Tag Archives: Creativity

Patreon Video Greeting and WIP Excerpt

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Greetings and Salutations

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QDGvk_IYztY]

You can get excerpts like the one below, blog posts, lyrics, and videos like the one above over at my Patreon page a full two months before you will see them here. Affordable tiers ($1, $3, $5) and something for everyone. Don’t wait to see it on the blog, check it out on Patreon!


Sometime in 2020 the first book in The “No” Conspiracies series, No Fixed Address, will hit the shelves. Here’s your first look at the antagonist, Peter. Take note that this is an UNEDITED excerpt and may end up looking quite different after it goes through my editing team.

I am the only person in Dallas who has ever had this phone number. My dad pulled some strings for me when I moved here and he ensured that it had never before been in use. He also pays the bill. The only time it rings it when he calls me every Wednesday evening at seven PM.

The ring sounds like someone has let loose a compendium of three-year-olds with wooden spoons banging every pot and pan in the house. It is deafening. In the three years I have lived here, I have not been able to figure out how to turn down the volume and I am too lazy to replace the phone with something less obnoxious.

I am awakened from a deep dreamless sleep to the cookware cacophony that is my telephone. With my heart pounding like a bass drum in my chest at one hundred and eighty beats per minute my arm shoots out and knocks over my stack of bedtime reading comic books. Until that moment it was topped with my black hardcover engineering notebook. It makes a nice thwack as it slaps against the wall and slams to the floor.

I glance at the clock. Three PM. Four hours of sleep after writing code for the previous twenty does not feel like enough. I find and answer the phone without so much as clearing my throat.

“Hello?”

“Pete!”

The enthusiastic, high pitched squeal of my boss hits me like a steak knife on a stoneware plate. You have got to be fucking kidding me.

“Peter?”

At least the useless peon is correcting how he addresses me now. I am not a fan of short forms or nicknames. I empty my lungs with a long sigh. I cannot resist getting a quick dig in. The man loves to be called Rich.

“Yes, Richard?”

Incoherent mumbles come through the phone’s plastic receiver. Is he laughing? Heh. I hope he does not think I am being playful. The fact that an asshole as dim as a 4 Watt bulb is working that job never ceases to amaze me. The fact that he is an insufferable brownnoser makes it worse. The fact that I have to report into him makes me want to shove a Costco-sized bundle of sharpened number two pencils up his ass. Yes sir, one hundred and forty-four miniature graphite enemas coming right up. I should write that into the computer game I am working on.

“Pete—Sorry—Peter, are you there? We have a bit of a situation here. We need some WLCs to fill in for an Overnighter.”

WLC stands for Weekend and Leave Coverage; the Overnighters are the group that works the eleven P.M. to seven A.M. shift.

“How is this a situation? Our job is to cover off other people’s shifts. Why does it need to be me? Not interested”

“You’ve been specifically requested.”

“By whom?”

“You know how the hierarchical game is played, Peter. That’s not the direction this type of stuff flows.”

Richard is incapable of pronouncing hierarchical. Every time he tries, it comes out sounding like the name of some science fiction villain. Hire-arch-eee-cal. He uses big ten-dollar words all the time to make him sound managerial and important.

“I am intimately familiar with the office pyramid of accountability. How long are we talking?” Shit, I should not have asked that. Now I am negotiating. Never negotiate with terrorists or idiot supervisors. I look to my floor for my notebook, find it within an arm’s reach, and grab it.

“Well here’s the thing, it’s for the foreseeable future. Between you and me, it’s likely going to be permanent.”

I open my notebook with one hand and catch the pencil as it falls out from between the pages. “I am still not interested, Richard. I am not real keen on busting my ass as a full-timer and not getting any of the other benefits that come along with it.”

I am still not fully awake and my pencil leaves shaky scribbles of numbers on the page already cluttered with the last set of algorithms I am working on for a special assignment.

“You should be excited, Peter! Y’all are coming off weekends and leave.”

My grip on the handset tightens. The fake excitement in his voice makes me want to set my phaser a degree or two past stun and fire off a shot right at his throat. “You said ‘y’all’, Richard. Who is ‘y’all’?”

Thanks for reading!

~ Andrew

To Create or Not to Create? There is No Question.

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Last night I went out to see The Monuments Men with my wife (good movie that could/should have been amazing) and I drove the babysitter home it dawned on me that I was without a post topic for this week, so I asked the sitter for her thoughts.

We bantered around a couple ideas when finally she said to me, “Do you listen to the radio?”

Anyone who read last week’s post about the radio promo I disagreed with knows that I listen to the radio now and then so I replied honestly with, “On occasion, yes.”

What she said next intrigued me (but given her upbringing I was not surprised). She said, “You could do your post on why it is that most artists that seem to be popular on the radio today aren’t very good.”

Now this isn’t simply a case of an old fart like me complaining about the music (or art in general) of the kids today. This is a very intelligent, well adjusted, popular, 15 year old girl saying that what’s popular today in the music department is coming up drastically short. I happen to think she’s right, and I don’t necessarily think it’s a bad thing.

One woman wrecking machine.

Since the dawn of time there has always been debate over the quality of art. This is not a new thing, and every medium or genre sees its share of great and not-so-great artists over the years. A couple hundred years ago it’s entirely possible that fans of an up-and-coming Mozart thought that J.S. Bach was a hack.

So after hearing the babysitter’s suggestion, and fresh out of the movie theatre where I spent 90 minutes watching men risk, and sacrifice, their lives for great works of art, I got to thinking:

 If the Nazis sought out to destroy the “Wrecking Ball” video, every copy of Twilight, and the movie Jersey Girl, would anyone care?

 I can imagine that Miley Cyrus, Stephenie Meyer, and Kevin Smith would care; though from what I’ve heard from Kevin he might be willing to let that one go.

More importantly, I think a great many other people would care as well, myself included. As much as I think Miley is nothing more than an overproduced PR stunt; as much as reading a few chapters of Twilight to my daughter made me want to re-take high school English; and as much as watching Jersey Girl made me question my man-crush for Kevin Smith; these are all just personal opinions based on limited knowledge.

All the “bad” art has just as much place in the world as the “great” art. Yes, it only took one person to write the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” (as performed by Queen) and something like five to write “Baby” (as performed by Justin Bieber), but when it’s all said and done, what we’re left with is more art. As individuals we can always choose to vote with our wallets, our page views, our downloads, and our ‘likes’.

“Like”

Thankfully, we’re not all programmed to appreciate the same things and while I’d rather poke my eyes out with a salad fork than watch another Rebecca Black video the reality is that not every musician can be Freddy Mercury, not every painter can be Claude Monet, not every poet can be Edgar Allan Poe, and not every novelist can be J.K. Rowling.

The Nazis wanted it all and when they realized that wasn’t possible they set out to destroy it. The good news is The Monuments Men and hundreds of other conscientious civilians saved a lot of it, and would have saved the rest had they been given the chance. What really struck me was they didn’t just save the “classics” (though it is understandable why that was the focus).

Matt Damon is shown returning an ordinary portrait to the home of a Jewish family that had long since left Paris. Whether that’s true to the actual story or not, the sentiment is the same: art matters, and the absolute worst thing we can do is destroy it.

Coming in a close second would be if we stop creating it in the first place.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0omja1ivpx0?rel=0]

~ Andrew

The Hardest Job in the World

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Okay, so the title of the post may be debatable. Certainly there are people in all sorts of professions that will argue that their job is the hardest. I’ve been exposed to a great number of jobs in my almost (cough cough) years here on Earth and even have practical experience in a wide variety of them. Hell, I had a job where I was promoted to cleaning toilets. Some of these jobs have been difficult.

Image courtesy vectorolie at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
There are some jobs that are done by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide and there are some jobs that only a few people in the entire world are taking on. Are the jobs in the latter group harder? Not necessarily. The job might be in an extremely remote area, or there may not be any need for more than one or two of these people, or it might be a nice-and-easy but really horrible job.

The hardest though? Well, from where I sit (currently my couch), one of the hardest jobs in the world – if not the hardest – is the one performed by the people who have accepted the challenge of creating something new. These are the people who will be bringing you the next big thing for some industry or the greatest thing since sliced bread for your home. Some will be saving the world and others will be writing the novel that our children’s children will be reading in school.

For obvious reasons, it’s the last item on that list that spawned this week’s post. With my first novel just into the re-writing and editing stage I suffer from no grand delusions that students will be discussing my work in their English classes any time soon. However, that’s not going to stop me from trying. The problem, and this is where the task becomes increasingly difficult, is that there are only so many stories that can be told.

Sure, there are a couple dozen genres and probably a hundred sub-genres to choose from, but how many different stories are there?

There’s the love story, the overcome diversity story, the bad guy makes good story. The coming of age story, the war story, the who done it story. The robbery, the life lesson, the superhero.

Image courtesy vectorolie at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net
There are only so many stories to tell. The challenge is in telling them differently, and the hardest challenge is in creating a brand new story from scratch – the story no one has ever told before. Great works of fiction have been created by doing the latter (being the first at anything noteworthy has a way of leaving a lasting impression), and certainly any of what we would call “the classics” today are great examples of doing the former, and doing it remarkable well.

But how?

There’s a great post floating around out there that quotes 23 famous people who have written famous things. These folks give their “expert” advice to the aspiring writer. There’s some good stuff in there and throughout many of the quotes you’ll find an underlying theme: do it your way.

Great writers seem to acknowledge that:

  1. the only way to be a writer is to write; and 
  2. every person is different. 

Therefore, every person who wishes to become a writer, must not just commit to putting words down on the page, but must commit to doing in their own style and with their own voice. They must take those parts of themselves that make them unique: the personal experiences, dreams, fantasies, and challenges – and they must create something new.

Blake Snyder wrote a great book on screenwriting that I’m currently reading. In “Save The Cat!“, he breaks down every movie ever made into one of 10 genres. That’s it. Ten stories. Ten stories with thousands of variations. He also tells a story about how the studio heads are always saying the same thing: “Give me the same thing, but different.”

It sounds so simple, but as it turns out that’s the hardest part. 

~ Andrew

You Are Getting Sleeeeeepy…

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I have suffered from insomnia for about four years now. If anyone out there has even gone a few nights without a good night’s sleep you know how debilitating it can be. I spent the greater part of 18 months without more than a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep each night and I was basically a high functioning zombie.

There was no shortage of people willing to impart their advice on the situation either:

Have you tried this?
Yes, it did not work.

Have you tried that?
Yes, it did not work.

Have you been to a sleep study?
Yes, twice. They prescribed me medication. It sort of worked but I had to take two pills every day.

Hmm…
Yes, hmm indeed.

I sleep really well. Always have. I can sleep anytime anywhere. It’s awesome.
I’m sure it is. I’ve even gone to a six week information/instructional on how to sleep!

Really? They have classes for that?
Yes, and I fell asleep in the last lecture.

Now that’s irony at its finest.
Indeed.

Have you tried…

Well, you get the idea by now I’m sure. At any rate, what does this have to do with anything? I’ll meander y’all to the point in just a second, I promise.

The key to sleep in humans is melatonin. The only word to describe this stuff is “magical”, so naturally one of the things I tried was some melatonin supplements. I tried 0.5mg and later 0.25mg and I might have well been taking sugar pills. My non-expert opinion was that this was because it wasn’t naturally occurring. You see, tryptophan metabolizes into seratonin; and if it’s dark out it’s further metabolized into melatonin, and that’s the stuff that promotes sleep. Just plunking the melatonin in directly didn’t seem to be working.

So, enter in this stuff called ZenBev®. Sounds like new age hippy juice, right? Well it sort of is. I call it my magic pumpkin powder. It’s basically powdered tryptophan made from pumpkin seed flour. The myth of the tryptophan loaded turkey dinner is partially true, only turkey has about as much of it as any other meat and three times less than dried egg white and about half as much as dried pumpkin seeds (if you care, the winner by a mile is Alaskan sea lion).

Sea Lions Up Close courtesy Liz Noffsinger at http://www.freedigitalphotos.net 

Again, you may be asking, what does this have to do with anything? Fine, I’ll get right to it then. Thanks for sticking with me so far (hopefully still awake, though after first re-read of this post I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve nodded off).

I tried ZenBev® and I immediately started sleeping better. Not more, but better. Same number of hours of sleep at night but I wasn’t falling asleep at my desk at 3:00 every afternoon. The really awesome part though was that I started dreaming again. I’ve probably had less than a handful of dreams in the last four years and after two weeks on this magic pumpkin powder I’m dreaming five or six nights a week, and let me tell you, after going so long without recognizing that I’d had a dream this current influx has me discombobulated to say the least. It’s not quite Jacob’s Ladder crazy, but I have got to say it’s really something.

After a couple weeks of getting some better sleep I’ve felt the urge to be creative again. November was a bit crazy with NaNoWriMo and a work project is bringing some high stress moments at my day job so the first week of December wasn’t much from a creativity standpoint. A couple weeks of dreaming though and my brain itching for creation again, and that’s a good thing. I’m also starting to figure out what The Beatles were talking about in their song I Am The Walrus.

I am the egg man.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0sc0L1UoO1M?rel=0]

~ Andrew

Frame of Mind

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I find it fascinating to watch people in the process of creating. I don’t know why this is but I think it has something to do with the fact that I have my own special brand of “getting in the mood” and I’m looking for some sort of validation that I’m normal.  More and more lately I suspect that I am not.

I was on the phone with my wife and she was telling me to get some words done while she was out and the kids were asleep. Sage advice from a woman who knows me very well and wants me to finish this damn book. The only problem was that I was exhausted from a week of working the day job and I wasn’t in the mood to write. Plus, with only 13,000 or so words left in the novel I was beginning to realize that an outline would have been a good idea. These were some of my notes for unfinished chapters:

  • Insert some stuff about the police in here doing police-type things
  • Hint a bit more about extreme nefariousness
  • Peter and Dana come across some disturbing shit

This is going to win me Kafka Prize, I can feel it.

Kafka1906
Franz Kafka

As someone with a history of traumatic brain injuries I can attest to the fact that sometimes the best ideas are the ones that come to you when you’re head is not on straight. Out in the real world they are usually called “bad ideas” and people end up losing their jobs, or their loved one, or their friends; but for creators a bad idea is still salvageable – it’s just going to take a little bit of creativity.

A while back I did a post about giving birth to ideas; a process that in my opinion is significantly less interesting compared with what actually happens when someone starts to work on that idea and begins to flesh it out and bring it to life.

For most people, getting into a creative mindset is nontrivial, and for some finding the Creativity Zone is almost as elusive as finding the G-spot (only the Creativity Zone actually exists). You may be thinking, “But it looks like people do it effortlessly” Well these people are few and far between. They are amazing to watch and invaluable to interact with to be sure, but they are definitely a rare breed. For the rest of us schleps, finding the right frame of mind is a fair amount of work – just like anything else.

Frame of Mind (I know, I know…)

Even one of the most creative minds on the planet will tell you that there’s a process to it, that it doesn’t just appear out of thin air like a catapulting cow that’s just been hurled over the wall of a castle. If you have 36 minutes you should watch the John Cleese on Creativity video. It completely changed the way I approach things. If you don’t I’ll sum it up for you:

If you’ve got a nice quiet place to work, about 90 minutes, and access to some like-minded creative people then you’ve got what you need to foster a good amount of creativity.

This brings us to my problem from the second paragraph of this article. Exacerbating it is the fact that there are very few moments in a day where I have all those things at the same time. The best I can do most days is have the kids asleep, a couch to sit on, the Internet on my laptop, and 120 minutes before I go to bed. The other night it turns out that this was close enough.

What I did then, was sit by myself with my manuscript open in one window and YouTube and Facebook in another. My cursor was set to the part of my story that was in need of attention. Then, I watched a good half an hour of Louis CK stand up comedy. This guy is really funny and I find that laughing out loud has a way of relaxing the mind. Then I hit up a friend on Facebook who had a few minutes to spare. We chatted for a bit and just tossed random silly ideas back and forth. The last one I came up with went something like this:

“I think I’ll write a story about a window washer. A transsexual window washer who doesn’t use scaffolding but instead floats down from the roofs of buildings on one of those big Cirque du Soleil velvet ropes, squeegee in hand, washing the windows and winning the hearts of big city Dallas.”

All he needs is a squeegee

What?!

I had been reading something about transsexuals recently and my story takes place in Dallas. There was that Cirque person who tragically died a while back during a show, so that was probably in the back of my mind as well. As for the window washing, I can’t explain it. I think I just like the word squeegee.

Squ-ee-g-ee.

SquEEEEE-gEEEEEE.

Once I hit that point I was off to the races and I flipped over to my MS and just started typing. I guess it worked because 24 minutes later I had more than 700 words on the page and was still going strong (anyone who has done NaNoWriMo knows that this is a pretty good clip).

So there you have it. One example of what it took to get from “I’m not in the mood to write” to real life words on a page. I hereby dub it The Squeegee Process™. Is is fascinating? Probably not to most people, but it works for me, multiple concussions and all.

If you have a creative process you’d like to share please comment below. I’d really like to know that I’m not alone.

~ Andrew