Nobody likes me, everybody hates me. Might as well go eat woooooorms!
Day 8. The loneliness has set in. I’m starting to feel isolated and disconnected from people. This is the first day since I started that I don’t really WANT to blog. I think it’s just a bad day. My hands have been hurting pretty bad the past few days (probably osteoarthritis) and I turn into a petulant dirt-kicker when I have a health thing I can’t just ignore. I intellectually know that it is just an off day cause I had such a productive weekend and eventually there has to be a down, but emotionally I just think everything sucks and maybe it will suck forever and what am I doing here? This is not my beautiful house. This is not my beautiful wife. So forth etc.
I really appreciate the people who have been reaching out and sending email or chatting with me about nothing in particular. I decided to write a list of things that make me happy today and I stared at a blank page for several minutes before googling the phrase to jumpstart my brain on what makes it happy. So, that’s disconcerting. I’m plenty happy, it’s just my brain came up blank from that prompt so I’m clearly not thinking as much about being happy when I am and identifying what it is that puts me there.
Today’s Links (Weird, Wonderful things that make me happy unironically):
Awhile back I was having a bad time of it and reached out to Richard Dansky. I think just posting the conversation here (with permission and cutting out the 2 hours of talking about sasquatches afterward) explains it best.
Minerva Zimmerman: Does the sense that you’re sending words out into a vacuum really ever end?
Richard Dansky: No
MZ: That’s good to know.
RD: Nobody wants them until suddenly everybody wants them but the words that weren’t specifically asked for still feel like paper boats on a very large river.
MZ: Thanks. That helps.
RD: It’s the truth
MZ: That’s easier to deal with than believing it will change.
And it’s true. It does help to know it continues to feel like that, it means I don’t have to worry about it. That I feel like that all the time and so does everyone else makes me less likely to obsess about it. It was originally (way back when I was a disillusioned teen) BBS systems that made me feel less alone. Then it was when I first entered the workforce and had a large group of peers outside of a school environment. Eventually it was internet message boards, ICQ, and blogs. It’s only relatively recently that social media has taken on that role. Prior to social media, my social interaction was dependent on me going TO it, rather than being an interactive observer. Social media has allowed me to be less mindful of my social interaction… at the same time it has led me to many MANY wonderful things. I am trying very hard to be more mindful of my life and my actions this year. It doesn’t matter what I do so much as it matters that I CHOOSE to do it.
Anthropological Concept of the Day:
Dunbar’s Number – suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships.
A list of things that scare me (in no particular order):
being unable to save my loved ones
being taken advantage of intellectually without catching on
everyone agreeing with my inner critic
that something I know to be really evil/dangerous seems innocent and harmless to everyone else and I can’t get them to listen and so I am forced to watch as it destroys them
that I have somehow misplaced my pants in public
having a viscous and sticky substance on my hands that I cannot get off
being forced to choose between saving a single loved one when two or more are in peril
watching the deterioration of a loved one in a body they no longer control
losing my mind
caring for my aging parents
being trapped in any way
tight spaces
that everyone will suddenly forget me
losing the use of my hands (and with beginning osteoarthritis this is a big one)
losing language, being unable to speak or write
losing my sense of self
that I will die before I write the stories in my head
that I will forget important memories of people who are no longer here
that I will outlive all of my loved ones
knowing that someday my dogs will die before me
that my actions will cause someone I love to suffer or die horribly
that my body will betray me and breakdown before my mind does
that being happy means I can’t write/create and these two things can never coexist in my life.
Today we planted tomatoes, peas, and an artichoke. It’s not a bad a bad start, but we’re going to try and plant a lot more veggies this year. The drought in California is likely to make produce more expensive. We’ll try to get some carrots, radishes, and various greens and lettuce as the soil warms up more.
I spent today working outside planting flowers and reclaiming the front garden. We’ve let the blackberries and weeds get the better of us and I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. Aaron fixed the lawnmower and mowed the whole yard. We’re tired, sore, and feel happily productive. So pizza and drinks, and watching the Trail Blazers is on the menu for this evening.
Last Night I managed to have an ink-tastrophe. I started writing notecards to people and got all fancy using a dip pen and… managed to tip over a whole bottle of purple ink. I managed to clean most of it up but I ended up with quite a bit on me.
Luckily LAVA soap is damn near magical at getting such things out of skin. Someone remind me not to start using a dip pen at 11pm on the top level of my desk. It will only end in a purple curtain of swearing.
One of the things I’ve found myself worrying about on this Twitter Hiatus, is how other people are doing physically, emotionally, and so forth. It was only yesterday that I realized I could y’know… just email people and ask after their well-being. Which, was frankly a rather uncomfortable realization. How long have I just been stalking my friends on social media rather than actually showing my concern? I must be a really crappy friend to a whole lot of people because I have been neglecting on the ones not on social media entirely, and pseudo-neglecting a great many people by simply seeking their updates rather than reaching out. Ouch.
Why is the act of sending a simple “thinking of you” email feel so difficult all of a sudden? Why is using the phone to call someone a paralyzing idea? I don’t actually have a real hang-up about either… I just don’t do them. Even intellectually knowing that it really doesn’t matter WHAT to say, just that it matters to say something… isn’t helping me get over this hurdle. I guess it’s just going to be one of those things that’s difficult until it suddenly isn’t anymore. I just need to suck it up and reach out. I need to reach out ESPECIALLY since I don’t need anything from anyone. Hell, I don’t even need an email in response… I just need people to know I care.
Quotes of the Day:
“Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So, love the people who treat you right and forget about the ones who don’t. And believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said that it would be easy, they just promised it would be worth it.”—Harvey MacKay
“If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.”—Virginia Woolf
“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”—Bob Marley
THINGS YOU SHOULD LOOK AT:
New Episodes of Gortimer Gibbons Life On Normal Street
March Flash Madness: Voting is over, but the stories will be up for another month before going into an anthology to benefit the SFWA’s Emergency Medical Fund to provide financial assistance to writers in medical need.
Revision by Andrea Phillips – I have read this and it is an excellent near-future SF novel with a female protagonist I would not describe as typically strong. To be honest, the protagonist is kind of a dork and you want to shake her sometimes, but she’s the sort of protagonist who seems like a real person and her mistakes are the kind we’ve all made. Luckily most of us aren’t actually rewriting reality when we make them…
THING I WOULD LIKE EVERYONE TO DO TODAY:
Reach out specifically to just one person you haven’t talked directly to in awhile just to say Hi.
This is getting easier. It’s still HARD, but it’s getting easier. Also I remembered to start the day with sound coping mechanisms rather than waiting until everything wasn’t working later. Today’s soundscape is a mix of Binaural Harmonies, Singing Bowls (man I love these), and Subaquatic Dream set to Ocean Waves (cause I really REALLY don’t find scuba sounds or dolphins very calming. I don’t think, “Dolphins, how sweet and beautiful” I think, “Oh crap, get out of the water before they start harassing the humans!” Don’t even get me started on how people who make meditation tapes think that the sounds of seagulls are soothing. I have to assume they live in a landlocked area.)
I am a huge believer in balance. So a good portion of my two weeks will be spent in finding a greater sense of personal balance without the influence of Twitter. My hope is that when I go back to it, I will be able to extend that balance to using Twitter as well, but let’s get over this bridge first.
3 (of many) Things I Am Grateful For Today:
1. My Dogs – who show me what love and living in the moment is all about
2. My Museum Job – which is interesting and flexible
3. Living in a Beautiful Place (hey guess what the sun is out today!)
I’m toying with composing a particular short story via voice recognition on my tablet. It is working simultaneously better than I would have thought, and mindbogglingly frustrating. I do NOT use the same parts of my brain to compose verbal sounds as I do to compose written words. That’s somewhat useful for this story as I’m trying to write from a very young POV… but ugh I just… I just want to write it RIGHT! Also, it turns out voice recognition censors swear words, which is really irritating to me. I swear a lot more out-loud than I ever do in text. I also have nominal aphasia where I forget the words for things much more frequently while speaking than I ever do writing or typing. I makes composing in this fashion a frustrating exercise even before I am Slowly. And. Carefully. Enunciating. Words. In. An. Irritated. Voice. Because. Voice. Recognition. Has. Just. Interpreted. “Bears” as “Virgins.” Really, fiction should have characters getting annoyed with voice recognition systems more frequently than we do. Even the good ones have weird foibles.
Neato Science Thingy: Making ancient patterns on seashells visible with black light. OH EM GEE. THIS IS SO COOL AND I WONDER IF IT WORKS ON NOT ANCIENT ONES TOO?! Just the ones bleached by sun and waves, or if the shells have to be fossilized for it to work.
Random Thing: One of the things I like to do to help bring into focus what I already know are fortune telling techniques. Your mind seeks patterns and meaning and will suddenly make conscious connections in your universe. A super easy tool for doing this is the website Facade. It has Tarot, Runes, I Ching, and others with lots of different options or it will randomly choose options for you. Try it, you might find your mind knows things you didn’t know you already knew.
I have decided the best way to describe how I feel as: Like a squirrel who has gone cold turkey on cocaine. I’m just sort of twitching and screaming “WHY AREN’T THE NUTS HELPING?!”
I really thought my focus and concentration would come back immediately… and HA HA HA yeah, no. It’s like returning to a physical activity after a long illness. I’m discovering that those “muscles” are flabby, out of shape, and resistant to change. On the plus side, that means that I really NEED to be doing this… but argh.
Anyway, since I’m not on Twitter, I figure I should blog more and put any neato links I find here to share with all of you, cause that’s what we used to do with blogs, right? I think so… it seems so long ago.
Science: I’m trying to wrap my brain around this Quantum Entanglement thing. I mean the idea is REALLY cool, and I totally get what scientists think they’ve found… I’m just trying to figure out how they are totally certain that they’ve split the particle and not just directed it one way or another and what they think they’re seeing as a split particle isn’t a particular kind of echo caused by the “splitting”. Now I understand from people smarter than me that the behavior in the particles changes rather than just traveling one direction or another.. but I still don’t have my brain wrapped around it yet. I think physics is really neat but it really isn’t one of my strengths. I mean my pool game is weak even before we get to quantum aspects of it.
Medicine: Ok this is really cool. Scientists took a 9th Century eye salve recipe involving leeks, onions, garlic, and cow bile and then left it to ferment (per original instructions) and then tested it on bacteria thinking “oh hey yeah it might do something” and damned if it doesn’t kill MRSA!
I’m going to go ahead and post this tonight rather than tomorrow because I don’t want anyone to think it is an April Fool’s Joke. Seriously, April 1 is the day you are safest from me pulling a prank out of any day of the year.
I’m taking a 2 week break from Twitter.
There’s a bunch of reasons but none of them big or bad. One is that I want to avoid April Fool’s Day stuff as so little of it is ever done well. Another is that I now default to checking Twitter over everything. I need to break myself of the habit and I don’t think anything short of 2 weeks will be enough for that. I’ve also been noticing a lot of avoidant behavior in myself, cringing away from things I find scary, including writing. Twitter makes it too easy for me to avoid that discomfort rather than work through it. I’m not going to grow as a person or a writer if I don’t get over myself and stay in my own lane. It turned out to be a very good time for me to do this, so I’m just biting the bullet and doing it. I’m blocking access on all of my computers and deleting the apps from phone and tablet.
I’ve been really weird about being out of connectivity since 9/11 and I don’t really know why. I mean I spent the days after curled up on our bed watching Cartoon Network for 72 hours straight or something. I couldn’t stand the quiet, but I couldn’t stand the news either and it was the only channel I could find that didn’t have ANY news. After that I got into the habit of checking the news online several times a day, sometimes several times an hour. I’ve slowly gotten away from that over the last 14 years but have seemingly just traded checking news for checking Twitter and I feel really uncomfortable when I don’t, especially when I’m in front of a computer.
I’m really geographically isolated and most of my socialization is over Twitter, so there’s a real possibility this could leave me feeling more isolated than normal. That’s the reasoning I’ve always given myself for not doing this before.
I want to consciously choose the time I spend there and be mindful of it. I don’t know a way (for me) to do that without a lengthy break from it.
I’m not seeking isolation! I’m hoping to reach out via email, text, phone, hangout, letters and what have you and I hope some of you will do the same. This is a good time to make sure I have your current email and contact information. You can always email me at minervazimmerman at gmail dot com, or use my contact form. I hope that many of you will reach out to do Conversations Between Writers and otherwise just harass me in the time I’m away from Twitter.
Hope to hear from you soon, otherwise I’ll see you when I come back.
I forgot to get a picture and his site is grumptroll.com so Fremont Troll it is.
J. M. McDermott
March brings March Flash Madness a flash fiction competition broken into brackets. Each week the participants get a prompt and then just the weekend to write it. Readers vote for their favorites and only the winners move on. This week you can vote in the battle between Sun, Moon and Stars and Circle vs. Square. For all this year’s stories check out grumptroll.com. It is hosted by J. M. McDermott who can also be found on Twitter.
J M McDermott: Okay, then. I always assume the answer to all first questions is either Royal Blue or African or European?
Minerva Zimmerman: Heh. I was going to ask you what is March Flash Madness and why are you doing it?
JM: March Flash Madness is an event, a stunt, and a lot more fun than watching unpaid teenagers make millionaires of everyone else. I pay writers more than the kids playing basketball in March Madness. It is part of why actual March Madness must die and be replaced by my flash fiction contest. It is also a lot more fun to read.
It raises money for SFWA, in its way, and the EMF, which is a very important thing.
JM: After the contest is over and winners are crowned, the stories remain live for only one month. Then, they are bundled into an eBook and sold with all proceeds going to the EMF. Many contestants also donate their payment to the EMF.
Sent at 1:45 PM on Tuesday
JM: For writers, it is also an amazingly challenging feat to produce pro-caliber flash fiction every weekend for a wide audience. It is a very difficult thing to do, and pushes us out of our comfort zones, our usual tropes, and our easy ideas. We have to run to the bones of ideas and run with them to unexpected places. It is hard. It is also fun, and wonderful to read what happens from our diverse slate of writers.
For readers, it is also, I hope, a lot of fun to read and vote.
MZ: Do you normally write a lot of flash fiction as a writer?
I ask mostly because I mostly seem to write it for this, at least over the last 2 years I’ve been participating.
JM: No. Hardly any story I write comes in lower than 7000 words, naturally. I prefer to write short novels, or long novellas, between 60000-90000 words, ideally. It is my comfortable length. For me, less than 3k for a complete story always feels impossible.
MZ: Me TOO!
But I seem to pull it off for this… so it’s kind of weird.
JM: Currently, in Asimovs april/may, the short story “paul and his son” feels like the shortest story I can easily write, and it is about 6k, I think, thereabouts.
MZ: I write mostly dialog driven fiction and that’s hard to do in under 1000 words
JM: Yeah, for the challenge, it is almost like because it is so constrained and competitive, something just clicks.
If we had a week to write it, I don’t think it would work. Weekends are much tighter.
MZ: Yeah I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I could do better with a week, and other times… yeah no. I’d just get in my own head too much.
JM: Exactly. Cut to the bones of the idea and run fast. There is no time. It is almost like temporal writing, like that. Almost.
MZ: Not quite, I think there’s more room for editing in a weekend than “during an event” writing.
JM: You must work faster than I do!
MZ: or edit faster 🙂
JM: I think about the story all day Saturday (when I am working) and I write it in the morning of Sunday before my wife and dog demand my attention. It can be constraining to have responsibility, but it is a good constraint.
MZ: it’s true. I write more when I’m working then when I have time off.
JM: How do you find your process changes under the constraints? What do you do if fervently?
Autocorrect is fun. I like that better.
MZ: I’m not sure the process changes so much as is just much more condensed and I get out of my own way more.
JM: Would you do this again if you didn’t have to?
MZ: so I usually take my prompt and start trying out associations and following those rabbit holes
and sometimes I get a concept right away or sometimes it takes a full day
JM: I have been both blessed and cursed to lose in the first round both years. It is actually a relief to know I don’t have to keep going, but I also hate losing, and so early!
Hopefully, next year… But it would be poor form to host a contest and win it.
MZ: It’s probably about the same time actually butt in chair, but how much whining and carrying on before getting to that point changes.
JM: As a reader, has anyone really surprised you? I try hard to put together diversity of voice and style. Have you felt that? Did you like someone you didn’t expect to?
MZ: Alex Livingston’s entry this week knocked my socks off.
I didn’t really have expectations, but man… I wish I’d written that 🙂
JM: Eric Bosarge, I thought, had a stellar entry that was way out of his usual wheelhouse. I am also very glad I didn’t have to pick between Natania and Alex, first week.
MZ: Ugh, man the brackets were rough this year in particular.
JM: Alex is a real surprise! He actually came in over the transom, so to speak, during an open call, and he is KILLING IT with his work. It is impressive.
MZ: And I think it’s also interesting talking with the other writers and realizing how true it is that we’re often our own worst judges.
JM: Everyone is busting out great stories, though, so it shouldn’t be a surprise.
Sent at 2:02 PM on Tuesday
MZ: I talked with Brooke Bolander about her entry before we both turned ours in this week and she was hating on hers… but my god, it has such a great gut punch at the end.
JM: Bolander was miserable about her story and whining about how little she did, and it looks like it might win the week. One of the readers who voted for her is noted and notable genre critic Jon Ginsburg-Stevens. Erudite ogre, himself.
Seriously, like you said, get out of your own way.
Voting is still open until Thursday. Who knows who will win?!
MZ: And this is the sort of competition that pushes you but also gets in your head and I know I’ve had a lot of “oh god, why am I doing this? I’m not even in the same league” thoughts this week, so there’s a bit of a downside too.
I mean all writers go through that at different times and I know this is just mine, and intellectually I’m good… just, ugh.
JM: All I have to say is that after six novels and two short story collections, I have lost in the first round for two years, and I still feel like I am just starting out, as a writer.
Good is good. It can come from anyone at any length who find their voice, their spark, their effortless awesome.
Some people really do well under constraint, too. It is important to try different things, mix it up, and stuff.
MZ: Yeah, I am lucky to have a really good support structure of other writers. So I can go virtually lean on someone’s shoulder when I need it. I think others do the same to me, and that’s really important to have as a writer at any point in your career.
Also I find out about all sorts of amazing writers every time I do this competition and I hope other people do too!
Sent at 2:07 PM on Tuesday
JM: I think we, as a genre, fall into our online comfort zone, our bubbles within bubbles, and it takes concerted effort to push out of that comfortable space and find new ideas and influences. I try to make a contest that reflects that idea. Eric is a great example. You’ve probably never heard of Eric Bosarge, but he has a book coming out from Medallion soon, and until this contest, it wasn’t even a blip to a lot of people. His entry was solid SF. People read that who have never heard the name Bosarge. Now, we have this new author in our known sphere. Expanding is a good thing.
MZ: Yes! It’s my favorite part of March Flash Madness. Making new connections and hopefully picking up a few new readers in the process.
[I need to head back to work we can wrap this up with a few last thoughts from you or continue in about 10 min]
JM: I hope to increase that in years to come, and the open call for submissions is very important to achieve that. I hope to see more submissions next year, from as diverse a group as possible.
So, Polish your verbs and sharpen your adjectives out there in Zimmerland. March Flash Madness will be back, and you, too, can step into the arena!
MINERVA ZIMMERMAN 
