Jeremy Zimmerman's Blog, page 4

Kensei Universe?

Ever since a friend suggested on my Patreon page that I do a Kensei serial, my brain has been picking away at the idea. When it first came up, I pitched it to my wife, Dawn. Any writing I did on it would have to go through her for editing. Assuming a weekly short of about 5,000 words, could she handle that on top of the work she does for Mad Scientist Journal?

The short answer is “No.” But we compromised and said, “We’d do it for the right amount of money.” So I put it as the second milestone on Patreon. (The first is to cover the costs of Mad Scientist Journal.) Mostly the money is intended to compensate my lovely wife for helping with another one of my weird schemes.

Since then, I’ve been poking around ideas for what I would write. I have a lot of little seeds for sub-plots that I’ve jammed into my Kensei books. I don’t necessarily know how I’m going to resolve them all in the other two books I have planned. It may be easier to just turn them into plots for serials.

This is especially helpful because I planned on a small time jump between books 2 and 3 for a few different reasons. Part of it is to give Jamie a chance to grow and learn from the things she went through. Part of it is because I originally planned on five books but realized that I only had four solid ideas for how to structure the uber-plot. Part of it is that there are three other Cobalt City books by other authors that take place in the near future of Kensei, and I would like to move towards a place where they fit together a bit more.

But there’s also no sign of me ever meeting those milestones on Patreon. While I love the six friends that kicked in a bit of scratch to help support me, I’m a long ways from my first milestone of $300 let alone an additional $500 to pay for a weekly serial. Once I get Kensei in a stand alone format and start promoting the second book, I was planning on pushing for backers. But there’s still no guarantee that anything will happen.

So I’m looking to compromise and start with something simple: one 5K-ish story per month. Dawn’s said she’s okay with it, so now I just need to start planning. Increased backing will instead mean the stories will be put out more frequently.

For the serials, I’m looking to basically write stuff in the “Kensei Universe,” which will mostly be smaller stories about Kensei, but also other characters that overlap with her. Most of it will take place in December/January between books two and three. What would happen in these stories? Some initial thoughts I have had are:

A Kensei/Traffic Enforcer team-up.
Other lesser superheroes in Cobalt City who I sometimes reference but never actually do anything with.
Taking a fresh stab at my idea for “A Christmas Sutra” with Louis Malenfant as a Scrooge like figure and being visited by bodhisattvas on Christmas Eve.
A Picara story arc, which right now only means something to my beta readers. Suffice to say it’s a Mexican-American teenage female swashbuckling superhero.
Stories about some of the derby characters I introduced, especially the ones on the Glass Eyed Dolls. Because I feel there needs to be more stories about junior roller derby sleuths.
Maybe some flashback stories involving Jamie’s family.

I need to find some time to begin taking notes on what exactly I want to write about. But then, I probably need to spend October working on my outline for NaNoWriMo, which will be a novel-length sequel to A Tale of Two Bureaucracies. Because what the world needs is epic bureaucratic fantasy.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Space Cowboy Archetypes

After watching Guardians of the Galaxy a few times in the theater, I’ve felt more inclined to try and dust off my idea for a space cowboy Apocalypse World hack. I’ve yet to successfully complete an Apocalypse World hack of any sort, so this might be a dubious effort. But I figure I can at least poke at it for a bit.

Guardians hit on a lot of high points for me: Motley ensemble cast featuring a bunch of characters with a past. SF that focuses more on group dynamic than, well, science. A bit of genre bending/mashing. An excellent soundtrack. It was very similar to my deep love for Cowboy Bebop. I tried running a Fading Suns game with a similar setup with mixed results.

Since I love Apocalypse World hacks, it seems like a match made in heaven. I thought I’d toss some ideas out for other people to look at and critique.

I’m approaching this a bit differently than I’ve been approaching my Carnivale-inspired hack. Rather than start to think about mechanics right away, I’ve been trying to think about “what do I want to see in it?”

I liked the conceit from Star Wars Saga Edition, which has characters able to do some basic tasks for the genre. Since it tends to involve a lot of being on the ship, I am going to assume that everyone can accomplish any job on the ship. Being the pilot or the mechanic will not be limited to one particular character type. Some character types might fit better than others, but I wanted to keep it fast and loose.

With that in mind, I thought I’d look at source material for character types. Here are the shows that came immediately to mind.

Guardians of the Galaxy (Movie): Starlord, Gamora, Rocket, Groot, Drax
Star Wars: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, R2D2, C3PO, Lando
Cowboy Bebop: Spike, Jet, Edward, Faye, Ein
Firefly: Mal, Zoe, Wash, Inara, Kaylee, River, Jayne, Simon, Book
Farscape: John Crichton, Aeryn Sun, Ka D’Argo, Zhaan, Rygel, Pilot, Chiana

So then I tried to group them into broad groups of similarity. This was my initial pass. I encourage people to disagree with me. Some characters could easily fit into multiple categories.

Outlaw: Scoundrel. Criminal. Scruffy looking. Possibly herds nerfs.

Starlord, Han, Spike, Mal, John Crichton, Chiana
Brute: Thugs. The sort of people that will tear your arms off.

Groot, Drax, Chewbacca, Jayne, Ka D’Argo
Pro: The more militant types, more precise than the Brute.

Book, Gamora, Zoe, Jet, Aeryn Sun
Brains: Techs, scientists, mechanics, engineers. Nerds.

Wash, Rocket, R2D2, Edward, Kaylee, Simon
Diplomat: Socialites. Faces. People who talk to people for a living.

Lando, Faye, Inara, C3PO, Leia, Rygel
Mystic: People with weird powers.

Luke, River, Zhaan
Unknown: People that I just can’t easily fit into other categories.

Ein, Pilot

Thoughts?

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

D&D Starter Set!

I recently ordered the new Starter Set for D&D 5th Edition. In part to get a cheap look at what the new version was like. In part to check it out before I tried buying one for my niece. It’s a pretty big box, and looks like it’s filled to the brim:

After a cursory glance at the stuff on top, I dug out everything to see what all they included. And I ran into this:

It appears that the majority of the box is really just that filler box. The actual contents are just two booklets (the basic rules and an adventure, which has some GMing tips), a set of polyhedral dice (though only one d10, even though it notes you’ll need to do percentile rolls in the book) and a few pre-gen characters.

Somehow I thought they’d include something like a grid mat, maybe some cheap cardboard miniatures, something. Nope. This box is mostly filler.

I’ll probably still buy it for my niece. It looks like it’s an approachable intro. I’m just underwhelmed by the presentation.

 

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Leadership Training!

I recently completed the four days of training in King County’s “Leadership Academy“, which was offered through the new Training and Development Institute. It’s free for County employees to attend, and open to “community partners.” So in addition to other County employees, I met people who work with local non-profits and other local government.

Leads and supervisors with King County were encouraged to take this class. I missed taking it with the rest of my co-workers earlier in the year. I hadn’t taken my special duty role as an lead until after people had been registered. So I offered to go when it came up again.

Yes, I did this to myself.

Broadly speaking, I felt like there were two main things I experienced over the course of four days.

First, there were tons of self-assessment worksheets to determine personality type, leadership style, ability to delegate, etc. I generally scored poorly on all of these. In cases when there wasn’t a clear spectrum of Good vs. Bad, I fell into the least flattering category. This may be a commentary on my own perception of myself. But it left me feeling pretty depressed and anxious.

When I’ve tried to convey this sensation to friends, many didn’t seem to understand why it affected my mood so much. And I don’t know how to adequately explain the “why?” behind it. How do you explain an irrational and deep-seated reaction to something? All I can say is: I took those tests, my heart began to race, and my eyes started to tear up.

I’m just really not comfortable with social situations. It is draining for me to be around people and interacting with them. I can fake it if I need to or want to. I have people I do genuinely like to see. But the thought of having to be more vocally social on a regular basis…? That’s a bit overwhelming.

Second were the things I found fascinating that actually touched on things I’m going through. Those touched on questions of “Who am I?” in a much broader sense than just “Who am I in terms of my ability to do my job?” Some of it is still daunting, as I don’t have good answers for those questions. But it brought up some resources I might not have otherwise looked at.

Day One opened with getting to know people. There was one of those party games where you have to find people with certain experiences as part of a “scavenger hunt.” And we also had a lot of small group discussions. The person who taught the class the first day focused a lot on group discussions. However, someone else taught the other three days so that element faded into the background a bit.

The lessons focused on some basics that came up over and over again throughout the training. The explained some ideas about what leadership is, talked about styles of leadership, emotional intelligence, and how to get people engaged. It included this video, which I really liked.

I liked it so much, I bought the book. It spoke to my situation and kinda blew my mind. Once the book started getting into “too good to be true” territory, I did a bit more research and got a broader picture for where it fits. But I still like the idea.

Day Two was a bit more about work culture and how it can fall apart. It talked about onboarding, which I sort of dislike as a word, ethics, the effect of having four generations in the work force at once. New buzzword learned? Triangulation!

The video we had for this day was The Values-Based Leader. I also liked the approach it had, which had a great focus on examining the sort of person you are. I don’t have all the answers about that, but it asked some good questions and had some concrete steps. Sadly, you have to pay $95 to get the DVD or streaming video of this talk.

Day Three opened with a guest lecturer, Dr. Caprice D. Hollins, Psy.D., of Cultures Connecting. It really appealed to me because I’ve been trying to understand and incorporate topics of equity and social justice into my life and my writing. She was a magnificent speaker. I felt like she was able to address some really thorny subjects without alienating people either. It’s also always interesting to see the difference between how these topics are handled differently between professional contexts and, well, the Internet.

The afternoon covered the life cycle of teams and how to handle employee harassment as a lead. We also watched a video called The Abilene Paradox, which was pretty entertaining even with dodgy production values. Sadly, for this one you have to pay $995 for the whole instructional kit. You can get the gist of it on Wikipedia, though.

The final day covered ways to coach (both positively and negatively) employees, the pros and cons of collaborative decision making, and change management (which touched on some of the Lean stuff we’ve already learned). And we watched a video called The Happiness Advantage, which is based on the books by Shawn Achor. Unfortunately, I can’t find the video online. The video was interesting on a lot of levels, even if the guy kind of creeped me out. Though I’ve learned from experience that the power of positive thinking doesn’t do as much against my depression, it was at least a useful thing to consider when dealing with other people.

So what did I come away from this with?

First, the amount companies charge for some of these videos is mind blowing. Seriously. I guess they reason that this is something HR will purchase and share with dozens and dozens of employees. But for some shmoe just trying to figure out how to do a better job? I’m not going to pay $1,000 for a low budget production of The Abilene Paradox, regardless of it also coming with work books.

Second, I really dislike being in charge of people. I kind of knew that before, but this class really emphasized it.

Third, bizarrely, the most applications I found for things I learned were related to gaming. Because it’s easier for me to look at how to run a regular game for friends than to imagine applying these skills at work. So I found value in having tools to deal with players that are being a problem, how to motivate players, etc.

Fourth, even more expected, I’ve decided to try and get more serious about my meditation. The videos from Shaun Achor and Harry Kraemer both emphasized taking time for reflection, meditation. I’ve tried to get back into the habit of meditating lately, though five-to-ten minutes of meditating while I’m still loopy from my evening medication isn’t really ideal.

Since rage quitting religion, I’ve not had an organization that I’ve liked. For a while I was enjoying Jodo Shinshu, which I started checking out while writing Kensei. But even that lost it’s allure pretty quickly. I’ve been curious about the Seattle Insight Meditation Society, since I get the impression that it has more of a secular Buddhist vibe. It has a introductory class for insight meditation, which is not a type that I’ve tried before. So I’m hoping to give it a shot.

The downside is that the locations for their events are nowhere near me. But I’m more motivated to put forth the effort than I was before.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Return to Centerpoint

I recently had a second free interaction with the Centerpoint Institute. The founder had a couple trainees learning how to be career coaches and needed a Guinea pig for them to practice their skills. Since “free” is a great price, I offered to go in. I figured it would allow me to get a better taste for what they had to offer.

Overall I have found the experience to be good, and intend on trying to see what else I might do with them. But I had some reservations going in.

To prepare for the visit a bit more, I tried to catch up on my reading the founder’s book: The Time Between Dreams. I’d fallen behind on working on it due to conflicting reading needs, but I tried to at least have a better grasp on things going in.

My initial reaction to the book was that it felt at times a little New Age-y. Though this is not necessarily a problem, I sort of rage quit New Age things a while back. I had once been really interested in astrology, tarot, past life regression, etc. But now the topic just makes me angry thinking about it. (For those who care, I do still think of myself as Buddhist. But I have a much more agnostic/atheistic view of it, inspired heavily by Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Belief.)

A core of Centerpoint’s philosophy revolves around a cyclical view of change. She opens with talking about how a cyclical view of life is present in many older cultures: Native American Medicine Wheel, the Chinese yin-yang, the Roman Rota Fortunae. Then it starts talking about Jung and mandalas. So the small hateful part of my brain began thrashing around and growling, like a very angry small yappy dog. I’ve read enough New Age books that try to do this smooshing together of disparate cosmological views without having much context for the source material.

It was hard for me to not quit the book right there. But I reminded myself how badly I’m looking for change, so I soldiered on with the book.

It did ultimately back off of the analogies and used the concept of cycles as an interesting lens to look at things through. I’m currently at an exercise from the book, trying to figure out where my place of renewal is at. One of the things that the book has talked about is trying to find some emotional space and a centerpoint (see what they did there?) from which you can look at your life.

So I’m struggling to figure out where my place of renewal is at. This can be a physical space, or a time of day, or whatever. I don’t even know if I have one. I’ve tried to get back into the habit of meditating, but currently this has manifested with me sitting on the corner of my bed next to my shrine first thing in the morning. I’m usually half asleep and meditation lasts only about five minutes due to time constraints on my morning schedule.

Not the best example of a meditation practice.

I have things I do to decompress, but I don’t think I’m finding my emotional center by playing Mass Effect on my X-Box 360. Maybe this means I need to find a different approach to my meditation (a different time of day?). Maybe what this ultimately means is I need to find this space. I don’t know.

With my frustrations from reading the book, I wasn’t sure what to expect from my session. I’ve met some lame people in Buddhist and New Age circles. I’ve met some great people too. But with the whole rage-quitting thing, I automatically worried it would be someone awful.

When I arrived at the Centerpoint offices early on a Sunday morning and met Carol Vecchio, I instantly liked her. Instantly. She was really down to earth and welcoming.

The 45 minutes I spent with them had two other people that had been training with her. One had come from Australia just to learn from Vecchio. The other person, who was not Australian, took the lead on the interview. But all three people joined in over the course of things.

From what I could tell, the interview consisted mostly of asking me general questions about my situation and seeing how I emoted when describing things in my life. So they picked up that I love writing and putting out Mad Scientist Journal.

Their ultimate goal is to try and help me figure out what the underlying element of my passion for those things is. I guess ultimately that’s the same thing I was trying to do with the “Personal Mission Statement.” But it sounds nicer this way, stripped of double-plus ungood corp-speak.

Of course, we didn’t have a chance to dig into those deeper elements in this free 45 minute session for training the new people. However, I feel more comfortable with the notion of giving them $600 for the Passion Search workshop they offer. Not that I have $600, but I’m in a better place than I was several months ago to arrange a payment plan with them.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Checking in On the Whole “Figure Out My Life” Thing

This post has ended up being longer than intended. There’s a lot of frustration. You’ve been warned.

I haven’t written much recently about my progress for a couple reasons. Part of it is that I’ve been pretty busy during Camp NaNoWriMo, working on a novel that I under outlined and had to improvise frantically with. So that was fun. I hit 50,001 words and stopped. I need to send it to my wife to see how awful she thinks it is. It’s gone into a lot of places I hadn’t intended or anticipated, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

The other part is that I’ve hit some stumbling blocks.

One setback has been problems obtaining the book I intended on reading, The Time Between Dreams. A friend had been kind enough to take pity on me and Paypal me money for the book. Since the money was in Paypal, I figured it would be easiest to just use the Paypal shopping cart at Centerpoint’s site. Easy, right?

And then I waited for two weeks with no sign of the book. I checked one last time as we headed out to the coast for some vacation, and then I sent them an email just to make sure they got the order. I’ve run an online store with a Paypal shopping cart. I know how sale notifications things can be hard to track sometimes, especially if you don’t get many orders. Later that day I got a shipment notification from Paypal with a note that said “Thanks for being so patient!”

I finally have the book and I’ve been chugging along through the Prologue. So far just a lot of broad philosophical stuff. I can also understand a bit better why they charge as much as they do: Color content on most of the pages. Sometimes it’s just a single alternate color, like a splash of orange. Sometimes it’s photos. I will refrain from making snarky commentary beyond, “It’s not the choice I would have made.”

Beyond that, the prologue has a note towards the end that says that the book doesn’t offer certain things. Included in that list was “uncovering your passion.” Which worried me, since the whole “Passion Search” thing was the main reason I came to Centerpoint in the first place. I remembered seeing “Passion Search” in the index, so I looked that up. It appears they do a “macro view” of the Passion Search in The Time Between Dreams, but a more thorough examination of the topic will be covered in the next book.

Note: There’s no next book yet. The sentence in this book is the first time I’ve heard there’s another book in the works.

So I’m feeling like the book is really going to be just a general overview of their philosophy. Which is fine, just not what I was hoping for. On the bright side, I’ve landed a free 45-minute consultation with the founder and several students as a training opportunity for the students. I’m not looking forward to being questioned by a panel of students, but free is free. It’s on August 17th. I’ll let you know how that works out.

The other problem has been that I’ve been trying to work on a “personal mission statement” as recommended by my adviser in HR using this site here:

http://www.quintcareers.com/creating_personal_mission_statements.html

As a general life philosophy, I hate things like “mission statements.” It goes with a bunch of corporate nomenclature that I just hate. I joke about it in my office, especially with all of the weird bureaucratic weirdness you get in government. But there’s a huge streak of “I laugh so I don’t cry.” I don’t like the notion of applying that sort of malarky to my own life. It’s a mode of thinking that hurts my soul. (Though I did get a juvenile laugh when someone offered to let me “leverage” her if I needed to. Hur-hur-hur.)

But I’m also at a point of desperation, so I’m willing to give it a whirl. And so far the whirl is leaving me depressed. First, I find some of the questions really hard to answer. And what I can answer feels it feels like it points to a pretty obvious direction that is not really feasible given my financial situation. Which isn’t fair, because really I’m supposed to create this totally vague statement and not a specific job. But depression isn’t rational.

Here’s what I got. For more robust explanations of the questions, check out the link above.

Step 1: Identify Past Successes. (Four or five examples.)

Wrote Kensei and published
Ran a successful Kickstarter for an anthology
Ran a successful Shadowrun game
Ran a successful Changeling game
Have run a quality (if not profitable) e-zine for over two years

Step 2: Identify Core Values.

This one sucked a lot because I just freeze up on these questions. It’s like the old, “Introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself!” “Um, uh, I’m Jeremy. And I have five cats…?”

It took me a month to come up with these:

Creative
Reliable
Well-Intentioned
Compassionate
Storyteller
Social Equity

Then I need to narrow it down to five or six most important values. So far I only have six, so this one is meaningless.

Then I need to pick the Most Important of Them All! I haven’t figured out that one yet. In part because there are ones I feel it should be (like “Compassionate” and “Social Equity”) and then there’s the ones that seem like they resonate with me (“Creative” or “Storyteller”).

Step 3: Identify Contributions. How can I make a difference to assorted groups.

the world in general: I can promote diversity through fiction (mine and others). I can also help support other writers in their work.
 your family: Um… I can try to be a reasonable human being and support all my nieces and nephews.
your employer or future employers: I don’t even know.
your friends: Be a nice person who helps friends?
your community: No clue.

Step 4: Identify Goals.

This is where I really want to cry. It tries to be helpful and break it down into two categories.

Short-term (up to three years): I don’t have much beyond “find something that I’m actually happy to do, maybe publish some more books.”

Long-term (beyond three years): This is like looking into a yawning abyss.

Step Five: Mission Statement

Using steps 1-4, I’m supposed to come up with a mission statement. The one they offer as a sample is:

“To live life completely, honestly, and compassionately, with a healthy dose of realism mixed with the imagination and dreams that all things are possible if one sets their mind to finding an answer.”

That is so suitably vague that it could be mine. On the one hand I can interpret my answers to be so specific that they point me to a non-viable career. Or I can have something super vague.

There are some links at the bottom that I clicked on to try and better understand what to do with this info. So I clicked on a link to an article called “Using a Personal Mission Statement to Chart Your Career Course.”

http://www.quintcareers.com/mission_statements.html

Even broader strokes than the first one, but had this quote that hit me right in the feels:

First Things First is actually about time management, but Covey and his co-authors use the personal mission statement as an important principle. The idea is that if you live by a statement of what’s really important to you, you can make better time-management decisions. The authors ask, “Why worry about saving minutes when you might be wasting years?”

And then from here I found an article called “Are You Living on Purpose? Personal Mission Statement Exercises.”

http://www.quintcareers.com/mission_statement_exercises.html

I found msyelf even more overwhelmed by this bit:

A personal mission statement addresses three questions:

1) What is my life about?

2) What do I stand for?

3) What action am I taking to live what my life is about and what I stand for?

So, yeah. I don’t know what the fuck my life is about. I don’t believe any claptrap about there being some mystic meaning behind my existence. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just animated meat stumbling around for an average of 70-80 years until entropy causes all my systems to fall apart. So looking at all this stuff I just feel myself going through this sort of circular moping:

I’m spending half of my waking hours (including commute time) going to a job that leaves me feeling like I’m just wasting my life.
Anything I decide on as a purpose in life is just something I’ve chosen to believe in that kind of resonates with me. It’s an artificial construct.
What good does it do me to find something I’m passionate about if it’s not feasible for me to quit my day job to do it?
But do I really want to spend the rest of my days grinding away at a job that is so draining?

So that’s where I’m kinda orbiting without any success right now.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Checking in On the Whole “Figure Out My Life” Thing

This post has ended up being longer than intended. There’s a lot of frustration. You’ve been warned.

I haven’t written much recently about my progress for a couple reasons. Part of it is that I’ve been pretty busy during Camp NaNoWriMo, working on a novel that I under outlined and had to improvise frantically with. So that was fun. I hit 50,001 words and stopped. I need to send it to my wife to see how awful she thinks it is. It’s gone into a lot of places I hadn’t intended or anticipated, and I don’t know how I feel about that.

The other part is that I’ve hit some stumbling blocks.

One setback has been problems obtaining the book I intended on reading, The Time Between Dreams. A friend had been kind enough to take pity on me and Paypal me money for the book. Since the money was in Paypal, I figured it would be easiest to just use the Paypal shopping cart at Centerpoint’s site. Easy, right?

And then I waited for two weeks with no sign of the book. I checked one last time as we headed out to the coast for some vacation, and then I sent them an email just to make sure they got the order. I’ve run an online store with a Paypal shopping cart. I know how sale notifications things can be hard to track sometimes, especially if you don’t get many orders. Later that day I got a shipment notification from Paypal with a note that said “Thanks for being so patient!”

I finally have the book and I’ve been chugging along through the Prologue. So far just a lot of broad philosophical stuff. I can also understand a bit better why they charge as much as they do: Color content on most of the pages. Sometimes it’s just a single alternate color, like a splash of orange. Sometimes it’s photos. I will refrain from making snarky commentary beyond, “It’s not the choice I would have made.”

Beyond that, the prologue has a note towards the end that says that the book doesn’t offer certain things. Included in that list was “uncovering your passion.” Which worried me, since the whole “Passion Search” thing was the main reason I came to Centerpoint in the first place. I remembered seeing “Passion Search” in the index, so I looked that up. It appears they do a “macro view” of the Passion Search in The Time Between Dreams, but a more thorough examination of the topic will be covered in the next book.

Note: There’s no next book yet. The sentence in this book is the first time I’ve heard there’s another book in the works.

So I’m feeling like the book is really going to be just a general overview of their philosophy. Which is fine, just not what I was hoping for. On the bright side, I’ve landed a free 45-minute consultation with the founder and several students as a training opportunity for the students. I’m not looking forward to being questioned by a panel of students, but free is free. It’s on August 17th. I’ll let you know how that works out.

The other problem has been that I’ve been trying to work on a “personal mission statement” as recommended by my adviser in HR using this site here:

http://www.quintcareers.com/creating_personal_mission_statements.html

As a general life philosophy, I hate things like “mission statements.” It goes with a bunch of corporate nomenclature that I just hate. I joke about it in my office, especially with all of the weird bureaucratic weirdness you get in government. But there’s a huge streak of “I laugh so I don’t cry.” I don’t like the notion of applying that sort of malarky to my own life. It’s a mode of thinking that hurts my soul. (Though I did get a juvenile laugh when someone offered to let me “leverage” her if I needed to. Hur-hur-hur.)

But I’m also at a point of desperation, so I’m willing to give it a whirl. And so far the whirl is leaving me depressed. First, I find some of the questions really hard to answer. And what I can answer feels it feels like it points to a pretty obvious direction that is not really feasible given my financial situation. Which isn’t fair, because really I’m supposed to create this totally vague statement and not a specific job. But depression isn’t rational.

Here’s what I got. For more robust explanations of the questions, check out the link above.

Step 1: Identify Past Successes. (Four or five examples.)

Wrote Kensei and published
Ran a successful Kickstarter for an anthology
Ran a successful Shadowrun game
Ran a successful Changeling game
Have run a quality (if not profitable) e-zine for over two years

Step 2: Identify Core Values.

This one sucked a lot because I just freeze up on these questions. It’s like the old, “Introduce yourself and tell us something interesting about yourself!” “Um, uh, I’m Jeremy. And I have five cats…?”

It took me a month to come up with these:

Creative
Reliable
Well-Intentioned
Compassionate
Storyteller
Social Equity

Then I need to narrow it down to five or six most important values. So far I only have six, so this one is meaningless.

Then I need to pick the Most Important of Them All! I haven’t figured out that one yet. In part because there are ones I feel it should be (like “Compassionate” and “Social Equity”) and then there’s the ones that seem like they resonate with me (“Creative” or “Storyteller”).

Step 3: Identify Contributions. How can I make a difference to assorted groups.

the world in general: I can promote diversity through fiction (mine and others). I can also help support other writers in their work.
 your family: Um… I can try to be a reasonable human being and support all my nieces and nephews.
your employer or future employers: I don’t even know.
your friends: Be a nice person who helps friends?
your community: No clue.

Step 4: Identify Goals.

This is where I really want to cry. It tries to be helpful and break it down into two categories.

Short-term (up to three years): I don’t have much beyond “find something that I’m actually happy to do, maybe publish some more books.”

Long-term (beyond three years): This is like looking into a yawning abyss.

Step Five: Mission Statement

Using steps 1-4, I’m supposed to come up with a mission statement. The one they offer as a sample is:

“To live life completely, honestly, and compassionately, with a healthy dose of realism mixed with the imagination and dreams that all things are possible if one sets their mind to finding an answer.”

That is so suitably vague that it could be mine. On the one hand I can interpret my answers to be so specific that they point me to a non-viable career. Or I can have something super vague.

There are some links at the bottom that I clicked on to try and better understand what to do with this info. So I clicked on a link to an article called “Using a Personal Mission Statement to Chart Your Career Course.”

http://www.quintcareers.com/mission_s...

Even broader strokes than the first one, but had this quote that hit me right in the feels:

First Things First is actually about time management, but Covey and his co-authors use the personal mission statement as an important principle. The idea is that if you live by a statement of what’s really important to you, you can make better time-management decisions. The authors ask, “Why worry about saving minutes when you might be wasting years?”

And then from here I found an article called “Are You Living on Purpose? Personal Mission Statement Exercises.”

http://www.quintcareers.com/mission_statement_exercises.html

I found msyelf even more overwhelmed by this bit:

A personal mission statement addresses three questions:

1) What is my life about?

2) What do I stand for?

3) What action am I taking to live what my life is about and what I stand for?

So, yeah. I don’t know what the fuck my life is about. I don’t believe any claptrap about there being some mystic meaning behind my existence. As far as I’m concerned, I’m just animated meat stumbling around for an average of 70-80 years until entropy causes all my systems to fall apart. So looking at all this stuff I just feel myself going through this sort of circular moping:

I’m spending half of my waking hours (including commute time) going to a job that leaves me feeling like I’m just wasting my life.
Anything I decide on as a purpose in life is just something I’ve chosen to believe in that kind of resonates with me. It’s an artificial construct.
What good does it do me to find something I’m passionate about if it’s not feasible for me to quit my day job to do it?
But do I really want to spend the rest of my days grinding away at a job that is so draining?

So that’s where I’m kinda orbiting without any success right now.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

My First Date with Centerpoint

Before I get into my recent visit to the Centerpoint Institute, I thought I’d share a couple other related bits of news that don’t fit in elsewhere.

First off, the HR person from the Career Support group sent me some pages from a book called Do What You Are, specifically listing out likely career possibilities that fit with my Myers-Briggs personality type (INFJ). Some of what it says in abstract seems like it matches my personality. But the specific jobs seem less like a good match. I half wonder if they mean the same thing I do when I think “introvert.”

A lot of the things listed are very social: career counselor, teacher, social worker, “director, social service agency,” crisis hotline operator, “diversity manager-human resources.” A lot of these leave me with a feeling of cold dread in my stomach. “I have to talk to how many people?!”

There’s also a part of me that wonders if my general stress level is exacerbating my social anxiety, making it harder for me to think about jobs that require a lot of human interaction.

Second, in the interest of trying to offset some of my expenses (especially related to Mad Scientist Journal), I’ve started a Patreon page. So you can show your love with moneys: http://www.patreon.com/bolthy

So anyway, let’s talk about my visit to Centerpoint.

I admit, I was a bit iffy about the whole thing starting out. Between involvement with New Agey/Buddhist organizations and hard-sell “free” introductory things, I’ve become pretty cynical as I’ve gotten older. So an organization I’d never heard of, headed by a charismatic founder, with a “different” way of helping people in their careers. A lot of red flags went off for me.

Really, I probably would not have even gone if I wasn’t at the end of my rope. After sitting through their spiel, I feel less like it’s a scam. But I felt I should note up front I was wary going in.

The Centerpoint offices were in a beautiful 18-acre campus belonging to Talaris Conference Center. It’s in a stretch of Seattle I’ve never been before, and well off the beaten path. From the way the County HR person described it, I thought Centerpoint owned the whole shebang. I’m less confident of that now, but I’m not sure who owns what.

The meeting space at the Centerpoint offices was more like a very large living room, with really soft sofas arranged in a circle. There were potted plants in every window (the kind regular people take care of instead of some firm), a library of books on career planning, a bulletin board, and a water cooler. Overall very comfortable and homey.

I barely arrived on time, as I had to haul myself from work to there (and get dinner on the way) in under an hour. I’d missed introductions as I filled out my visitor card, and so I didn’t realize that the person giving the talk was the Executive Director of the place until I looked her up on the website later.

All told there were six attendees present, myself included. One person had a career goal but didn’t know how to get there. One person was the daughter of the first person who got dragged there by her father. The rest were in my situation: No clue what they wanted to do with their lives.

I don’t know that I can adequately recap what they talked about, but I’ll give it the old college try. (Or maybe it’s the new college. I lose track.)

Their whole thing starts with a general philosophy of change cycles, which they arrange in a circle. They describe it as being true of any sort of change in your life, whether it’s a divorce or a death in the family or a job change situation. But they specifically apply it to career management there.

I haven’t looked into it closely yet, so I don’t know how universal their philosophy is. The Buddhist in me wonders how it compares to the Tibetan Buddhist Wheel of Life. Having just been subjected to A3 Lean Training, I’m wondering how well it maps out the PDCA process as well. If nothing else, I want to compare them for my epic bureaucratic fantasy novel I’m going to write in November.

They primarily have three workshops that they spoke about.

There’s “Navigating Change,” which is supposed to help you understand their philosophy and understand where you are in the cycle. “Vision Into Action” is a workshop on bringing your vision into interviews, networking, understanding the 21st century workworld. These are each $165.

The other one, “Passion Search,” is the one that was recommended to me and the one to which I paid the most attention. It’s built around six people and a facilitator. Rather than going with mere personality tests and stock lists, it’s meant to be a collaborative sharing thing where you do exercises at home by yourself and then share and interact with the other workshoppers. The homework includes doing informational interviews with people in different fields. The workshop time is 20 hours over the course of either 5 or 8 days. It costs $625.

It’s an intimate sharing your feelings sort of thing. Which instantly makes me panic a little bit. Sharing my feels with five strangers…? *And* doing informational interviews with people in different career fields?! I have trouble with the thought sharing my feelings with five people I know pretty well. I’m inclined towards a big “NOPE.” But they swear by the concept, so I’m a little hesitant to dismiss it outright. I’m struggling with the question of where social anxiety balances against the need to change.

They do offer one-on-one counseling at the cost of $95/hour for one of their staff trainers and $175/hour if you want to meet with their resident expert. For comparison, I spent $125 to see a professional career counselor.

They don’t hard sell the thing. At the end of the spiel, they left you to your own devices. However, they *did* give coupons for discounts on their services if you act within two weeks of the introductory thing. (And then a week later I received a follow up email from the Executive Director checking in on me I gave her the same answer I decided on here and seemed to agree with my reasoning.)

There was also an out that they offered which will probably be my first step: the founder of Centerpoint has a book, The Time Between Dreams. Which is significantly cheaper than attending a workshop. It’s $21.95 if you buy it directly from Centerpoint, plus $5 for shipping if you want it shipped to you.

It’s available through Amazon for the bizarre price of $27.43. Not discounted to that price. Just set at that price. My best guess is that it’s a price set by the author to offset whatever cut Amazon takes from selling it as opposed to them ordering physical copies and keeping on hand.

Though it appears to be published through Amazon, there is a bizarre lack of an ebook version. Which is a shame, because I’d really rather read it on my Kindle iPhone app. (And I’d like to pay less than $25-$30 for what Amazon describes as a a 165-page book.)

My strategy at this point is to try and buy the book when I can afford it, and base any decision I make on workshops from the written description of their process. I won’t be able to take advantage of their two-week discounts, but I figure it’s worth a shot.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Finding Meaning

I’ve written and deleted a few different posts that border on this over the last several months. Generally they revolved around some frustration with something I had done or was doing (going to conventions, writing, whatever) that I wasn’t happy with. I ended up scrapping them because ultimately the disatisfaction I experienced arose from my own internal issues.

I didn’t want to muddy other things just because I have issues, and I couldn’t give an honest assessment without reflecting those. So I generally gave up. Because I hate the idea of filling my blog with my own existential whining. And I have a lot of things I don’t talk about.

I’ve lately felt motivated to do something about this and begun taking small steps. Since I know I’m hardly alone in this, I figured I’d share my experiences. I don’t know where I’m going with this. But hopefully my broken and scorched trail will help someone else.

There are a few things that have brought me to this point in my life.

First, I’ve struggled for years with depression and other things. It’s only been in the last few years that I’ve received the right level of medication. I still have my bad days, but it’s no longer every day. The difference is so astounding, it has cast my pre-medication life in an entirely new light. I’ve resisted talking about this openly for a while for many reasons, including stigmas against mental health and putting this out for potential future employers to see. But I’ve come to realize that I’ve had an Internet presence for 20+ years in one form or another. There are worse things that people can find about me.

Second, I don’t know what to do with my life. Call it a lack of meaning, I guess? I don’t have career goals, my past attempts at finding career goals have repeatedly tanked. Instead ,I’ve just stumbled through a series of jobs where I’ve been competent enough to be valued but never happy with where I am. I’m on the cusp of 40, and I just feel kind of lost and all too mortal. (Yes, while I recognize intellectually that 40 is not really that old, emotionally it is weighing on me. I’m not entirely sure why.)

Third, I have a metric crap-ton of debt. I’ve always been bad with managing my money, and I’ve suffered for it. I won’t name a number. Let’s just say that if I stopped spending money on *anything* else, I could probably pay it all off within a year. Maybe less. And this is with a well paying government job. I bring this up mainly because it feeds into the other two problems pretty heavy.

For the last decade, these three things have loomed larger in my life than before. Toss in a divorce and an evolution in my belief system, and it’s been a mess. It impacts a lot of my life. My current theory is that I lack a purpose. Or meaning. They might not even be the right words. But it’s a working model.

I’m seeking to solve that through finding a career that I actually care about. Which isn’t easy with the whole debt thing. But I spend most of my waking ours at a job that’s emotionally unsatisfying at best. While it provides hilarious inspiration for my writing sometimes, it’s increasingly draining.

For a while I thought I wanted to write full time, and maybe I still do. But it’s not an option for me at this point with the whole mountain-o-debt thing. Because seriously: Authors don’t generally make much money. Especially SF writers. I won’t belabor the point. Google it if you don’t believe me.

So a couple weeks ago, when looking for something else entirely on the King County website, I discovered that the County has a Career Support Services Program. (I work for King County, for those who don’t know.) And it’s come at a point where I’m really feeling motivated to find a change.

There was a point a few years ago when I had reached a need to change and saw a career counselor on my own time and dime. And it was generally helpful, but I didn’t have much success early on and ultimately chickened out. Because it was hard for me to leave the County and give up good pay, benefits, and retirement on a “maybe this will be better.”

It doesn’t help that I’ve gotten burned a lot in past attempts to change to a more satisfying job.

So here I am, back at it. I had my first meeting with someone from the Career Support group. Talked about where I am with my job and my life. My Introversion and my Myers Briggs results came up. She asked to see my Myers Briggs info. I don’t know what became of the test I did with the other career counselor, so I did a new one and this is what I have:

INFJ

Introvert(67%) iNtuitive(25%) Feeling(38%) Judging(1%)

•You have distinct preference of Introversion over Extraversion (67%)

•You have moderate preference of Intuition over Sensing (25%)

•You have moderate preference of Feeling over Thinking (38%)

•You have marginal or no preference of Judging over Perceiving (1%)

From:

http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/j...

She recommended a workshop through Centerpoint Institute for Life and Career Renewal, specifically the “Passion Search” workshop. The cynical part of me recoils at the thought of a bunch of new agey touchy-feely stuff. But at this point in my life I’m desperate enough to try something new.

The biggest downside is that it’s $625, which is a bit outside of my budget. They have a free introductory thing every Tuesday evening, so I’m going to check it out. Hopefully it won’t be as hard-sell as other things that are offered as “free.”

I’m also to look at job listings of various sorts to see what jumps out at me. Not searching with an eye towards actually applying. Just seeing what things appeal to me and what don’t. This is all with an eye towards creating a “Vision Statement.” The author of the link uses Google+ as his web site. Not sure how much I can respect him after that, but I guess I’m going to give it a shot.

She also sent me this site as a way to look at different sorts of occupations:

http://www.onetonline.org/

I hope if someone else is in the same place in their life, my shared experiences will help them along.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.

Gone are the Days of Warlords

Some time back I tried to submit a story for a flash fiction contest. It was judged by Neil Gaiman. The theme was something like, “The future of classic sci fi.” So I jotted out this little piece at the last minute, sort of an homage to my love of the John Carter of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. What would Mars be like after several years of cultural exchange with our Earth? Little did I realize that the due time was British Summer Time, and not Eastern Standard Time. So, I missed the deadline by several hours. Here’s the story I wrote. I have an amusing anecdote after it.

Otan-Dur clambered up into the cockpit of the airship, chuckling at the naivety of the owners. Some folks still lived in the past, believing that theft had been permanently extinguished from Barsoom. And that attitude made Otan-Dur’s life so much easier.

Most people blamed the Jasoomians, or Earthlings as they called themselves. Barsoom had provided them with the technology to create airships kept aloft by the Eighth Ray, oxygen creation with the Ninth Ray, even interplanetary travel with the Tenth. Jasoom in turn provided them with the allure of criminal culture. Gangsters with Tommy guns defying the authorities. Thousands of years without theft, eliminated in a few months by a few ruthless entrepreneurs from Jasoom.

He had just finished hot-wiring the airship when he felt cold hard metal pressed against his back.

“Thank you for doing all the hard work for me,” a sultry woman’s voice said behind him. “How about you hop out real slow and leave the rest to me?”

Otan-Dur stepped down from the cockpit slowly. He didn’t want to give this woman any excuse to shoot him. As he descended, he brushed hard against the knob of the levitation tanks.

From the ground he saw a beautiful woman, dark haired and copper skinned, seated in the cockpit, radium pistol aimed at him. Like him, she was dressed in a jeweled leather harness and furs. She gave a wink and pushed the throttle forward. The silent propeller sprung into life and launched her forward.

Behind her trailed a miasma of light, a color not normally seen in nature. She probably wouldn’t run out of Eighth Ray within walking distance, but he took a grim satisfaction in tainting her victory.

He continued down the street, wondering if any new gangster films were playing at the cinema.

I did try shopping it around unsuccessfully. One place gave me extensive feedback on the piece from multiple reviewers, which was nice. But many didn’t realize that this was set in a world created by someone else. Which was extra surreal since they made a movie the same year. This was the best:

“I wasn’t sure why Jasoomians (Earthlings) were even brought up. Were the thieves Jasoom or Barsoom? It is said the Jasoomians were to blame, but wasn’t made clear as to who this man and woman are. The[n] we have the “Ray” idea. I love this concept that various “rays” provide things like power and oxygen — that has a nice magical-yet-scientific feel to it. But without more words to explain it, this felt like an intro chapter to a much longer work set in this new realm.”

It had not occurred to me before that anyone I submitted it to would be unaware of the source material. I didn’t want to risk someone thinking I created this, so I decided to just stop shopping it. I hope you enjoyed it.

Originally published at Jeremy Zimmerman. You can comment here or there.