While “what happens in Frisco STAYS in Frisco” I will share the following sequence of Wednesday night texts from a good friend and colleague of almost five years, unedited:

ME: Did we lose you?
HIM: Jiffy saute g’day HDTV
HIM: No
HIM: Sarah heftier jiggly
HIM: Fuck
HIM: Tree grey hoots
HIM: Fucjir I can’t tyie
ME: Where the HELL are you man??? That looks like a serious good time in progress!!!

I’m not going to lie, “Sarah heftier jiggly” became something of a theme and a mantra for the rest of that night. Was this a person, a place, an event? I won’t tell you the answer, but I will say it’s none of those things and all of them. And maybe the best auto-correct fail I’ve ever been a party to.

Enigmatic tales of late night adventures aside, it was a very productive meeting and it managed to have a bit of a theme. On the flight out for the east coast team we saw the movie “Moneyball” staring Brad Pitt and written by Aaron Sorkin based on a book by financial writer Michael Lewis. It’s the story of Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane trying to change the way the game of baseball is played from the foundation up. Surprisingly, for a movie about baseball, it’s not a “baseball movie.” It’s a business movie. A very VERY good business movie, and if I was a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences I’d be voting for Best Picture and Best Actor without a moment’s hesitation.

While I won’t give any of the specific details away, I will share the finer points that a group of consultants in the financial industry took away from a viewing. This was the theme of our regional kickoff session, and I imagine these lessons are going to be very much in my mind as I move forward for the coming year:

1. The goal shouldn’t be to buy players, the goal should be to buy wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.
2. In order to score a run, we have to get on base. Do we care how we get on base? No, we do not.
3. We get paid to get on first, we do not get paid to get thrown out stealing second.
4. Sometimes we have to learn to play a new position. That’s not hard, it’s INCREDIBLY HARD.
5. They aren’t paying us because of the player we were or the player we could be, they’re paying us for the kind of player we are today.
6. The first guy through the wall always gets kicked in the teeth, always gets bloody. Always.
7. Losing is NEVER fun. We hate losing more than we love winning.
8. No one will remember setting records or great games or even a winning season if you don’t win the last game of the season.
9. How can you not get romantic about the game?

I don’t play baseball, but I do play the business equivalent of a full-contact sport at a professional level. I feel very good about my team this year, and I think there’s a very good chance we’ll win the last game of this season.

The other thing I did in my down time last week, was try to edit the first chapter I posted up in my last two posts. Editing is hard. Tracking your changes and writing up WHY you changed things is BRUTALLY hard.

I’ve gotten about the first third of the first half done. It only took me the better part of four hours. I’m 100% committed to getting this post done, but I recognize it’s going to take longer than I had initially expected. I’m guessing that it’s going to take the rest of the week and I also want to actually continue writing the next chapters too. So, to accomplish that I’ve decided to re-invest the rest of my writing time this week to finishing up the next two chapters and THEN going back and finishing the edits on Chapter One. It’s not how I thought I’d go through it, but I’m afraid of running out of steam if I don’t actually commit to more chapter writing and less poking at the one I already have on paper.

So, expect at least two more chapter posts this week, and hopefully the edit post will go up before (or during) the weekend. One of my “emails but doesn’t comment” readers asked if it was a romance novel like my mom wrote, and the answer is no. There are romantic moments in the first third, but they are counter-balanced by some very unromantic moments, and a theme that is not about how everything works out in the end.

After the third chapter I’ll post the synopsis of the book and the cover letter I stick on it before shipping it off to a slush pile somewhere. As a bit of social experience, I’ll post up the rejection letters and my reactions to them. I have a different perspective on rejection letters than many aspiring writers, and I think actually talking about the nature of rejection and how it may not actually be a personal attack on the author is worth putting into its own post one of these days. I figure I’ll wait until I have a specific example to work from. Shouldn’t take much more than six to nine months after I send it off, which at the rate I write should be just enough time for me to get it written.

[Word Count: 1055]

Someone else asked if it has a happy ending, and the answer is no, but it doesn’t have an unhappy ending either. As it’s a story about life, and life is a story that won’t end until the last of us succumbs to the Zombie Apocalypse (or comet impact or religious tribulation or what have you), it doesn’t end cleanly with anyone riding off into a sunset. Happily-ever-after is the province of fairy tales and fantasy novels. I love both of those things and aspire to write them, but this is not either of those kinds of stories.

Growing up, I spent years believing that if we loved enough bad things wouldn’t happen to us. I grew up and discovered that bad things happen no matter how much you love someone. This story is about bad things that happen and the fact that people can love each other in spite of (or even because of) the string of tragedies that make up a human life. If you live a life without ever experiencing a tragedy, then you never bothered to live at all. The people in this story live a lot of life and earn whatever love that comes on the other side.

In this post I’ll put up the rest of the raw and unedited first chapter, and in my next post I’ll post the same for chapter two. After that, I’ll post my editing process and you can all see how I trim sentences and change words and generally whack back the unruly beast that is a draft into something a little bit more tame and readable.

     The old truck rumbled to life and the radio crackled alive a moment later.
     “...more attention to the troubles of the White House just a week after Bernstein and Woodward’s book hit shelves, and less than two weeks before arguments over the secret tapes are made before the Supreme Court...”
     She cranked the dial over and tried to find anything that wasn’t about the nation’s obsession with Watergate. A few crackling bursts later and she found the station out of Birmingham that played rock and roll when it switched to the overnight pattern. Lynyrd Skynyrd jumped out of the speaker, singing a love song to everything she was ready to drive away from.
     “...Now Watergate does not bother me, does your conscience bother you?..”
     She left it as it was better than nothing and pulled out onto the dirt road heading into town. It took less than two minutes to get to the gas station on the corner of 4th and 4th, directly across from the post office and next door to the diner where she worked. The station closed up the same time the diner closed down, almost three hours earlier, but Bailey knew where the switch was for the pump, and she stuck a ten through the mail slot to cover the tank of gas that would get her at least two-hundred miles down the road.
     “Why Dixie girl, what on the good Lord’s fine earth has you out at this time of night?” Mrs. Little’s voice rang out from her front porch across the street and directly behind her as she was faced her pick-up. Bailey was barely able to contain the fingernails-on-a-chalkboard shudder that ran through her at the sound of it. Town busybody, terrible gossip, and Sherriff’s Wife, Eugenia Little took her self-assigned job of mother hen to everyone in a ten mile radius seriously. Her home on the corner between the town hall and the county jail just happened to give her a wonderful view over everything that might be happening that was worth repeating in hushed tones to the women at the rotary or the beauty parlor.
     “Evening Mrs. Little,” Bailey defaulted to her waitress manners and gave the older woman her best welcome-to-the-diner smile, “just getting some errands done before the heat of the day tomorrow.”
     “Why would you be pumping gas at this time of the night dear? One of the boys will be around tomorrow to help you, doesn’t matter if they sweat in the sun a little.”
     “I’m running over to Gadsden tomorrow morning, early. I figured I’d fill up now and leave Earl a note in case I’m late for my shift. You know how those doctors can be.”
     Given how many times she’d been over to the hospital when her Grandma was sick, trips to Gadsden had become a staple of Bailey’s life. She figured it would take Mrs. Little a few hours of working it over to realize that Bailey hadn’t had a good reason to go to Gadsden in the last two years.
     “Well...” the busybody’s face clouded over for a moment with an intuition that she wasn’t getting the whole story, “you just be sure you don’t leave poor Earl hanging. You know how busy it is on Friday mornings.”
     If by ‘busy’ she meant ‘two farmers and a deputy who drank his thermos dry before midnight’ then sure, anything else would be a serious stretch of the imagination.
     “I will Mrs. Little, you have a good night now.”
     Bailey hung up the nozzle and flipped the pump off, then crossed the street and unlocked the diner with the key under the flower pot next to the door. She opened the cash register and took out a twenty and three tens, then wrote a quick note on an order pad:
     “Earl, I took fifty out of the register to cover my final pay paycheck. If there’s more than that, please give it to Randy and tell him to pay the utility man before he spends it on beer. If it comes to less than that, we’ll just call it even or I’ll tell Jane how you run your hands under the girl’s skirts when we’re getting stuff out of the back. – Dixie”
     Below that she wrote in big block letters “I QUIT” just for clarity and then posted the order note on the line where the diner owner and full-time cook would be sure to see it first thing in the morning. Her grandma once told her that “some bridges you cross in life, some bridges you burn.” For all the times she’s been pinched on the ass to earn a dime tip, this was one bridge she wanted to burn on the way out of town.
     She grabbed two packs of Camels off the stack next to the register and a lighter from under the counter. She pulled one out and lit it up while she looked out the door of the place she’d worked for the last eight years. With one last glance down the counter she walked through the door and climbed into her truck, not even bothering to lock up behind her.
     When the truck roared back to life the radio was playing a driving guitar rhythm and a deep voice was singing about the girls in La Grange. Bailey looked northeast towards Chattanooga, and southwest towards Birmingham. Beyond Birmingham was Mississippi and Texas and at the end of the road was Hollywood.
     “Prettiest face since Hollywood...”
     She put it in gear to the beat of the music and dropped the clutch. The truck launched southwest, headlights illuminating all the something in front of her, taillights shining on all the nothing she was leaving behind.

[Word Count: 1345]

Anyway, I’ll be posting the rest of the pieces on my fiction oriented site once I refresh that one and give it a face-lift and reboot. As I continue to post over there I’ll drop posts with links here just so no one has to follow both to keep up with the writing if they want to.

—

     The train-whistle called out through the heavy air of an Alabama summer night, and she looked out over the long moonlit field between her front porch and the tracks on the other side of old man Gilbert’s farm.
     It was the ten-thirty running north and east from Birmingham to Chattanooga, and like everything else in her eye-blink little town it was running slow. Slow like the words on the lips of the customers at the diner she called a job. Slow like the ambition of her brother sleeping off an afternoon of beers and girly magazines on the couch in the living room. Slow like the minutes of her life that were bleeding out of her with every breath she took, choking on the stink of stale cigarettes and rotting garbage piled up under the sink; the smell of a little life drowning in boredom and suffocating under the weight of being less than the nothing she ever thought she’d be.
     She looked back at the picture of Ben Franklin on the hundred dollar bill she’d been holding as reverently as her grandmother’s Bible for the last hour. She couldn’t decide if he’d been drunk when he tipped her more money than she took home in a week, but he said she “had the prettiest face he’d seen since Hollywood” and then drove away in his fancy silver sports car. She’d spent her entire shift assuming it was a dollar bill, or maybe even a five like she might get from the men who thought they were high rollers after too much whiskey on a Saturday night. When she pulled it out at the end of her shift it shocked her so much she dropped it on the bathroom floor like it had burned her finger tips.
     The train called out again in the night, telling the world it was going somewhere, anywhere, just not here. Attalla Alabama was nothing and nowhere. She’d been born here on a summer night in nineteen fifty and not a damn thing had happened in the twenty-four years since. She listened to the power of the train pushing itself away from her nowhere, wheels grinding in a deep roar of purpose eating up the black distance between where she was and the brighter lights of anywhere else on earth.
     The sudden sound of an empty beer bottle falling from her brother’s sleeping hand snapped her out of her reverie, and jolted Bailey Dixon – the girl everyone called Dixie - into making the first something decision of her nothing life.
     Truthfully, she’d been thinking about this since the day two years ago when she inherited the house and responsibility for the drunk and snoring pervert face-down and drooling between the spread thighs of his latest Hustler darling in the next room. Her grandmother left her both of them, as well as a stack of hospital bills and the rough running ’56 Chevy pick-up parked next to the pecan tree out front. The doctors said it was cancer from the cigarettes that killed her, but Bailey figured being a miserable old bitch might have had something to do with it.
     She walked down the hallway back to the bedroom with the crooked door hanging from one hinge and took the oversized white Bible down off the top shelf. The morning after her grandmother’s funeral she’d opened it up to write down the date in the record of births and deaths recorded in the front, and that’s when she found them. Placed neatly and pressed smooth, fives and tens and twenties squirreled away in the one place no one would ever look by accident. Her grandmother had spent years using that old white monstrosity to threaten and torture her, never once letting slip that almost five hundred dollars were hiding between Ruth and Samuel.
     She took out the old tweed-covered suitcase with the leather trimmed edges for the first time since she brought hit home with her grandmother’s effects from the funeral home. Unceremoniously she emptied the old woman’s shirts and polyester pants into a heap on the floor and then packed it with the three dresses she owned, four shirts, two pairs of jeans, the grey mock-heels she’d bought on a lark last spring, her Sunday bra and slip, and all the panties in her top drawer. Just before closing the lid she had a pang of sympathy for the old woman who’d raised her since her mother disappeared on a summer night hardly any different from this one, the same year they bought the pickup new off the lot in Birmingham; so she grabbed up the old woman’s Bible and placed it in the suitcase before snapping the latches tight and carrying the only pieces of her nothing life she could be bothered to keep out to the old Chevy.

[Word Count: 980]

The rest of Chapter 1 in this post.

Stupid.

The jolt from a solar-powered box with a 2500 milliamp battery is basically equivalent to the zip you get from a 9v battery on your tongue times two. The jolt from an AC fence energizer that can power ten miles of fence and runs dedicated off a 20 amp breaker over 12 gauge wire is…stronger. Like, “red scorch mark on your hand” and “knee buckles out from under you” stronger. Let us just say that I didn’t have to test it a second time.

Anyway, the thing I didn’t do over the holidays was write. Anything. At all.

A couple of weeks ago I got a comment that, for a lot of reasons, hit a pretty deep nerve. Explaining why means opening up and sharing something very personal.

As I’ve discussed before, growing up my mom wrote novels. A lot of novels. And won awards. And spoke at conventions. And signed books for hours and hours at signings. And talked to a lot of aspiring writers.

All of those aspiring writers had one thing in common, they honestly and truly believed they could write at a professional level. MANY of them would have my mom read something they had written and ask for advice. My mom was so good at saying positive things and encouraging them to follow their dreams. But there’s a dark side to that happy memory. Of the hundreds of people who asked her for advice, the exact number of people who had any conceivable chance of being published by a paying market was exactly zero. Not a one. Over twenty-five years my mom encountered exactly no-one with even a reasonable grasp of English and the ability to string words into sentences and sentences into something that anyone would willing pay money to read. Nada. Zip. Nil. Goose-Egg. Doughnut. ZERO.

But every single one of them believed they could. They looked at what they’d written and were completely oblivious to the flaws. Something in them said “this is good enough” and went out looking for confirmation.

In the years since, I’ve dabbled in the professional writing industry. I know editors and agents, and I have some pretty good insight into how it all works and I’ve done enough light editing and structure advice for others that I know how to critique, how to revise, how to take what is there and fashion it into something professional. Something people would pay for. I imagine that there are life choices I could have made that would have led me into the production side of the industry as an editor or agent (or at least that side of the industry, those jobs are tough as tough can be and I don’t have the hubris to believe I could have just moseyed in and magically gotten one of the premier jobs in the industry).

I know enough about the slushpile (the place where unsolicited manuscripts go to languish) to know that for every manuscript with the potential to be published that crosses the threshold, at least a thousand piles of dreck masquerading as written words crossed over before it. Piles of dreck that someone honestly thought was the best “synopsis and three” they could put out. Piles of dreck that someone believed in enough to put their name on and send out into the world.

I do not understand this.

Every moment of every day I have an insidious imp of self-doubt sitting on my shoulder and whispering into my ear all the reasons I’m not good enough. My greatest challenge isn’t believing that I’m “the best” or that I’m “good enough” or anything like that…my challenge is just ignoring the imp. I don’t have to believe I’m the best, I just have to believe I’m not as crappy as I’m afraid I am.

“Who would write this?” he says to me. “Who would be stupid enough to publish this where people could read it?”

I stopped answering long ago, but my silence is simply encouragement to him.

“You know you suck. You know it and you prove it every time you try.”

And because I’m afraid of him, I decide that the best way to avoid my fears is to do something else. He can’t taunt me if I don’t try.

Sometimes I do try, and that’s when he gets personal. You see, because he’s just a metaphorical manifestation of my own insecurities, he knows exactly where to hit me.

“You know what she said. She read everything you’ve ever written and then said that you should ‘keep practicing and just follow your dream’…exactly what she said to every other loser that couldn’t write their way out of a wet paper bag.”

And that does me in. Because it’s true. And it kills me.

Every time I read through my archives I hit some point where the writing just doesn’t shine and the taunts from the imp drown out the glow from the words that I’m proud of having written. Deep down I suspect that this will keep me from ever writing in a significant professional capacity.

Now, please don’t think this is some kind of reverse plea for internet affirmation because that’s the most insidious part of it, I don’t believe them. At least, not for long. Not in a significant or lasting way.

The last time I wrote about this, several people chided me for taking my writing so seriously, “it’s just a blog” and “write for yourself” are true and accurate statements; but they’re also just fodder for the imp. “It’s just a blog” can easily be appended with “because you suck” and nothing anyone can do can change that. Not even me.

When I first started blogging there was one thing that anonymity gave me, and that was insulation from the imp. You can’t take your writing personally when no one knows who wrote it. Which is dangerous. Anonymity may free us from self-doubt, but it also eliminates self-restraint and self-censorship, which are tools civilized people created to prevent the collapse of society.

Two weeks ago someone said exactly what I’m afraid of, that half the stuff I write sucks. I’m afraid of it, because deep down I know half of it does. Nominally, this doesn’t matter because no one (and I do mean NO ONE) actually hits it out of the park every time they swing the bat; and I’m smart enough to know that. But it’s fodder for the imp and that just beats me to the ground.

As I’ve tried to work through this over the last few days I’ve been confronted by a quote someone posted on Facebook:

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.” -Marianne Williamson

I think this is true. I think I’m not afraid of writing crap, I’m afraid of being a good writer who ALSO wrote crap. Really, I’m afraid of not being able to tell the difference. The imp would have no power over me if I didn’t care. And if I didn’t suspect that something, somewhere, deep down really was worth putting out there then I wouldn’t care at all. I’d do tax-automation integrations and drink a beer at night and worry about fantasy football and my XBox Gamerscore and writing would never cross my mind.

I know what I need to do, I need to write more. The more I produce, the more quality stuff comes out. The more quality I can see, the less power the imp has over me. If I can’t do that, then I need to accept that I’m not a writer and turn the imp loose and climb off this existential roller-coaster. Of course, I know I can’t do that. Without an outlet I become intellectually constipated, which makes me irritable and unpleasant to be around.

So I’m going to ramp back up the writing habit for a while, to see if I can get back to a place where writing happens more frequently if not necessarily more consistently. To that end, I’m considering some other changes around here. I’m going to reset the word count down in the bottom right corner and try to crank out about 20k words a month. As a short blog post from me cracks in at 1500 words that works out to about three posts a week. I’m going to try for a Monday-Wednesday-Friday pattern but we’ll see what we can do.

Also, I’m going to actively try to ramp up the fiction writing over at serialstoryteller.com and include those words in the word count as well. That way even if I’m not blogging I’m still giving myself credit for writing, and that’s really what I need to be doing.

My goal for the next few months (before my birthday in April) is to finish my “What I’m Looking For” series and put up at least two short stories on Serial Storyteller. If I can do that and be around 75k words in the word count bucket I’ll be pretty happy with my progress. If I come up short, well, I’ll just have to buy imp-proof earplugs or something.

We’ll all see how it goes.

[Word Count: 1645]

Still, a friend of mine pointed out a few days ago that thirty-five is “the age when even the elderly don’t think you’re young anymore.” That kind of hit me.

I’ve spent the last couple of birthday’s a bit depressed or pensive or just sorting stuff out. I’m not really in that place this year. The year I turned 30 my marriage of 11 years fell apart. The year I turned 31 I ended up in the hospital. The year I turned 32 I was unemployed and struggling to find my way forward. The year I turned 33 my daughter moved across the country. And last year I took Sarah back to the airport to fly home after spring break.

Of those years, when I turned 32 (which feels like several blogs and lifetimes ago) I did something I don’t usually do, I made a list of things I expressly wanted to accomplish. I didn’t accomplish some of them because they were essentially abstract and therefore essentially unaccomplishable. But on the other hand, the more concrete ones, like get a job with a specific salary, buy a nice camera, use my passport, scare the shit out of myself…those I did manage to accomplish. In no small part because I wrote them down. I made them concrete. I had something to work towards and compare against.

There are 1827 days until I turn 40.

There are things that I believed would be true about myself before I was 40, things that I feel are now starting to slip away.

What follows is the list of forty things that I want to accomplish before I turn 40:

1. Be selected for and attend Viable Paradise.
2. Have a short story published in an SFWA qualifying publication.
3. Have a novel published by a SFWA qualifying publisher.
4. Join the SFWA.
5. Have a short story published in Electric Velocipede.
6. Have a novel published by TOR Books.
7. Visit the TOR offices in the Flatiron Building in NYC.
8. Meet PNH and TNH in person. Tell them thank you.
9. Meet Catherynne M Valente. Try not to go fanboi.
10. Meet Neil Gaiman in person. Get him to sign my Sandman #1 and Fragile Things.
11. Meet Russel T Davies. Tell him thank you.
12. Write a screenplay for an episode of Doctor Who.
13. Go to a sci-fi/fantasy related convention (ComiCon, DragonCon, etc.)
14. Buy a current generation Mac.
15. Buy a late model-year car/truck.
16. Buy a project car.
17. Buy the tools to fix up a project car.
18. Actually fix up a project car.
19. Take the project car on a serious, multi-day road trip.
20. Buy a motorcycle or officially give up on that long-held dream.
21. Buy a decent acoustic guitar.
22. Learn to play Fields of Gold on the guitar.
23. Learn to play Fragile on the guitar.
24. Learn to play Saint Agnes and the Burning Train on the guitar.
25. Learn to speak French well enough to understand a French film without subtitles.
26. Learn to read French well enough to read Dumas, Casanova, and Voltaire without a French to English dictionary.
27. Learn to speak Italian well enough to understand a Roberto Benigni film without subtitles.
28. Learn to read Italian well enough to read Umberto Eco without an Italian to English dictionary.
29. Visit France.
30. Visit Italy.
31. Buy L-series lenses: Telephoto lens, Wide-Angle lens, Macro lens.
32. Buy a Speedlight, remote, and diffusers.
33. Improve my photography skills.
34. Upgrade my camera to a level appropriate for my improved skills.
35. Run a 5K.
36. Run a Marathon.
37. Run a Triathlon.
38. Take Communion on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, Easter, All-Saints Day, And Christmas in the same year.
39. Spend a school-year with my daughter.
40. Buy a house.

I might not do all of these things before I turn 40, but I’m not going to turn 40 without trying do do all of these things.

[Word Count: 695]

For once, I’m trying to be realistic about what comes next. In under 24 hours (more like 17) Sarah will walk back down a jetway and board a flight back to her mother. I always try to convince myself that “I’ll be fine” and it won’t really affect me, the practical part of me knows that tomorrow I won’t feel like blogging. At all.

So, I’ve decided to ask my blog-friends for help. When you read this tomorrow (as I assume most of you will), would you please remind me to write more. Write something. Write anything. I always feel better when I do…and I’m gonna need all the kicks in the pants I can get to push me across the chasm between writing nothing and writing something.

I’ve got the genesis of a music-based post largely inspired by finding that picture of my 1974 Van, as well as the next few “What I’m Looking For” lines in various states of done (and by done I mean partial drafts and/or fragments) so I should be able to wrap myself around something.

Or I can just go off on my opinion about substituting “Young Earth Creationism” for science in school curriculum. I’ve got a good sized blog post about that built up after a week with Sarah and “I don’t need to learn that because GodDidIt” being a good enough excuse for a nine-year-old lacking a fundamental understanding of things like heliocentrism, what stars are, the minimal basics of biology, or the fact that atomic particles aren’t imaginary and just made up by scientists who refuse to believe in GodDidIt.

Anyway, I could (and just might) go off on that for quite the spiel but now isn’t the time.

Now is the time to ask for help. Tomorrow will suck, and I need people to remind me to do the things that help me get past the suck that I never remember to do when things suck.

So…please…start reminding me tomorrow. I will deeply appreciate it.

See, not dead! (and I know some of you suspected different.)

Ok, so this isn’t a post per se, just a quick note. I’ve watched several people visit this blog recently from my GoodReads profile and They tend to start with my navigation section on the left, hitting my Author’s Note, the Preface and Prolog, and then they start in on some recent posts. They usually find one of the last “What I’m Looking For” posts and then peter out. Mostly I blame the ridiculous length of my average posts, but I also realized (ok, someone emailed me and told me) that navigating within the larger sections is pretty much impossible.

So, I’ve added a top page for the “What I’m Looking For” series and stuck it in the Navigation Pane, and also put some line by line links in the posts. I’ll try to keep up with that as I add more.

Which brings us to the next point, i.e. adding more.

I’ll be honest, I’m struggling with this right now. Not because I don’t know what to say, or I have a hard time writing the next few lines…it’s because I don’t like what the next few things say about me. So far the sequence has largely followed events from my youth and teen years, and while I’ve really learned something from writing some of them, for the most part they don’t make a statement about who I am now. Mistakes or victories that happen when you’re a teenager (or younger) are meaningful, but they’re not necessarily indicative of who a person is as an adult.

I just finished reading an autobiography, and I was reminded of a quote a college professor once passed on: “Autobiography is when we tell the story of our life the way we want to remember it. Biography is when someone tells it like it really was.”

So far I’ve tried to be relatively true to my personal history, even when I don’t look particularly “cool” or “suave” or “with it.” Not being “with it” isn’t something that is particularly bad, or even particularly unusual; especially for teenagers and young adults. But what comes next is largely bad. And ugly. And I don’t get to hide behind the “I was just an awkward teen” defense anymore.

I once started to draft a post about all of this titled “The Lesser Angles of My Nature” that never got past paragraph one because I’m terribly disappointed in myself when I read back through it. But, I’ve started to recount my past, and what makes me “me,” and that means being true to the history, even when it’s not the Autobiography I wish I could write.

Bare with me, the next few lines are coming. Perhaps slowly, and with stops and starts, but they are coming.

[Word Count: 466]

Which reminded me that I’m now allowed to talk about my day job in my blog.  The company that bought the company that I work for has a “uniform policy for personal internet communication, social media, and online networking” (and I deeply love the fact that they used the serial comma) which was distributed as both a .pdf and a printed brochure (which, frankly seemed redundant) during our onboarding process.  Now that the rules about talking about my job are more clearly defined than “pull a Dooce and we fire your ass,” I’ll regale all (six) of you with a description of what I’m sure you will agree is the single most boring job description in the world.  The job itself is FAR from boring, but describing it is like watching paint dry.

I am a Senior Implementation Consultant working in the Workflow and Service Solutions Group of the Tax Automation division of Thomson Reuters Tax and Accounting Global Services business unit.  Specifically, I am focused on delivering end-to-end integration of the Sabrix Indirect Tax Solution into complex financial and accounting systems for Fortune 500 and Global 100 customers around the world.

Essentially, if you were a large to super-large company, and you had a software package that automated your financial accounting (and you would), we provide a solution that can be integrated into your financial system that will calculate the appropriate indirect tax treatment for a particular product based on transaction criteria and produce a resulting rate combination, and then optionally record the transaction to a Sarbanes-Oxley satisfying audit record that can generate compliance returns and reports for legal jurisdictions around the world.

My job is to understand super-expensive financial systems (SAP, Oracle Financials, J.D. Edwards, Peoplesoft, Ariba, etc.) and the potential underlying technology platforms (Oracle, DB2, Java, XML, Unix in essentially every flavor from AIX to HPUX to Linux to Solaris, WebLogic, WebSphere, NetWeaver, JBOSS, et. all) and create solutions for integrating our product into those environments.  It’s different every time.

Every customer I’ve dealt with in the last three years has a name you’d recognize.  I’ve met with their CIOs and CFOs and Controllers and Directors of Finance and Technology Managers in boardrooms and conference rooms around the country.  They don’t come to us, we obviously go to them.

If this sounds specialized, well…it is.  There are less than a dozen people who do what I do.  My company employs about half of them.  Our partners employ the rest.

My day tends to involve solving weird interface issues between Java Application Servers and integration packages on unusual operating systems, followed by a call where we discuss chain transactions for VAT recovery and intrastat scenarios around the EU, followed by a call about creating test cases for use tax on cross-border supplier shipments through the tax-free zone at Shannon Airport landing in Newark and Toronto.

I have to be ready at the drop of a hat (well, the ring of a cell phone that never shuts off) to answer questions about incredibly detailed technology issues from IT groups and Software Engineers, followed without pause by questions from tax managers and business unit accountants about software configuration customizations to accommodate detailed and specific tax and financial transaction processes from a non-technical perspective.

And I’m a specialist, generally Implementation consultants focus on one specific integration platform (Oracle Financials or SAP) but I’m one of two people (in the company AND essentially on earth) who goes the full cycle.  I can do SAP or Oracle, but I also design custom integrations from scratch.  Have a mainframe that sits on old AS400 gear and you want to batch process in a nightly run written in RPG and Cobol to our XML process engine?  I can help with that.  Have a completely custom built software system based on some version of DB2 running in Z/OS on IBM mega-hardware?  Yeah, I can help.  Hell, if you run on DB2 I’m gonna get your account, since I’m “it” in the DB2 department.

Fifteen years ago I wrote financial software for government agencies.  Now, I’m one of a handful of people with the skillset to integrate one of the most flexible and powerful indirect tax software platforms into pretty much anything that constitutes a financial package.  Well, one of two if you do something outside of the SAP or Oracle Financials world.

And I am in demand.  The interesting thing about being in the Tax Automation business is that taxes don’t really have a recession.  In good times or bad times, companies pay taxes; and companies that pay taxes want to find solutions that will help them maximize their tax accuracy and minimize their audit exposure.  When a company buys our product they almost always need time with our consultants to guide and assist them with the implementation.  As the consultant in question, this has been good for my job security.

All this job security means that I travel pretty much three out of every four weeks in a month; but now, I’ve been given an incredible opportunity.

My company (before the acquisition) was primarily based right here in beautiful Lake Oswego, Oregon (with our corporate headquarters in San Ramon, California…but that was just so we could say we were a Bay Area software startup ).  It’s great for someone who lives in (and loves) the Portland area, but kinda crap for supporting the eighty-plus percent of our customers who are in the east or central time zones, or the ten percent who are in Europe.  I’ve flown coast to coast pretty much every week in April and May, when I got to fly home.  Before that I’d been in Chicago, Columbus, and New York all for week-long stints multiple times since the start of the year.

People always tell me how “glamorous” it is for me to get to travel, and I will admit that the travel is a bonus to my job most of the time; but after a while life becomes an endless parade of airplane seats, airports, taxis, hotel restaurants and hotel beds.  You know you travel a lot when you land in a connecting airport and have NO idea where you are.  I had a layover in Houston and had to ask someone what airport I was in.  It wasn’t critical to know, I just didn’t recognize the layout, which was disconcerting.  Conversely, I could walk through the Denver and Chicago airports blindfolded and comfortably navigate from gate to gate while on a conference call and buying something to eat.

So, as the powers-that-be are happy with my performance, and have the ability to identify a gaping hole in our ability to support our customers, I’ve been offered a relocation package to move to Atlanta, Georgia and start up a practice that will focus on east coast customers and provide technical leadership for our UK and South American groups in a timezone that can answer before they all go home for the day.

I have to say, I’m excited.  I’ve never lived east of Boise, Idaho; so this is going to be an adventure.

OregonSunshine has been a true trooper as she scouted for new homes and worked on the practical details of our move (and also started to consider a change to her nom de plume).  We think we’ve already found a place to lease for the first year and still keep our “hobby farm” lifestyle, and we’ll be settling the details within the next few days.  I fully expect to be moved before the Fourth of July holiday.

Yes, my job is unusual.  I do technology AND finance…I’m a Geek AND a Nerd.  If anyone read this far without their eyes glazing over or falling asleep at their desk, well, I’m either really impressed or just a little bit frightened.  But I have to admit, I love my job.  I love the challenges and the complexity, and I really love the people I work with and the quality of the work that we do; but it does tend to eat into my free time.  Currently I’m “on the job” for about 12 hours a day…on a slow day.  Hopefully the move to the eastern time zone will help me find more time away from work simply by being closer to the work that I’m doing.  Well, that’s the plan anyway.

So, I’ll try to post more and essay less, but honestly that’s just not how I naturally write.  If things are a bit quiet on this front, keep in mind that I’m probably in the middle of hauling my life across the country.  I’ll post pictures and tweet from my iPhone, so watch the twitter feed for updates.

And wish us luck.  I don’t know that we’ll need it, but it NEVER hurts to have all that we can get.

I haven’t felt like this in a long time and I guess I wasn’t expecting the depression to hit quite so hard.  Sarah, my eight-year-old daughter, has gotten on a plane and flown back to her mother.  She was here for her spring break, and I was lucky that it coincided with my birthday on the 14^th.

We took her to the airport Friday and she completely and utterly didn’t want to go back.  I understand, we have chickens and goats and horses and 20 acres of woods to explore and a giant house to ramble about in; but, never the less, we took her up to PDX and I sat in the gate as she walked to the plane and then waved once more through her tears before climbing the stairway and disappearing for another long span of months.

Now, I find myself in that dangerous place, the place where I have trouble balancing the world “as it is” with the world “as I wish it could be.”  Right now, it would be very easy for the dragon to grab me by the throat again and squeeze me for all I’m worth once more.

Which brings me full circle back to writing and blogging and whatever.  There was a time when I wrote things that I was proud of having written.  I have not felt that way about something I’ve blogged in a long time.  At one point I felt that anonymity was the key; that by being behind a veil of self-defense, I had the freedom to say things in a way that wasn’t filtered and ultimately made for better writing.  Now, I think that’s just crap.  I think that for the last year or so I’ve just been too damn cautious in my writing, and that it has suffered for it (when and if I even bothered to post it).  It wasn’t the anonymity that made it better, it was the confidence to just write and let the chips fall where they may.  I used to be the kind of person who “did” first and “worried” later (if ever).  Now, I calculate everything.  I analyze, and measure, and contingency – until I don’t act at all.

The downside is that I recognize that depression is affecting my reasoning, and now I don’t trust my inner voice to have a monologue that isn’t overshadowed by my negative emotions.  I’m in a bad place, doing my best to not be in a bad place, and that’s a bad place to write from.  What troubles me, is that when I was writing things I’m proud of, I was enmeshed in a deep and consuming depression.  On the surface I was doing “OK,” but underneath I was seething with frustration and drowning in my own dark waters.  Is that my muse?  Is that where I draw inspiration?

What’s odd, is that at the same time my personal/blog writing has dried up, my professional/fiction writing has improved in both inspiration and output; which is a tradeoff I’ll gladly accept.  I’ll start posting more of that on Serial Storyteller in the next few weeks, so at least there will be something to show for all the effort.

After a lot of thought, I realized that the difference is how I perceive “critique” of the things I write.  I cringe when someone who “knows” me critiques my personal writing, or my personal writing process, or the meaning behind the things I have to say that are personal to me.  It strikes a nerve that was safely hidden behind my anonymity.  I realize that if I’m going to write things that ARE personal, then I have to give them up the same way I give up my fiction.

I grew up with a fiction writer in the house.  From the age of six until long after I was out of college, my mom wrote genre novels for Pocket Books and St. Martins.  Some won awards, some were “not her best effort,” but every last one of them left the house, went to an editor and reviewers and readers, and had to be given up.

Writing is both an art and a business.  If you do it for a living, there’s money involved; and where money is involved, emotions had better be checked at the door.  Editors and agents and reviewers and readers ALL wield sharp swords and they take no prisoners.

You start with an idea; you give it form and purpose, breath and wings.  You raise it up; you feed it and make it grow.  Then, you take it out into the world, and you give it up.  Either it flies, or it fails.  The chips fall where they may.  The most horrible moment is watching the people you trust take a sharp sword and attack your precious thing.  It hurts you; in your heart, in your soul, in your confidence and faith in yourself.

When I was eleven years old, my dad got an album for his birthday that I probably listened to more than a hundred times before I turned twelve.  The lead track was something so powerful it was probably the most significant single song that defined my pre-teen and teen years.  I wore out two cassette copies of that album before I was fourteen, and I’ve had a copy on CD ever since.

The album “…Nothing Like the Sun” by Sting isn’t really something you would expect to be defining for a teenager in the 90’s, but if you want to have a little insight into who I am, that album is key.  Every single second of it is specifically meaningful to who I am, and how I perceive the world.  As much as I love the whole thing, the first track is absolutely integral to who I am and how I perceive the role of parents, the acts of creation and protection, and the process of sacrifice and forgiveness.

I think the lyrics are some of the most beautiful poetry ever set to music, and I’m quoting them from his book “Lyrics by Sting” to have the line breaks and spacing “as intended” for the printed page.

The Lazarus Heart
-by Sting

He looked beneath his shirt today
There was a wound in his flesh so deep and wide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside
He turned around to face his mother
To show her the wound in his breast
That burned like a brand
But the sword that cut him open
Was the sword in his mother’s hand

Every day another miracle
Only death would tear us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Though the sword was his protection
The wound itself would give him power
The power to remake himself
At the time of his darkest hour
She said the wound would give him courage and pain
The kind of pain that you can’t hide
From the wound a lovely flower grew
From somewhere deep inside

Every day another miracle
Only death would keep us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
I’ve no stones to chase them away
Birds on the roof of my mother’s house
They’ll sit on my own roof someday
They fly at the window, they fly at the door
Where does she get the strength to fight them anymore?
She counts all her children as a shield against the pain
Lifts her eyes to the sky like a flower to the rain

Every day another miracle
Only death could keep us apart
To sacrifice a life for yours
I’d be the blood of the Lazarus heart
The blood of the Lazarus heart

Every time I create something this song is ringing in my head.  When I taught my daughter to ride her bike, this song was ringing in my head.  When I talk to my dad on the phone, or IM with my mom, this song is ringing in my head.

We give life to something, and then we hope we’ve given it everything it needs to survive and flourish and fly away.  I know that I’ve done this with my daughter, even when it hurts so much to realize what I’m doing.  And I don’t regret it.  She’s a beautiful girl with a strong heart and a brilliant imagination, and she will overcome the failings of her parents.  I know that someday she will have the strength to fight the birds that no longer sit on my own roof, I know that my blood has given her the heart she will need.

I have to start giving myself and my writing that same level of confidence, that same freedom to fly.  I need to trust more in the blood that I’ve given and the heart that it creates.