Sense of Adventure

Halloween night some of the folks from my local extended family, the Albuquerque Science Fiction Society, kindly had some of us over for pizza and scary movies while our host and hostess handed out candy to kiddos. Of whom there weren’t all that many, probably owing to the fact it was windy as hell. Provided Hell’s windy, I suppose; you’d probably have some, uh, demon convection going on.

Anyway, the reason I was so pleased (other than the fact I live alone except for the critters and tend to get a little company-starved) is that whereas some years I eagerly anticipate the joys of handing out candy to the little goblins, other years I’d rather spend the evening shooting myself in the thigh with a staple gun.

This was a staple-gun year.

Of course the original Allman Bros. quote is, “Dreams I’ll never see.”

And these, frankly, have a bit of ambivalence for me. Some parts I’d like to see. Others less.

I didn’t sleep too well last night, for no reason I can perceive; I kept waking up and staying awake, but not long enough to make it worthwhile to just say screw it and read or write. Just enough to cost me rest.

But in between I had a series of dreams I found pretty intriguing. I’ve had a lot of vivid and unusual dreams lately.

In this case, I dreamed I was involved in making a movie of The Cybernetic Shogun, little-known sequel to my Prometheus Award winning Cybernetic Samurai. It seemed to be the near-future. I relived various scenes and sections of the book - some that are authentically there, others that I never really wrote. But they seemed to fit.

Of course that may’ve just been dream logic. We all know how that song goes.

That’s the part, you likely figured out on your own (being the smart, perceptive people my bloggers readers naturally would be!), I hoped I would see.

Less so - much less so - were the dream segments in which I seemed actually to be living in the world of Cybernetic Shogun. How you like your fantasy now, monkey boy?

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Since I went ahead and posted about this on Freelancefolder.com, in a comment to a (useful) post called “7 Can’t-Miss Ways To Kick-Start The Writing Habit,” I figured I probably ought to talk about it here. It’s something I came up with 4-5 years ago.

It’s called Five Words. It’s a way of getting yourself started writing, and getting yourself into the habit of writing daily.

It’s what it sounds like: commit each and every day to sitting down and writing a minimum of five words.

They don’t have to be good words. They should be sensible and purposeful and bring you at least plausibly closer to your objective: “The End.” That means not just writing the same word five times - unless for some reason that’s actually called for - or five random words.

Once you do your Five Words, you are okay with yourself for today. That’s your pact with yourself. You don’t have to do more.

Of course, you can. Five Words is a minimum, not a maximum. Clearly, what you really want is to write more. With Five Words you’re trying to trick yourself into a state conducive to writing. You’re also trying to create a habit of going there daily.

There’s nothing magical about the number five. I snagged it because it strikes me as a solid sort of number. It’s enough to produce a decent sentence. The point is to set a goal so low it’s just near-impossible not to reach it.

Again, the keys are state and habit.

Five Words serves me, and various other people who’ve tried it, pretty well. You can apply it to endeavors other than writing: come up with some other simple quantum of any task, such that it’s more trouble to talk yourself out of doing it than just doing it.

One caveat: the Five Words technique may not help you produce as much as you want or need to. If it doesn’t there are other tricks to use - the post I linked to above offers some good ones. The first step toward producing enough every day is producing every day. “Five Words” is an easy way to build that fundamental habit.

Emma Dog and I just got back from a walk along the clear ditch by the Río Grande Nature Center. Beautiful, warm, clear autumn afternoon.

As we turned down the path back to the end of Candelaria the pumping station there, which I think gives water seeping down from the city’s storm drains its final kick to the Río Grande, belched loudly and then released this vast, gurgling slosh. It sounded … obscenely biological, but on a truly industrial scale. It put me in mind of some kind of subterranean Chinese dragon suffering a seriously liquid gastric upset.

Emma jumped right up in the air and spun around to glare in the general direction of the noise. At that moment a man emerged from the path to Candy: a skinny old gent in shorts and tennies, with RGNC badges and patches on his ball cap and vest. He resembled an extremely elderly bloodhound. I think he was one of the Bird Nerds who volunteer to answer questions from visitors.

Immediately Emma transferred her alert stare to him. Clearly she suspected he was responsible for the awful gurgle, and hence a Bad Sorcerer.

I told her to cool it. First, he probably wasn’t a Bad Sorcerer. Second, there will be no maiming of Bad Sorcerers, or anyone else, without my permission. Third, in the unlikely event he really was a Bad Sorcerer, messing with him would probably be a bad idea. If Emma and I turned up back home as field mice, the cats might get ideas.

Poor Emma. She’s my self-appointed bodyguard. She takes the job extremely seriously. And she’s totally convinced that every time we venture forth we encounter myriad lethal threats I don’t take seriously enough. (”No, sweetie, I really doubt the old lady in the wheelchair we just passed is going to whip out a MAC-10 and fire us up. You can’t hit squat with one of those things at this range, anyway.”)

Slowly I assert control over my yards, fore and aft. I’m conquering the weeds and preparing to put in some form of landscaping.

What I want is xeriscaping. Not just because it saves on water, although practically it’s a concern. I happen to think it looks cool.

What I’m not so clear on is: okay, how exactly does a xeric plant differ from a weed?

Case in point: I was surveying for a final season-ending orgy of weed-whacking when by the north front corner of the house I saw exploding from the tip of what I took to be a Noxious Weed a spectacularly beautiful blossom, with deep red-purple petals surrounding a bright yellow head.

Well, weed or not, I wasn’t purging it. It’s too dang pretty. One of the prettiest flowers I’ve seen, in fact. Moreover, as a couple days have passed, it’s been joined by similar blooms.

Driving back along Griegos from walks with Emma Dog (notice the subtle way I work her in here; she draws more traffic to the site than I do) I’ve noticed similar flowers blooming in a number of yards, some from pretty respectably-sized plants (mine are a tad on the, well, weedy side.) They’re obviously incorporated deliberately into designed xeriscapes, not just happy accidents like the ones by my house.

I looked for them in my sundry books on xeriscaping and couldn’t find them. Then I finally turned up my new copy of The New Mexico Gardener’s Guide: Revised Edition, which I stumbled upon and snapped up at Costco last month. My good pal Larry, who’s shaping up to be a pretty hotshot xeriscaper himself, gave me the original edition as a gift a couple years ago, which is excellent. This version is even better, rewritten and with these big, clear color plates.

And a couple/three pages into the listings I found myself staring right at the culprits. They’re Cosmos. Cosmos pinnatus, in polite company. Which these hardly are, to be sure.

How these beauties came to sprout in my somewhat blighted front yard is a mystery to me. But I’ll nurture them, and be sure to grow plenty of them deliberately next year.

I’ve been wondering what flowers I wanted to grow in the beds by the house and the fences. Now I know one for sure.

Indeed do many things come to pass.

Back in the early Oughts, when my ex and I split and my life - personal and professional - had hit bottom hard, one of the paths up I explored was investigation of Neurolinguistic Programming.

That led me to self-hypnosis. I even took a class at the (sadly) departed Sage Ways seminar center here in Burque.

I accepted there was much behind self-hypnosis immediately, because I recognized one fact right off: when I’m writing I tend to go into an unmistakable trance state. The deeper in I am, the better - and more, for want of a better word, ecstatic - the writing goes.

People have expressed much amazement at my ability to write seemingly anywhere: in airports, on trains, even at parties. Last night at the monthly ASFS meeting, which I attended in part because I’ve been so isolated of late and at risk of turning into a cheese - I startled club newcomer Gerald Weinberg, a writer and a really good guy, by writing enthusiastically on my notebook PC during the early part of the meeting.

It’s the trance, folks.

One thing I’ve tried to do with indifferent success has been learn how consistently to put myself deep into writing-trance. It’s never been reliable with me. And for a while I’ve had a hard time really, I guess, committing to it.

At this last Bubonicon, I was on a panel about how writers write. Somewhat to my surprise it was well-attended. Even more to my surprise it actually turned out to be interesting - to me, and on the evidence, both my fellow panelists (who included Betsy James and Walter Jon Williams; I’ve spaced out the others for the moment: sorry) and for the audience.

For my opening statement I sucked it up and took what I thought was the radical step of copping to the whole writer’s trance thing. I fully expected to get hit with Massive Skeptical Denial, both from the rest of the panel and the audience.

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Actually, it came to us of its own accord. And thereby hangs a tale of terror, appropriate to the remorseless approach of Halloween.

As recounted in my previous post, When Great Sky Demons Attack!, my Black Sharpie, Emma Dog, is terrified of hot-air balloons. She’s afraid of Round Monster Heads as it is. When they’re great big and fly and roar and breathe fire - well, how would you expect a girl to react?

Even a Tuff Chick like Emma, who is in almost all ways a most valiant defender of Daddy and Pack.

Once, walking along the lateral ditch that runs south of Montaño to the clear ditch, Emma and I encountered a stout, elderly Lab-cross dog running frantically the opposite way. Usually I’m upset by loose dogs; I’m always concerned they might get frisky with Emma, and issues ensue. In this case, no: the poor beast was puffing hard and clearly scared stumbling.

Her owner, a pleasant young lesbian (the haircut, the bulky sweatshirt - just give me this one, okay?) came trotting in hot pursuit. “She’s trying to get home before the Moon comes up,” she explained in passing. “She fears the full Moon. She thinks it’s a hot air balloon.”

At which Emma and I could only shake our heads in amusement. Emma doesn’t fear the Moon, full or not. She knows it’s just an orbiting celestial object. Whereas hot air balloons are Great Sky Demons.

Nonetheless I dared entertain the hope I might wean Emma from this particular phobia (why, I admit, I’m not sure.) Until, that is, a certain afternoon early last winter. Or perhaps the winter before.

Emma was out in the backyard. Suddenly I heard her just totally fly into pieces. This wasn’t just barking; it was nigh hysterics.

I ran out, expecting Charlie to be coming over the wire. Or at the least the back fence. Instead I beheld, floating neither high up nor far off, the familiar inverted-fruit shape of a hot air balloon.

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Actually, they haven’t much this year. Yet.

Emma Dog has always had problems with monsters with giant round heads. Not long after I got her in May of 2004 we were driving down Candelaria in Albuquerque’s North Valley to our usual walking-place, the ditch that runs along the east edge of the fields of the Rio Grande Nature Center wildfowl preserve. It was afternoon, full summer by then, and hot. And walking toward us on the far sidewalk I saw a couple of people with a parasol. Oddly, that’s something I’m not sure if I’ve even seen before here in Albuquerque, although given the stinging - and burning! - quality of our UV-rich high desert summer sun, it makes all kinda sense.

And Emma did this Jim Carrey-in-The Mask eyes-stand-out-on-springs take. She clearly perceived this apparition as a horrible four-legged megacephalic humanoid monster.

According to the best and most sense-filled book I’ve read about dogs and their bizarre longstanding relationship with a certain primate, The Other End of the Leash by Patricia McConnell, dogs don’t really grasp things like clothing and accessories. Given their limited ability to think in the abstract and eyesight that doesn’t appear very detail-oriented, they seem to perceive your putting on a hat or a bulky jacket as actually changing your body shape.

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Emma and I went for an early walk (and by “early” I mean, “around 11″) in the perfect bright autumn morning, down by the Nature Center. Having breakfasted joyfully on some 2^nd Birthday cake (not 2^nd year birthday, obviously; my 53^rd birthday 2.0) I was writing enthusiastically on DinoLords, and avid to get to the new Annja when I was done. I’m violating most of my rules, here: I’m rewriting Chapter 01, and the way I’m trying to teach myself to write means don’t backtrack.

But perhaps my cardinal rule is, never spurn Inspiration. When I was a kid in high school I remember we always used to say, “You can’t force creativity, man.” We had to say “man” because this was the 1960’s-early ’70’s, and it was, like, required, man. Anyway, about the first thing I learned when I started writing full-time professionally, at the advanced age of 20, was, if you can’t force creativity, you can kiss writing for a living good-bye. That said, when Inspiration does zap me, I go with it.

And I was really going, because I was filled with the perfect way to do Chapter 01. No point in hoping I’d still remember in a month or two or three when I’m finished with the whole draft. And I’m past the halfway point, on the downward slope, as it were; I’ve got momentum up. No harm.

I got up to go attend to something. When I got back the notebook PC had gone to sleep. And when I jostled the touchpad it refused to wake.

I wasn’t too concerned. I’d been running on battery power - Inspiration hit hard, and I was so caught up rollin’ with the punch I didn’t slow down to plug in. So I plugged in.

Nada. It did not awake.

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Today, after much too long an absence, Emma Dog and I went for a walk along the clear ditch by the Rio Grande Nature Center. It was one of those golden-velvet afternoons that make Fall my favorite season of the year.

Coming out of the Center proper, or up the bike path from the south, you cross a bridge to the levee bike path on the west side of the ditch. Perhaps a quarter mile north another footbridge crosses back to the east side, where a tree-shaded dirt trail runs. As you come off that bridge you’re looking off across the wide fields the Nature Center maintains as a wildfowl preserve.

Stopping to look out at them I saw, far off across them, suspicious looking pale-grey shapes. Looking through my indispensable Simmons monocular I confirmed they were, in fact, Sandhill cranes - first of the season that I’ve seen.

Always a treat to see them. I’m looking forward to hearing them, and looking up and seeing them fly south in their vees. If I’m lucky, I might be wakened some morning soon by their distinctive, piercing, bubbling cries. When I first moved into my house on Jupiter the wild geese would announce autumn by flying over, which always thrilled me. Then their flight paths shifted and I was bereft. But a couple years ago the cranes started going over. Which is at least as cool.

As we walked back the Canada geese, who are arriving back in big numbers (unlike cranes they never all leave ABQ), raised a colossal fuss off out of sight in the fields. I’m guessing coyotes were working the field. They do that.

On the way home I stopped off to buy dinner at Lowe’s across Fourth Street. In the produce section I heard a middle-aged guy cheerfully explaining to a lady who works there that he was just buying a pumpkin as a treat for his chickens - and only because they were out of watermelons.

Indeed do many things come to pass.

Next: When Great Sky Demons Attack and its terrifying sequel, Bring Me the Head of Mickey Mouse.