"You should write a book"

Funny thing happened today. Two different people from two completely different walks of life suggested I write a book. One of them didn't even know that I'd been bleeding at the altar of the written word for the past...oh my god...decade. And still, she said, she'd want to read a book if I wrote it.
I'm not sure what I want to write a book about. I watch my predilections flop around from human sexuality to relationships to all things science-y and consumable to urban design to behavioral neuroscience. People fascinate me, I guess. We're pretty remarkable creatures.
I could memoir, I suppose, but my memory for details, my regard for the past even, is so thin, that much of it would be fiction, intended or not.
And speaking of fiction, I could do that. I have been doing that, page after hand-scrawled page of a twisted fairy tale where no one isn't damaged but most people are pretty good anyway.
Art imitating life again.
Maybe the goddess is calling me back to the nest, maybe she's putting the pen squarely back in my fist. It's been too long, after all, and my soul is drying out on the edges. To curl back in her arms with some blank pages and the goal of spinning a book out of them might not be a bad thing.
And maybe this blog post is a reasonable start.

Reno does double duty as a white morass

Ok. I admit it. I'm writing this post to kill some time while I download some gypsy jazz given to me by a player in Reno. Dan left some iPod equipment behind and I told him he'd only get it back if he came armed with gypsy jazz.

Which I'm currently downloading at the Java Jungle in Reno.

The Java Jungle is a friendly damned coffee shop. It sits right in downtown Reno with mile-high casinos breathing down its neck on every side—a little refuge where I've already met a pile of nice people. I think it might even be a friendlier place than the shops in Prescott. I would have earlier claimed that's not possible, but there it is. Makes me wonder if I shouldn't be friendlier as well, and anyone who knows me knows I'm already pee-on-the-floor friendly.

In any case, Dan was saying that his friends are playing down at the Raven in April. Turned out to be the same band that my beautiful friend Candace wrote about at ReadItNews.com. And please know Dan and Candace both say you should go see 'em if you can.

Reno snowed me in and I'm still not sure I'll be seeing the other side of the Sierras anytime soon. I've sent out a dozen resumes to all corners of the country so far, but I think I'll have to belly up to a few publications to get the jobby of my dreams. Bellying up is, in fact, my dominant reason for being out here. I sort of wish I'd stayed home in Prescott for a few days to mountain bike in 70-degree weather rather than skulking in Reno coffee shops, but the fact is, only a deadline would have gotten my ass out of Prescott. And that deadline was last Saturday.

Still, I'm bummed with the stupid snow. Strong words for a devout snow lover, but there you are. And now, I'm off to buy chains and to call an award-winning editor of a Sedona pub.

The Impulse Factor: Hacking the novelty-seeking brain

Maybe you can relate. I was raised by aliens and so I know little of social norms. I usually guess and then I beat myself up rather than consider that my equipment is more or less normal.

Or at least I assumed it was normal.

But then I ran across a book, The Impulse Factor, which posits that about a quarter of us naked monkeys process dopamine poorly. That poor processing causes us to misbehave in search of the dopamine jolt we sorely need in order to feel normal. The book's author says the mutation behind the dopamine problem coincided with the diaspora of homo sapiens from Africa; in doing so, he joins a legion of non-fiction authors who claimed to find the one 'it' that drove the formation of human civilization. Earlier 'its' include coal and salt, so I'll let that pass.

What's especially intriguing for me, a poster child for those who bear the mutation (witness: can't sit through a meeting, pedalled cross country by myself, will try anything but heroin and meth once) is that short deadlines make our faulty little brains work really, really well. So all that procrastinating was actually just me biding time until my smart brain kicked in.

So now I'm toying with how to use the power of the smart brain without screwing myself on short deadline. There's a great essay on Structured Procrastination that meditates on how to use said downtime for good rather than for evil. Last night, I experimented with deliberate, structured procrastination by reading 200 pages of a friend's manuscript. I think the approach might be a winner. Instead of watching crappy ol' TV, or trying to play keyboard in my freezing garage apartment (don't ask) I could find inspiration by reading another human's work of art, rest my brain and prepare for a productive next day.

And the next day, when I did sit down to write, I knocked out 3,000 words of—get this—pleasurable prose. Incredible.

Now I'll be the first to admit that all these lifehacks work sort of OK some of the time. Productivity and flow, for me at least, are moving targets. Sometimes it's the bottom of the hour hack, sometimes it's the avoiding of all the evil timesucking web sites hack, and sometimes it's just reading late into the night and filling the proverbial well.

The 3 building blocks of happiness: What writers need to know to make it through the day

Martin Seligman posits that there's more to mental health than the mere absence of the mental wackies. For more than 30 years, the director of the Positive Psychology Center of the University of Pennsylvania has been studying the psychology of happiness, and happiness, he maintains, is the result of experiencing meaning, engagement and, to a lesser degree, pleasure in one's life.

The meaning piece explains why parents of children, be they flesh or creative, can sport those haunted, tortured expressions and still claim to be happy. Seligman's ideas also illustrate why engaged Golgafrinchans who create no value in society—think motivational speakers, day traders or middle management—say they're pretty happy despite the fact that they occupy a near vacuum of meaning. And why a brilliant steak dinner at the end of the day tastes so good, but it doesn't go very far in creating happiness in the absence of an engaged, meaningful life.

Trying to find a dynamic balance amongst the three seems the way to go. Enjoy flow (the ultimate sense of engagement) when it happens, and don't sweat it, writerly crowd, if the writing hurts most of the time. At least it's meaningful. And if the going gets too rough, pull a pleausurable pint of Guiness or grab a bag of Dove chocolate and try to relax. It might only be a small dose of happiness, but even a small dose can be powerful.

Mountain biking is a laboratory for life process

In June, I told everyone that I was going on a roadtrip. Then I house-sat for three weeks and forgot I told everyone I was leaving. Fast forward through a bunch of surprised reactions at Prescott's coffee shops, stores and pubs and I've finally hit the road.

The framework: An open-ended (anywhere from a week until I draw my last breath) driving trip aimed at places I can ride my mountain bike.

I rode the Rocky Ridge trail in Flagstaff on Wednesday. Unlike the lonely trails of Prescott, this trail swarmed with people. I saw an 8-year-old kid going over technical terrain on a bmx. Impressive.

In any case, for a while now, I've pondered the similarities between mountain biking and navigating my way through life. Or at least the lessons mountain biking offers.

Disclaimer: Mountain biking, while fun, is a singularly selfish, self-serving sport, so don't imagine that I'm trying to elevate it in any way shape or form.

That being said, it comes down to this. When you mountain bike, you MUST look where you want to go. Choose to look where you don't want to go and you go there, typically with painful results. Even if you want to go elsewhere, you'll always go to the exact spot where you put your attention. I'm pretty sure this holds true in life as well, but it's less noticeable because you don't break a collar bone every time you focus on what you don't want.

Also, sometimes when you get into a hairy spot, the only way to avoid disaster is to not only keep pedaling, but pedal HARDER. Do that, and you often surprise yourself by getting over something you would earlier have told yourself was impossible.

I'm in Moab today, so I'll keep you posted on the life lessons of slickrock.

St. Exupery in the flesh

The closest I've come to getting a tattoo in recent memory was after seeing this web site:
Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos. Most of the tats are very pretty, and some are downright inspiring. If I ever secure a very favorite quote of five words or less, I'm so going to go there. Just watch!

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 1

It's been an interesting couple of months. I stopped my magazine for awhile and now with the help of a new partner, I'm fixing to restart it. I got invited by my landlordette to be homeless. I stopped a relationship and had a not-so-shiny rebound. I didn't even know what a rebound was until this year. Seriously. I thought rebounding was the province of effete goth people who listened to minor key electro-pop music. You know, music like Dido, a chanteuse with great skills at song-writing and bad skills at love.

I've been listening to Dido for weeks.

And so, what with my life falling down around my ears and all, you can imagine that maintaining my productivity and creativity has been a challenge. Oh, I'm writing really bad love songs and journaling my ass off, but the most important bits, the bits where I take authentic action towards driving my career as a publishing writer, sometimes fall prey to these depressed tetris-playing, Dido-blasting jags that go on for far, far too long.

And so, since I've been sucking a little, I figure I can ALSO find a way to suck it up.

In the past, when I was teaching school and had to be 'on' – broken heart or no (and there were a few) – I discovered that feeling like dookie didn't mean that my output was going to be any better or worse than it would normally. Simply put, creative/social juice or the lack thereof determines the level of fun I'll have but not the quality of output.

Based on that bit of hard-earned wisdom, I knew I just had to find a way to 1) think my day through and 2) follow through, regardless of my level of pain or distress. In my next post, I'll tell you what I came up with.

On the care and feeding of the creative life - PART 2

In PART 1, I described my emo-roller coaster rides and how I wanted to manage them with regard to my creativity and productivity. Here's what I've come up with.

Hour-long chunks. See, there's 8 of them in a day, so if you allot an hour or so to all active projects, you can get a heck of a lot done in one working day. For example, Saturday I scheduled one hour for journalism, one hour for http://www.readitnews.com/ and one hour for my commercial work (Accounting for the limited hours: I had a wedding that afternoon - in fact, I'm typed a draft of this entry out at the Juniper Well Ranch).

Starting to work wasn't easy. For some reason, when I sit down to commence my day, I often feel a paralyzing anxiety wherein I become terrified to make a decision of what to start. The one hour chunks mandate I do something, and since none of the chunks are long enough to actually create a protracted suck experience, I'm finding that I can actually start and then subsequently don't need to procrastinate too much.

The other part of it is that the the short intervals demand that I pick the most important thing to attack and then stick with it for the duration. It actually forces a bit of unconscious prioritization. I'll never get it all done in one sitting, so I have to chose the the things with the most juice to get to.

While this is a new experiment whose success is uncertain, quite a few of my old experiments have worked, and so I have hope. This is, in fact, an expansion on a old approach wherein I spent .5 - 1 hour writing and playing music in the morning. And about the same amount of time cleaning beforehand. I've been doing that routine for months now with wonderful success.

I'll keep you posted on how well it works.

Vivan art and creativity, but don't confuse them

I was going through my old email account when I rediscovered one of signature lines, a quote:

"Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." The quote has everything to do with my morning practice.

In the last 5 months, I've begun my day by cleaning my soon-to-be ex-casa and then sit down for 1/2 hour to be creative - a prescribed period of time when it's ok to make mistakes. After brewing a cup of tea, I sit down to my Pocket PC to write (I use my Pocket PC because it's so much easier to be creative with a computer lacking Internet). I take solace in this scheduled time; there's nothing in all the world that I'm supposed to be doing besides creating and that takes the pressure off.

For me, it's super important to create a scheduled practice to make sure my writing, that thing that's so important that I've made countless sacrifices to keep doing it, actually happens. And I've found that doing the important stuff first thing is the key to making sure it doesn't slip through the cracks.

The practice worked very well while I was creating - I could write anywhere from 300-1000 words depending on how easily the writing was flowing. But then I finished the story I was working on, and I faced a conundrum. Do I start creating something else, or do I spend that 1/2 hour doing art, the deciding what to keep?

For the time being, I've decided to do what inspires me, which means I've spent the last two days doing art - cleaning up my mistakes and creations from last week and turning them into something that I'd be willing to show my friends, and eventually, if all goes well, the world.