Dave | unobtrusive lucidity

To Twist, or not to Twist?

I wasn’t planning on expanding on my last post, but I just found myself inspired.

When I say inspired, I’m talking about my work in progress, which is a science fiction novel. I met my self-imposed deadline, and finished Part I just before the new addition to the family arrived, working under the assumption that I would only have to time to edit for about a month after she was born, if I had time to do that. So far, I’ve squeezed out about an hour to tackle some editing, only to discover just how enormously monumental a task this is going to be.

When I say “rough draft,” I didn’t realize just how rough it is.

Tonight, though, I was finishing playing catch-up on Haven, which I blogged about at the beginning of the week. This season has ended with some excellent plot twists that I just didn’t see coming. I respect the writing a great deal, and I’m very much anticipating next season (we had to wait for season 2 after a cliffhanger, and they’re using the same approach between seasons 2 and 3).

I remember these sorts of plot twists in Heroes, as well…back in its first two seasons when it was still an excellent program. Unfortunately, it didn’t survive the writer’s strike, but the show was known for outstanding and inventive teasers and plot twists that kept you hooked from week to week. In that way, it left me in mind of the comic books to which it paid homage.

And, since those comic books inform my own work in progress, I’m wondering if that specific type of foreshadowing and twisting is even possible outside of a serial. That is, since I’m writing a novel, I wonder if its possible to include that in a novel’s format? Certainly, there are writers of various genres that have reputations for keeping the reader guessing as to what’s really going on. Yet, when I think of the great writers of speculative fiction…the Asimovs and Henleins…I don’t really see these types of plot twists in their work.

Not that I’m thinking that I could even possibly be at the level of those writers. I’m just inspired with these sorts of surprises in story arcs, and I’m left wanting to re-visit the ideas that I formulated for the second half of my work in progress. My concern with this project from the beginning has been that the plot is interesting, but not gripping. I’m inspired to explore the possibility of twisting the plot around a bit. Yet, I don’t want to impose something onto the story that doesn’t belong there. That is, I don’t want to try to make it something its not, but I don’t want to hold it back from reaching its potential, either.

Decisions, decisions. And that, of course, is assuming I have to time to explore any of this any time soon as I’m busy exploring my new role as “daddy.” Here’s to the weekend!

Boo!

Every now and then, I find myself right in the middle of a trend that I always vowed to avoid, and am amazed at myself. “How did that happen?”, I think to myself. Its not always a bad thing…typically pretty innocent, to be honest, and often, in the interest of being genuine about life, I just sort of roll with it.

Actually, “trend” isn’t really the right word choice there, because that brings to mind fashionable clothes and colloquialisms that could invoke images of me speaking vacuously and parading tight jeans down a catwalk (actually, if it brings that to mind, I’m sorry. So, so sorry). I guess “finding myself interested in something popular that didn’t interest me before” might be the better phrase, but it just seemed too wordy.

In any case, I’ve always avoided horror movies and slasher films. They’ve never interested me. And they still don’t. Its just that I typically avoided their close cousin, suspense, as well. Ironically, I’ve always been heavily drawn to dystopian literature, specifically dystopian science fiction. I like the “this is what’s going to go wrong if we keep going the way we’re going” warnings that these stories present. I like a good action film as well as the next guy, as long as its not blowing things up for the sake of blowing things up. But suspense I’ve typically stayed away from, with only occasional exceptions in the past.

Lately, though, without realizing it, I realize that I’m into suspenseful tales. I first noticed it while watching Dr. Who. Karen comments on random episodes that she doesn’t want to watch them because they look too scary. When I watch them without her, I realize that there is a suspenseful element to them…the sort of “jump because something just popped out of the closet” suspense. No violence, no bloodshed, just real suspense of the sort you would find in a good children’s tale.

Similarly (because Karen didn’t want to watch an episode), I’ve discovered the same thing about Haven. If you’re not familiar with Haven, its one of the more original concepts that the SyFy network has produced lately, and an unlikely addiction for me. The gorgeous location shots are enough to bring you back for each episode (the story is set in Maine, and filmed in Nova Scotia), and the plot is based on the works of Stephen King in very original ways. I’m not a Stephen King fan, and I’ve only ever seen one of his films that I can recall (and didn’t finish that one). Like I said, its just not my genre. I’ve never read any of King’s work, either. If I had, I would probably thrive on the hidden references that are sprinkled through the show that link back to King’s work and, as I understand it, thrill his fans. Still, Haven isn’t frightening or anything close to the horror genre. Its good science fiction, just dark and spooky enough to pique my interest from week to week.

I’m not sure why I’m drawn involuntarily to suspense and spookiness of late. It hasn’t shown up in my writing, at least not that I’m aware of, but I’ve noticed it popping up more and more in the things I enjoy watching since Karen has pointed this out to me. Its even popped up in recent reading choices. I’m interested to see where this goes in my story interests in the future.

Are you into scary? If so, I want to hear to hear about it…

Photo Attribution: The Intrepid Traveler

The Book of About-Faces

Because I can count on one hand the number of my close friends who don’t use a social network, and because Facebook has been a dominant online presence for me for some time, Facebook’s announcement last week caught my eye. I’ll say up front that I’ve been disillusioned with Facebook for some time, and each of the “improvements” that they make to their user interface and website design leave me grumbling and trying to figure why they, like Microsoft, never actually improve anything, but merely make it more difficult to get to. Now, I’ve read several opinions about how positive this latest overhaul of Facebook will be, and I’ve heard at least one colleague say that this is the best thing Facebook has ever done. However, as I’ve come to use Facebook less and less (at least as far as my personal page is concerned, if not so much this blog’s Facebook page), I’m struck by the rationale behind this change.

Karen is much less of a sharer than me. I readily post details on Facebook about myself and us, including “checking in” to particular spots that I frequent. However, I post less intensely personal information on Twitter. Part of the reason I have chosen to use Facebook for this purpose instead of Twitter is because Facebook is a “walled garden;” that is, I have (at least until recently) had careful control over who sees this information. I know that my Twitter feed is open to the public, so I filter the information I post there more carefully. When we were in the hospital last week delivering our baby, I kept family and friends updated via status updates on Facebook in detail, but gave much less detail on Twitter. This is because I knew exactly who was going to see my Facebook updates, but not my Twitter updates. Part of Facebook’s overhaul, as I understand it, is to make sharing more automatic. I hear this to mean that my online activities will be fed into Facebook without my thought or ongoing permission. There is such a thing as too much sharing. I post a lot of the books I read, but not all of them. I share several links I find interesting, but not all of them, and certainly not all of them on Facebook. I want to give more awareness to what I share, not less. This seems to place me at odds with Facebook’s new strategy.

And, honestly, that form of sharing wasn’t the reason I set up a Facebook profile to begin with. Real-time sharing has always been Twitter’s strength, whereas a Facebook page, for me, is a static place to be able to communicate with friends and family even though their phone numbers of email addresses may have changed. I began to dislike Facebook when it began trying to copy Twitter…that is, when it tried to become a stream of real-time updates like Twitter was. I’ve always been a fan of a business being good at its specialty, and not trying to spread into multiple specialties. At some point, things become diluted until nothing is done well.

What grabs me more than disagreeing over the approach of Facebook, however, is the culture of sharing that has launched the changes. The mentality of our culture, and apparently of Mark Zuckerburg, seems to be that true happiness is only found when we’re completely transparent with everyone around us. As an introvert, I find the idea of everyone around me knowing everything about me to be remarkably similar to hell. Perhaps this is another way in which our culture rewards extroverts and prizes them as the examples of “good people,” but there is such a thing as too much sharing. I resonate with a comment that I read on Google+ recently to the effect of transparency being a good thing with politicians because we pay them, but opaqueness for the rest of us being an equally good thing. I think we forget that anything we post online has no expectation of privacy, and that its online forever, somewhere. Still, I have no obligation to be transparent to my neighbors. I only share what I choose to share, and I don’t like the idea of someone sharing things that I don’t agree to being shared.

My fellow-blogger, Ami, recently said that she intentionally never posts pictures of her children online, for any reason, and becomes upset when others post photos of them and tag her in them. As my daughter joined the world last week, I thought about this. I shared photos of her with my friends on closed networks, but not here, which I leave open to anyone who wants to read, and not on my Twitter feed, where I do the same. And, I was specific and careful about which photos I shared. When she’s old enough to make the decision of how much of her life she chooses to share, then she can, but I’m not going to rush that for her. Perhaps, after all, she’ll be an introvert like her dad.

My answer to the whole thing? Move away from social networks that don’t protect and respect my privacy. I’m over Facebook. I’ve found myself using Twitter much more fruitfully for some time, but I have to recognize that I use the two networks for different things. Earlier misgivings aside, I’m particularly taken with Google+, where I can meld my pubic and private sharing with a much greater degree of control than Facebook permits. I’m also considering creating a Tumblr page, and would gladly remove myself from the Facebook world altogether and make Google+ (and potentially Tumblr) my primary network(s).

Here’s the issue with that strategy, however, and its one that concerns me: Facebook, as a sort of patriarch of social networks, has achieved a “too big to fail” status. This manifests to me most readily in the fact that I find myself forced to keep using Facebook because that is where most of my friends remain. A social network, after all, is only as effective as how many of your friends, family, and colleagues with whom you can be social. So, for now, I continue to touch base with my Facebook page, but with much less frequency than I have in the past. I’m waiting patiently until more (or even most?) of my friends begin to use Google+, in the hopes of leaving Facebook behind forever.

What are your social network preferences? Are you tired of Facebook’s privacy abuses? Tell me what you think.

Photo Attribution: Nikke Lindqvist

Looking Different

There are these occasional moments in life that are simply and absolutely too surreal to ever just forget. They are the moments that are inscribed onto the parchment of our memories in permanent ink in the instant that they happen. You’ll never lose them, at least not normally, and you know that. Some of them are events that were momentous or tragic, and unexpected…you know, the ones to which you can immediately answer the question, “where were you when (fill in the blank)?” Others are things that you knew were coming, and that you were anticipating, but that you had no clue how they would cause your entire life to go sideways. As much as you sort of knew that you would never be able to wrap your brain around the rest of your life afterward, you just didn’t know to what extent that you wouldn’t be able to do so, or how little, in that instant, you would care that you couldn’t.

When Karen called me at my day job nine months ago as she was leaving her doctor’s office and told me we were expecting, something happened that rarely happens with me. I was speechless. I was, in fact, stupid for several minutes, unable to do basic tasks like talk on the phone with any sort of proficiency. I remember driving home that afternoon, and thinking that life literally looked different to me. As strange as it sounds, the vehicles in traffic around me looked differently, the people around me as well. And here any skills I have as a writer fail me, because I couldn’t describe how they looked different, only that they did.

Last Wednesday, after a long and arduous labor, I was sitting at Karen’s side, able only to see her face among all of the accoutrements of the operating room as a C-section was performed to deliver our little girl. I’ve jokingly told some friends since that night that, up until then, our daughter had sort of existed only in theory in my mind. That is, all the business and painstaking care of preparing for her arrival had busied our schedules, brought our friends rallying, and taxed our bank account, but, not only have I never had a child before, but neither have I spent any significant time around them in my life. Not only did I not know what to expect, but I didn’t even a referent for what this could be like, outside of the stories of others.

The cry came out of the blue that night, piercing the room while yet being melodious, and I saw my tiny little girl for the first time. I’ve experienced my share of moments in which I felt the Divine reach into my daily life, and certainly that was one of them. I was exhausted, with no more than three hours of sleep out of the last twenty four, and had honestly become emotionally flattened until that moment. Then, all at once, all of those months spent talking to my Karen’s stomach paid off, because my daughter knew my voice! Due to some complications, I went with our daughter for her physical, and stayed with her for the nearly three hours of recovery until Karen could join us. In that period of time, she came to trust my voice, to calm when she heard my voice, to focus her wide and inquisitive eyes on her daddy, to orient immediately to the sound of my voice. Since then, when no one else can console her, I can. As overwhelmed and maddening and stressful as the last few days have been, as poorly as I have coped with the chaos that has descended on the household despite my best attempts to curtail it, the protective instinct that I have for my daughter is at times overwhelming. I have had, and continue to have, moments in which I’m irrevocably convinced of my own ineptitude, as well as the knowledge that I cannot possibly continue this for another day. Yet, I know her face, I can discern her cries, I let her grasp my finger in her tiny hand, and I get to know her better daily.

For the rest of my life, I will be getting to know her. She isn’t just a theory anymore.

I don’t think I have to describe a faith metaphor about this…I think you can get there from here. I just know that while I knew my life would never be the same upon returning from the hospital as it had been when I left for it, I didn’t have any way of predicting that it would be this different. And, if I thought that everything looked different on the day I found out, that pales compared to the way things look today in a such an extreme as to be nonsensical.

I have a daughter. I’m a father. I’m not just married now, but I have a family of my own. There’s so much that goes with that, that I can’t even begin to unpack it yet. And I’m not sure that I ever will.

And, somehow, I’m beginning to be okay with that.

Making Statements

Everyone wants to make a statement, right?

Now, in high school, I would have assumed that to mean something about the way someone dressed, or styled their hair. I think there’s something deeper behind this statement about a statement today, though. This thought-provoking post over at Transpositions, the title of which grabbed me immediately, as Tillich has long been one of the most influential theologians to my thought process, is an exploration of how fashion sense portrays the perspective on worldview of the wearer or designer. So, in an introductory way, perhaps what I’m writing does start with thinking about fashion sense, but doesn’t stop there.

The post started some great thoughts churning about something that happened this weekend. An epiphany, of sorts…kind of a religious experience, if you will. I was navigating through the parking lot at the local Barnes & Noble in an attempt to find a parking space, and yielded to oncoming traffic. That oncoming traffic caught my attention, coming in the form of a petite and pretty blonde woman behind the wheel of an enormous SUV, a GMC something-or-other that looked as though it took up most of the parking lot and needed to drop anchor rather than park. I found myself caught in a moment of disgust. Not at the woman driving…this was not a judgmental, “who do you think you are?” sort of thought process. Rather, it was a glimpse into the error of my ways.

I’ve always hinted to my wife that one day, should we ever find ourselves in a position to afford such a thing, I think I would like to own a Hummer. I always thought that they were a creative sort of expression, somehow…urban chic, I guess. In that moment in front of Barnes & Noble, though, I repented of my desires, because the absolutely un-necessary excess of such a huge vehicle left me completely sick at my stomach. The wasted fuel, the obnoxious amount of space required to simply move through traffic, the failed attempt at intimidation to other drivers, the mis-spent money (I can only imagine what that titan cost). The woman looked like a young professional, perhaps a mother. The SUV was a luxury vehicle, not what you would use to transport equipment or goods for a business. In short, it was one of those situations where the SUV looked like a status symbol or a false sense of safety, rather than a necessary implement.

Fire departments need huge vehicles. The average suburban housewife really doesn’t. Such a waste.

Along the lines of the post I mentioned above…in congruence, I think, with Tillich’s theology of culture…our choices of things to purchase make a statement about us. I mean that, like the blogger for Transpositions, not just as a statement about us, but how we think theologically. And all of us think theologically at some level, because anytime we think those sort of existential questions like, “why am I here?”, or “what’s the point in all of this?”, we’re thinking theologically.

I tend to be loyal to certain brands, and I think that the brands that I buy say things about my worldview. Three examples: I like clothes from L.L. Bean. I use Apple computers. I like Subaru vehicles. I purchase all of these brands for the same reasons: they represent excellent craftsmanship (that is, they’re reliable and high-quality), and they have an attractive visual aesthetic. What this says about my value system is that I believe that quality and visual aesthetics matter. This reflects my view of the Divine, as well: I think that quality and beauty matter to God. So, a cultural theology asserts that the fact that you like a certain label of clothing or type of food isn’t simply a “consumer” choice; its reflective of your view on life, your role in life, and your view on God (even if its your view as to the presence of absence of God).

I can see fashion design (although its not really my thing) as a creative expression of beauty, sort of along the same lines as costume design in the theatre (which, again, was never really my specialty). Because we’re all creative in some capacity, the things we create speak about how we see life. We really can’t keep that from happening. It flows out even if we attempt to prevent it from doing so.

So, my sudden epiphany that I can never, for the rest of my life, force myself to own an SUV, is a statement of my values (and, of course, of my bank account). Which is fine, because, while people are cruising around in enormous vehicles that they can’t afford, I’ll have saved something for our retirement, and be perfectly content parking my Subaru in compact car spaces, all the while valuing the visual aesthetic and the dependability of the vehicle. I’d like to know why the woman I saw on Saturday chose the vehicle that she did, as well, because I would be genuinely fascinated to have insight into her worldview. And discovering her rationale for buying (or letting a spouse buy, perhaps?) the huge SUV would reveal a glimpse into her worldview, her metaphysical perspective.

We really don’t do anything for no reason. And there’s a reason for that.

Photo Attribution: deltaMike