upgrade, revise, correct, or revamp certain processes, action plans, or itineraries. Sometimes your suggestions influence how a project will unfold in the coming months, years, or decades. You might find fault with your own or another person’s talents, skills, or knowledge. To some extent, fixing people or things ranks in the top half of your list of favorite activities. Because of your strengths, you long to know more so you remain on the cutting edge of your field or areas of interest. Your inventive mind usually generates more possibilities than you can handle or fund. Nonetheless, you are committed to acquiring knowledge and/or skills. You study everything involved in a situation and conceive entirely new ways of seeing or doing things. What you already know prompts you to ask questions and delve even deeper into a subject or problem.
4. Responsibility
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Responsibility theme take psychological ownership of what they say they will do. They are committed to stable values such as honesty and loyalty.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Instinctively, you are an individual performer who wants to be held accountable for your results. Why? You generally accomplish more when high expectations are established. You probably set these high expectations for yourself when no one else does. Because of your strengths, you conduct yourself in an exceptionally mature and orderly fashion even when your teammates, classmates, friends, coworkers, and colleagues are acting childish. It’s very likely that you are quite comfortable being honest about yourself with others. You harbor very few illusions about who you really are. Furthermore, you can openly acknowledge your mistakes and shortcomings. This is apt to distinguish you from most people. By nature, you are naturally open and honest about who you are, what you have done, what you can do, and what you cannot do. Your straightforward explanations and stories help listeners see you as you see yourself. You reveal your strengths and limitations. You are forthright and plainspoken. People generally seek your company and want to work with you. Many are impelled to move into action by your words and examples. Driven by your talents, you probably want to work on your own because you thrive in settings where you can function independently. You have a strong need to know each task has been done correctly and ethically before you declare it is done.
5. Intellection
   SHARED THEME DESCRIPTION People who are especially talented in the Intellection theme are characterized by their intellectual activity. They are introspective and appreciate intellectual discussions.
   YOUR PERSONALIZED STRENGTHS INSIGHTS What makes you stand out?
   Driven by your talents, you prepare for important conversations or discussions by collecting lots of background information. It is not unusual for you to set aside at least five hours of quiet time each week to consider what you have discovered. You are likely to use this time to expand your thinking. A new piece of material can send you hunting for additional evidence to support your theories, concepts, or proposals. Chances are good that you value education and scholarship at any level and at any age. Your thirst for knowledge causes you to explore many topics of study or specialize in one particular subject. You thoroughly enjoy opportunities to acquire additional information, skills, and experiences. It’s very likely that you are more comfortable talking about ideas than issuing orders or dealing with conflict. You gravitate to conversations with intelligent people. You intentionally cast aside emotions and concentrate on the facts. You continually search for evidence to make your points and wish others would do the same. Because of your strengths, you prefer having quiet time to mull over ideas as well as read and examine interesting topics. Periods of uninterrupted thinking give you great pleasure. You probably excuse yourself from noisy, active, or distracting situations to thoroughly process your ideas. By nature, you may place great value on moments alone with your thoughts. You might consider whatever arouses your intellectual curiosity. Setting aside time each week to explore particular ideas might be a pleasurable or necessary activity for you.

(Next five in order, if anyone cares or even if they don’t: Individualization, Achiever, Analytical, Competition, Developer. Sort of interesting to see what they’re said to mean. Ish.)

Okay. Right. Fine. All descriptions are flattering. It’s how they roll. Nothing wrong with that.

But…weirdly…since I’d decided to play the game, take it seriously for argument’s sake…it made a certain amount of sense to me. And led to some of them epiphanitis whatsits.

1. There’s nothing in my “top 5” about focus. About successfully limiting my options.
2. Also, nothing much about other people other than feeling responsible to them. They don’t motivate me at all? Hmm.
3. So, uh, it might be a mistake (within this paradigm) to self-define success and failure according to whether I accomplished a predetermined task? I mean, if I’m mostly a guy looking for new ideas…maybe trying to do a non-new thing isn’t going to be a great fit?
4. So this might be “why” outlining/planning won’t ever seem to work for me? I don’t know how to stop having epiphanies/ideas as I write? So the outline just can’t work. I mean, I rebel against it & come up with new stuff. The ideas in the outline might have worked, if only I hadn’t written them down and attempted to self-constrain….
5. Maybe the barriers to task-switching I’ve been attempting to set up (phone off, operating system only for writing, full-screen emphasis on one project, etc.) are actually counterproductive? Maybe I should instead minimize costs of switching from one activity to another?

Look, there’s lots more, and as I said about Chuck’s stuff above…it’s pretty much blowing my mind. Maybe distractions aren’t as bad as I’ve told myself (and others)? Maybe I get irritated when I’m “trying to focus” and people dare to breathe nearby, not so much because they did that gas-exchange thing with their lungs, but because “focus” itself really isn’t my forte? Maybe I need to find a way to make things new/interesting, not only sometimes, but ALL THE TIME??

Okay. Well, whatever. We’ll see how things develop. But I can see why, maybe, “hiking the Appalachian Trail” ended after a month. Or riding my bike from New Orleans to Alaska ended just south of Minneapolis. But how I maybe also built a lot of things, from scratch, on my own. Because they were new/interesting.

Maybe focusing on a project is the wrong idea. Maybe a project can only work for me in that context if it’s sufficiently complex that I can actually switch to different sorts of effort without (apparently) abandoning my goals? So, actually, project boundaries are sort of fluid/nonessential/arbitrary, and it might make more sense to give myself opportunities instead of trying to restrict them?

Well. Hmm.

I don’t actually expect this will make sense to many of you, of those few of you who are you who read these things. But I do love me a paradigm shift.

You know, it wasn’t too long ago that I identified “epiphanies” as my primary goal in both reading and writing fiction. So, uh.

I still say it’s fuckin’ voodoo. But I’m heading off on a path that’s, you know, other than others. To see how it goes from here.

Oh yeah! The title of this post! I think I remember a book by James P. Hogan of the same title. I haven’t found a reference to it online, though. Instead I found a Wikipedia article about him…the article called him a “Holocaust denier.”

Well, ouch. I liked his stuff. The Holocaust seemed like a bad thing. But here’s how my mind works: I got curious. Not enough to actually do any research, at least not yet. But in that CliftonStrengths world there’s a “Strength” called “Harmony.” It’s apparently about valuing the experience of having people all get along. Well, there are 34 strengths, so-called, and for me that’s #34. I really can’t think that way.

What I thought: “Huh. Hogan was pretty smart. No idea whether he was right/wrong, or whether he in fact said/believed what’s being said here, but it might be fun to research the topic and see what’s out there.”

Because, really, I don’t care about which hypothesis/theory turns out to be correct, in any area at all. I’m not interested on any level in “consensus” on any topic. I just want to play with ideas. See where they lead. And violently disagree with those that make no damn sense at all. AFTER I look into them.

So there’s that. It may offend some/most/all/none. Frankly, guys, I don’t care. And it’s fun to see a test that agrees I’m not supposed to do. Enabling! You should see what I do to cows when nobody’s looking! If anything! (Couldn’t get away with that on my home planet. Them cows is mean.)

Have fun out there!

The post Epiphanies and Apostrophes first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Here’s what I did a while back: I wrote a book with two viewpoint characters, that was supposed to be the first in a series.

Then the story went in a different direction. It was a fun direction, but either it needed a completely different ending or it needed to be a standalone novel.

So I finally figured out I needed to cut it down to a single viewpoint.

So half the book went away.

And it was really not fun to go back and recreate the missing scenes/events, because I knew how it ended & the whole process felt artificial.

Then (yesterday!) I thought of a fun twist & it started to be exciting to work on the book again. So the first half or so is done, and I have roughly half of the remaining story written. I can probably use most of that. The short version of all this is that I think I’ll finish it up in the next couple of weeks.

Of course, I could be wrong about that. Sometimes things take longer than I expect. Fairly often, actually. We’ll see how it goes.

Equally of course, there were other ways I could have gone with all this. Probably the best would have been to simply publish the standalone version (though it did need some work), and write some other book to be the first in a series. Chances are, I’d have spent less time on that overall.

But I really, really wanted to write a series. For silly reasons having to do with getting paid. And I didn’t realize (though in hindsight it’s fairly obvious) how little fun I would have trying to make that novel fit into the pattern I was after.

Anyway.

I’m back to having fun. And I have some time to do this–time not obligated in a bunch of other directions. I kind of made that time, and it involves both getting up early and closing the door (or going elsewhere) to cut myself off from my family, two things of which I’m not especially fond. But: fun! Really. It’s nice. I hope it continues.

Because that’s a thing for me. Writing is supposed to be fun. I need to get better at remembering that. When it’s not fun, it flat doesn’t work.

For me, anyway. Maybe for readers too? I couldn’t say. If the words don’t come, readers are most unlikely to show up. What would they read? Something else. Right.

So…

Have fun out there!

The post Series woes? Not really. first appeared on Caveat Lector.

An impossible goal? Maybe. But I don’t think so. I mean, what’s involved here?

• It should be distraction-free.
• It should provide potentially inspiring distractions.
• Writing equipment (phone, laptop, voice recorder, whatever) should be well-suited to the space.

Right. No problem. What I’m getting at: for me at least, everything needs to be portable. And swappable! There are times when working on my laptop in my office makes sense. There are times, such as next week when I’ll be on a road trip, when I’d really like to get some writing done in the car. I also like coffee shops. And I don’t like carrying my laptop everywhere I go.

No problem. If I write in text files, they can be edited on any device. And if I use Markdown as a text format, the files can include such things as italics. (Otherwise, once I import the file into a word processor capable of italics, I can no longer edit them as plaintext, which restricts the devices/apps I can use thereafter.)

What I’ve been doing until very recently is using Scrivener to synchronize projects with text files. That’s worked pretty well, but then I’ve moved everything into Jutoh to create ebooks. (Yes, Scrivener can create ebooks directly, but I strongly prefer Jutoh’s vastly increased scope for fiddling with the resulting document.) I’ve never liked Scrivener for writing fiction–too heavy for me, with lots of features that just get in the way–but it’s been working.

The problem? Once I’ve moved the text into Jutoh, editing it has only happened in Jutoh. After all, it’s clearly better to have a single always-preferred location for editing. And I’ve had no desire to re-create all of my Jutoh-specific formatting once I’ve done it the first time.

But I’ve been emailing with Julian Smart, technical director of Anthemion Software Ltd., and he’s solved that issue for me! Well, probably not just for me. Probably he thinks there are multiple users who will benefit. I’m not sure he’s right about that, but here’s hoping.

Jutoh is now capable of exporting and importing to and from Markdown. There are still a couple of glitches in the process (including losing quotation marks upon import), but I’ve figured out some workarounds and I expect the problems to go away very soon.

[UPDATE: Yes, very soon. I got an email about an hour after I typed the above. The latest beta release of Jutoh has solved the issues with quotation marks. Awesome!]

I could always have worked this out for myself, exporting from Markdown to HTML prior to importing into Jutoh, and exporting from Jutoh to HTML followed by conversion to Markdown, but frankly I didn’t think of it. Also that sounds like a pain in the ass.

What does this mean? It means I can edit anywhere, on any device. And my work is saved in Dropbox. So even borrowing a computer or phone would work, with very little setup delay.

Rather than carry a full laptop, I can carry my phone, a folding stand, a folding keyboard, and a Bluetooth finger-mouse if I happen to feel like it. In addition, I can carry a voice recorder. All of that fits into a very manly pouch-dingus, by the way.

As far as that voice recorder goes…I could record directly into my phone, and sometimes I do. Mostly I don’t, because I like the microphones of the recorder better. Either way, I can upload files to Dropbox and have my laptop (which is still sitting at the house in this scenario, and connected to Dropbox) auto-transcribe them via Dragon NaturallySpeaking. The transcriptions are then uploaded to Dropbox, and available on any device I happen to want to use within a few minutes (depending on the length of the recording).

Another option is to use an app called Dragon Anywhere for dictation on my phone. But the profile I have on my laptop is much more configurable than the online version. It also doesn’t cost a goofy amount of money every month. It also doesn’t turn itself off every time I pause for 20 seconds.

We’re pretty deep into the weeds here. But just in case any of you think this sounds like fun, or even useful, I’ll give you a bit more information.

• I use WriteMonkey 2.7 on Windows when I want to dictate in real time. WriteMonkey “natively” uses Markdown, so something like CTRL-I will italicize via Markdown (*example* yields example) and prevent me from having to explicitly voice asterisks and such. Or type them either. I have to use this older version of the program, because Dragon’s “Full Text Control” doesn’t work in the latest version.
• I use JotterPad on Android for pretty much the same reason. It works very well with an external keyboard, and the usual shortcut keys work as expected.
• There is also a program called Jarte which works with Dragon. Jarte is built upon WordPad, so Full Text Control works very well. Or anyway it works after you apply the fix found on the following page: http://www.jarte.com/dragon_naturally_speaking.html. Jarte does not understand Markdown, so it’s not ideal for me, but WriteMonkey creates additional files in your working folder that are sort of annoying, so if you’re not interested in the Markdown piece of this it’s a great choice.
• FWIW, I strongly recommend not dictating into DragonPad, the text editor that comes with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. It crashes, taking Dragon with it, and losing your work. It’s much better to avoid this scenario.
• I really, really like using Typora to edit text (and Markdown) files when I’m not going to be dictating and when I’m using my laptop. It works identically under Windows and Linux, as far as I can tell. There’s a beta version for Mac, but I haven’t tried that.

Things can get even more ridiculous, of course.

• I can put my laptop into a backpack, connect a microphone, and walk around dictating.
• I can use my phone as a monitor for the laptop using an app called aRDP to see what I’m doing as I wander, and vastly improve on the dictation experience I would have using Dragon Anywhere. This works via sharing my phone’s internet connection via a Hotspot, or if I want to avoid any interruptions I can conversely create a Wi-Fi network on the laptop, put the phone into Airplane mode, turn on Wi-Fi on the phone, and connect it to the laptop.
• I can use an app called WO Mic to redirect the microphone from my phone to the laptop over Wi-Fi, and wander around the house or backyard, phone in hand, sans backpack, also using aRDP as above.
• I can simultaneously use a headset microphone connected to my phone and carry the voice recorder in my hand, reassuring myself that one or the other will actually work. This is probably just me, but dictation works better for me if I don’t look at the words being generated…but if I don’t see them I’m constantly concerned that speaking into the air won’t really work. Have I lost a lot of work that way? Nope. But redundancy makes me feel better.
• Since my voice recorder includes a jack for audio output, through which I can listen to my voice as I record (nice in a headset scenario when the recorder is in a pocket and I want to be sure it’s actually still working), I can get creative and run an aux cable from the recorder to a USB sound card dongle plugged into my laptop: this way I get both a recording (for backup purposes & training Dragon’s accuracy) AND real-time transcription. This is actually my favorite scenario, because I’m trying to train myself to use (and trust) the recorder by itself. Of course there are lots of other ways to get simultaneous recording and transcription. But I like this one.

So maybe this will help somebody. Or not. As for me, I have recently begun writing again. There’s a lot to say about that, and potentially also about my use of a pen name, but maybe I’ll get to it another day.

Have fun out there!

The post The Perfect Writing Environment first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Yesterday’s 30-minute session came to 1041 words. So, are you a writer? If you are, you’ll probably know exactly what I mean when I say there’s no way to win with these numbers. I mean, at over 2000 words/hour a rational person would say that’s just swell. On the other hand? Some people are supposedly reaching speeds of over 4000 words per hour. I’ve heard rumors of 7000. And since that 30 minutes was all I did, the total count for the day isn’t all that impressive.

Is it faster in every single measurable way than I’ve been managing, on average, for the last couple of years? Yes. By a lot. How does that matter? I need to DO ALL THE THINGS! RIGHT NOW!

Heh. The people making the high-word-count claims, at least the ones I’m familiar with, also say they are outlining in advance. Sometimes even going beyond that to include pre-writing “beats” for each chapter. The beats could be anything from simple sentences to descriptions of scenes, potentially including information about setting, character development, dialogue versus action, or whatever. They also do other pre-writing work on some or all of the above before getting to the actual writing of words intended to be read by other people. That’s…a lot of work, right? Good for them! (I like stories more than work, though. I sit down, or more likely wander around all over the place, and tell myself a story. Weird and not correct, maybe?)

Truth: am I totally opposed to writing this way, in theory? Nah, not so much. But there are two primary problems. First, the whole idea bores me, and all my attempts to outline thus far (in advance, anyway–sometimes I do write an outline as I go along, and in fact I’m doing that with the current book) have led to insta-avoidance, the precise opposite of a “flow” state. Second, I wonder just how long all this outlining and pre-writing takes? If that’s figured into the words-per-hour count, what do you end up with then?

Of course I could be completely wrong about all this, which wouldn’t be unusual. Maybe the next book will tell me it needs an outline, or I’ll find a way to make myself do it and see what happens, or the pixies will write the damn thing instead of leaving dirty dishes for me to find in the kitchen of a morning. Or maybe “the reason” I don’t need to outline is that I cycle back and edit my work as I go along (not via dictation, or at least mostly not…definitely not via transcription, though if there were a way to do that I’d probably try it). Or maybe I’ll just get better at this over time, and either speed way up or slow way down and require less editing, or I’ll begin to love rewriting things six times, or the answers will all be different with different books, or whatever. Time will tell.

In the ever-lasting “plotters” vs. “pantsers” debate (as in “writing by the seat of your pants”), sometimes the plotters say that pantsers have no idea where their book is going, so they’ll have to throw out tons of work, or they’ll end up with a mess. Some of the pantsers buy that notion, and actually do either or both of those things. Hmm.

As for me…I wonder: why is it that, when I begin a chapter, I’m going to know less about what I need to write than a person who outlined in advance would? I mean, that person presumably wrote the outline before starting the book, right? But as I begin a new chapter, I ought to know more about the book than I did before I started. Right?

Both of us are aware of things like story structure, character arcs, and so forth? Maybe so. The plotter probably changes the outline as she goes along, and the pantser is probably aware of what, in some sort of meta-writing sense, needs to be going on. I’m not sure either is theoretically better than the other. The goal, it seems to me, is to reach a flow state and give yourself permission to write. Does an outline help with that? Use it! Does it get in the way? Eschews it! So says me, if not all that darn-well grammatically. You’re welcome.

Arguments on both sides strike me as suspiciously self-serving. Some of the pantsers say plotters end up with formulaic plots, and also say that if they don’t know where their book is going that must be true for the reader too. Uh…that argument reminds me of the folks who don’t like open-source software, because it’s presumably easy to find bugs/exploits in it. Right, but see, creating software you don’t know how to break is easy. Creating software nobody knows how to break is quite a bit harder. The more eyes on it, the better, I think. In other words, the fact that you don’t know where your story is going as you write it has nothing at all to do with its predictability to someone else. Just saying.

Do what works, I say. If it quits working, do something else. Try other things even if what you’re doing is working, to see if they work better. But mostly, do what works. Kind of a rule around here. On my better days I sometimes follow it. Ish.

About rebooting? As if I’m going to finally get to why that’s in the title of this post? Well, maybe. There’s the career-level thing, about which I’ll probably tell you tomorrow. Not fair, given the headline and all, but I do have other things to do today. Then there’s the fact that transcription quality was falling off a cliff yesterday, and the first computer-reboot seemed to help but later attempts didn’t. And then there’s the way I’m approaching transcription itself.

Version 15 of Dragon NaturallySpeaking is precisely 1.836 metric shit-tons better than previous versions. So what did I do? I decided to ignore things like maintaining separate profiles for separate microphones. I mean, what if I didn’t need to? Wouldn’t that be convenient? The software works so well, after all, so maybe…?

Yeah, no. I was using my USB headset when dictating directly into my laptop, plus using my phone both with and without a headset for transcription. I also used the phone’s headset on the laptop. Plus I played around with the laptop’s internal microphone. All in the same profile, telling Dragon it was the same microphone. I also used the same profile for both fiction and nonfiction. This…isn’t supposed to be a good idea. Probably it wasn’t. So I deleted that profile, and started afresh, and Dragon’s accuracy improved greatly. Immediately. So now I have five entirely separate profiles, and may have more soon. (I also bought an Olympus digital voice recorder, which I like quite a bit, and used it in this morning’s session.)

Huh. Long post. Need to get back to work soon. You too, maybe?

Anyway, before I leave you for today: this morning I got 42 minutes of dictation in. No idea about word count, but I did realize I’d actually finished Chapter 7 yesterday. Or, you know, I got to a point where I realized what I had looked like a chapter and it came in at around 2500 words, which feels appropriate for this book. Magic, right? Maybe so. Anyway, today’s stuff was all for Chapter 8.

On the cookbook front, I got the ebook mostly done last night. Today and tomorrow I’ll be doing a cover and formatting it for print. Ideally ordering a proof before the weekend…I definitely want that done before Monday, though, so I can dedicate next week to fiction and hopefully finish this thing by the end of it.

Oh. Did I say I should get back to work? I think I did. I should have said it, because it’s true. I should also do it. Maybe I will?

Have fun out there!

Yesterday’s dictation count: 1041 words
Time spent dictating: 30 minutes, 1 session
Week to date: 4118 words
Total words since 1/22/18: 4118

The post Rebooting! Also, plotters vs. pantsers vs. me! Who’s gonna win? first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Lots of changes around here. More coming, too, but I don’t want to get into it…at least not yet.

There are many things I wish weren’t true but are, and one of them is that I get my best results writing in the morning – by which I mean first thing in the morning. So okay, that’s what I’m doing.

It’ll be complicated with all the kids in the house and with the summer break looming, but Monday through Friday I’ll have four hours to write before doing anything else. There’s a little bit of time on Saturday and Sunday mornings, as well.

Chiefly, though, if any of you are writers – or want to be writers – by which I guess I mean you want to write – and are interested in dictation? I have to highly recommend Dragon Anywhere, available for both Android and iOS, though I don’t want to.

Why don’t I want to? Because it requires constant Internet access. Because Nuance, the company that produces it, is extremely annoying to deal with. Because the app screws up my punctuation and capitalization, and doesn’t understand paragraphs without line spaces between them, and forces me to treat it as a text-only first-draft sort of tool, including such weirdnesses (no, the app did not recognize that word, but whose fault is that?) as only uploading to Dropbox when I specifically tell it to, and even then only as text files with no formatting. Because the app costs $15 a month.

Can I overlook all that? Yes. Why? Because, in the end, it works. I’m doing all my writing on my phone these days. I’m using its built-in microphone. Its text-to-speech engine, wherever in the cloud it may reside, works a heck of a lot better than the version of Dragon running on my laptop.

In principle I could simply be recording my voice using any old app, and transcribing those recordings back at my laptop whenever it happened to be convenient. And I’ve done that. But I don’t get any immediate feedback if there’s something wrong with the recording, which has led to a lot of wasted time and eroded my trust in the process. Also, the transcription is less accurate than simply using Dragon Anywhere. Also, the editing/transcribing process is fairly cumbersome and I very much prefer to do it as I go along, with immediate feedback.

Mostly, I just talk and my words appear on the phone. That’s what I want.

There are bugs, of course. If I press “delete” or “backspace” on my folding Bluetooth keyboard, if for some reason I actually connect it, for some other reason the app behaves as if I’d hit the key twice. I have to say…that’s clearly weird. It’s not clear to me why such a simple thing wouldn’t be fixed, even if it had to be done by giving users an optional setting.

It’s exciting for a geek like me to watch just how well this thing works. I’ve used it in a crowded pizza joint that had a full arcade blaring, with running-screaming kids, and the dictation was next to flawlessly transcribed. On the other hand, when I tried to use it outdoors with a slight breeze, I’d have been better off arranging rocks into the shapes of the characters I wanted to type. Maybe I could solve the problem with the right external microphone, or maybe not. So far, not.

I tried a few Bluetooth microphones, by the way. No go. I’d read that they wouldn’t work, and sure enough they didn’t. Too bad.

So that’s it. That’s what I’m doing. It’s going all right, except that somehow I started off writing a new novel I hadn’t seen coming. But what the heck; I’m having fun with it.

And yes, I dictated this entire post using Dragon Anywhere. Took me about 20 minutes, with editing, at a bit under 700 words (no, the app does not have a word-count feature). I guess you’ll have to judge the result for yourselves.

Meanwhile? Have fun out there!

The post Writing Process Revisited first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Hi!

Of course you guys knew that already. So what I did today was write down a lot of things that might or might not be objectively true, but will have to be true if I’m going to write fiction in the midst of distractions. Then I recorded myself reading those things aloud. Then I recorded an app on my phone that plays stuff I like that kind of helps block other noises…crickets, frogs, thunder, and so forth. Then I put the two tracks together, fiddled with them, and created a five-minute MP3. Which I put back on my phone.

So I’ll probably play the thing for myself, and let it repeat, as I sleep.

Why would I do this? Well, how’s it going to hurt? I credit Lawrence Block with any value this plan has, and freely offer both the idea and the text as targets for your amusement. The text follows:

I am not behind. I’m never behind. I always have exactly the progress I’ve created. I have no obligation to write.

There is no reason I can’t write, often, except that I get in the way. Writing is easy and fun for me.

I don’t need a particular method. It’s okay to type on a Neo, type directly on my laptop, dictate into my phone or laptop, type on a Bluetooth keyboard, or what have you. I don’t need special equipment. A napkin and a pencil will do in a pinch.

I will aim for one draft, but will leave placeholders with quick notes to myself in lieu of stopping to do research, or stopping to figure something out, or stopping to flip back through previously completed work to answer a question. I will produce one clean draft, with quick notes as needed.

I don’t need a particular location. I can type at my desk, or in a coffee shop. I can dictate while sitting on a rock, or possibly while walking down a trail.

I don’t need a particular schedule. I can write anytime I get a free moment. I can write on a Neo, or dictate text, while sitting on a bench and watching kids play. I can write at my desk while kids watch TV. It does not matter that I will be interrupted, or that dictation is faster than typing. It only matters that I can write if I want to.

I can write in a crowded room, while being distracted. Writing is not difficult. It does not require perfect concentration.

Writing is not a job. Writing may or may not lead to income. Writing more is better than writing less. I feel good when I write. I feel bad when I don’t write. So I should write, a lot, and feel good.

Planning and outlining kill the fun. I will not plan to write anything in particular. I will write whatever I feel like writing. I will not plan writing time, because that creates pressure. I will find time when I feel like writing, and write only then.

I don’t owe anybody any fiction. I write for my own enjoyment. If I’m not enjoying what I write, I will write something else.

Writing is not important. I don’t have to stop doing anything else in order to write. Writing is just a fun thing to do. I write for fun, only, and often, because I want to.

The business side of writing is not writing. Writing blurbs and descriptions are part of the business side of things. They are only tangentially related to fiction. I write fiction to tell myself a fun story. Blurbs and descriptions exist to sell books and stories.

I do all my writing myself. I do all editing myself, too. I create my own book covers, and blurbs, and descriptions. I do all the book design. I don’t need a team. It’s okay that other people have teams. They just get in my way.

I publish everything myself. I may or may not allow others to publish my work in the future. That is a business decision, and has nothing to do with my writing.

Writing is creation. Publishing is business. Writing can not be a slave to publishing. Publishing is a game to be played after writing is finished.

I do not check sales figures. I do not read or solicit reviews. Instead I write more than I would if I let those things take over my brain.

As a matter of convenience I usually write on my phone. I almost always have my phone with me. My phone has current versions of whatever I’m writing. I can edit on my phone.

It is time to write now.

So that’s it. Enjoy it if you can, and have fun out there!

The post I am such a geek. first appeared on Caveat Lector.

So I posted a comment over at Anarchist Shemale’s blog (well worth reading, by the way), and decided I might as well post it over here too. It’s sort of philosophical: I disagreed with the notion that reason is superior to emotion. Like this:

I don’t want you guys to misinterpret: I say house pets, because they’re lovable. Loved, too, in many but sadly not all cases. But most people probably won’t contribute much to the world at large. Fill the emotional needs of others, yes, sure. Maybe contribute food and other necessities too. So do animals in the wild, even insects. But will they contribute original thought or analysis or art that inspires us? Most folks never will, because they can’t. That doesn’t mean they’re not valuable, and deserving of love and affection. Doesn’t mean there aren’t several I’d gladly take a bullet for, because I love them and want to do whatever I can for them. That’s a separate matter entirely. But it does mean there’s not a lot of point in worrying about their opinions, present or future, or appealing to them via reason. That’s…just not their thing. It probably never will be.

It is what it is. Luckily most folks, regardless of all that, are actually pretty decent. By which I mean they have a degree of empathy, and mostly treat others as they’d like to be treated. I have no idea why this is true, but I’m convinced of it. It makes me happy.

Is this at all relevant to the main business, whatever that might be, of this blog? Not that I can tell. I’m maintaining my every-day writing streak, though, so there’s that.

Really should have taken on the end of this trilogy (unless there are more books later) earlier. I’m having a blast.

Have fun out there!

The post Stealing from myself first appeared on Caveat Lector.

Yes, I’m working on stuff. Intermittently. Not making much progress. Not writing about that today. Meanwhile, I’m venting here.

I keep being told, essentially, that I shouldn’t advocate for the kids. Even if this isn’t explicit (it’s very much not explicit), I have trouble coming up with another interpretation of what gets said to me. By well-meaning people, who are trying to help, and I’m not kidding about that–they want this to work. And yet I experience great dissonance in my cognition. I would be tempted to the dark side, if only I could find it. Yet all is mush.

The above apparently meaning that if there’s something I can’t do myself, I also shouldn’t ask for help from those who might or might not be able to help. As in, I ask one person…get told there’s nothing to be done. Another person asks me if there are outstanding issues with any of the kids. I say yes, because I’m supposed to communicate truthfully and in fact kids can get removed from our home if I don’t do that with this person. Who is required to ask me that sort of question, too. This gets me “in trouble.”

I mean, on the most recent issue I sent an email to one person. Got a verbal reply. Then answered a question, and did what the person asking the question told me to do (“go ask someone Person One talked to the first time and say I’ll get a paper in front of the judge if that will help”). This was apparently over-reaching, or something. At any rate I did it wrong and should have gone through only one person. How I would have done that more is not clear.

Which was I not supposed to do? Ask the first person? Answer the second person’s question? Do as the second person asked me to do? It’s a problem I have, I guess, that even after being chastised I have no clue.

Also I describe what’s going on in the house in regular updates, which I’m told are helpful. This is a problem, because of things. I don’t know what things, though. I’m not supposed to describe things others don’t see when they’re here, because that way these things are all unsubstantiated and whatnot. On the other hand if I don’t describe what’s going on and a situation develops further, how come I never said anything? Oh wait, I am supposed to send that information, but not to the people who say I should send it to them, because of coordination and not misunderstanding anything.

Plus when I send an email it may be that I was supposed to call a phone number, except that there was no crisis and no immediate help was needed, and the rules I’ve seen say notification within 24 hours is required. I did that. And on the evening in question I was busy dealing with the issue at hand, thus not free to make a call. Anyway, I’m wrong about that too. I either say too much or not enough, based on criteria I can’t see.

Also I go to court hearings. This is unusual. Perhaps it’s bad. Now, in the last hearing I got to hear the judge being told what a great job we were doing with this and that, and the judge suggested we should teach classes in the other thing. But, you know, going to hearings is probably not good, because other foster parents don’t. Never mind that the kids asked me to, because they would be in school but still wanted me to tell them what was going on. (Minus what gets caught in a filter for age-level reasons.) Also never mind that the kids’ lawyer wanted to talk to me that day. And everybody says it’s great that I go, as if I’m a puppy who needs that. But then it’s an example of how I’m difficult to deal with, too. Um. Sorry?

Also I start and end emails with things like “this is just an update; there’s no crisis” but am told that I shouldn’t include so much information, or at least not to the people who have explicitly asked me to keep them updated, who have the authority to remove the kids from our home if I don’t do as they ask. Because after all I’m not asking for anything, so email is wrong to send. See, the fact that I write email means…uh…that I must be demanding something, and I’m probably being rude about it. Somehow. Even if I say it’s just an update, and I don’t ask for anything, and in fact even if the email is about how a kid is doing better.

I also have to write about how kids react to specific events. Once, recently, I said “these kids are going to have a very tough week because of specific events of the sort for which I’m supposed to document their reactions, because everybody wants a piece of them and they’re not going to get a break for even a single day, plus they’re going to get a final version of some bad news (for most of them, with a strong minority opinion) that we’ve already told them but they don’t want to believe is true right now.” Then I documented that the kids had a tough week. Then I said “we’re now dealing with this and that, which I attribute to fallout from that rough week.”

Only, see, I did it wrong. I guess I was supposed to say it was a tough week only afterward, not to say it would be tough in advance, because saying it in advance is confrontational even if kind of obvious, and it was probably wrong of me to hope that somebody would change their schedule (multiple somebodies had the option, but perhaps I blamed only one even if I never said so or even implied it, because…I guess…it could be true…but for what it’s worth that actually didn’t even occur to me). And then (maybe?) I was supposed to give “antecedents” for problematic behavior, but not supposed to include recent stresses like, you know, anything that happened during that rough week. Because then people might think I was blaming them. Instead of, you know, saying it was a tough week and we were handling it but the kids were basically doing okay. Which is what I wrote.

Uh. All right then. New rule: the fact of the email means more than the content of the email. Second new rule: sending a message to people is an attack on those people, because clearly I want them to fix everything in sight even if I’m not asking for any kind of help, because after all I sent the email I was asked to send and who does that unless they want specific actions? So if I mention something they’re involved in, and I sent it to them among others, I’m mad at them. Because email is the same as anger. That’s all.

I miss talking to software developers sometimes. They’re a screwy bunch, but the idea of communicating information as information doesn’t generally upset them.

On another topic: I just deleted a specific example of something I once wrote about. Too sensitive for this venue. It was…harrowing. Seriously, I wake up at night and worry sometimes. But, you know, I was required to tell people, and did tell people, and then I was required to pretend it made sense when I was told that saying anything about it was uncalled for, because I’m not a therapist or otherwise a professional thingamajig. I’m just a person legally required to mention it, who could easily be stopped from being a foster parent if I didn’t mention it. So next time, what do I do instead? The same thing, as far as I can tell. And then I pretend the resulting scolding makes sense. Only I don’t do that second part very well.

This system? It seems to want foster parents to run kid-warehouses. Not to pay attention, not to try to help, not to describe how kids are actually responding to events…if, you know, kids act differently and speak differently around people they’ve come to trust more than other people, which of course is doubtful because who says it even happened? I wonder what kinds of foster parents tend to flourish in a system like that. I mean, if incentives matter. Good thing that’s just a myth. The incentive thing, I mean.

Document everything, but don’t write so much. Do as folks ask, but don’t do it when they might or might not have meant it, because miscommunication is bad. Report everything worth reporting, but not necessarily in the form that’s written down as a requirement, in case someone else has another idea in their head of how to handle any given situation, and of course I should know what that idea is and probably just do it right to begin with. Give only facts, not opinions. Bear in mind that anything I say about what I’ve seen is only an opinion…if anyone who saw it might feel there might be an obvious implication, anyway.

Because: it can’t be a fact if there are implications. If I report a fact that might cause concern, that’s the same as saying what people might be concerned about is true, and since I’m not a professional whatsit, that makes the fact itself an opinion. It’s actually kind of weird that I never noticed that rule before.

Even if I explicitly say I’m reporting what I saw but not forming or giving an opinion because I don’t know that it means anything, but I figure it’s worth mentioning just in case more develops. Then when a bit more develops, and I see it, and I keep people updated as they’ve requested, I should know I did that wrong too. Because reasons. Meanwhile I should form a connection with the kids, and build trust in both directions, but don’t tell anyone what I learn from doing so, but be sure to talk about kids’ progress and reactions, as long as I do that without giving opinions or writing too much or sending it to people who ask.

Sure. I can do that.

It goes like this: “Don’t make waves, even by accident, because if you do you’re doing it wrong. Bear in mind that the kids can be removed at any time. Please be fearful of that, and keep your head down, because you need us more than we need you.”

No problem. Incidentally, that last part is very true. I need to help these kids. I can’t do it unless people let me. And I’ve made commitments–even if it’s only implied, “I’ll stick around and see you through to the other side of this mess” isn’t one of those things on which I’d like to renege. They’ve been tossed around enough, says me. I don’t want to be another perpetrator.

The system’s horrifically broken, though. How do I know? Because I think every single one of the people I’ve dealt with in the system is doing his or her best to help the kids. Seriously. All of them are doing their best, within the system. I’m impressed by how many good people I’ve met. It’s uplifting–this isn’t sarcasm; it’s simple truth. And yet the system seems to come out on top.

Oh. Never mind. I just realized I got that completely wrong. The system’s pretty good, come to think of it.

It’s just not actually designed to help kids. It works for its own survival.

The post Man…the kids are great people. So are the folks trying to help them. first appeared on Caveat Lector.