Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 26

Mushrooms in the Grass

Mushrooms in the grass

You are nicely round and plump

Until you’re stepped on

(this haiku was written with the help of my older daughter)

A Balkan Morning

A Balkan morning

A breeze and distant goat bells

Swallows kiss the pool

May Newsletter: Ice Cream and Hope

So there I was, feeling good.

I was in the grocery store for maybe the third time since February, buying ice, salt, frozen strawberries, and the other ingredients of home-made ice cream. My headphones were in my ears, playing Terry Pratchett’s Maskerade, and my own mask was fogging up my glasses.

I carried my bags out, nodded to the hand-sanitizer lady, and emerged into the green, breezy warmth of May in Sofia. Big, white clouds piled themselves above the hilly crowns of the chestnut trees. Swallows dove and starlings chimed. People walked between the apartment buildings and neighborhood stores, but the playground was still roped off. I removed my mask, attempting to neither rip my glasses nor my earphones off my face, and made for home.

The whole scene should have scared the hell out me.

Warm breezes? Fluffy white clouds? Last spring, buying ice cream would grip my guts with dread. I remember stopping by the frozen food section and feeling the depression settle over my shoulders like a wet woolen sweater. I remember an earlier May, another playground where I ate ice cream with Pavlina and the girls, when I was dying of cancer. That was four years ago, almost to the day.

Don’t worry, I won’t go into any more details of how I got sick. If you want to know more, I wrote about it here. Suffice to say that spring is a hard time for me. For the past three years, the period between March to June reminded me of this very painful and frightening time, and that made happiness hard to keep hold of.

Except that this year, we’ve been in quarantine the whole season! I haven’t been teaching classes in the same office, or eating at the same restaurants, or doing any of the same stuff I was doing four years ago. This time, when I went shopping for ice cream, I was wearing a face mask. The playgrounds are closed. We had been rushing forward, and disease knocked us back hard. That does feel familiar.

The good news is that the recovery also feels familiar. In Europe, the first wave of the coronavirus is receding. Bulgaria’s kindergartens and restaurants have reopened after nearly three months of complete lock-down. There have been two deaths in the past 24 hours and seventeen new cases. We’re planning to reopen hotels. It’s still too early to drop all caution and go back to normal, of course…

But I find I don’t want to. I don’t like a lot about the old normal. I don’t want to return to the Cult of Busy and the Fear of Missing Out. I don’t want to spend half the day in transit and half the weekend worrying about whether I’m being social enough. I made ice cream with my kids during the lock-down*! I wrote poems about budgies and helped them with their homework. I had more snowball fights this spring than ever in my adult life.

Of course the coronavirus is a disaster. It has killed hundreds of thousands of people. It’s knocked global society back hard. But if that feeling of being knocked back is very familiar to me, so is the knowledge that I’m lucky to be alive to think about what comes next. Four years ago, I went in for surgery and came back to consciousness with new priorities. I promised myself I would do more good with the time I had been given.

Then I began the great, good work of recovery.

What does your recovery look like? What will you do differently now? Let’s make a list.

Ahem.

Apparently, my recovery looks like focusing even harder on writing books. My webpage and twitter stream look pretty barren this month, but I finished the beta version of Wealthgiver. I also spent more time on personal emails than I have for a while, and I’ve had some really deep and interesting discussions there and on Zoom. I’ve talked with experts on biology, physics, and Thracology, as well as colleagues and mentors in the sphere of writing. I feel as if I’m growing. My Thracian wordlist is undergoing some major metamorphosis, let me tell you.

Here’s a fun example:

Zi-issa ax issti zălmossa.

“The truest face is the mask.”

Doesn’t that look nice? All sinister and hissy? And here’s the “classical Thracian” for the same sentence.

Ax sa źi ísas ḗsti źälmós sa.

Now that’s sinister, hissy, and needlessly complicated! Just the aethetic I’m going for! Umlauts, baby!

I want to play with my Thracian some more, so without further ado, here’s what I liked this month:

Ronja the Robber’s Daughter: Astrid Lingrin + Studio Ghibli + Birmingham accents = good wholesome fun. As a father, I wish Ronja spent less time leaping back and forth over deadly crevasses. And those harpies are top notch.

Octonaut: Underwater adventures where the biology isn’t bad and everything has bunny-noses and beady little black eyes, including the carrots. Why are there spaient submarine carrots? It’s just one of the many mysteries of the deep.

Feierabend by Grossstadtgeflüster: I don’t know what she’s singing about, but she’s super into it.

Yggdrasill by SKÁLD: These guys are are into it too! Urðar brunni!

85 by Andy Grammer: Damn that backbeat! Mm’mm whappa mm!

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner: It has a good twist ending and a claustrophobic tomb-robbing scene that just about makes up for the characters’ sarcastic sniping.

Maskerade by Terry Pratchett: This is one of the first Diskworld books I read back in high school. I didn’t realize it until now, but it set a lot of my expectations about helping other people and writing. Those expectations weren’t entirely borne out, but maybe that’s just a sign I should become an erotic witch-chef instead.

Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold: Holy Russian Space-Gods this book is a work of art! It is a pleasure and an education to see Bujold take her character through a high, a low, and lower low, then back up for a quick trip to the store to buy eggs, and then its back down we go! Forget that nonsense about the three act structure and the hero’s journey, Miles has an ego-shattering revalatory insight like every third chapter! God damn but I want to write like this! Just read it.

Rising Strong by Brené Brown: I always enjoy Brown’s books because she’s approaching being a good person from the opposite direction as me. She talks about her childhood and her basic fears and desires and none of it rings a bell for me, but then she’ll come out with “judgementalness is caused by resentment, and the antidote for resentment is boundaries.” I don’t agree with her about everything, but she really seems to have a-

The Judging Eye by R. Scott Bakker: (Aspect-Emperor #1): It wasn’t as good as the books of Bakker’s previous series in this world, but it’s still pretty damn good. The tangly depths of scene description and character emotion don’t go quite as deep. The author’s thoughts on judgement are interesting, but they don’t quite ever get where they’re going. And I didn’t care much about the teenage prince of Rohan. But all that crawling through the black catacombs of an ancient and corrupted civilization? Mmwah!

Next month I’m working on the sequel to Protector. So anybody got some recommendations for spy thrillers, the Italian Renaissance, nano-manufacturing, and meditations on trust?

Wealthgiver Beta is done!

My experimentation with Terry Pratchett’s “scaffolding story” writing process continues, now with ingredients from the Eleusinian Mysteries!

Not many ingredients. Just a bit.

Okay, so remember how I wrote the alpha draft of Wealthgiver by the seat of my pants? I skipped chunks of plot, went with whatever whims took me, and generally had a good time for about ninety minutes four days a week until I hit the end of the story. For draft two, though I needed more structure.

For that structure, I turned to the Eleusinian Mysteries, which include a narration of the story of Demeter’s search for her daughter Persephone, after Persephone is stolen by Hades. It’s split into three phases: Descent, Search, and Ascent.  First Hades abducts Persephone, then Demeter searches for her, then Persephone comes back from the underworld. It’s actually a rather good mystery story.

Anyway, I matched that up to the three-act structure, where the book’s hero gets abducted, then casts around trying to figure out ever comfortable way to solve his problem, until he finally makes the sacrifice needed to become the person who can solve the problem. The first two items in that list are specific scenes in the story (the inciting incident and the inflection point before the climax), but the middle part is the whole second act. That second act, is anchored by its midpoint (the middle of the book), where the character thinks “is this who I am?”

I found that point in the story and discovered something: the stuff I had written last year was almost completely contained in the second half. The first half of the story was still mostly missing. So I – I actually don’t know why I did this – I mirrored the whole book around its midpoint. I took every scene in the second half and made a mirror-scene of it in the first half (and vice-versa). So for example there’s a scene near the beginning where the hero is dragged into the underworld. Then near the end, there’s a scene where he willingly goes back into the underworld in order to save someone.

I juggled those scenes around for a few days until I had a chain of plot points the filled up the blank spaces in my manuscript. Then I prioritized the scenes based on how exciting or pivotal they were. Then I juggled them a bit more, lining up the symmetries in tension and theme and pacing just so…then I realized I was procrastinating and started writing again.

And a month later, here’s what I got!

Wealthgiver

Complete skeleton (beta draft) finished at 49, 218 words

Begun (writing) at 2:45pm on Thursday, April 16th 2020 in the highest chamber of the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy.

First line (of new scenes): “A little yellow snake slithered through the grass by the crack in the earth.”

Finished at 11am on Tuesday, May 26th 2020, still in that tower chamber.

Last line: “’It remains only for us to build something.'”

Now I’m going to work on the sequel to Protector while I wait for edits for Interchange. Happy summer, everyone.

A Thracian quote

Ve na dorre pont ăn na terrpe. Skărrkes ko roffes. Nerrai ko spelles ao. Ssonke ko lărra. Ve lide mănno ta ve santo dizammass.

“To us is given all that we need. Silvers and swords. Men and their words. Blood and stone. It remains only for us to build something.”

April Newsletter: Stripping the Gears

So there I was, locked in the attic, stripping my gears.

I bounced in my chair, heart racing, breath baited, teeth clench, shoulders scrunched together, tingling fingers typing furiously away at nothing.

And I mean nothing! I was moving words around on a spreadsheet, for God’s sake. I copied those words, deleted the copies, made changes to spelling and undid them. I wasn’t thinking, wasn’t working, just churning, churning, churning those words until all sense had been ground into a slurry.

My plan that Wednesday morning  was to get up around 8 like I had most mornings of the quarantine, have my breakfast and coffee while I talked to Pavlina, then lock myself in the attic guest room from 9:30 to 11 for focused writing time.

What a luxury! From September to January, we’d had to make up at 6 every morning to get our girls to school and daycare. Then we’d rush from one meeting to another until it was time to pick the girls up and rush home with them. Now, I do miss restaurants and seeing my friends and working in my quiet office. I do not, though, miss spending two hours a day in transportation from one place to another. Now I spend that two hours sleeping. I have significantly more energy.

The problem, of course, is that energy has to go somewhere. In March, it went into completing the latest draft of Interchange (and existential angst). In April, though, I wanted to let Interchange rest and work on Wealthgiver instead. And I did. I  made a new outline. I did research on Thracian history and language. I ran the premise of the story past the people on Codex and my writing mentor and the people in my writing group. I made the outline symmetrical around its midpoint. I turned the newly-symmetrical outline into sentences rather than bullet points. I made a prioritized list of scenes to write…

You get the idea. So did I. I wasn’t wasting my time exactly, but I wasn’t writing. I was doing things that were easier than writing, things that took less energy.

So I told myself, “today you’re going to write that first scene.” I had a whole plan for the scene. I had my coffee. I had a song to put me in the mood. I sat in my chair and meditated for ten minutes. I opened my laptop and saw that I’d left my Thracian dictionary spreadsheet open. I thought, “I’d better clarify the etymological history of the name of the goddess Bendis, the name of the Bithynian people, and the word zibythídes, which Hesychius of Alexandria reports as meaning “the noble, most holy one.” Are those three words related?

The answer is “no, no, and maybe,” but I was so full of energy that I couldn’t stop myself from leaping on every tiny detail in my research material. Was the name of the Illyrian god Pindus related to one of those words? What about the Bulgarian folklore figure/fashion accessory Penda? Albanian bind (“to convince”) and pend (“a henchman”), Ancient Greek pentherá (“a mother in law”), Lithuanian žibéti (“to glow”)?

And now it was 10am. That’s all right. I still had an hour to write. 10:30, and now I didn’t have time to write anything, but I couldn’t leave this work half-done. 11am. They need me downstairs, but I only had a little farther to go. Noon, and I was an hour late to go downstairs and take care of the kids. Three entries in my dictionary had mushroomed into a tangled mess of dozens, and I couldn’t even see it because there were spots in front of my eyes. My fingers were so cramped I could barely force them to slide the cursor to the upper right corner of the screen and quit without saving.

Then I rushed downstairs, rushed my kids into their jackets, rushed to our garden, and ran back and forth there until my body started breathing again. I had achieved zero progress that morning, but at least my progress wasn’t negative.

Later that day, I found some unexpected time and wrote the first scene of my new draft of Wealthgiver. But that’s not the point. The point is that creativity isn’t just about cultivating greater and greater mental energy. You also have to give that energy something to do. Thinking about it, that’s not a bad problem to have.

So yes, I am working on Wealthgiver. In April I wrote about half of the new scenes, and I’m on track to write the other half by the end of May. It’s a good counter-point to Interchange, which will rest until…

I get it back from the editor. Haha! That manuscript is out of my hands now. I even got paid for it (thank you, Flametree Press and Donald Maass Literary Agency!) Now I’m letting Interchange rest and processing beta-reader feedback into notes for the next revision. Thank you, beta-readers! I’ll write more about this next month, but working with you is both toweringly scary and deeply satisfying. It’s like looking up at the mountain you’re about to climb, except in this case, you all made that mountain for me. Thank you

Insomnia help

“Love is like sleep. One can never seize (it).”

-R. Scott Bakker

In February’s newsletter, I talked about my trouble with insomnia and how I’ve been dealing with it. And a bunch of you responded! Here are our various solutions, all together in one list.

Try to keep yourself from finding out what time it is. Turn your clocks to the wall. Try not to look at your phone. Don’t calculate how much time you have left to sleep.

Stay out of bed unless you’re sleeping in it (or having sex, obviously). Read, watch TV, and relax in other places.

Track when you drink coffee and see what happens when you move the last coffee of the day earlier. (I try not to drink coffee after 2pm)

Avoid screens and blue lights after dark .

Let yourself get up or move around if you’re restless.

Stringing together an ongoing sequence of unrelated or rhyming words or even nonsense syllables to ease the transition into hypangogic babble. (from Thomas Duffy)

Make up a little story. Imagine yourself as a character in some environment going on a little journey in a fairy tale. (from Thomas Duffy)

Tell your toes to go to sleep, then your feet and legs and so on all the way up your body (Thomas and me)

Count your breaths. In is 1, out is 2, up to 10. Then start again. (Thomas and me)

Listen to music on YouTube – anything labelled “binaural,” “isochronic,” “subliminal,” or even “healing” (from Thomas Duffy)

Valerian, kava, lavender, and chamomile seem to help (Thomas and me)

CAVEAT: I started taking valerian extract after I got sick, but I’m trying to limit it now. I’m not so much worried about long-term effects, but I think that leaning on it too heavily will allow me ignore problems which would be better for me to solve. I feel the same way about coffee and diphenhydramine hydrochloride (Advil PM in the US, Calmaben in Eastern Europe) — they buy me time to solve problems, but there is always the temptation to not solve the problem and just use pharmacology to paper over it.

I also don’t recommend alcohol. Aside from all the terrible long-term side-effects, alcohol makes me worse at the meditation exercises that control my anxiety, and make me more likely to scare myself awake again.

When you sleep with no trouble, reward yourself! I buy myself books.

Perhaps this one? Overcoming Insomnia and Sleep Problems: A Self-Help Guide Using Cognitive Behavioral Techniques Paperback – 26 Jan. 2006 It comes recommended by Ashley Pollard, fellow scifi writer and real life cognitive-behavioral therapist.

The above are all “mechanical” solutions that might not touch the basic cause of your insomnia (as with me). I attacked the deeper problems by:

Talking about them, journaling, and mediating. Occasionally, I got an insight.

And be kind to yourself. You’re enough.

Snow Drops off a Branch

Snow drops off a branch

Nothing pushed it but itself

Soft sounds in puddles

March Newsletter: the virtuous ratchet

So there I was, washing the banister. I had my rubber gloves on, but not my face-mask because those thing fog up my glasses and I was inside where the cops couldn’t see me. I had my little tin bowl full of warm water and my sponge, which I ran down the dribble of dish-soap I’d made for it. The wood didn’t look any different, but my sponge was dirty. I must be doing something.

Every night at about 9:15, I’d put on A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge and spend about ten minutes washing the banister. That was after Clapping at 9, where I’d stand on the balcony and clap along with about three other people in earshot. Before that was Bluey at 8:30, which was after reading or playing with the girls, or maybe a shower or a walk with Pavlina. After washing the stairs, I might do dishes or watch a Studio Ghibli movie with the girls until 10. After they were upstairs with their grandma, I wrote in my writing journal (“today I finished revising chapter 18” “today I finished revising chapter 19”). Then I’d read a novel while Pavlina took a shower, and we’d watch about ten minutes of a Korean drama before going to sleep. It’s all there in my calendar.

I discovered this calendar system on Monday the 19th of February 2018 (guess how I know that so precisely!), based on advice Lisa Nichols gives about “microwins.” I’ve also seen the technique called “tracking” and it’s not so different from “journaling.” When I do something good (e.g. “wash the stairs,” or “play with the girls”) I enter it into google calendar on my phone. At the end of the day, I have most of the day blocked out with things I’m proud of.

That was Wednesday the 25th of March. Look at how nice that day was. I set those events to repeat weekly.

This is Wednesday the 1st of April. You’ll notice that this day doesn’t actually bear much resemblance to the previous Wednesday. I didn’t take the repeating events as a “to do” list – I shifted or deleted them as necessity dictated, and I added new things. A few events (like ordering groceries from Ebag) are on a different cycle, and so float across the week until they find a stable position.

It’s not a perfect system. Sometimes my calendar gets cluttered and I feel like I have to do everything at once. The solution to that problem is to delete events with a free hand, but sometimes that means that I break what would be good habits. I need to devote some time every week to reviewing the past seven days and shuffling things around in the next seven. That last is really a mental health exercise, though. I spend some time each week reflecting on the good things I did and will do.

And over time, the calendar evolves. Order emerges from chaos. Causes and effects reveal each other and events fall into resonances. Habits build themselves, and I find myself meditating or exercising or doing some other boring self-maintenance that it would just never occur to me to do if I had total freedom of choice. It’s like a ratchet that makes it easier to build than destroy.

Which helped me a lot in March. We’re still scared, of course, and stir-crazy, and worried about our jobs like everyone else. But we’re getting enough sleep. We’re cooking a whole lot. In March we played more in the snow with our girls than we ever could before. I know that’s true because it’s all there in my calendar.

The banister never looked any better after I washed it. A month later, though, that wood positively god-damn gleams.

In other news

Yes, I finished Interchange delta! That’s the “muscles” draft where all the basic parts are there – the story should work from beginning to end – but it isn’t prettied up yet. I sent it off to beta-readers and my agent, and I’m letting Interchange rest for a month now. In May I’ll start in on it again, and hopefully I should have the epsilon (“skin”) draft ready to send to my editor by the end of May. Then he’ll help me put the clothes on.

If you want to beta-read Interchange, tell me. It’s not too late

Snow Falling at Night

Snow falling at night

White flakes rush past the streetlight

The light though stays still