Christopher J.H. Jones's Blog, page 7

Give It Up for Lent!

Lent isn’t a part of my faith tradition. But, if you want to get technical, neither is Groundhog Day, and I celebrate that like mad every single year.

For the uninitiated (like, honestly, me), Lent is a forty-day fast leading up to Easter. It comes out of the forty-day fast of Christ in the wilderness (Matthew 4:2). You may never have heard of Lent – a lot of people haven’t, or only heard of it in passing – but I bet you’ve heard of Mardi Gras (also known as Fat Tuesday, which is what mardi gras means in French), which is what happens the day before Lent begins. Basically, you eat, drink, and be merry the day before you die.

Lent also doesn’t include Sundays (depending on which liturgical rite you follow), which is a thing I did not know until Tuesday, so it actually lasts about 46 calendar days. Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which was yesterday. Thinking about it a little, I thought that while the 40-day fast of Christ has always seemed to me to be metaphorical rather than actual (40 is a mystical number, and means a lot of different things in Hebraic tradition), if you exclude one day in seven, I bet it’s possible to fast for 40 days and 40 nights.

No, I’m not going to. Nor do I recommend it, although I bet you the experience would be enlightening, unless you use the Mormon definition of fasting, in which case it would be lethal (Mormon fasts, occurring once a month on the first Sunday, include all food and drink, even water) (Ramadan, since we’re talking about fasting, is also all food and drink, from dawn to sunset, but lasts 29 days, a full lunar cycle from crescent to crescent – starts on June 17 this year, if you’re interested).

ANYWAY (you see, here, a perfect example of what happens in almost all of the classes I teach, which is why my students adore me and I always feel like I don’t get a tenth of the class material covered in 90 minutes) I have always thought that a partial lenten observance would be a good thing for me. I have so much to learn and so many things that giving up would make my life better. You know, things like speeding or negativity, or criticizing myself. That kind of makes Lent like a New Year’s resolution, a little like our family tradition of birthday gifts to Jesus, on Christmas Eve, where we make a gift to Him of something to improve ourselves.

This week, though, I read a very good article about giving up something for Lent, and it talked about the wisdom of giving up something good for Lent, something we like, or that we do a lot that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. From the post:

I like the idea of mindful deprivation of a thing you enjoy (or at the very least, just plain do a lot), with an eye toward reflecting on that thing and its place in your life.

Read the whole (very short) thing, then go buy John Scalzi’s books, because he is great. The article made me think about what I ought to give up this year. I’m going with sugar.

I am not anti-sugar. I like sugar very much, and I don’t believe it’s worse for you than crack, or that it’s a corporate plot to enslave the world. I do think I would be better off eating less of it, but I don’t now eat ridiculous amounts. I just want to see what it means to me, and a good way to find that out is to stop eating it altogether.

Except on Sunday, of course.

The rules are this, so I am accountable: “sugar”, for purposes of this experiment, means the thing itself – brown, white, whatever, including molasses – and any vehicle designed primarily for the purpose of transporting sugar into me: doughnuts, ice cream, cookies, cake, cupcakes, etc. Banana bread is okay, being primarily a bread (kind of), and muffins are okay if I make them myself (which I do). I shall report.

What would you give up?

It Ain’t Bragging If You Done It.

And I’ve done it.

Three straight NaNoWriMos. That’s right, people. 150,000 words since Halloween. At least 500 words every day. Every day between 500 and 2700 words, averaging a cool 1650. That doesn’t sound like a lot when I write it that way, but dog, on Saturday night at 11pm, with nothing on the page, it sounds like War and Peace.

Today’s win is especially delicious because it happens to coincide with the completion of a project two years in the making, the finishing of novel #5, the (very necessary) prequel to a novel I’d finished two years ago (The Repairers). This one is called It Would Take a Miracle, about a young man more naughty than nice, by the name of Niccolo Davos Archos Kanikedes, known everywhere and to everyone as Nik. Having had a…mishap…in getting his collegiate degree in Mesoamerican Studies, a topic even he acknowledges he pursued more for the grad assistant (a tall blonde named Hillary) than for the academic understanding, he finds himself at loose ends, no job, no prospects, and hits upon an idea that suits his peculiar skills. Accordingly, he starts the InterNational Institute for the Study of Miracle (INISM), a foundation organized to find conclusive scientific proof that God is really doing miracles, yes, even in the 21st Century.

No, really. It is. It says so right on the very polished and expensive letterhead. There are donors and everything. No, since you ask, Nik has no scientific credentials. But hey, he’s a smart kid.

What could possibly go wrong?

It will need substantial editing, but I like many of the words. Some of it will prove to be salvageable, I’m sure.

Meanwhile, on to the next three straight NaNos, and the completion of The Knights of Insanity, a project I started 18 months ago, and that’s probably a third done. If I pull it off, it will get finished in February. I’m also finishing the first-pass edit of Stolen Away, now that I’ve figured out the sidereal motion and apparent traverse of Nameless Moon, the closer of the two moons to the planet. Marinating and waiting for edits are The Vortigern Jack, a cyberpunk novel (finished for NaNo this year), It Would Take a Miracle (above) and The Repairers (sequel to the foregoing).

I’m also a couple of short stories away from being ready to edit and publish a collection called Faith, where all the stories have something to do with religious faith, even if it isn’t how we usually think of it in the 21st century. Sometime the middle of the year I should also have enough content to finish off another collection called Work, where all the stories have to do with jobs people do, some of them decidedly not the kind that one goes to school for.

If you read that above and are tempted to feel jealous, remember that I’m 46. It took me forty-five years to get to the point where I had enough discipline and tenacity and commitment to be able to write like this. You’ve almost certainly got a head start, and if you don’t, you surely have the weapons to go after whatever thing has nagged you to get done.

Hey – if you tell me what it is, I’ll bug you to do it. That will be helpful, I’m sure.

It’s a good day.

Keeping the Peace

NOT a post about policemen and women.

This morning on Facebook I saw so many of my friends and family in pain, with loved-ones suffering, even dying. My life is…good. Really, ridiculously good. I have happiness wide and deep, and a settled peace in my soul that’s beyond anything I could have imagined in earlier days. I like helping people, too, and though I couldn’t see anything I could do to help these people – what do you do for a woman in a coma, besides be still and know that He is God? – I thought I could send something out there into the aether, and maybe that would help them feel less alone.

So I promised my Facebook list – all of it – that they could borrow my happiness and lean on my peace all they wanted today to take all they needed and that I would get more. I really have no idea if it will help them.

Funny thing is, though, it helped me.

I’m not losing my cool today. I’m not getting distracted. I’m staying in the center of peace and happiness, because I promised I would. If I’m offering others my peace, I better have some, hadn’t I? I find myself concentrating on my peace, on serenity and calm, because others need it so badly, and even if I have no idea how the celestial harmonics work when it comes to stuff like this – really, I’m just a bear of very little brain – I’m not risking it. I’m not a half-giver, where I say I’m going to give something and then don’t, because I don’t have it. And then my life is better because of my trying to give. Thus, He doth immediately bless me. How I need to remember this later, when the winds come and the rains fall.

Meanwhile, I have that peace right here, if you want some. It’s free.

Being a Superhero, or How Things Change

I was browsing my Evernote files today, part of a two-week commitment to consume no new articles until I’ve read the old ones, and I found something I’d forgotten about entirely. Most of you know I wax eloquent from time to time on subjects like getting old, sticking to unpleasant tasks, and Sheer Cussedness. This article I found was one of those. The interesting thing to me was that although I could remember having written it, I couldn’t conjure up the attitude I would have had to do so. I feel very different about things now than I did then. Though I can’t blame myself for feeling that way then, nor do I in any way want to run down people that feel this way, I do marvel at how much my life has changed since I wrote it. I’ve come some way from it, in what I think is a positive direction. Then I looked at the date.

October 27, 2014.

Not even three months ago. I was, and still am, stunned by this. I had thought that at that point, just three days before Hallowe’en, I was much closer to how I feel now than apparently I was. C.S. Lewis, in The Great Divorce, has this passage:

“Son,’he said,’ ye cannot in your present state understand eternity…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say “Let me have but this and I’ll take the consequences”: little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death. The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man’s past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness. And that is why…the Blessed will say “We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven, : and the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.” 

Here it is, in my own life, absolutely clearly. I spent a long time doing what I should, but not how I should, and I was miserable. When I finally listened to my good friends, my dear (and smoking hot) wife, and my God, and did the right thing the right way, I was almost instantly happier, and looking back the joy of it has made the rough places smoother. I have always been happy, or at least, I’ve thought I had been happier than I apparently was, for longer than I was. This forgotten post is a good reminder, and it’s a perspective that deserves a hearing. So here is my post, that I never put up, from October 27 of last year:

I almost didn’t write this. I almost opened up my loan origination software and started running numbers for a potential client that I’m 90% sure I’m going to recommend he not do a loan with me, because that’s the job that pays most of the bills.

That’s this post. That’s what this is about: what if Mr. Incredible just went back to work in his cubicle?

What if Bruce Willis dismisses his curiosity about his uncanny invulnerability as silly imagination?

Or Will Hunting doesn’t have to see about a girl? Or Clark Kent thinks football is really important?

What if Hermione Granger’s envelope never came? Harry Potter was going to get his no matter what. Ron Weasely would, too; everyone in his family was a wizard. But Hermione is the glue that sticks the whole thing together, the brightest witch of her age, and she’s muggle-born. She would never have known.

Worse, what happens if the letter is delayed by a few years? She goes to a regular school, gets excellent grades (of course), maybe valedictorian, ends up at a research school doing research on mitochondrial division in deep-sea organisms. Then the owl comes. What does she do?

She doesn’t go, is what.

Mr. Incredible pays the pathetic bills. Bruce Willis goes to work and comes home, like always. Superman makes it to Canton. Hermione Granger gets a couple articles published in scholarly magazines, makes a hundred grand or so a year, has a couple of kids in the suburbs.

Everyone would say they made solid choices. Good, sensible ones. They stayed out of trouble, kept their families going, did quality work in their fields. Unremarkable, even laudable lives. And that’s most of the people I know. That’s me, sort of (my life is less laudable than most).

A few years back we were driving up a canyon here local and talking about superpowers. I told the kids that they had them. They were smaller then, and listened to me. They believed me. “What are they?” they asked, and I said “I have no idea. You’ll have to find that out for yourself. Maybe you can throw fireballs.” “Wow!” they said, “that would be so epic! But I can’t do that.” “Really?” I said. “How often have you tried?”

They never had tried. Nor would they ever have. Why would they? So they spent the next twenty minutes trying. “Maybe you just aren’t saying the right words, or thinking the right thing,” I said. “You just have to keep trying.”

But we don’t do that, do we? Maybe we can fly, but we’re not going to jump off a building to find out. Maybe we’re bulletproof, or sharkproof. Maybe we can write the kind of novel that changes the world. How would we ever know?

We wouldn’t. Mr. Incredible had been a superhero, and was now confronting the idea that it’s hard to eat superpowers, and mortgage companies are all kryptonite, all the way down. The confrontation would have killed him, had his nemesis not tried to do it quicker. There’s a movie for you – Syndrome, instead of trying to kill Mr. Incredible by defeating his strength, left him to die in a cube farm. You want revenge? Don’t poke him. Leave him and let the world do your work for you.

Most of us don’t try enough things to ever know if we have any power at all, let alone “super” power. That’s a tragedy. But the worse one, I think, is that some of us find out we have a superpower, but so late that we feel powerless to do anything with it. What would I do if I were Spider Man, all of a sudden? I’ll tell you. I’d sit here at this desk and write mortgages. I don’t want to be a cop, there are no buildings in Lehi that one can legitimately swing from, and super strength might make me a hit at parties, but it’s not going to make me a career.

Is that sad? Yeah, it is. Even I know it. Heck, I know what my superpower is, and I use it a couple times a week in very limited, not to say invisible ways. I’ve only used it on a larger scale maybe three times in my life, all huge, ringing successes, all of them experiences I’ll never forget and that changed the person I am (and I daresay some of the people involved), but they were separated by so many years that it wasn’t until the last one that I dared to admit that something might be going on beyond just blind luck. And even now, I don’t have any idea what to do with it. I don’t have any real method of employing it that doesn’t eat up huge amounts of time and energy I need for other things – noble, important things like raising a family and keeping my business going so that I and others can eat. There’s value in that. Most of the time there’s even beauty and power in it.

What would I want to go to Hogwarts for? I’m busy.

The inspirational sting-in-the-tail here would be for me to say, “kids, try so many things while you’re young that you at least know what your superpower MIGHT be. Don’t wait. You won’t be able to try things forever.” That’s a good message. I could also say, “Anyone, any age, can find their superpower and pursue it and make the world a better place,” and that’s true, too, but there’s a hollowness to it, an unreality. It might be true that you have a superpower, but like my kids throwing fireballs, it might be that in the end it was just too complicated to keep trying every possible thing to make it happen. For some people, it can work. For most of us, though, it can’t. That’s depressing to me, today. Today, I want a wand.

Instead, I’ll post this and then I’ll open up my loan origination software and (probably not) write a mortgage. And then I’ll prep for class tomorrow, and go home and play with my children. And I will not think about Harry Potter and Ron Weasely, whoever they are. I will ignore the mysterious envelope, not correct the mathematical proof on the board, refuse to put on the suit.

I have work to do.

I finish reading this, and I want to say this: if you believe you have no superpower, you are wrong. If you have one you don’t believe is worth pursuing, you’re wrong. If you believe that your life has tied you in a straitjacket and that makes it impossible for you to do what you are miraculous at, you are wrong. I was wrong. The above might make a fun story to write (and I suspect I’ll do that here shortly), but it won’t be a true one.

Maybe you’ll never support a family on your wild-eyed fantasy. So what? Spider-Man doesn’t get flowers for Mary Jane from web-swinging. He’s a photographer. Superman is a reporter. Mr. Incredible…well, I don’t know what he does anymore. But I bet that when he goes to replace his house (remember the end of the film?), he’s going to have to use homeowners’ insurance money just like all the rest of us. But they’re still super, when they can be.

Well, what do you know. So am I.

I’ll be watching for your fireball, too.

 

But, Audrey, There Really IS a Santa Claus

This post talks about religion in a serious and believing way, and about Santa Claus in a similar way. If that bugs you, stop now, and read something else.

My dear friend and fellow Magyar Audrey Rindlisbacher wrote a blog post about Santa Claus. Do not read it with young children. But read it, because she’s a delightful person, even though on this issue she’s so wrong I’m speechless.

Not really. I’m not speechless very often.

In fact, after you read her missive, here is my response to it:

Audrey-

I read your blog. I didn’t like it (you should not be dismayed in the slightest by this), but one of the reasons is that I think you’re lying to your children in a different way. I shall offer an example dear to my heart and see if I can illustrate what I mean.

Is there a Jesus Christ? Yes, assuredly. How do you know? Well, because there are writings about him of an historical nature, there are millions of people that believe in Him, and we can see His handiwork all around us (and the Holy Spirit has so testified, but leave that aside for the moment). But none of this is proof, in the commonly accepted sense of the term. And, as you probably already deduced, all of it also applies to Santa Claus.

In fact, there is a Santa Claus, although it might be slightly less inaccurate to talk about Father Christmas, or even better, Saint Nicholas, who was almost certainly a real person. Since the three names (and hundreds of others, like another person above) all mean the same dude, let’s just pick St. Nick as the name we’ll discuss.

He was probably real. He was possibly also magic, in the sense that he performed deeds that defy easy explanation and could be called supernatural. If we were Catholics, we could dispense with the formalities and just say that he did miracles. Again, there’s a close analogue in Jesus Christ.

But, you will say, Christ is alive, right now, and active. I won’t dispute that for one second. I’m not at all sure that St. Nick isn’t, too, and I don’t know how you could be. In spite of His activity and reality, most of the discernible work being done here on earth is being done not by Him directly, but by people like you and me, acting in His place.

And that sounds a lot like St. Nicholas, too, doesn’t it?

There are a lot of people that believe in some cartoon version of Christ, where He is alleged to have done things He almost certainly didn’t do, and even where He has behaved (or asked them to behave) in ways that are completely unlike Him. That doesn’t change His reality. It doesn’t change His importance, or His power, or diminish my obligation to behave in a way that testifies of the truth about Him. So St. Nick is cartoony and weird in claymation videos. So what? They’re fairy tales, which are also dead useful and fun to boot. Lots of people think the Bible is fairy tales, you may be aware. Some of those stories may be legends, not precisely accurate in the modern CSI sense. Does that mean there is no Bible? Of course not. The “legend of Job” (not saying there’s no truth in it) has no bearing on the historical Christ. Rudolph has no bearing on St. Nick, either.

Lest I be accused of equating Christ and St. Nicholas, I should say that analogies always break down at some point, and this one breaks down here, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have uses. In my house, St. Nicholas is alive and well, and Christmas wouldn’t be the same without him. He isn’t Christ, but he isn’t a fake, either. He has true power, and his example moves millions of people to behave in better ways than they otherwise would. That isn’t real? What’s your definition of real, then? Is Nephi real? Paul? Caesar? None of them have anything like the impact on the modern world, either for good or ill, that St. Nick does. Each of them has problems of historicity (yes, even Caesar, whose image is funhouse-mirrored by Shakespeare) analogous to those that St. Nicholas faces.

You can say there’s no Santa Claus, in the magical fairy sense, but there’s also no St. Paul in that sense, either. So what? Both of them are real, just as real as you and I are. Every day I’m going about doing things in the name of a long-dead (and now living nonetheless) being that wants me to be a better person, kinder and more generous to everyone around me, who has asked me to give gifts at particular times and places to people near and far. If I can do that as a disciple of Jesus Christ, who can tell me I’m not also Santa Claus?

Our approach also isn’t for everyone, but I think it has an imaginative and magical element that defies the simple “I told them there wasn’t a Santa Claus” bailout mode that seems to be the default for so many people, almost all of whom mean well, but seem to me to be missing some of the point. I’ve written about that here, among other places. And to me, it has the virtue of being as close to the reality of the situation as it’s possible for a bear of Very Little Brain to come.

Thanks for a stimulating blog post, Audrey. No matter what this serious treatise may sound like, I’m a fan. You do good work, and I’m proud to know you.

Cj

P.S. The magic of Santa is an interesting (but to me tangential) point. In our family, we read a lot of fantasy, and one of the things that Dad has been heard to loudly complain about is magic that has 1) no rules and 2) no cost. Magic always has rules, and always has costs. Always. Santa doesn’t magic up toys without limit – no one can do that. To return to the analogy, Christ’s gift is infinite, but that’s only because the COST was infinite. You can’t pay it, not even the smallest part of it, nor can I. But it was because of the rules that it was necessary in the first place, and it has a tremendous cost. At our house, the mechanics of this haven’t been discussed, but the letters St. Nick leaves (on December 5th – St. Nicholas’ Day – not Christmas Day) always reference not only his need to make sure there’s enough for everyone, but also that he expects us to be giving much more than we’re receiving at this time of year. Yeah, I suppose I have to admit that the Jones version of how all this works is complicated and possibly not all that coherent, if you press it, but my very inquisitive children have come to terms with it, each in their own way. Nevertheless, they all know, in no uncertain terms, that Dad and Mom believe in St. Nicholas, whatever his trappings and location and size of helper. He is real to me.

BTW, I’ve never seen a Christmas list in my house. Not one. Ever. The kids would be offended at the suggestion they should have one. Once one of my kids did get a blank “Christmas list” from a department store Santa, and all he used it for was to write a lengthy list of what his brothers and sisters wanted for Christmas. What YOU want for Christmas couldn’t be less relevant; the only thing we ever talk about is what we’re GIVING.

Call it luck. Could be – there’s surely an element of luck to it. No dispute. But a lot of it is planning and discussing and hard work. It’s made Christmas as greed-free as it can be, I think, without in any way diminishing the magical unpredictability of it.

I love Christmas, and I hope yours is very merry indeed.

P.S. My favorite, and probably best, post on Christmas is here.

I Won. And I’m Lost. This will make sense in a sec.

Last post I was 42,000 words from winning NaNo. As predicted in that post, however, I won. When I won in 2012, I did it with a huge early push – facilitated by being held in an airport for a whole day (thanks, Atlanta!) – and kind of mailing it in for the middle two weeks, followed by a big rally at the end. This time, it was slow and steady, doing the work every day. See chart. I’m prouder of the chart than I am of winning. Well, no, but it’s close.

The book I was supposed to be writing, Knights of Insanity, I never touched. Instead, I took a short story and made it 70,000 words, and sometime in spring you’ll see The Vortigern Jack come out. I’ll tell you about it sometime.

Toward the end of the month I went to see a play at Lehi HS, which sits a block from my house. The kids were putting on Urinetown, which is not quite as crude as it sounds, and has interesting though ultimately snide and condescending elements, and I didn’t care overly for the show itself. I find that there’s not a single tune from it I can remember (or could even later that night).

The performance, though, was exceptional. The leads were good, some of them outstandingly so, but everyone was more than adequate, better than most casts I’ve seen do things I thought were much more interesting. I was impressed with them all.

It wasn’t that that captured me, though. I rarely watch the leads. I’m expecting them to be good. I’m watching the ensemble, especially the kids buried in the back. I’ve been out front, and I know that the show is made by the whole cast, not just the guys in the playbill. A truly great show requires 100% buy-in from everyone out there, no matter how small the part. This, ladies and gentlemen, was a truly great show.

I’ve been in my share of plays, and seen dozens more, both professional and community, big casts and small. I’ve never seen anything done this well by any high school or college; only a handful of professional troupes can match what Lehi is doing on that stage. There is a shocking crispness to the performance. Dropping a line is unthinkable. There isn’t any moment in which you catch the leads acting; they simply are the characters they’re portraying. More, though, is the absolutely incandescent ensemble – and it’s dozens and dozens of people – and the ridiculous energy they put out.

No, that’s not high enough praise. There is beautiful precision to the dancing and inventiveness to the choreography, and the ensemble performs it with verve, but it’s so good that while they are all together, they are also individuals. Every character has character. I can tell you what “boy number 4 on the right” thinks about what’s going on, because he was allowed to show it, and he did. I’ve never seen anything like that, nowhere, to that degree. I certainly can’t believe – even now, I can’t believe – that I saw that on a high school stage, with actors who aren’t paid.

It was so good I was depressed by it. I’ve directed shows. THAT certainly never happened in any show I’ve been in, much less supervised. I like to think I’m pretty good at what I do, but I don’t know that I could have auditioned and made the ensemble of that show, let alone one of the leads. Leaving that aside, what I really wanted to know was how the director got that to happen up there. I’m not kidding when I tell you it was magic. Not only has no play I’ve been part of ever produced that, no other organization, volunteer or paid, has ever produced it. I want to be a part of something like that so bad it kills me.

Jill and I discussed at some length how you can make something like that happen. I clearly don’t know, or baby, I’d have done it. Jill thought about if for a night and came up with the idea that in order to get that level of buy-in from a group, the leader has to have a crystal-clear vision of what it is he wants to see happen.

Most of my life I’ve had great things happen for me almost by accident. I married Jeanette because I was chasing another girl, who ran and hid. We have eight children because…well, I don’t really know. Biologically, yes, but we certainly never set out to have eight children, we just took what opportunities were there and did what seemed like a good idea at the time. I was never going to be a mortgage guy, sing opera, or teach school. Yet here I am. Every one of these things is better than what I had planned. I’m ecstatic about my life. But there’s no way I’m getting that level of excellence without knowing exactly what it is that I want.

I’m lost. I don’t mind being lost. It’s pretty normal by now. Still, part of me wonders if some of these other things I think I want are not going to be achieved by wandering into them, but by intentionally creating something I’ve seen clearly and pursued with focus and discipline. How to get there, though, I don’t know.

I’m asking you. How do you get a clarity in your mind about what it is you want to see? Lehi drama kids, how do you get from the director the permission to be yourselves, and yet want so badly to buy into what the group is doing? How does that work? If you’ve been part of something like that, I really need your help.

One More Foot: How to win NaNo and finally get that novel written

I’m a NaNo veteran, since one battle makes one a veteran, technically. I’m even a successful veteran, because I’ve never lost a NaNo challenge.

In addition to that, I’ve written somewhere around 300,000 words over the last two years, the equivalent of four good-sized novels, in all manner of genres, while holding down 5 (five) jobs that pay enough that I have to declare the income on my taxes. And being father to eight children and the hottest wife on planet earth. Others have done more, there isn’t any doubt, but I put that out there to establish my credentials as someone with a few things going on. And I still write.

This year I’m right on schedule at about 8000 words so far. I’m not worried that I’ll make it, though, because I’ve learned a couple of critical things over the years about how to get the writing done. With the hope that it might help you, here are some of them.

Just start. The hardest thing about writing is the start. This is actually true of most worthwhile endeavors. I refer you to the utterly brilliant War of Art , by Stephen Pressfield, for more on this. You want to write, you love it when you’re writing, the sight of thousands of words on the page fills you with joy. But you don’t sit down and write. Like almost all of us, you like to have written, but writing itself is the very devil. The trick here is to start. Just type SOMETHING (I like “Uh uh, Mr. PoopyPants,” she said). It really, honestly doesn’t matter what it is. Once you’re moving, the resistance breaks and you can get some words in before it comes back.
Get ahead early. This applies specifically to NaNoWriMo, but it holds for other endeavors as well. Writing 50,000 words in a month is something hardly anyone ever pulls off successfully. That’s a TON of words. It’s writing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, plus another 10-page paper. If you’ve never written that much that fast, the amount of daily written words necessary will overwhelm you unless you get ahead. Like most projects, when you start them is when you have the most momentum and can make the most hay. It will start to suck soon enough, so get that cushion so that at least one day you can say “heck with it” and not be so far behind that you can’t make it back.
When the slog begins, and it will, have some backup motivation. Look, nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. There are what C.S. Lewis calls “troughs” (I think in Screwtape), and everyone goes through them. For me, I know that somewhere around the 8th of November I’ll look at the calendar and think, “I have more than three weeks of this left” and it will seem like a geologic age. Last time I won, I had motivation in the form of the Winner’s t-shirt. That’s right. I buy the winner’s shirt before the contest starts. Ethically I have my quirks like everyone, but one of them is that I won’t wear that shirt unless I’ve earned it. I respect the winners too much. But I really, really want to wear the shirt. So I’ll do the work to win. It’s not much, but it’s something. This time around I have the winner’s shirt, but I also have this below.   I’m reminded every minute that I have work to do, and that I can do it. I want the wristband to be a positive reminder that I can do hard things, not a reminder of a failure. That will be enough to get me past the blahs.
At the critical moment, just suck it up and WIN. Somewhere in the late innings, there will be a sprint required, a day when you’ll have to write 6,000 words. It always happens. If you’re going to win, someplace in the combat with yourself you’re going to have to go big and wipe out the enemy. Apropos of this is the title of this post, which references Theban general Epaminondas at the battle of Leuctra, which deserves to be as famous as Thermopylae, in my opinion. Epaminondas trained the Thebans to fight the Spartans, who had been whipping everyone for the last couple hundred years. He trained them harder than they’d ever been trained before, but he also laid one sacred promise on them, that when he asked for it, they would give him one foot. Just one foot of push. That’s all. So the battle commenced, and Epaminondas is a genius, so it was going well, but as Boromir says, one does not simply rout the Spartan army. Anyway, they’re straining and grunting and shoving and stabbing in their wall of phalanx, and Epaminondas calls for that one foot. Just one foot, the whole Theban Sacred Band pushed the Spartans back. And that was all it took. The Spartans broke, and were never a power in Greece again. You’ll need that foot. Commit to yourself that when you ask for it, or your writing partners ask, you’ll give it, whatever it takes.

Hope this helps. Only 42,000 words to go.

And no, this 900 words doesn’t count.

No, It’s Not You: Why Your To-do List Ate Chicago

There you are, beavering away. You are being focused, productive. Tasks fall before you like wheat before the sickle. Then you pull out your list (either physically or electronically) and it’s twice as long as before. You scream in frustration and have a brownie.

Aside from the brownie, which should correctly be interpreted as a good thing, you might be tempted to revise your opinion of how productive you’ve been, and downgrade your efforts. This would be a mistake. Because:

Productivity multiplies responsibility.

That is to say, the days you’re being most productive will be the ones that produce the most stuff for you to do. Hercules and the hydra is the model here; cut one head off, two more appear. It’s not in spite of your efforts that your to-do list is lengthening, it’s because of them.

Consider a salient example. We are about to put on the street the latest edition of the Pontificating Potty Post (if you want one, and you so do, email me at chris@iamchrisjones.com). It’s taken some serious work. We’re quite proud of how it’s gone, and we think it will be well received.

At its core, though, the PPP is a piece that builds relationships with our clients of all kinds and stripes. Relationships take time. Therefore, clearing this item from our lists will not reduce them in size. Oh no, if we’ve done our work correctly, it will blow them up like a pufferfish. Most of the work we do here is like that. Most of your work is like that, too.

Next month (two days!) is NaNoWriMo, and as a writer I will have one task: write 50,000 words. When I’ve done that, though, I will then have editing, design, and publishing work to do that I do not have right now. My list will grow. It’s meant to be that way, hard as it is for us to see it.

And to be happy about it. I get that. But next time your list of to-dos threatens to consume all known space, remember – if you weren’t so awesome, it wouldn’t be like that. It’s a tribute to the person you are that your list has done this. Take it like that instead of being unhappy about it.

Once in a while, too, you might have to just KILL the hydra, instead of slicing off its head. But that’s a post for another day. My list is too long to get to it now.

P.S. There is a way, the inimitable Jill points out, to make your to-do list really small, and that is to curl up in a ball and lie there for a couple of days. Much as you might wish to do that, resist. That way madness lies.

P.P.S. Yes, room should be made in this topic for delegation and vacation. But it’s tangential. Don’t get distracted. Focus.

Mormon Messages We Ought Not to Send

Disclaimer: I’m a Mormon. You can listen in if you want, but in this post I’m speaking to the Saints, as we call ourselves.

I realize that we are not, as a people, the only ones that get bent out of shape when others – especially others of our own faith – attempt to correct our vision. It’s a worldwide neurosis that anyone could be saying anything to us that might make us uncomfortable. I believe we should be better than that, given the number of places where rebuke is given in the scriptures. Is there any place you can think of where a righteous person took offense when someone falsely accused them? Contrast that with the many places where people said “hey, that’s not fair”, and are any of the speakers people you want to be?

On the subject of the viral Mormon Messages video that I won’t link to, but you know the one I mean (you have the Internet before you, therefore search it):

I’m a man, so I don’t get to have an opinion here (for reasons I find quite valid, actually), but the video falls under Internet Rule #4:

If it offended you, it’s not FOR you.

There’s another rule that applies here as well, not just to the Internet, and that is:

When faced with a difficult, even seriously unpleasant message, ask first: Is there anything I can learn from this to make myself a better person?

The message may be unfair. It may be unwise. It may be MEANT to be offensive. We, however, have the ultimate choice here. If there is anything that can make me better, I want it. If only one percent of a terribly unfair comment is accurate, I need to hear it. Before I protest, before I reject, before I complain to the entire planet that something someone said is Just Not Right, is there anything here I can do to improve?

And there always is.

All that said, it’s rare in my experience for so many people to so completely miss the point of something. Though it’s presumptuous of me, let me say this:

If you’re complaining about the message of this video, I wonder if you didn’t understand it.

I don’t know why the mother in that video didn’t have a husband to help. I don’t know why she chose to give in to her manipulative child (aren’t they all?). I don’t know why she had a to-do list. I don’t know why she cared if she scratched all the items off. I don’t know HOW she scratched them all off, either. I don’t know why she did her son’s science project instead of letting him fail. I don’t know what she was thinking when she agreed to watch the neighbor’s kid. I don’t know why she didn’t take the neighbor’s kid with her. I don’t know why she didn’t order a pizza. I don’t know why she didn’t take the unbaked casserole to the neighbors for them to cook. I don’t know why she didn’t at least call her cousin at the airport. I don’t know why, plans ruined but having a babysitter anyway, she didn’t go out for a beer (metaphorically speaking), since she had a free evening.

In every one of those instances – and I have both seen them and experienced them all (except for the beer) – I have made both the choice she made and a different choice on multiple occasions. I don’t know why she chose what she chose.

Here’s a secret: NEITHER DO YOU.

See, this wasn’t a video telling us what we should do, it was a video showing us what we do do, already. It wasn’t an exercise program, it was a diagnosis of a disease, with a prescription for medicine that will ease the pain of it.

We all have this in common, don’t we? We’ve all got to the end of a day where we have done the very best we felt we could, and still been hugely discouraged and disappointed in ourselves (and our results). If there is anything to get from the video, it is that this feeling is unjustified. We cannot know what our best was worth. We cannot know what the effects will be. We cannot know anything but whether we put in our best efforts and did what we felt was right. All else is hidden, though we often think we see it. We are wrong.

Not only are we not in control of victory or defeat, most of the time we do not even know which we are experiencing at any given moment.

If you don’t identify with the woman, exhausted and disappointed, on the couch at the end of the day, then go watch something else. If you do identify with her – and I personally did – hear the message: you don’t know all the good you did. Each life touches so many other lives. You, George Bailey, really have a wonderful life. This is the truth, and the discouragement you are feeling is a lie. See it. Recognize it. Rise above it.

Right now the Internet is filled with derision for the message of this short film. “Your needs are important,” say some, and “learn to say no,” call others and “those were your own choices” still others advise. Those of us on that couch, we do get that. Know what you’re saying to us when you give this advice? “You did wrong, and that’s why you’re sad.” That’s what we hear. But we didn’t do wrong, or at least, if we did, we did it with the best intentions according to the best information and knowledge and inspiration we had, to which you are not privy and which you cannot judge. And we’re disappointed and sad, and you are NOT HELPING. Exhorting us to greater selfishness is not wise. We already fear that we are too much inclined that way.

If I am to err, the scriptures are abundantly clear, I must err on the side of being kind to and serving others. I must, if I have to choose between equal claims of myself and others, choose them. WHEN I DO, I MUST NOT BELIEVE I HAVE FAILED. That is the dark side.

Know who is helping? President Hinckley. That’s why he gets to talk at the end of the video. He’s calling out the lie, pointing to it, shrinking it. He’s putting a jack under our flat and raising us up. He’s offering perspective. He isn’t saying that we did everything right – if you think that’s what this video is about then methinks thou dost protest too much – but he is saying that even we, who think we know all about ourselves, don’t know how to judge, and we should be willing to give ourselves some of the benefit of the doubt.

Much of the world didn’t hear that message. But some of us did. And some of us were profoundly grateful for it. Maybe it wasn’t for you. Maybe it was just for me. I’m glad; I needed to hear it.

Your message will come along, soon enough. Meanwhile, leave mine alone?

Chrisistent

A couple weeks ago I saw an interesting article about Google’s study on leadership, and what were the most important qualities of a leader. The findings were somewhat surprising, but they made sense. Turns out that inspirational speaking, organizational acumen and fanatical work ethic are all second (or third) fiddle to the most important quality: consistency. A consistent leader is a good leader. It’s more important to be able to count on the guy in charge than to be inspired by him.

A consistent leader gives his team space to innovate, create, and perform. In the absence of consistency people are hesitant and protecting of their own turf, and that makes the whole organization slow down and become inefficient. It’s one of the things I’ve never been very good at as a leader. I’m big on the heroic act, much less focused on just showing up every day and doing my job well, though it’s something I’ve tried to work on.

Apropos of this, I was playing basketball Friday. I do that, three times a week, with a rotating but mostly recurring band of brothers. As happens, we have nicknames for each other.

One of those nicknames is “Friday Damon”, for the guy that always seems to be red-hot on Friday, for some reason. We were late in the morning, finishing up game number nine or ten, where we had been playing for an hour and a half, more or less without pause. Once, a long time ago, I was a scorer and a slasher, the primary option on my team. Those days are gone. Mostly, now, my role is mucker, cleaning up rebounds, hitting holes on the baseline, taking the occasional three-pointer. It’s a role that requires a huge amount of effort on every play, an effort I try very hard to make.

On this particular play, Friday Damon had missed the shot – one of the few he missed that day – and I had good box out, got the rebound, and put it back in. One of the guys laughed (I’m not very tall) and said “Everyday Chris”. I like that – anything where I get the reputation for being an everyday reliable guy, I like. A few minutes later, though, he grabs me and says “I think I’m going to go with Chrisistent instead.”

Being a grasshopper, consistency is a problem for me, so I was very gratified by this. Heck, it hit several good notes – consistent, persistent, insistent, resistant. These are qualities I’ve never had associated with me. Now, the fellow doing the nicknaming is a very decent guy, so that surely has something to do with it. But I’m hopeful all the same. Nobody argued with him.

I sure hope it’s a trend.