General

In high school I played a game called Revolution, and as the hipsters would say, you’ve probably never heard of it.

There’s no such thing as cowardice.

What I mean is that cowardice isn’t a personality trait. No one’s actually a coward. No one’s “yellow-bellied” through-and-through. It’s not some mark of Cain, a permanent facet of oneself. Cowardice is momentary, oftentimes a symptom of something else that needs to be addressed.

I’m currently re-reading On Writing, Stephen King’s blunt, intimate account of his writing career and philosophy. It’s a perennial favorite of mine, half-autobiography and half-style guide.

His definition of writing was transformative when I first read it almost ten years ago. “What Writing Is,” he declares:

Telepathy, of course.

He’s right. But I think it only applies to words on a page/screen.

There’s a theory in neurolinguistics (which I am no expert in) which states that language is closely tied to our thinking patterns. Polyglots will exhibit different neural scans when thinking in different languages. So, speak a different language, think differently.

I left my job earlier this month, something I’ve kept quiet for several weeks. It was for a multitude of reasons, but the most pertinent for this discussion was this: a need for personal autonomy. In other words, I want to pick who I work for and what I give them.

And right now, I only want to work for myself.

I’m lucky. I have valuable skills, so I could get an office job if I wanted to. I had also saved some money, despite a minor financial crisis, so living a non-extravagant lifestyle I can survive for a few months. I’ve been downsizing. I’m selling things I don’t need or giving them away.

One of my favorite quotes is by Isaac Asimov, from the first Foundation novel: “Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.” In a single sentence, he encapsulates much of my belief as a pacifist. People become violent when they run out of options, when all other avenues of recourse – argument, the judicial system, the political process – are closed to them. Violence should always be the last, somber resort, and should never be glorified. It’s a philosophy I try to embody in my writing.

I first came in touch with the modern peace movement about fifteen years ago, around the same time I joined the Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. There’s a great deal of overlap and bidirectional influence between the church and the movement, although UU is not explicitly pacifist. Given UU’s liberal Christian roots (along with the Quakers), it’s no surprise that many UUs are also pacifists.

Despite my personal philosophy, there’s a vast gulf between myself and the modern pacifist movement. I don’t feel that the peace movement has done any good, definitely not since Operation Iraqi Freedom, and may have hurt its own cause.

How happy are you with your body?

I have never been happy with mine. I’ve always been “lumpy,” as one doctor described me in high school. I was even “husky” at one point, that awkward category for slightly-larger-than-average preteen boys.

But recently I’ve felt more uncomfortable with my body than I ever have.

Can I tell you a secret?

I don’t remember when we first met, but I think it was in college. When I lived in a rural town in Tennessee, a friend remarked that the recent opening of a Starbucks cafe meant that we finally lived in civilization. You were in Barnes and Noble, in Target, in airports and malls. It was such a surprise when you began opening drive-thru, free-standing cafes. You are such a success.

For someone who likes both writing and programming, it took me a long time to try out interactive fiction. See, I love prose fiction, and I enjoy narrative-heavy video games (such as Gone Home or Heavy Rain), but in-between was a no-man’s land. I never cared for text-based adventure games, and visual novels (not to be confused with graphic novels) didn’t have much appeal.

So it was with some reluctance that I tried out Twine. It’s designed to mimic the “choose your own adventure” books of yesteryear, using HTML as a compile target. Creating something like this had tickled my brain occasionally, but I didn’t want to take the time to build an entire engine from scratch. Luckily, someone had already done that.

I’ve been blocked since November last year. I was in the middle of NaNoWriMo. For a couple days, I locked myself in my bedroom, faced my laptop, and tried to will out the words onto the screen. After this failed, I decided to take a break and work on other things, such as what I’ll be doing for work in 2015.

Since then, it’s been difficult to write blog posts and journal entries, much less fiction. I’ve had a break today, though. I thought that one problem might be my environment. I had been cutting sugar lately and trying not to spend too much money in coffee shops, and at the same time my writing output was negligible. So I gave myself a break, hit up the bookstore, bought some chai tea, and prayed I be able to write anything.