But the result is that the work isn’t grounded in experience so much as in other work, like painting a picture of a picture. You’ve seen it: mix in some elves, some swords, some magic and (lately) some brooding anti-hero. Carnage, blood, killing your babies has produced a new gritty world of f&sf that is even more retarded than the old one. There’s garbage in other kinds of fiction, too, but it seems to stink more when it’s genre, I suppose because the readers are more forgiving. There’s something to be said for departure from reality, whatever else its flaws, so the bar stays low.

Anyway, setting that aside, the problem with the ‘write what you know’ bit is that it can be misleading. I’ve been working on something for the last few days, for the first time since August, really, and it’s really struck me that I’m writing the same story over and over. Or rather, some depressingly large subset of what I do is the same story with altered particulars. And the story isn’t even very good. It’s authentic, yeah, but you know what else is authentic? Sitting on the couch and watching TV for four hours, every night of your life. Lots of people do that, but we have little need for their stories.

So then I started thinking about the stuff I’ve done that I’m actually proud of; and its defining quality seems to be that its written with my head not stuck up my own ass. In other words, a departure from the solipsistic universe I know better than anyone.

So now I think the canard should be: fuck what you know. Write what you aspire to. We’ll see how that goes.

The nice thing, I guess, is that intolerable things go away quickly. You get used to whatever it is, whatever tragedy, even when you think you won’t. The re-basing of our attitudes toward pleasure and pain is the glory and the tragedy of the human condition. And here we are, again: a cold day tomorrow, the future stretching ahead, promising whatever it’s promising.

Thanksgiving, dead a week and a half, blinked and I missed it.

Me: Does that work?
Him: Try it.

Results: ten minutes later it started working. Started babbling, felt full of ideas and energized. One hour later felt like brain exploded, had to take nap on couch in library. Woke up feeling like someone shit in mouth.

Wtf? Maybe something else was in there.

Yesterday DDB came over and essentially guilted me into mowing the lawn, or rather doing a part of the lawncare, by beginning to do another part himself. Before this shaming began, he said something like: just do it now, and then you’ll have the whole Saturday to yourself, and you’ll feel better.

It should come as no surprise that, when the weed wacker was put away and the grass was beat back, I did feel better. I always feel better, in fact, whenever this happens wrt anything — writing, programming, studying, cleaning. Anything. The effect has never been anything less than 100% correlated with intense psychological relief. And yet, my default is to put things off, to struggle with them, to avoid starting something until I’ve achieved some other milestone, which is always idiotic.

Another example: on Thursday after a meeting Dan asked how one might go about getting a histogram of the number of papers published on “bayesion models of vision” over the years. His hypothesis was that topic popularity rises exponentially and then drops off. I told him how I would solve the problem: write Python code to crawl Google Scholar, mine the abstract text for the publication date, keep a hash count based on year, find the “Next” link for the next set of results, etc. etc. Dan was a little disappointed that so many steps would be required, and said something like: well, maybe that will be an excuse to learn Python sometime.

Now, I knew all the tools for accomplishing this task, as evidenced by my detailed plan for accomplishing it. But I hadn’t used some of the tools in a while, it would require re-learning how to walk an HTML tree and programatically submitting forms, etc. etc., and of course I had other stuff to do. But Dan’s disappointment inspired me to screw around a little, and once I started screwing around a little I got into it, and once I got into it I managed, in short order, to throw together something that almost worked, and once I got that far I decided that I would finish it, as a surprise to Dan. So I finished it, sent him some graphs, and he was delighted and surprised, which made me feel great.

Which got me to thinking about how many things follow that same pattern. In just the world of software development there are a seemingly infinite number of projects I’ve been talking about building, which I’ve spent years thinking about how best to build them, so that I could have built at least a preliminary version ten times over if I’d just thrown myself into the job of doing it. And for stories, I think about writing them instead of writing them, I plan how I will write them, scribble down the ever-expanding list of things I need to know before I can begin writing them, with the result that I don’t ever write anything, except every so often when circumstances force me into avoiding all of that ‘groundwork’ and I do something that would have seemed inconceivable at any other time, like writing 5 stories in five weeks, or seventy stories in three months, or whatever.

I know that all of this sounds simple, and is simple, motivationally it’s simple, but of course things that seem simple are really not simple underneath the covers, even very smart people often mistake surface-simplicity for deep simplicity, like the researchers at MIT who came up with a computer vision problem they figured would take a few students three months to solve and which has rather taken an entire research community fifty-something years, and counting.

So what to do?

One thing that doesn’t work is making complicated plans and schemes, I’ve learned that lesson. But sometimes plans and schemes that are so simple as to almost defy the labels “plans” and “schemes” _can_ actually work. So here is my very simple plan: this summer, I’m going to accomplish the smallest amount possible. Instead of favoring getting something magnificent done, instead of titanic war efforts that harness every available resource, I’m going to harness the barest minimum of resources, with one caveat: I will do so little that doing _something_ becmes automatic. If I automatically make some tiny effort, if by default I write a sentence instead of waiting and mustering all my energy to write a 10k story, maybe that will shake something loose, effect a fundamental change in how I think about taking action, in what it costs me to do so.

So I’ll eat a handful of leaves when I don’t feel like making one of my fancy salads; I’ll solve one math problem when I can’t bear to settle down for two hours and beat myself over the head; I’ll write one line of code, I’ll make one Evernote note for my literature review, I’ll do one plank, one pull-up. I will ooze forward like a slug, but at least I’ll be oozing forward. That’s my scheme, the totality of my ambitions. I know mowing the lawn isn’t that hard. I just want to become the kind of person who really understands that in his bones.

1. Can you believe this ever happened?

I mean, there’s a stretch where the singer is standing on stage, dressed in a bunch of clothes it looked like he picked out of a rubbish bin at Salvation Army, kind of dry humping (from a standing position, mind) the air. And this was sexy. This drove a generation of girls from 15-25 into having to change their underwear. Can you fucking comprehend this? I cannot comprehend this.

2. I want to shoot myself again.

because what a glorious time. What a magnificent, glorious time, not for me particularly, because I could never dry hump the air and have chicks change their underwear because of it. But because _someone_ who looked like this could do it. Because there was a time of life — which I shared in in the way the people in Plato’s cave watched their shadows playing out on the wall — when this was possible. And now it is not possible. Even if I had a billion dollars and was suddenly a playboy, living on a fleet of yachts in Monte Carlo crewed by a saucy team of Russian hookers, drinking champagne out of Gisele’s golden shoe and scratching my ass with the trophy they give for the Nobel Prize in literature –

even then, it wouldn’t be as good. Nothing on this earth could be as sweet as that delusion, as that shared fever dream. Unless I got a robot body somehow.

All my hopes are now hung on the prospect of a robot body.

Third story, Nothing To Be Afraid Of And No Pain is going to Apex. They like dark sci-fi, which is just about perfect for that one. I cleaned it up very slightly but it was already as done as I could make it. Further changes would likely be for the worse.

Next up, if I can get reviewers’ comments, is Not What You Would Say Is Love which you might remember as the “Dad’s fucking a Russian Whore” story. Folks willing to crit this thing sooner rather than later (as in, within a few days) give me a shout. Now that I’m submitting I have this visceral need to fill the pipeline.

It’s interesting that over the course of CCW0809 I wrote more stories than I had written in my entire life to that point. With submission #3 I have already submitted more stories than I have submitted in my entire life. What other wonders does 2010 hold? Will I bathe more than I have in my entire life? That’s low-hanging fruit. Hmm.

Did I mention 2010 was gonna be my year?

Not sure what to do about this.

This is not the cat, but it will help you visualize maybe.

Help.