My dashboard tells me this will be my 1,318th post.
I have posted a lot of blogposts, haven’t I?
There is a part of me that wants to hurry up and make it to 1500. Maybe I”ll have a littls party on my log when I get there.
I should have commemorative t-shirts
!
HA!
self-promoting t-shirt.
ain’t the internet grand?
okay, that’s a tortured metaphor/pun.
Writers are always talking about “finding your voice”
But I have recently heard about a super cool voice recognition software. This article tells about an author who uses it to writer her romance novels
She’s written a lot of novels.
I am slavering over the idea of spending the many many many hours I drive to compose new works.
Novenber is national novel writing month. Maybe I could turn my commute into the great american novel.
It could be a return of the e e cummings style of writing, no capitals or punctuations. that would be something, alright
I have been discussing the right to be right on this blog for a long time. Since the beginning really.
It’s come up again with a friend in the process of finishing her PhD. Genius Girl and blessed with an honest lucidity of expression.
She is hitting the wall in her study of education. How do we fix the education of young people in America? It’s broken, and we know how to fix it. But we don’t know how to start putting the fix into place.
I talked with her some about the old tropes of this aged blog. Who has the right to be right? Who get to bar the gates to the engine of power, and most importantly, the engine of change?
I think I’ve learned a couple things in the nearly ten years since I started this blog. I hope so. And I think I’ve been looking at that question all the wrong way.
Here’s the facts:”
We are endowed by our Creator with the unalienable Right to be Right.
And in America, we get to be right. We get to pick whatever we want to do, with a limited book of restrictions. Therefore, I have the right to be right.
And I have the right to be wrong.
But that wasn’t really what the Right to be Right is all about. The question implies that someone else has to grant one the right. And what would that granting consist of?
It would be an agreement. “Oh! yes! That’s right!”
If we are talking about buy-in, or agreement, or FOLLOWERS…well…that’s a whole other thing altogether.
It’s really being a leader, then.
Who gave Steve Jobs the right to be right? Nobody. He took it, and he was proved right by getting followers, getting customers.
Who gave Hitler or Ghandi the right to be right? One was far more right than the other. One was far more destructive. But their ability to enact their ideas about what was right was granted them by their followers.
So the right to be right has nothing to do with the ‘correctness’ of an idea.
Don’t we cube-dwellers know that all too well.
it has to do with whether it has popular appeal.
Now we are back to the education system. GirlGenius-PhD-to-be tells me that all the answers have long ago been discovered about how to fix what’s broken. They are safely stored in journals in libraries.
What we don’t have is a machine to get those fixes to the students that need them.
That’s the question:
one hand holds the problem, and all it’s parts
the other hand hold the fix, and all it’s details
How do they meet?
It might be called Middleware. What hardware or software or widget will get those two together?
..I dont’ think that widget is well understood. I have ideas. But I’m not so good at getting popular appeal.
We’ve hit the wall as a culture. We don’t know how to do this part. Not really well.
All the answers lie in plain view.
Across a deep chasm. Where are the bridge builders?
Kindle says in 72% done with A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire.
I’m ready to throw it out the window. I am almost certain that this 5th book in the series is not going to pay back the effort I’ve invested in it. I am almost sure the author is not going to make good on all the stories he began to tell.
SOME authors do. Dickens was famous for it.
But George R.R. Martin is no Dickens.
I may be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. But I am only finishing this book of duty now.
Someone posted on facebook, most likely a quote from someone else:
If you aren’t the one buying, you’re the one being sold.
I think we ought to remember that. Except, you are ALWAYS the one being sold.
I guess we’d better be aware of that, so we can get a good price.
Is that a Gen-X thing? Is that thing that the baby boomers wouldn’t be able to hang on to? Well. Cynicism is a way of life, and it’s not so bad once you get used to it.
The gatekeepers are not on our side. The popularity contestst, the university admission letters, the job interviews and the rejection letters. Nobody is your fairy godmother. It’s not a meritocracy, unless the merit being autocracied by your own self.
King of the Hill. Until you are pushed off.
But I’m not interested in tooth and fang. I want something beautiful.
And I am not interested in the gatekeepers and their right to be right.
Who gave them the right? I take it back.
So, I find myself recognizing the Stockholm syndrome inside. Those gatekeepers have infected me.
“Oh…that’s not really good. *I* can do better than that…and I’m no good either.”
No, no. We are all good. Why not?
What is the point of all this judgement? Are we so very fragile that we cannot withstand the horror of a less-than-sublime experiene?
Crappy music is great! if you enjoy it.
Horrible writing? Should we all just cut off our right hands because they offend us with a mixed metaphor or dangling participle?
No. Never. Let the walls fall down.
Yes, there are differences in quality. But we eat Pringles and Potatoes au gratin with oil of truffle. There is room in the world for all of us and all of our growing gifts.
We may have to march around the walls every day for a very long time. To interpret that metaphor, I mean we need to do the work. We need to get good at what we are doing by doing it.
Maybe eventually we will see that we never needed to get the gatekeeper’s help after all. We had the power all along.
Thank you internet. Thank you for letting us know that this whole world is our for the taking, and that we are not bound by the old rules.
If we are going to be sold, let’s broker our own deal.
It’s the date night to celebrate our 4-year anniversary.
Chris went to drop off the daughter at granma’s house so we could go to Olive Garden.
Yes, that is who we are now. Olive Garden. AND THA”TS OKAY. it’s freaking amazing, actually, just to go out and be along over the course of sundown.
I am left alone to get beautiful. Chris would be okay if I came in shorts. I would not be okay with that.
So i find a strappy little crushed velvet dressed that I bought in ’99. It still fits, 🙂
and I want some music to get ready with.
Alanis.
THere will never be a time when this album does not rock me. Never. I’ll be 90 and telling my grandkids to turn it up.
There are 20 somethings right now who won’t get her. That’s fine. She belongs to me and a few million of my closest demographic-sharers.
I’m not young anymore. But I’m still wise.
I’m STILL sane and overwhelmed.
this rockabilly dress doesn’t have pockets, but I’ve still got one hand in my pocket tonight
This computer has a bug. The keyboard will decide to stick on a key
It’s excited.
Maybe i am too!
I am excited about the world at large becoming aquainted with my new book.
And with my old book.
And my not-yet-released-but-even-older book.
The world seems freindlier.
Maybe that’s why I’m feeling like opening up.
Hello again, World
The weather has been kind to us this summer. Not too hot. But around here, in desert country, you never know when the hot will kick in.
It was hot this week. It seems cooler today.
I hope it will be cooler today.
I really need to take the daughter on a bike ride. Every night she asked for it.
BICYCOO!
I suspect that is a ploy to get out of going to bed. But…she is asking for it. And i have that nice little baby seat on the back of my bike. I ~want~ to give her a bike ride.
I will try to do it if I remember.
Lord Give me strength!
My job has a lot to do with synchronicity.
What i mean by that is, things happening at basically the same time. I work in telecommunications, and this is a concept most people are very familiar with.
In a phone call, both people have to be there at the same time. Not the same place, but the same time.
A face to face, also known as f2f, has to be at the same place and the same time. The nerdword for the same place is co-location, sometimes called co-lo.
A phone call doesnt’ need the same place, as long as there is technology in place that connect the two people. Cell towers, cell phones, regular wired phone equipment, SOMETHING that allows people to be far away but still talk at the same time.
But they both have to be ther at the same time
SYNCHRONICITY
then again, there are ways of talking that don’t require synchronicity. Remember letters? Tools in the form of paper and ink, a delivery mechanism, the education background to READ, letters allow asynchronous communication.
Email uses different tools, but also allows for asynchronous communication.
To step away from nerddom for a moment, there are things in life that require synchronicity and others that don’t.
Some moments don’t come back.
But some moments will come if you wait.
And you just have to wait.
Stayed up way too late tonight with some old friends. We are rekindling a writer’s group.
There is little in life so precious as a good writer’s group. And this is a good writer’s group.
Ironically, we spoke very little about our writing tonight. We didn’t talk about our writing at ALL last meeting. Nevertheless, it was essential to the writing process that we do this.
See, just coming together and listening and talking with one another made me feel so much more ready to be creative.
To misquote:
If a writer writes alone in the woods, and nobody hears it, did it make a noise?
If I think about sitting down to put word to screen, and I do not have confidence that anyone besides myself gives a damn–I will most likely not sit down to put word to screen.
I have ideas and thought that I *think* about capturing and crafting.
But I don’t do it.
HOWEVER! My group got together to listen and to talk to one another. We were saying to one another ‘Yes! That is worth thinking about! Yes, you did phrase that cleverly! You do have a gift to share with us-with the world.’
We were cherishing one another.
It takes effort to write. To write ANYTHING, be it an opus magnum or a grocery list.
If I don’t value what I want to write, I lose it. All the ideas in the world are nothing to the lost ideas of the world.
It’s worth the effort