I’ve seen “The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King” more times than I can remember. It’s a movie full of great moments and memorable quotes. One of my favorite parts is near the end, right when Frodo and Sam cross into Mordor and get their first look at what an improbable task it will be for the two of them to make their way across to Mount Doom unseen. Frodo says as much, sounding utterly defeated before even taking a first step. But Sam, always reliable and sensible, encourages him to press on by simply saying, “Let’s just make it down the hill for starters.” I see a lot of wisdom in that. Who among us has never started a task that seemed to be insurmountable at the very beginning? By setting a much smaller, more reasonable and easily attainable goal, Sam was getting things started in the right direction. Any time I’ve accomplished something that I considered meaningful, the process started much like that -- slow and steady, one baby step at a time, just getting down that hill at first and then deciding what would come next.
This is a theme I’ve been reflecting on during the past few days. The whole New Year’s Eve thing has always been more contemplative than celebratory for me (I know, I know; try to contain your surprise). The start of a new year is a natural time to pause and think about what is or isn’t working in your life, or what has or hasn’t changed since the last time you switched out a calendar. For a lot of people this existential pause predictably leads to a list of New Year’s resolutions. And just as predictably most of those resolutions fall apart before the end of January.
Wanting to make changes or improvements is a noble and worthwhile pursuit, but I think a lot of people get caught up in looking at all of Mordor from the top of the hill, and are overwhelmed by the magnitude (Pop Pop!) of the undertaking they’ve just assigned themselves. Resolutions are usually less about reaching goals than they are about redefining life, which I think is why they so commonly fail. Habits are hard to break, and even harder to intentionally establish. Any resolution worth making wouldn’t be the kind of thing that someone would do for just one year and give up on when December 31st rolled around. A resolution usually becomes too much to think about or manage, and quietly fades away to join the other former resolutions that didn’t work out the way they were intended.
I’ve made resolutions in the past and almost always they’ve eventually come apart at the seams for me. But my chronic overthinking has taught me a few important things about myself. First of all, I know I NEED some kind of a goal. I’m not good at sitting back and relaxing and just letting life happen as it will. I need forward motion. I need purpose -- big or small, significant or not. And when I don’t have it... well, it’s not pretty. So a New Year’s resolution would seem like a natural direction to take, wouldn’t it? But why set myself up for a goal that has little chance of succeeding? Which brings us to Thing I’ve Learned About Myself #2: With the right combination of time and accountability, I know I’m able achieve nearly any goal I put my mind to. I won’t go into a list of victory laps since this post is far too self-indulgent already, but I will point out that I’m a NaNoWriMo winner five times over now -- five different book-length manuscripts written in five different months. And reaching that goal got me thinking: Why does a resolution need to last a whole year? Why not just set it for a month? What if instead of resolving to make some kind of lifelong change as of January first, the goal was just to try and build up a little momentum? One month is a long enough time to make it worth the effort, and also a short enough time to make the goal attainable. Once the month is over, then you’re off the hook about whether or not you want to continue. Maybe the momentum is there and you want to see how much further it can carry you. Or maybe it felt forced all along and became something that doesn’t fit. At least after a month you should know if that goal is one you want to keep chasing.
So this year instead of making any grand New Year’s resolutions, my plan is to make monthly resolutions. Speaking as someone with experience in the matter, you really would be surprised to discover what you can accomplish in one month’s time if you really set your mind to it. But a big key to that success for me is accountability. It’s fair to say I have the attention span of a goldfish, so the best way for me to get anything significant accomplished is if I have to answer to someone for it. So here’s the plan: As I go through this series of monthly resolutions throughout 2013, I’ll add a Summer Vacation post at the end of each month to report on how things went. I won’t say what the goals are at the beginning -- that much I’ll keep to myself while I’m working on them. And I don’t think I’ll ask for any suggestions about things to try; it’s kind of scary to think about what other people might tell me I need to fix. But if I have to answer to the three people who read this at the end of each month, I think that will provide me with the necessary motivation. Time will tell.
Sitting here hours away from 2013 beginning, I’m wondering how different life could be in a year if I actually reach twelve write-a-book-in-a-month-sized goals. Since I don’t even know what all of those goals will be yet, it really has me curious to find out.
Sunday, December 30, 2012
Thursday, December 27, 2012
Imprinting 2012
I’ve written about musical imprinting here before -- those times when you make such a strong personal connection between a song or an album and an event from your life that even years later you’re unable to separate the two. Looking back over the course of a year and all of the music that appeared during that time, you’d think there would be at least a handful of those imprinting moments happening along the way. And there were, though some were admittedly much more significant than others:
El Camino by The Black Keys
This was the first album I bought in 2012. I greatly prefer the band’s previous album Brothers over this one, but El Camino was more of a commercial breakthrough and the album that propelled them from playing in clubs to arenas. On a school night in mid-May, I tagged along to see them play the Target Center. I figured it would at least be a good show, but I really went because I wanted to see Nephew #3 take in his first big Rock Show. Over the past year or two he’s followed in the family footsteps and has become quite a budding musicologist -- at twelve years old he can already play two instruments and spends a lot of time plugged into his iPod listening to favorite bands and discovering new ones. The Black Keys are one of his favorite bands, so it was cool to see him see them play.
“I’m Okay” by Styx
I won’t get into specifics so much, but I spent last January (and some of February) going through something that had me living with more than a little bit of worry and dread. Yeah, that’s nothing new, but this time there was actual cause. Long story short - things worked out in the end, and were resolved in a manner that was more than I could have hoped for, and more than anyone other than two or three other people could have appreciated how I felt. About this same time I found a live two-album set by Styx, where they had played all the way through The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight as live sets. Pieces of Eight was never one of my favorite Styx albums because my ninth-grade self didn’t appreciate it much, including this song, which I felt (rightly so) was kind of sappy. But some thirty or so years later as I found myself making it through an unnerving trial, this song became a sort of anthem in the aftermath of things working out.
“Stay Frosty” by Van Halen
I had written Van Halen off as a viable rock band years ago after I saw Eddie stagger his way through the show I saw in summer of 2007. But out of nowhere they reunited with David Lee Roth (like that was gonna stick) and released a new album that was surprisingly strong. This song was one of my favorites and got a lot of airplay in the car and on the iPods in the spring, to the point that as I look over my new music library for 2012, this was the song with the highest play count.
Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen
I was worried about this one, since his previous album, Working on a Dream, might be the worst one he’s ever released. Not every song on Wrecking Ball is great, but most of them are at least good, and there are three or four that will stand out over time as classics. I saw him for my eighth time in November -- again with Nephew #3 -- for what is probably third or fourth on my all-time greatest concert list. It’s really something to experience the way the world comes back to life in the spring when you have a soundtrack to listen to that encapsulates the greater ideals of the life you try to lead.
“This’ll Be My Year” by Train
The opening song from their criminally soulless album California 37. It’s a great, catchy, optimistic pop song with some good examples of the kind of self-deprecating wordplay I think is a thumbprint of the band. Upon hearing it I had hopes that maybe the rest of the album wasn’t going to be the cash-grab pile of suck I feared it would be. Those hopes were not realized. But at least I got one good song out of it.
“Southern Man / Needle and the Damage Done / Cinnamon Girl” - Neal Morse
Yes, that’s Neal Morse, not Neil Young. Neal Morse very well could be my favorite musician, and this year he released his second album of outtake covers that he and his frequent collaborators made just for kicks. For the record -- I am NOT a Neil Young fan at all. I hate his voice and I don’t understand why anyone would think his songs are anything other than generic seventies slow-motion picking and strumming. But Neal, Mike, and Randy brought these three songs to such ferocious life in a three-song, eleven-minute medley that I probably like as much as anything that came from Neal’s actual album release that came later in the year. I had different parts of this medley shuffling through my head for the last two weeks of the 2011-2012 school year.
Clockwork Angels by Rush
My favorite album of the year, and now that I’ve had a few months to live with it I can honestly say it’s also one of my favorite Rush albums. I can remember very little of what I was doing in the month of June other than proofreading a manuscript, but anything else I was doing I did while I was listening to this.
“Cage” by Van Ghost
This isn’t a great song, but it brings me back to a very specific moment. I had gone down to the zoo with my sister and brother-in-law to see Bruce Hornsby play the same impressive live show he always puts on. But he had Van Ghost playing as a rare opening act, and they really caught us by surprise. A strong out-of-nowhere opening act discovery is always great. Is this one of my favorite songs of the year? Not by a mile. But it's imprinted on that whole evening at the zoo amphitheater. If I play this album now I realize I remember a lot more about Van Ghost's set than I do about Bruce Hornsby's, and not just because they featured a gorgeous trombone player/back-up singer wearing a skintight purple dress.
“Youth Without Youth” by Metric
I bought the album with this song on a whim in the summer, but whenever I hear it now I'm going to visualize Dutton, the main character from this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, plugged into her iPod and rocking out.
“Below My Feet” by Mumford and Sons
The first time I heard this was when they played it as their second song on Saturday Night Live the weekend before their album Babel was released. The power and the beauty of hearing this song for the first time affected me deeply; I’m not ashamed to admit the performance didn’t just bring tears to my eyes -- I openly wept.
“Runaways” by The Killers
The Killers are a weird band. The singer isn’t all that great at holding a note, and none of the players stand out as being anything other than competent. Many of their songs have an awkward quality that almost comes across as ironic, and a lot of their lyrics aim for higher ambitions than they really have the writing talent to achieve. And yet I still have every album they’ve released; it’s a guilty pleasure like the junk food you can’t make yourself stop eating. This album, Battle Born, was one of my favorites of the year, and this particular song was stuck in my head throughout many school days past this fall.
Epicloud by The Devin Townsend Project
It seems every year there’s an album from an act I discover that just takes over my entire life for awhile, and this year it was this one. Seriously. To the point that I can distinctly remember dreaming some of the song from this. It’s listed under “metal” at the iTunes store and that isn’t wrong, but the power behind the music has a such a purely joyous quality it’s almost incongruous to think of it as a metal album. I would encourage anyone who can see the appeal of loud music and prides themselves on being slightly adventurous to buy this album without any previews, and then just play it all the way through on a first listen. You’ll either love it or hate it, but I promise you won’t be neutral.
“The Light Behind Your Eyes” by My Chemical Romance
This one is spooky. It was released days after the Sandy Hook shootings, and almost seems to be written specifically to acknowledge the aftermath of that horror. Ironically it was part of an album that was recorded years ago but was never released by the band, though back in October they began releasing those lost songs two at a time over a period of months so the fans could finally hear them. Even more ironically, the title of that album was supposed to be “Conventional Weapons.” And if you looked up the song on YouTube you’d find a band logo superimposed over artwork featuring a symmetric design made up of machine guns. That's the world we live in.
"The Light Behind Your Eyes" was also the last song I bought in 2012. In a few days I’ll clear my “Purchased” playlist and start over, waiting to see what 2013 will bring and how long it will take until life and music intersect hard enough to begin the imprinting all over again.
El Camino by The Black Keys
This was the first album I bought in 2012. I greatly prefer the band’s previous album Brothers over this one, but El Camino was more of a commercial breakthrough and the album that propelled them from playing in clubs to arenas. On a school night in mid-May, I tagged along to see them play the Target Center. I figured it would at least be a good show, but I really went because I wanted to see Nephew #3 take in his first big Rock Show. Over the past year or two he’s followed in the family footsteps and has become quite a budding musicologist -- at twelve years old he can already play two instruments and spends a lot of time plugged into his iPod listening to favorite bands and discovering new ones. The Black Keys are one of his favorite bands, so it was cool to see him see them play.
“I’m Okay” by Styx
I won’t get into specifics so much, but I spent last January (and some of February) going through something that had me living with more than a little bit of worry and dread. Yeah, that’s nothing new, but this time there was actual cause. Long story short - things worked out in the end, and were resolved in a manner that was more than I could have hoped for, and more than anyone other than two or three other people could have appreciated how I felt. About this same time I found a live two-album set by Styx, where they had played all the way through The Grand Illusion and Pieces of Eight as live sets. Pieces of Eight was never one of my favorite Styx albums because my ninth-grade self didn’t appreciate it much, including this song, which I felt (rightly so) was kind of sappy. But some thirty or so years later as I found myself making it through an unnerving trial, this song became a sort of anthem in the aftermath of things working out.
“Stay Frosty” by Van Halen
I had written Van Halen off as a viable rock band years ago after I saw Eddie stagger his way through the show I saw in summer of 2007. But out of nowhere they reunited with David Lee Roth (like that was gonna stick) and released a new album that was surprisingly strong. This song was one of my favorites and got a lot of airplay in the car and on the iPods in the spring, to the point that as I look over my new music library for 2012, this was the song with the highest play count.
Wrecking Ball by Bruce Springsteen
I was worried about this one, since his previous album, Working on a Dream, might be the worst one he’s ever released. Not every song on Wrecking Ball is great, but most of them are at least good, and there are three or four that will stand out over time as classics. I saw him for my eighth time in November -- again with Nephew #3 -- for what is probably third or fourth on my all-time greatest concert list. It’s really something to experience the way the world comes back to life in the spring when you have a soundtrack to listen to that encapsulates the greater ideals of the life you try to lead.
“This’ll Be My Year” by Train
The opening song from their criminally soulless album California 37. It’s a great, catchy, optimistic pop song with some good examples of the kind of self-deprecating wordplay I think is a thumbprint of the band. Upon hearing it I had hopes that maybe the rest of the album wasn’t going to be the cash-grab pile of suck I feared it would be. Those hopes were not realized. But at least I got one good song out of it.
“Southern Man / Needle and the Damage Done / Cinnamon Girl” - Neal Morse
Yes, that’s Neal Morse, not Neil Young. Neal Morse very well could be my favorite musician, and this year he released his second album of outtake covers that he and his frequent collaborators made just for kicks. For the record -- I am NOT a Neil Young fan at all. I hate his voice and I don’t understand why anyone would think his songs are anything other than generic seventies slow-motion picking and strumming. But Neal, Mike, and Randy brought these three songs to such ferocious life in a three-song, eleven-minute medley that I probably like as much as anything that came from Neal’s actual album release that came later in the year. I had different parts of this medley shuffling through my head for the last two weeks of the 2011-2012 school year.
Clockwork Angels by Rush
My favorite album of the year, and now that I’ve had a few months to live with it I can honestly say it’s also one of my favorite Rush albums. I can remember very little of what I was doing in the month of June other than proofreading a manuscript, but anything else I was doing I did while I was listening to this.
“Cage” by Van Ghost
This isn’t a great song, but it brings me back to a very specific moment. I had gone down to the zoo with my sister and brother-in-law to see Bruce Hornsby play the same impressive live show he always puts on. But he had Van Ghost playing as a rare opening act, and they really caught us by surprise. A strong out-of-nowhere opening act discovery is always great. Is this one of my favorite songs of the year? Not by a mile. But it's imprinted on that whole evening at the zoo amphitheater. If I play this album now I realize I remember a lot more about Van Ghost's set than I do about Bruce Hornsby's, and not just because they featured a gorgeous trombone player/back-up singer wearing a skintight purple dress.
“Youth Without Youth” by Metric
I bought the album with this song on a whim in the summer, but whenever I hear it now I'm going to visualize Dutton, the main character from this year’s NaNoWriMo novel, plugged into her iPod and rocking out.
“Below My Feet” by Mumford and Sons
The first time I heard this was when they played it as their second song on Saturday Night Live the weekend before their album Babel was released. The power and the beauty of hearing this song for the first time affected me deeply; I’m not ashamed to admit the performance didn’t just bring tears to my eyes -- I openly wept.
“Runaways” by The Killers
The Killers are a weird band. The singer isn’t all that great at holding a note, and none of the players stand out as being anything other than competent. Many of their songs have an awkward quality that almost comes across as ironic, and a lot of their lyrics aim for higher ambitions than they really have the writing talent to achieve. And yet I still have every album they’ve released; it’s a guilty pleasure like the junk food you can’t make yourself stop eating. This album, Battle Born, was one of my favorites of the year, and this particular song was stuck in my head throughout many school days past this fall.
Epicloud by The Devin Townsend Project
It seems every year there’s an album from an act I discover that just takes over my entire life for awhile, and this year it was this one. Seriously. To the point that I can distinctly remember dreaming some of the song from this. It’s listed under “metal” at the iTunes store and that isn’t wrong, but the power behind the music has a such a purely joyous quality it’s almost incongruous to think of it as a metal album. I would encourage anyone who can see the appeal of loud music and prides themselves on being slightly adventurous to buy this album without any previews, and then just play it all the way through on a first listen. You’ll either love it or hate it, but I promise you won’t be neutral.
“The Light Behind Your Eyes” by My Chemical Romance
This one is spooky. It was released days after the Sandy Hook shootings, and almost seems to be written specifically to acknowledge the aftermath of that horror. Ironically it was part of an album that was recorded years ago but was never released by the band, though back in October they began releasing those lost songs two at a time over a period of months so the fans could finally hear them. Even more ironically, the title of that album was supposed to be “Conventional Weapons.” And if you looked up the song on YouTube you’d find a band logo superimposed over artwork featuring a symmetric design made up of machine guns. That's the world we live in.
"The Light Behind Your Eyes" was also the last song I bought in 2012. In a few days I’ll clear my “Purchased” playlist and start over, waiting to see what 2013 will bring and how long it will take until life and music intersect hard enough to begin the imprinting all over again.
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Decompression / Aftermath
My parents used to live in a house beside a lake and had a beautiful view from their living room. I always enjoyed watching the lake freeze over as autumn slowly settled into winter. It would start with curiously undisturbed patches on the surface that were always revealed as the earliest sheets of fragile ice. As the temperatures continued dropping, these sheets would grow larger, wider, and more substantial with every passing day. Eventually I’d realize there was more ice on the lake than there was open water remaining, and not long after that the floes would join together until finally the entire surface was frozen solid.
Ice forming on a lake is a good analogy for what it’s been like for me over the past month during NaNoWrimo 2012. This year marks the fifth time I’ve met the 50,000 word goal, and the fourth time I’ve written the manuscript out on chronological order. You’ll notice I said up there that I met the goal -- I still have not yet finished the manuscript. That will be ongoing for a bit longer, and frankly I only have estimates of how much it’s going to take; my best guess right now would be somewhere between another 15,000-20,000 words. So even though most of my literary lake has frozen over, there are still enough gaps in the ice that my characters and plot could easily fall through if I’m not careful.
Those remaining thousands of words will take a little longer because I’m slowing down the pace for awhile and reclaiming a few other parts of my life. It will be nice to know I won’t have to stay in constant motion to keep up with my school work. I’m looking forward to reading a book or two, catching up on my DVR, and maybe evening trying to remember where I hid my XBox controller at the beginning of the month. I’ll be able to keep up with my Words With Friends games more often than just when I’m watching the news, and I won’t have to leave my phone in a different room when I sit down at the computer anymore. I think I’m still going to be waking up between 5:00 and 5:30 for awhile though; that’s a hard habit to just turn off. Maybe that’s just going to be my designated writing time until I work my way through the rest of the draft, and then I can worry about repairing my sleep patterns when winter break arrives. It’s going to be nice to open up the iTunes library to a wider variety of music again, since I’ve been limiting myself to the kind of alternative / industrial music my main character prefers. In fact, a lot of my chapter titles could pass for the titles of instrumental tracks by some of those bands: “Existential Firewalls;” “Kill the Memory;” “All the Lies We Tell Ourselves;” “The Pros and Cons of Quantum Suicide,” just to name a few.
And thankfully on the last day of the month I did FINALLY find a title for the book: “Revisionist Future.” The thing is the title doesn’t matter much; all it will need to do is be noticeable enough to get the attention of an agent when I start sending out query letters in a year or so. If it ever gets published (which has about the same odds of happening as me being struck by lightning and getting kicked by a Sasquatch at the same moment I’m buying a winning Powerball ticket), the title would almost certainly be changed. In fact, the one project I’ve ever seen carried into the light of day was a play a wrote that a community theater group produced a million years ago, and guess what! They changed the title to something they thought was more marketable, even if I quietly hated it. So as much as I like my title now, I have to accept it as the placeholder it is.
I’m happy to call this year’s endeavor a success. I kept a pretty steady pace for most of the month without pushing myself to finish early, knowing from the start I wouldn’t be able to finish the whole thing in just November. Last night I looked back at the goals I wanted to reach in the month and was happy to see I was there with most of them. With any luck I’ll have that first draft knocked off by winter break and will be able to start revisions a few weeks later, after I’ve given myself a mental break from the project. Hopefully this winter I’ll have a draft with one coat of polish on it that I’ll be ready to share with a first round of beta readers -- the small group of people who will read my once-revised draft and tell me how much it does or doesn’t suck. I’m hoping this time to enlist some people for the job from the target audience (13-18 years old), and with any luck even a few who don’t know me too well and would be able to bring some added objectivity to their perspective.
But until then, I still have some work to do. I’ll still keep you posted. Just not daily.
Ice forming on a lake is a good analogy for what it’s been like for me over the past month during NaNoWrimo 2012. This year marks the fifth time I’ve met the 50,000 word goal, and the fourth time I’ve written the manuscript out on chronological order. You’ll notice I said up there that I met the goal -- I still have not yet finished the manuscript. That will be ongoing for a bit longer, and frankly I only have estimates of how much it’s going to take; my best guess right now would be somewhere between another 15,000-20,000 words. So even though most of my literary lake has frozen over, there are still enough gaps in the ice that my characters and plot could easily fall through if I’m not careful.
Those remaining thousands of words will take a little longer because I’m slowing down the pace for awhile and reclaiming a few other parts of my life. It will be nice to know I won’t have to stay in constant motion to keep up with my school work. I’m looking forward to reading a book or two, catching up on my DVR, and maybe evening trying to remember where I hid my XBox controller at the beginning of the month. I’ll be able to keep up with my Words With Friends games more often than just when I’m watching the news, and I won’t have to leave my phone in a different room when I sit down at the computer anymore. I think I’m still going to be waking up between 5:00 and 5:30 for awhile though; that’s a hard habit to just turn off. Maybe that’s just going to be my designated writing time until I work my way through the rest of the draft, and then I can worry about repairing my sleep patterns when winter break arrives. It’s going to be nice to open up the iTunes library to a wider variety of music again, since I’ve been limiting myself to the kind of alternative / industrial music my main character prefers. In fact, a lot of my chapter titles could pass for the titles of instrumental tracks by some of those bands: “Existential Firewalls;” “Kill the Memory;” “All the Lies We Tell Ourselves;” “The Pros and Cons of Quantum Suicide,” just to name a few.
And thankfully on the last day of the month I did FINALLY find a title for the book: “Revisionist Future.” The thing is the title doesn’t matter much; all it will need to do is be noticeable enough to get the attention of an agent when I start sending out query letters in a year or so. If it ever gets published (which has about the same odds of happening as me being struck by lightning and getting kicked by a Sasquatch at the same moment I’m buying a winning Powerball ticket), the title would almost certainly be changed. In fact, the one project I’ve ever seen carried into the light of day was a play a wrote that a community theater group produced a million years ago, and guess what! They changed the title to something they thought was more marketable, even if I quietly hated it. So as much as I like my title now, I have to accept it as the placeholder it is.
I’m happy to call this year’s endeavor a success. I kept a pretty steady pace for most of the month without pushing myself to finish early, knowing from the start I wouldn’t be able to finish the whole thing in just November. Last night I looked back at the goals I wanted to reach in the month and was happy to see I was there with most of them. With any luck I’ll have that first draft knocked off by winter break and will be able to start revisions a few weeks later, after I’ve given myself a mental break from the project. Hopefully this winter I’ll have a draft with one coat of polish on it that I’ll be ready to share with a first round of beta readers -- the small group of people who will read my once-revised draft and tell me how much it does or doesn’t suck. I’m hoping this time to enlist some people for the job from the target audience (13-18 years old), and with any luck even a few who don’t know me too well and would be able to bring some added objectivity to their perspective.
But until then, I still have some work to do. I’ll still keep you posted. Just not daily.
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