Eccentric Flower:199810/running in circles

twenty-one october eleven a m

Running In Circles

I am at low ebb.

1. My code doesn't work, I really hate working on it, and it's a week late.

2. Last night reminded me why I don't play on MUCKs anymore. Dismal. More people than I had seen in this room in ages and we all stood staring at each other. I tried, really I did - I can be vivacious when I'm in character - but when you're the only person being lively in the room, it just gets old fast. Faster if you're the person firing all your best material into the void.

3. So I played a Klingon a while (the game is good, but buggy and wildly difficult - I have to cheat a lot) to appease myself. Then when I went to bed (late) I couldn't sleep. And thus this morning I am extremely groggy - which brings me back to the difficulty of solving #1.

- - -

I want to finish my story and my writing for The CGI. But I don't.

Internal dialogue:

"You're going to write that story and put it on the web somewhere no one ever reads and it'll sit there. Why bother? Go work on The Novel instead."

"There's no market for The Novel. As far as I'm concerned I wrote it, finished it, a year ago. All the editing is fine-tuning so I can present it to an agent and the agent will tell me there's no market for it because publishers never take risks and it doesn't fit a genre."

"Well, you could say the same thing about working on the stories. You know how hard it is to sell short fiction. There are, what, five markets, and fewer for the not-quite-smut, not-quite-fantasy stuff you write? And most of them don't pay squat. You'll never make a living from short stories."

"I'll never make a living from novels either. At least with the stories I can write it off as a hobby. I can't write off that overlength monster on the floor as a hobby."

"Did you think, when you were eighteen, that you would ever refer to writing as a hobby? It was your goal in life. It was your only aspiration. Now look at you. You write fiction once every two weeks at most, in tiny little 3000-word bursts, and if it doesn't get finished in that burst, it doesn't get finished. Never mind. You're a flop. Go back to your tedious code that you hate working on, and languish. I don't care anymore."

- - -

Piers Anthony is an author who long ago lost all credibility with me, but he wrote some good stuff once. In the first Incarnations book, Gaea is explaining the five modes of thought to Death, using five sticks.

When you're trying to reach a specific conclusion, there are three ways to go. You can think serially, in slow steps, each conclusion leading to the next. This is five sticks end-to-end in a line. It gets you there, although maybe not quickly or efficiently.

Or you can do what we computer types refer to as "parallel processing," several different lines of thought all working toward a common conclusion. That's five sticks laid out in parallel, each over the other in a neat stack.

And then there's the intuitive leap. This looks a little like Evel Knievel preparing to jump three ramparts -|||- and works about the same way: You got there, but you're not sure how you did it.

But what about non-goal-oriented thought? There are two ways to go. One is good, the other is usually bad. Creative thought is represented by a five-pointed star: New ideas branching out in wholly different directions, all at once.

The final one is five sticks in a pentagon: A paranoid, self-chasing loop, running around and around in circles and never getting anywhere.

The thing is, those of us who think in stars most of the time find that they can turn to pentagons at a moment's notice. And it's really tricky to get out.

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