A quote from an article about the President's upcoming address to school children:

*** What seems to be drawing the most ire are optional preparatory materials from the Department of Education asking students to "Write letters to themselves about what they can do to help the president."

That has now been changed for students to "Write letters to themselves about how they can achieve their short-term and long-term education goals"  ***

JFK is spinning in his grave.  While it's good to be self-aware, I don't think our educational system is currently lacking in opportunities for children to ponder their own lives.  What we need to encourage is a sense of community, that we are participants in things greater than ourselves.

The Department of Education had it right the first time.

I recently saw The Time Traveler's Wife and enjoyed it immensely, but it got me thinking about the issues of time paradoxes and how they have been played out in various movies.  Time travel comes in two flavors, the first being the type where you can go back and change the past, and the second being where the past is unchangeable. 

Most science fiction movies fall under the first category.  The most recent Star Trek movie uses time travel in this way where the bad guy comes back in time to blow up the planet Vulcan and otherwise harass Spock who he held personally responsible for the destruction of his own planet.  Of course, those kind of changes would drastically alter history which would most likely mean that the bad guy would never set on his journey of destruction in the first place (or perhaps he might never be born).  But, most SF time travel stories avoid that paradox now by claiming that any change in the time line would result in the creation of a "new universe" pinched off from the original time line which continues on.  But either way, the idea of being able to change the past is an intriguing one that offers lots of opportunity for the story tellers to play the "what if" game.

But, The Time Traveler's Wife is a movie that adheres to the other type of time travel - where the past is unchangeable.  But if the past can't be changed, it's easy to ask "What's the point?"  And the answer is "Fate".  Both this movie and another time traveling love story from a while back (Somewhere in Time) have a time paradox that can't be resolved except for the inclusion of Fate.  In Somewhere in Time, the paradox is in the form of a gold watch, which she gives to him and he subsequently gives to her, so that she can give it to him ... It's a time piece that comes from nowhere and loops endlessly through time.  And in The Time Traveler's Wife, the paradox is in their relationship itself.  When she sees him in the library for his first time, she has already had a long relationship with him and promptly takes him home and jumps him.  Which then causes his later self to travel through time to meet her younger self and establish a relationship.  There is no "first cause", only Fate.

I like this kind of story because it allows the characters to have glimpses of the future which they can't change, but makes a profound effect on their present.  We take great stock in driving our own destiny, but sometimes the essence of life and the poetry of love is found in how we play out the hand that we're dealt.

I'm sorry up front about the following rant, but some times you just have to let it out.

The LA times just published an article about the reactor melt-down at the Santa Sussana Field site in the hills above Simi Valley that occurred 50 years ago.  The problem with the article is the problem I find with almost all journalism these days: The inability (or unwillingness) to actually investigate.  Shouldn't a reporter do more than transcribe what people say?  Don't they have an obligation to determine the veracity of statements that they pass along to readers? 

When I worked for the State of California, I participated in some of the on-going activities concerning this site.  Ostensibly, the state had no jurisdiction over the site because the Department of Energy was responsible for clean-up activities, but the political theory was that eventually it would be declared "clean" by DOE and if the State didn't agree with the final verdict, then officials would immediately declare the site to be "contaminated".  So, it should still be relatively easy to clean-up a site, right?  Just get the appropriate agencies with scientifically trained staff to review all the results of testing, right?  Wrong, you foolish people.  The most important thing to do is to get "community" involvement in the process.  And then make sure that political pressure is applied to make "community" concerns trump expert opinion and analysis.

I highlight "community" because the people that show up at community meetings come in two varieties: 1) those who live nearby and heard there might be some problem and want to have a better understanding, and 2) professional activists.  I love the former and hate the latter.  The true concerned citizen just wants the problem to be solved, while the professional activist needs the problem to continue forever and will use any means necessary to further that end. 

So, when the LA Times article leads with the picture of a local resident who believes her thyroid problems and leukemia are the results of the work done at the Santa Susanna field site, most readers are willing to take this as the de facto reality that must be disproved.  But proving how someone got a disease when there is no statistical anomalies in the local population is practically impossible.  Everyone who gets a life threatening disease, wants to know how it happened.  We all want things to have a reason, but sometimes things happen because we won the lottery (albeit a negative one). 

If I were writing the article from an objective (investigative) perspective, I would at least look for consistencies in cause and effect.  If the resident's diseases can be caused by radiation, then what's the threshold dose that we know is likely to cause the disease? What are the conservative estimates for the dose likely received by the resident?  What is the latency period of the disease (time between dose and onset of symptoms)?  Did the resident begin to show symptoms of the disease after the appropriate latency period?  If you ask enough questions, you can sometimes rule out causes.  That's the main thing you do when you investigate - seperate the possible from the impossible, then seperate the likely from the unlikely.  But, this reporter did none of that, instead all he did was transcribe.

One of the catch phrases that came out of the Watergate investigations (back when reporters actually did their job) was the declaration to "follow the money".  If you want to figure out who the bad guys are from the good guys, then it helps to figure out who is making money.  The LA Times article refers to Dan Hirsch of Committee to Bridge the Gap who states, "I have wasted three decades of my life trying to get them to clean up the mess they made, and we are still at least a decade away."  Are you kidding me?  Mr. Hirsch is a professional activist who has made a living screaming about cleanup of the site.  As long as he is around, they will always be "at least a decade away."  It's not in his personal interest for the issues to ever be resolved.  So, here are the tactics that get used:
1) In public meetings, refer to any claims or statements made by yourself or your cronies at any time in the past as "proven truths" and claims by government regulators as lies.  It helps immensly if this is accomplished by schills in the audience who shout their disaproval in a manner that makes the regulators look around to make sure security is on-hand and ready to help.  The true concerned citizen has no way of knowing the history of such statements nor the depth of contention against them, but will be impressed with your passion.   The regulators will check their watch and pray the charade will be over soon.
2) Question the integrity of all government workers by claiming they are in bed with industry because of past employment or because of fees collected from industry.  But, never let anyone question where you get your money from.  No one seems to ever wonder what it takes to become a full time activist.  They have to raise money.  The only way to raise money is if you have an important cause.  They only way the Santa Susanna field lab is an important cause is if people are dying, and the government is covering it up.
3) If you don't get the results you want (the continuation of the cause) from the regulators who have other equally important tasks to attend to, then apply political/legal pressure. 

One of the things Mr. Hirsch did was challenge a Federal rule that the State adopted which would set a standard for clean-up of radioactive material.  He was successful in his challenge based on a failure by the state to correctly follow their own procedures.  The technical merit of the clean-up level was never at issue, but that didn't stop Mr. Hirsch from claiming that it was thrown out because the clean-up levels were inadequate.  But, for Mr. Hirsch, the clean-up levels will always be inadequate because it limits his ability to claim there is a problem, and if there's no problem, then he doesn't get paid.  The State never went back and corrected the procedure to reinstate the rule because of ... political pressure.

My favorite anecdote about dealing with activists hit very close to home.  When my boss refused to bend to the political will and stuck with the known science about radiation health effects, a bill was introduced into the State senate which would remove the entire branch from the Dept of Health Services and place it in Cal EPA, an organization known to be much more compliant to politicians.  But the bill had one insidious catch: The Branch Chief (my boss) and all Section Chiefs (I was one at the time) would not be included in the move.  Furthermore, the Branch Chief and Section Chiefs would be prohibited from taking advantage of Civil Service rules regarding employment retention.  In other words, the politicians (at the behest of the activists) were trying to fire us.

So, in conclusion: I like real people with real issues who are looking for honest answers.  I hate activists with inherent conflicts of interest regarding the problem they are claiming to solve.  And, I'm beginning to loathe the reporters who are too lazy to figure out the differnce.

I've always had a knack for writing.  But there's a difference between being able to say what you mean, and creating a story.  I wrote exactly one short story in high school.  It was an assignment in my Freshman English class, and the instruction went something like this: "Write a short story." Since I was a fan of Jack London's at the time, I wrote a story that had some of the same elements as one of his stories about a guy in the Yukon who winds up freezing to death.  We don't really know he's dead until his dog leaves him because there's no more warmth.  In my story, I had a guy crash his car in the woods and when he wakes up, he's pinned under his car, and there's a snake that's curled up on his belly for the warmth.  In the end, we know the character dies because the snake crawls off, looking for someplace warm.  I got an A on the story and the teacher even commented that it read like a Jack London story, so I felt pretty good about it.  But I needed more. 

I needed someone to break down the elements of storytelling.  I needed someone to explain to me what I had just accomplished.  I needed a mentor.  Or, if not a mentor, then perhaps other like minded students willing to push each other.  But, this was a small town high school (total around 400, my graduating class had 79), and the odds of having a teacher with any real fiction writing skills would have been slim at best, and the odds of any other students having similar interests or talent was probably slimmer.  So, I did what I always did when I was trying to figure things out, and I read books on the subject.  But, the problem with reading books about writing is that most of it makes very little sense, until it's put in the context of your own writing.  So, you need to be writing, before you get much of any benefit from books on writing.  Which is not how I approached other subjects in school.  If I wanted to understand math, I read the math book.  Sure, I could solve problems and check answers, but I really understood it better when I read and understood the concepts.  Math teachers were great, but for the most part, I had enough "talent" in math, that I didn't need a whole lot of instruction.  Just explain it once and I usually got it.   But, when it came to writing fiction, I wasn't really getting any instruction. 

Ideally, it should have been similar to the way I learned to play tennis.  I signed up for tennis in summer school and it started with the teacher tossing me some balls that I promptly whacked over the fence.  But, with a few pointers about my grip and follow through on my swing, I had the tools to begin practicing effectively.  I could have gotten books on tennis, but those books (like writing books) are useless until you have some level of experience with the physical act.  And that's the thing I was missing for so many years.  I wanted to approach writing like it was an academic subject, but writing is really more of a physical act.  Yes, you can say that a story is derived from character and a character has to have compelling motivations to push the story along and interest the reader, but that's really just after-the-fact justification.  The story is truly nothing until you actually begin to write it and you begin to see, hear, smell, and feel the character.  When I was in high school, I needed someone to toss me some easy ones and then explain to me what worked and didn't work, and how to improve.  But I didn't get that, and so stumbled around for nearly three decades on my own before taking a class that finally put me on the right path. 

In hind sight, it seems kind of stupid.  Writers write; the don't read about writing.  But, I also recognize that it was part of my personality to try and figure things out, before starting anything new.  And frankly, the study of writing (without actually writing) gave me a solid grasp of theory.  How many times can you read "show, don't tell" before it becomes a part of your basic knowledge.  So, when I did start writing, I think I had some things floating around in my head that had reached the level of "intuitive" simply because I had read about them so many times.  In 2005, I took a fiction writing class and discovered (with a few friendly lobs, and some insightful pointers) that I might actually have some talent.  I wrote two stories for that class, and the second one (after much polishing) I eventually sold to a magazine.  However, I still struggled with my process.  I wanted to write in a fashion that I would describe as "purposeful".  If I was going to make a go of this writing, then I should be able to create a pattern or template to success.  Start with story question, build plot, add characters, mix with description and dialogue and close with something exciting.  It seemed like the logical thing to do, except that I've finally realized in hindsight that every story I've ever written doesn't follow this pattern.  I was looking for the "right" process, one that appealed to my non-creative brain, instead of simply listening to my creative brain (Fred) who had been showing me all along how to do it.  And the process is this: write the damned story, and build the elements like character and description as you go.  No, it won't be perfect, but that's what revision is for.  I didn't realize that this was the process, because the only stories I ever finished were to a deadline, and I assumed that "just getting it finished" meant that the process was different than it should have been.  But, the reality is, that deadline's just help me get out of my way so Fred can do his thing.

Which brings me to 2007, when I completed my third story, just in time to submit it and the one I had previously sold, as a part of my application to the Clarion Writer's Workshop.  In my arrogance, I really expected to be accepted.  In hindsight, the arrogance was foolish, but the stories were enough to be accepted anyway.  The workshop was a spectacular six weeks, but I continued to struggle with output.  The goal in the workshop is to produce a new story for critique by the group every week.  If I did it, I would be completing exactly twice as many stories as I'd ever written before.  As it turned out, I could only muster three new stories, so I had doubled my lifetime output.  Most everyone else seemed to have a pretty easy time meeting the goals.  It was old hat for most of them.  I recall having a conversation with one of my room mates about a friend of his who had been in a situation like mine, and his friend felt lost and overwhelmed.  I didn't have the guts to admit I might be in the same boat, but I was determined to get as much out of the experience as possible.  Even during those six weeks, I was trying to figure out my process, and still didn't recognize that it only worked when I finally got out of my way and let Fred finish.  But, It's been two years since Clarion now, and while I don't have any completed stories to show for it, I have been writing, and more importantly, I think I've finally come to terms with how I write.  It's not the way my logical brain would want to write, but it is the way that works ... for me.

I'm grateful that I'm finally in this place, feeling a bit more comfortable about the direction that I'm going with my writing, but the reason that I bring all this up is because of a sort of deja vu recognition in my home.  Like me in high school, my seventeen year old daughter Alicia has a knack for writing.  She recently got the results back on her ACT and it shows her in the 97th percentile for writing.  And it dawned on me that she probably gets the same insightful instruction about writing (especially fiction) that I got in high school (not).  So, today, I talked with her about her skills, and asked her if she's ever written any fiction.  She promptly showed me a story she's been writing over the last several days.  I'm very pleased to say that she's got some talent.  She instinctively knows how to make the story move, she understands how to build a story with scenes (probably her drama training) and I find the characters believable and sympathetic.  In short, I think she's way ahead of the curve.  I talked with her about her process, about what she was doing right, and asked her to finish the story and I'd help her revise it.  I don't think I even need to toss a few balls, just a couple of pointers on her grip and follow through on her swing.  Sometimes it's hard to connect with a teenager at home, but I'm looking forward to the future possibilities.

I'm reading "House of Rain" by Craig Childs, about the Anasazi culture that disappeared from the Southwest around 1100 AD, and there's a quote from an archeologist named Tom Windes that struck a tone with me. 

I've lived a lot of places and I can attest to the feel of different cultures, but it never really dawned on me that the landscape itself could shape or mold that culture.  I had a pretty good idea that weather could make a difference (one of the reasons that I live in California), but it never really dawned on me that the lay of the land might also affect culture.  But, it seems to make sense.

A few years ago, I was on a work related trip and found myself standing in a playa (dry lake bed) just off the I-15 on the California side of the border with Nevada.  As we looked across the playa and several miles further, we could see a freight train gliding on invisible tracks across the base of one of the numerous mountains in the area.  One of the men I was with (a government worker from back east) scratched his head and said, "You know, I don't think I've ever seen an entire train before." 

So, what does that do to a persons perspective in life?  If it's easier to take in the whole of the world, does that help you become a "big picture" kind of person?  Does it feed your humility when it's easy to see how small you are in the world?  I'll have to think about this a little more in my writing and consider how the setting itself informs the culture as well as the individual.

I got a nice camera for my birthday last August.  And by nice, I mean "don't have to live with automatic settings".  I got frustrated with cameras that think they know when and how you want to take a picture.  There was quite a bit of luck in this shot.  I didn't know exactly how it was going to turn out, but I like it a lot.  It's a shot of an opening sequence in my daughters school play.  That's her in the middle.  The ghostly blurs behind her are from other cast members moving about the stage.  I took it without the flash (for obvious reasons) and the shutter stays open a little longer to allow enough light in.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book, "Creativity" by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Most of the time when you see a book with this kind of title, you'll find someone's personal insight to the creative process; the things they do to help themselves be creative.  But this book is very different.  The author is a research psychologist who applies the scientific process to analyzing creativity.  It's a very fresh look at an old subject.

I'll try to blog periodically about what I learn as I go through the book, with a focus on writing as the creativity in question, although it applies to all creative endeavors.  I'll start with the author's description of where we find creativity.  Most people would say that creativity is soley a function of a particular individual.  But Mihaly says creativity is a function of a system made up of three parts:

1) Domain: a set of symbolic rules and procedures.  Writing consists of such things as letters, words, syntax, punctuation, scenes, and chapters, and much has been written about the appropriate way to put these all together to shape a narrative (rules and procedures). Domains are nested within a culture where the symbolic knowledge is shared.

2) Field: all the individuals who act as gate keepers to the domain.  The members of the Field decide whether a new idea of product should be included in the Domain.

3) Individual.  Creativity happens only when the individual uses the symbols of the Domain to form a new idea or pattern, AND the Field decides the new idea should be included in the Domain.

So, Creativity is then defined as:

I turned fifty in August. 

At the time, it seemed like I should post something really profound, something to show off my accumulated wisdom.  But you'll notice it's now two months later, and I'm afraid the delay was not because I had too much material to organize.  It appears that I don't have any secret insights to life.  I can tell you about where I've been, and where I think I'm going, but the meaning of it all often escapes me.  But I'm fifty now, so I have to offer at least a little reflection.  I don't really want to, but I think it's a rule or something.  So here goes:

As time passes, we get older!!!!!!


That's it.  Nothing special.  Time doesn't guarantee any additional wisdom.  A lot of men go through mid-life crises around this age because they feel like doors are closing.  They have the affair and buy the sports car because they are confusing youthful pleasures with pleasures of youth.  And the real pleasure of youth is the open ended sense of opportunity, the ability to point your life in whichever direction you choose.  But are those opportunities really gone?  I can think of three separate careers that I'd probably enjoy more than my current choice except that I'd lose at least half my income and all or most of my benefits if I switched.  So, the choices are still there, but there's a cost to making the change that never had to be considered from a youthful perspective.  But it's still a choice.  And there are plenty of other choices and paths to take that are not so drastic.  I can keep my current career and explore other paths, other careers, more easily at age fifty than I could at age twenty.

So, as time passes, we make choices, take paths, and get older.  Then we make more choices, take additional paths, and get older still.  If we all focus on the choices and paths, does the age really matter?

When I'm writing I'm always looking at the plausibility of events.  Would it really happen that way?  Am I pulling a rabbit out of the hat, making something happen simply because it needs to happen?  But what about the surprises in life?  Sometimes, unlikely things just happen.  We can simply be in the wrong place at the wrong time.  For instance, three days ago I drove up to see the observatory on the top of Palomar Mountain.  It was a beautiful drive out, but on the way back I took a wrong turn.  I drove for about three miles before I realized my mistake and began to backtrack.  While driving back, we saw a helicopter flying around, and then lost view of it as it descended somewhere ahead.  When we got to within a hundred yards of my original wrong turn, we saw dust and dirt swirling around and quickly closed our windows as the helicopter we had seen before ascended from an open area to the right of the road.  A car approached us from the other direction, so I glanced at the helicopter for only a moment before looking back at the road to verify I was still driving on my side of the line.  As usual, I was fine.  I'm a decent driver and can usually manage the basics like staying on my side of the road.  Unfortunately I can't say the same about the other driver.  When I realized she was crossing the line, I pulled quickly to the right but she hit me at a point near the end of the passenger door and scraped to the end of the bumper (estimated $2100 damage).  The lady driving the other car apologized but said that she lost her attention because she was "afraid" of the helicopter.

Now here's the point I'm turning over in my mind.  In order for this accident to occur, I have to make a wrong turn, then I have to drive for a pretty good distance before returning to arrive at exactly the same time as the helicopter lifts off and a distracted local driver approaches me from the other direction.  I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  So, could I use this scenario in a story?  Things are supposed to happen for a reason in fiction.  But I think there is one major exception.  You can use fateful events as the hook or push into the story as long as you're faithful in making everything else happen for a reason.  So, I could write a story that starts with this fateful collision and then follow the drivers or passengers to show how they are changed.

I could also turn what seems to be a fateful event and reveal that it wasn't so fateful.  Perhaps the people in the helicopter were looking for me and the other driver was in on it.  When they spotted me returning, they quickly drew up the plan to distract me with the helicopter so the driver could hit me.  Maybe they were hoping to disable the car, but my quick reaction turned it into just a scrape, sending them to plan B (I'm looking over my shoulder now).  Or maybe the fateful event occurred because the "fates" conspired for it to happen to further their supernatural agenda.  I was meant to meet the distracted driver who will ultimately lead me to the holy grail.

In the real world, sometimes shit happens.  In fiction, it has to be a little more interesting than that.

It's been one of those weeks where I struggle with any kind of satisfaction with my own writing.  My characters say and do things that are either stupid or just don't make any coherent sense.  It's exhausting.  It makes me question the whole gig.  When the writing sucks, it's easy to start looking at other ways to add meaning to your life.  Maybe I could be better, more productive, more meaningful if I spent the time taking long walks, solving the Theory of Everything, or contemplating the fate of the universe.

And along those lines I started indulging a new distraction in the last couple of weeks.  I had my eye on this eight volume "History of Philosophy" set that's at the University Book Store.  They've been sitting there beckoning to me for months and I finally bit the bullet and got one of the volumes.  I couldn't start with Volume I because it was already gone, So, I have to intuit some of the basics about Greek philosophy and dive directly into medieval philosophy, which I find to be mostly about the struggle to make a distinction between philosophy and theology.  And I LOVE it.  Which means of course that I'm a hopeless geek.  For the most part it's completely useless information; so much counting of angels dancing on the head of a pin.  It has more to do with attempts to construct a false sense of certitude even though ambiguity reigns in the real world.  But it's utterly fascinating to me.  I'll probably buy the rest of the volumes as I feel the urge, but I don't want to read them all at once.  My brain needs a little time to digest it's food.

But, even with interesting brain candy out there trying to distract me, I'm not willing to give up the writing.  The occasional decent stuff I produce is enough to keep me going for now.  And I also draw some perverse encouragement when I watch TV and realize that people are actually getting paid to write some of that nonsense.  I watched an episode of NCIS the other day and they had a female agent looking for her 16 or 17 year old "contact" in Baghdad.  The contact's father had tried to help her brother (a marine) and was killed by other marines for his troubles.  The agent was of course grateful, so she bequeathed this amazing and touching gift: 

"What?  You are giving us your laptop so my younger sister can have contact with the world?  Never mind that you haven't given us a power cord.  Never mind that the conditions of the community don't look like they even have power, let alone any kind of connectivity.  But, thank you, O wise and gracious keeper of holy technology.  This more than makes up for the loss of our father."

At least, that's how it came across to me.  I wanted to throw something at the TV.

And then I watched an episode of Shark.  I love James Woods acting, but the writers are killing his credibility.  They have him diving to the floor to avoid sniper bullets that are shattering the windows of his home, and then a day later he gets upset and takes a walk alone on a dark and deserted road.  He gets picked up in a limo (miraculous timing) by the same guy who was trying to kill him.  But NOW, with nobody watching, the bad guy only wants to give him a low-ball bribe.  Is it too much to ask for just a little bit of intelligent consistency in characters?

I would be embarrassed ... or maybe I should say I am embarrassed to write such ridiculous dreck.  But, I'll continue to plug away with the hope that some day I'll reach a level of competency that doesn't make me cringe without twenty rewrites.  It will probably take years and makes me wish I had started much earlier in my life.  I don't want to become a competent writer just in time to keel over with a stroke.  I might have to make plans to live forever just to get it right.  Or, I can always give it up and become an irritated TV critic.