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It Is Finished

Okay, it’s Sunday.  Two days past when Advance closed up.  I have been sore all weekend.  I hate to admit it, but I’m just not used to that level of intense physical labor anymore.  Weight lifting does not compensate for it.  Strong enough?  Certainly.  Ready for seven straight hours a day of hard lifting?  Not on your life.

But it’s done, it’s over.  We dismantled the entire lab.  This included two Kreonite paper processors, a Kreonite C-41 film processor, and E-6 film processor, some 14 enlargers, a mounting press, a slide mounting machine, stainless steel sinks of various sizes, counter space, tables, oversized trimmers….

I’m getting tired just listing it.  Suffice it to say that we were a full service photographic lab, with all that entails.  There was very very little we couldn’t do.

Yesterday (Saturday) I did virtually nothing.  All day, I basically sat around.  I read a little bit, Donna and I had a few conversations, we napped.  Nothing of any major effort.  Then we went out for a celebratory dinner.  Donna left it up to me and I decided on Franco’s, down in Soulard.  A friend of ours works there, Angela, and when I called she answered.

We sat on the patio in back, in near perfect weather, and indulged in a gourmet delight.  Explaining what was the cause of our celebration to Angela, she threw in a few extras that really added.  Especially at the end, when, after ordering our desert, she came out with another waiter in tow bearing two more desert plates on the house.  Excellent.  Well worth it.

We took Coffey for a walk when we got home, because just sitting around would have been inadvisable.  We were stuffed.  But not so stuffed as to be in pain.

Wonderful day.

Today, we went to our Dante group—of which Angela is also a part—and had a good session.

Donna and I are agreed, if even remotely possible, I am not going back to a day job.  Not unless it is extraordinary.  Certainly not in a lab.

So I have a summer of making things work ahead of me.  I worked at Advance for 12 years, about 10 years longer than I’d intended.  The last 4 have been hell.

I’m still recovering from a few muscle aches and bruises.  Tomorrow is Monday.  Tomorrow the new work begins.  For now, I am contented to know that I am home.

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Last Week

Today is the first day of work for the last week I will be employed, at least employed at Advance Photographics.  I have, as you might imagine, mixed feelings.

Interesting phrase, that.  Mixed feelings.  If they were truly mixed, mashed together as it were, would we be aware that there are several feelings, some conflicting?  Wouldn’t it be one feeling of a particular alloy?

Be that as it may.  I have mixed feelings.  I have never particularly wanted to work there.  As is my habit, I have tried to make the best of it.  I’ve liked most of the people with whom I’ve worked there over the last 12 years.  I mean no disrespect to any of them when I say that I’d rather not have worked there long enough to know them.

Not that I didn’t get a lot out of it.  Advance paid off our house.  I was able to continue doing photography on some level by using the place as my own lab.  I’ve made my first halting steps into digital photography from there.  It made possible certain things that were clearly not possible otherwise.

But it is a testament to failure on my part in many other ways.  Just the fact that I have been forced to keep that job means that I have not succeeded at the thing I want to do, which is writing.  For a few short years, I thought my goal was in hand.  Between 2000 and 2003, I thought I was on my way.  But then everything collapsed, and the sudden spurt of novels appearing between 2000 and 2005 came to an end, as did two of my publishers, and the third one did not make enough money on my last novel to entertain buying anymore.  Those of you who may read this blog regularly are well aware of all that.  I made a nice little piece of extra change during those years and it helpd in many ways, but until the house was paid off it was never enough to allow me to quit a job that I had come to despise.

Not for any reason other than what it symbolized to me.  Oh, like any job it had good days and bad, and occasionally I was really pleased with the work I did.  But the fact remained I didn’t want to be there.

But I am not a quitter.  It’s not in my nature.  If I accept a task, take on a responsibility, I may not perform it as well as others, but I do not quit.  Sometimes to my regret.  But this is part of who I am.

So I have stuck it out to the end.  Digital overwhelmed the wet-process, “traditional” photofinishing industry, bringing in changes much faster than we expected.  That stove in a goodly part of our business, certainly reduced my job.  Till the point where what used to require six to eight people now took two, one of them part time.   Nevertheless, we were holding our own, according to the boss, until October, when the economy really went into the crapper.  It was obvious to me what was happening, but I wasn’t going to quit.  I was curious to see how long this could last.

When Advance opened its doors in downtown St. Louis, we had at one time 23 or 24 employees, all busy, most working overtime, with one or two part time people besides.  We had a fulltime delivery driver on staff, two salesmen, three color printers, two black & white technicians, etc etc etc.  Including the boss, there are now five of us, and only one of us is getting any overtime—the digital tech.

So this coming Friday is the last day.  I intend drawing unemployment and writing for a year or so.  I don’t know what is going to develop.  I have plans, of course.  For one thing, paradoxically, I’ll be putting on my very first gallery exhibit in July.  Fortunately I have all the prints already.  We’ll see how that goes.

I have projects mapped out, so it won’t be a question of not knowing what work on.  But the question of how to sell it remains.  I’ve recently had a long conversation with a close friend about that, how the concern over money can utterly sabotage what you do, what you try to do, always second-guessing yourself, thinking oh, this is crap, this won’t sell, and not finishing or even starting on something that very well may be just fine, except that you’re looking at it with the wrong lens.  To a certain extent, I’ve never really had those kinds of doubts about my novels—I’m not doing anything so outre and experimental that no market exists, but that only makes it more frustrating for me, wondering why the books won’t sell.  Perhaps they’re too ordinary, but I doubt that as well.

But as I said, I am not a quitter.  In this regard, I may be exhibiting a profound intellectual fault, not being able to recognize the futility in something.  But I doubt that, too.

I may post something this coming weekend on the Last Day.  Stay Tuned.

Absurdity

Catcher In The Rye

I just completed an essay for a newsletter about books we never read, but it is assumed, because we are Readers, we have.  Catcher In The Rye is such a book for me.  Never read it.  Know a lot about it, through some kind of osmosis, rubbing up against people who have read it.  You can glean a lot that way.

I made the statement in the essay that I probably don’t even own a copy.  I just checked.  I do.  It’s not actually mine, the name of the person who apparently loaned it to me is stamped inside the front cover.  But there it is, on my shelf.  Accusing me.  “You never read me, but I won’t go away until you do!”

Some books, I think, are alive.  They find their way, by many avenues, into peoples’ hands.  Some of us never seem to have to purchase these books, they just show up.  They’re always there.  This is one of them.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems to be another.  We have never been without a copy in this house, though we have never bought one.  I haven’t read it.  Read in it, sure.  Open at random, do a few pages, close and reshelve.  I’ve got a few books like that.  But I never paid for a copy.  How did it get here?  And by “it” I mean the book itself, not just one singular copy.

We used to give books away.  We’d buy them for people and hand them out.  I did that for Time Enough For Love once, I bought ten copies and just passed them to friends.

What other books just seem to follow you around?  I suppose it depends on what kind of people you hang with.  I know people who have never bought The Lord of the Rings, but they have it, and have read it.  (Yes, I bought my copies, but there was one set of them passing among my friends at one time.  Wonder where that ended up?)

For years I had a tattered copy of To Kill A Mockingbird that arrived in my collection one day from where I do not know and stayed there.  I finally bought an anniversary edition hardcover of it and the paperback has subsequently disappeared.  Moved on, I suppose, to some other needy shelf.

When I say books live, this isn’t exactly what I have in mind, but it is kind of freaky.  I’ve never actually caught my books having relations and reproducing, but several years ago I discovered four full editions of The Foundation Trilogy.  

Occasionally, I know where these copies come from, but it is also true that many of them have just shown up, like unemployed people looking for work.  “Will Tell You A Good Story For a Warm Shelf for the Night.”  I’m looking at my shelves now and I see a copy of Lost Horizons that I did not buy (or borrow).  Likewise a copy of Dr. Zhivago.  That one baffles me.  Why would they pick my library in which to seek refuge?  Who passed the word to them that they’d be safe here?

Well, it’s true, I won’t turn them out.  Who knows, I may even read them.  Maybe not Catcher In The Rye, though.  I’m kind of holding out on that one.  It’s the kind of book everyone thinks you really must read, that I’ve got my back up about it.  Obviously, it thinks I should read it, but it slipped in here on the sly, probably in company with a few others (like the volume on Chinese Philosophy that I cannot imagine the origin of) and thinks it will taunt me into cracking it open.

We’ll see about that.

Home

My Dog

Okay, this is too cute.  I need to do videos, but they might mean something only to me.  So what?

My dog…her name is Coffey.  About 35 lbs, the color of coffee beans except for the slightly spotted white on her chest, around her neck, her paws, and a streak like spilled milk on her face from forehead down to around her nose.  Marvelous ears.

Happy.

I’m not in a great mood these days, for a variety of reasons, and this morning I seemed stuck in a funk.  I have to go in to the Day Job earlier than usual and it’s too damn cold outside to either go to the gym (can’t wait for winter to be over) or walk Coffey.  I won’t freeze my tush off anymore just because my dog needs—or wants—a walk.  This has been the norm most of this winter.  Windchill ducks below 20, we’re not going.  She seems okay with it as long as we do something else.

I am writing this just after the something else.  Because she made me laugh out loud.

I went upstairs, to the bathroom, and something about it triggered her play response.  She sat outside the bathroom door, at attention, looking very expectant.  I came out and she ran into the living room and sat again.  She watches you when she’s in this state, looking for cues as toyour intention.  Which way will I move?  Toward her leash?  To the couch?  And she tries to sit very still while studying me.  But when I look directly at her, motionlessness ends.  Her tail starts wagging, brushing along the carpet, swish swish swish, and there is enough kinetic energy in it to get her entire butt shifting back and forth, which, when I smile, increases, till she’s pivoting at a point almost midway up her spine.

I laugh.

She grabs her rope.

The Rope is a thick white and green length of about three feet, knotted at both ends and in the middle.  This is her favorite thing to do besides walking and eating.  I can’t refuse.  I grab my end.

The tug begins.  It’s amazing how heavy 35 lbs can be when combined with a mental exercise (on her part) to will herself to weigh more.  She drops her center of gravity as I lift and suddenly it feels more like 50 or 60 lbs.  I yank.  She comes off the floor.  We whip the rope back and forth across the floor.

Then I begin to spin around.  All four of her feet come off the ground and she hangs on, eyes bright, as I whirl her around five, six, ten times before setting her down again.  She, at least, is in heaven.

Gloom dissipates.  I’m still grinning.

I like my dog.

Coffey

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Chapter the Next

Yesterday, I stayed home from work again.  Nothing to do.  In a way, I like this.  I’d go on contract with the company if I could, go in only when there was actually something to do.  But it’s not that much money, so it’s a quandary.

On the other hand, I finished a chapter in a book that’s been teasing me for a couple of years.  I’d walked away form it to write something else, and I’ve been finding it difficult to go back.  I have a lot written—almost a third of it, at least—and I’m loathe to just give up on it, but with one thing or another I just haven’t been able to get any forward momentum.

Till yesterday.  So this morning I’m taking a stab at the Next Chapter.  And if that flows, if the words come, if the story proceeds, well…

Couple of things.  I posted a new piece over on Dangerous Intersection about one of my pet peaves with the Culture At Large.  Premature though it is, some folks are declaring that Intelligent Design as a movement is dead on University campuses.  Follow the links.

I pulled out an old piece of vinyl this morning to listen to, Todd Rundgren’s Initiation, which has some appropriately irreverant material on it—Eastern Intrigue, Initiation, A Treatise On Cosmic Fire—and a lot of good, solid rock’n’roll.

I’m going into work early this morning, just to wrap it up for the next four days.  I’m now looking forward to doing some actual fiction writing.  Maybe confession is good for the soul—or at least the creative muscle.

Have a good Christmas.

culture

Why I Write

From time to time someone asks me (as, no doubt, they ask other writers) why I do it.  Why, specifically, I write fiction as opposed to nonfiction.  It really is hard to explain to those who seem tone-deaf to what we call Art.  Sometimes it’s hard to explain to yourself.  The short answer for me is that I love it.  I love creating stories and weird stuff and making up plots, because I always loved stories.  (When I was a kid, I’d watch movies in which a group of people are thrust into a really cool adventure and at some point one of them would talk about wanting to just go home and having everything return to normal.  And, as a kid, I’d think why would you want to do that?  Can’t you see that what you’re doing now is so much cooler than going back to a dull life?  That was a kid talking, of course, because the stories were in fact so much cooler than what passed for my “real life.”  It’s only later that you realize that part of your “real” life was the freedom to indulge stories, pretend, and thrust yourself—quite safely—into adventures.)  Telling stories just felt like the coolest thing to do.

But then you grow up and actually try to do it and if you stick with it long enough to discover all sorts of other aspects to it that you couldn’t imagine as a kid just looking for a neat ride.  And that’s the art.  And that is hard to describe to people who don’t read fiction, who don’t Get It.

Dan Simmons wrote a novel called The Crook Factory about Ernest Hemingway in WWII.  He lived in Cuba then and he ran an amateur spy ring, hunting submarines, for a time.  This much is true.  Simmons built a very intricate and thrilling novel around it.  His viewpoint character, though, is a FBI agent who is one of those with the tin ear, who doesn’t Get It, why someone would write fiction.

Late in the novel they have a conversation about it.  Here is part of it.

“Why do you do it?”

“Do what?

“Write fiction rather than write about true things.”

Hemingway shook his head.  “It’s hard to be a great writer, Lucas, if you love the world and living in it and you love special people.  It’s even harder when you love so many places.  You can’t just transcribe things from the outside in, that’s photography.  You have to do it the way Cezanne did, from inside yourself.  That’s art.  You have to do it from inside yourself.  Do you understand?”

“No.”

Hemingway sighed softly and nodded.  “It’s like listening to people,  LUcas.  If their experiences are vivid, they become a part of you, whether or not their stories are bullshit or not.  It doesn’t matter.  After a while, their experiences get to be more vivid than your own.  Then you mix it all together.  You invent from your own life stories and from all of theirs, and after a while it doesn’t matter which is which…what’s yours and what’s theirs, what was true and what was bullshit.  It’s all true then.  It’s the country you know, and the weather.  Everyone you know…the trick in fiction is like the trick in packing a boat just so without losing trim.  There are a thousand intangibles that have to be crammed into every sentence.  Most of it should not visible, just suggested…

“Anyway, the…trick is to write truer than true.  And that’s why I write fiction rather than fact.”

That’s one way to describe it.  I didn’t realize truth had anything to do with it until I read an Algis Budrys review of a Gene Wolfe novel.  He said of Wolfe that he told the truth well.  I puzzled over that for a time before it clicked.  I’d been saying something of the sort for a long time concerning philosophy—that there’s truth and then there’s fact.  Occasionally the two meet and become tangled up and are in many respects the same thing, but mostly there are facts, which have no meaning.  Truth is the meaning, which must be derived or extrapolated from fact.  Which led me to the conclusion that Truth is a process, an ongoing experience of recognition.  One of the places I’ve found it has been in good fiction.

I don’t know if Hemingway ever actually said the above—it sounds like something he would have said, though, which makes it true, whether there is the fact of it or not.  And that is what fiction does.

Home

Little Lost Book

We returned home one year from a worldcon (world science fiction convention, for those who may not know the nomenclature)—I forget which year—and promptly I lost a book. Or a box of books. You see, we’d early on gotten into the habit of mailing our purchases home rather than try to take boxes of books on the plane. (The first worldcon we went to in 1984 resulted in about three hefty boxes going back, all of which cost around a hundred and fifty dollars. Today that much would fit in one (small) box.) This system worked pretty well until this time. I think it must have been Chicago in 2000.

We—I—misplaced a box. So I thought. We were rearranging the house once again, moving things from one place another, and along the way I thought this one box of books had disappeared. Oh, it was in the house, certainly, buried inadvertently, and one year it would reappear. But it never did, not even through subsequent house cleanings.

Over time the contents of this box took on mythic status. I only recalled one title that was in it, Dan Simmons’ Crook Factory, but I knew there must be others in there from maybe George R.R. Martin or Greg Bear or Emma Bull or a collectible hardcover by some SF luminary. It was a small box that acquired supreme status.

Well, this morning I found it. Or, rather, I found the one title I specifically remembered, the Dan Simmons. Not in a box with other books from a worldcon, but in a plastic file box filled with old Scientific Americans. One book.

As soon as I saw it I realized that the rest of the box did not exist. I’d put this book in with these magazines to get it out of the way while I did…something. It then ended up at the bottom of one of the closets in my office, and would have remained there had I not got it in my head a few weeks ago to completely purge this space.

The bubble burst, all those other volumes—which, tellingly, I could not recall—have vanished in memory. They never existed.

Now, I have lost stories of my own before, put somewhere to wait until I got back to them…those are not mythical, and some of them were masterpieces which may never see the light of day again.