Christopher J.H. Jones's Blog, page 8

On Wildest Dreams, Living Sadness, and the Wisdom of Flowers

Today, after a lovely meeting with the Social Security office (successful, and the people there are kind and patient) (not a joke), I got to go to lunch at a Chamber of Commerce event and hear about the new theme/adventure park coming to Utah County in the next couple of years. A place called Evermore. Heard of it? You’ll want to. They had a huge presence at ComicCon FanX earlier this year, and I think they have hold of a concept that will positively print money, and make the entertainment scene here wonderfully upgraded. I’m actually more psyched about this idea than I would be about relocating Disneyland to Utah.

And at the same time kind of sad.

Why? Because I’ve never done anything like what Ken Bretschneider and the brilliant team there are doing. It’s not a failure of ideas. It’s not a failure of imagination. It’s a failure of execution and drive, which I recognize and am a little ashamed of.

About thirteen years ago, I had a year of insanity. I was bought out of a management position at a tech company for a really ridiculous amount – on paper, I was a millionaire for an afternoon one day – and I had more or less retired. My brother had an idea for a haunted house concept that was different from the run-of-the-mill, something that required real acting, a lot of space, and a willingness to think differently about how the Halloween concept could be worked. I thought it was great, and we played around with some ideas, one of them involving the old ore assaying plant in Midvale, right off the freeway, a place we still call the Dark Tower. Nice, huh? You like that? You definitely would have, but we never had the money for even an appreciable fraction of what it would have cost.

Anyway, refusing to let the idea die, we engaged a different building, right next to Seven Peaks in Provo. Zoning being what it is there (and, to be fair, in a lot of places), we modified the concept, keeping the haunted environment for Halloween but changing the entire experience for every major holiday, and we called it the American Holiday Museum. At Halloween it would have great scares from haunted houses from across the country. At Christmas it would have exhibits from It’s a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Carol, the Christmas Story, etc. We’d do Valentine’s Day, Veterans’ Day, V-E and V-J Days, all sorts of things, even one-offs for Peanut Butter Day and National Doughnut Day. Everyone that heard about it agreed it was a cool concept.

During its heyday, we held a fundraising event called Twelfth Night (which became an annual event for a decade), at which we had 40s-era jazz and dancing. Supremely fun, raised very little, but also gave me a larger idea that grabbed me with both hands and wouldn’t let go.

Right about this time, Geneva Steel (image credit Rachel Lowry and the Utah Historical Society) was going under, leaving a huge tract of land right by the lake that was empty and derelict. The idea was that we would recreate a town there – a town like, oh, Bedford Falls, entirely in period gear. The entire town would be right out of the 1940s. We’d have old tanks you could drive, a small airfield that would house B-52s, Messerschmitts, P-52 Mustangs, Spitfires and such. We’d have Rick’s American Cafe, with a 40s band, dancing, even a Friday and Saturday-night radio broadcast (and fake gambling going on, about which we would be shocked, every night) (and yes I know that mixes movies, so sue me). We’d have houses and schools and people actually LIVING in the town, just like a real town, and you could take your family there for a week and live there, just like the 1940s, except for the much more ubiquitous air conditioning (wi-fi wasn’t a thing when I was planning this out, but I suspect it would have found a way to be included). Newspapers delivered to your rental house, dated 1945. Nothing in the town to indicate (overtly) that this wasn’t seventy years ago. A whole experience – wargames, museums, boat and plane and tank and car rides, history, all sorts of things.

None of it happened. We lasted until just after Christmas, and had to close. There were lots of reasons. One was indisputably the city of Provo, which at the time was…antagonistic…to the concept of the Museum, and shut it down at a critical moment, costing us about $20,000 and making the difference between being able to continue and having to let everyone go. Another was severe underfunding of the entire operation. My million turned into just less than $45,000 by the time I was able to liquidate it (the tech market crash was painful for a lot of people). We never really had the cash to even start entertaining the idea of buying $50 million of property along Utah Lake. But the biggest reason? Well, that would be me.

It’s true that I had no money. Lots of people don’t have money, and some of them find ways to get it. It’s true that I wasn’t connected to the kinds of people that do projects like this. Almost nobody is born with those connections, and some people get them anyway. Every time there’s a successful project like the one I was contemplating, someone didn’t have any of the resources necessary to pull it off, and then that someone went out and got them, and made the impossible happen. Lots of people with money fail to make their visions come to pass, and lots of people without money make them come to life in spite of that. What’s the difference?

I think it’s drive. I think it’s execution. It takes a relentless focus and a willingness to subsume all rationality and sense to the goal of bringing the image into being. Every big project is like this, whether it’s Comic Con or Disneyland or the creation of the world. First there’s an idea, and that idea in the head of someone that never, ever lets go of it, and then the thing happens.

If you’re thinking that you’ve had an idea like this, and despite your pursuit of it the dream remains unfulfilled, then I have a piece of knowledge for you: you haven’t worked on it hard enough or long enough. No matter what else is true of the process, that must be true. You may contend that you’ve worked very hard. I believe you. You may contend that you’ve worked on it every minute for years. I believe you. The fact remains that you haven’t worked long enough or hard enough, because if you had, the thing would be done.

You may be incapable of working long enough or hard enough to make it come true. In that case, you need help, either in the form of other people or in the form of machines to multiply your effort. But if you want it, you’re going to have to find out what you’re missing and plug it in, whether it’s time or energy or focus or dollars or whatever, because otherwise it won’t happen.

You may argue that you can’t do all that the creation demands. Fine. You won’t get the thing created. You may argue that others have done the same sort of thing with less effort or time. So? That changes nothing. You may argue that you shouldn’t have to work this hard to make your vision a reality. Unfortunately for you, there is no should. A thing costs what it costs, and until you have paid that price you will not get the thing. The price is different for everyone. For you it may be astronomical. The question remains: do you want the thing or not? If you want it, you’ll have to do what it takes to get it.

I know all these arguments so well, because I made them all. I think I was incapable of working hard enough for long enough to make Bedford Falls happen – and a hundred ideas since. I could have found the people that had the muscle to bring it about, but I didn’t. I have a lot of shortcomings, and some of them made me unwilling to pay the price, which for me is often painfully steep.

That impossible dream remains unrealized. I feel guilty, almost, that this is so, as if I owed that vision more than just a blog post twelve years on, as if by not measuring up to the challenge – and I absolutely did not – I’ve betrayed it. When I hear people talk about grand things they’re going to accomplish, I get a little twinge. I am sad, and I feel that I am so much less than I should be.

And then when I hear the Evermore people talk about their fantastic idea, the twinge is mighty enough to lock up my whole frame, because it’s so much the same as the one I had. But Ken is making it happen. My hat is off to him, and I’ll do whatever I can to help, little as that may be.

And today, I have other dreams. They’re a lot smaller, most of them, and some of them I believe to absolutely within my ability to bring about. Still, they’ll require something different than what I’ve given to them so far, else they would have already happened. To make them reality, I’ll have to do things I haven’t done, and I’ll have to stop doing things I’m doing now. My sadness, my shame, even, that I’ve not been willing to do some of that work in the past is a thing that works against me, and as wrong as it feels to let it go and focus only on what I can do right now, that’s what has to happen.

On the way back to the office from the presentation, Jill and I passed a huge flower garden, filled with bright summer flowers in full bloom. We stopped, took pictures, admired the beautiful view. We had just been talking about how we were sad that we hadn’t been all we feel we could (and should) have been, that so many of our visions remained unrealized. Then the flowers said to me, “should we be sad that in May we did not look like what we do in August?”

I love being chastened by vegetation. Flowers are wise. Lamenting that my time past has been lost will not effectively use the time right now. I have a dream to chase. Let us see if I have the will to chase it.

And I’ll see you, opening night, at Evermore. That much I promise you.

The Last Day of My 46th Year

Note: we count birthdays starting at 1, meaning that our first birthday is the end of our first year. I turn 46 today, thus today is the last day of my 46th year. That sounds depressing, because as of this minute I am MORE than 46 years old, but there it is.

Today I get to start clicking the menu item under “Age” that reads “46-55″.

I am watching the World Cup (where the US had best beat the Belch), and I am older than every player on every roster of every nation.

My youngest child is Gabriel Maxwell, and he is 5. His playmates’ parents are almost all at least a decade younger than I am. Our children’s friends have parents our age who have no young children, or parents who have young children who aren’t our age. Not both (with a couple of happy exceptions).

I was in the studio today with Elizabeth Smart, who became famous twelve years ago when she was kidnapped from her home. I was 34. I had gone to college before she was born.

So I’m old. Getting older, which has uncomfortable bits. But it beats the alternative. I’ve written sad, contemplative posts about aging, and this is not doing to be one of those.

Because people, I feel absolutely fantastic.

Physically, emotionally, you name it, I feel better than I have in years. In some ways, yes, I feel the encroaching time, but overall, baby, I feel like a kid. So here, if you’ll indulge me in using my own mistakes as cautionary examples, are some things I haven’t learned yet, in 46 years.

1. How to keep my mouth shut. I’m better at this than I was, but still, I ought to be so much better. I wear my heart on my sleeve, which doesn’t bother me much as it appears my heart is good, but it isn’t perfect and boy, my life would be simpler if I would learn to just shut the bleep up for a second once in a while.

2. How to just let it go when there’s nothing I can do. This isn’t strictly true – I do know how – but it’s close enough. I’ll give you an example. A couple weeks ago I got the amazing opportunity to spend a few days on an oceanography trip with some of my students. I’ve been reading Horatio Hornblower and Aubrey/Maturin novels for twenty years, and hankering for a chance to ride a sailing ship. It was every bit as great as I thought it would be. Except I brought something with me – a loan I needed to close and that meant (at the time) business life and death. We got terrible news just as I passed out of electronic range, and I carried that with me for two days. Some wonderful ladies helped me keep my head, and in the end it was okay. I had a good trip, enjoyed myself for the most part. But it could have and should have been so much better. There was nothing I could do. What was the point in worrying? I tried to convince myself that I was preparing, considering options, that sort of thing, but I knew better. It’s a thing I really wish to learn.

3. How to believe in myself. When I got home, we dealt with the problem. It didn’t kill us (it was, confessedly, close). But that happens all the time. I have great people to help me, and great support at home, and we always find a way through. Why don’t I trust that?

4. How to remain optimistic when things are bad. Corollary to #3 above. Things do get bad, when you’re a risk-taker, which I am. I actually like that, probably mostly subconsciously, and it provides spice in a life that satisfies me. But I get down when things are bad, and miss opportunities that could be exploited. Worse yet, it makes my wife sad, which is unacceptable. And, as mentioned, things do get better, and we always come out well. My wife and I are not going to be split by anything outside our relationship, so whatever comes, we can deal with it. I should remember that.

The US is going to lose. Good test of #4.

5. Why water is exothermic. Good thing it is, though, or the oceans would freeze solid.

6. Why the US cannot develop a true, world-class striker in soccer.

7. Where Amelia Earhart died. I’d sure love to know, though. She was some woman.

8. Where this is all going. None of my plans for my life – with very few exceptions - have come to fruition. I had ideas, I had “goals”, if you want to call them that. They haven’t been realized. No, what I’ve ended up with so far is far BETTER than what I planned to get. In every area of my life, I have something deeper and richer than what I had planned and aimed for. How that happens, I’m not sure.

I guess whatever success I’ve had in that arena comes from the degree to which I’ve been able to make progress on the stuff above. That has to be encouraging.

New chapters being written as I type this. This is going to be an interesting year. Follow along, will you?

Some Advice to My Young Friends, for Summer

Dear young friends-

I know most of you from school, but some of you are sons and daughters of other friends of mine, and I think all of you are fine people. It is not in the nature of criticism, but in a desire to help you out, that I write this letter and in it give away one of the great secrets of life. You didn’t ask me for this advice, but you would have if you’d thought of it, so I forgive you.

You are going to get bored very, very quickly this summer if all you do is play.

I know, right now, on week one of the Fantastic Summer of Awesomeness, you do not believe this. You are busy in the pool (photocredit Dandelion Moms), running through sprinklers, digging, jumping on the trampoline, playing video games, and all the wonderful things you’ve been able to do only in drips and drabs throughout the last long nine months. Good for you. This is entirely proper.

But soon, very soon, you’ll be bored with this. It seems impossible, yet if I recall to your mind the previous summer, you will find, deep in the back of your brains, a nagging feeling that you remember something like this happening before. It is true. It did. It will again. As terrific as cotton candy is, you cannot eat it for long before you just don’t want any more. Life is like this. You will want actual food, at some point. Likewise, you will want to stop playing.

You’ll stave it off for a while. You’ll invite friends over – and that is an excellent way of staying interested in life – but even that, if all you do is run around and play tag, will pale. You’ll start looking about at your balls and bats and jump ropes and yes, even your DS and your iPad, and thinking… “I’m bored. This doesn’t seem like fun anymore.” With desperation, because three whole months stretch ahead of you, and if the golden fleece of video games isn’t enough to keep you interested, what on earth can perform the task?

Fear not. Your kind friend Mr. C has some advice that will keep this at bay, and it goes like this:

You need to redefine play to include a lot of things you currently think of as work.

NO WHINING. This is good advice, and I will explain why. You won’t hate it as much as it may sound like you will. Here you have to trust me. Those of you that have been in my classes know that I can make studying economics almost (almost!) like fun, so please believe that I can make fun like fun, too. I’m a kid like you. You’ve suspected this, let me confirm it. And this, above, is my secret.

Here are some handy examples:

Playing the piano (or insert other instrument here). Yes, you hate practicing. This is because you are human. That won’t really go away much, but please note something: they don’t call it WORKING the piano. It’s called playing the piano because it is fun. It truly is. Sit down on the bench, pull open the cover, and start hitting the keys. Don’t practice (or, at least not right now). Just play.

Making a movie. The brilliant little device we call a phone (hilariously, given what we actually use the thing for) is great at doing all sorts of things, and one of them is taking pictures that move, hence the term “move-ie”. There is free software out there that will do animations and video editing and a host of amazing things. Pixar is giving away its software this summer. Take advantage of this. Making movies is work, but it’s the kind of work that doesn’t get old in a hurry. If you don’t want to shoot pictures of real things, this leads me to

Learning to draw. Your library (this is an ancient civilization’s version of the Internet, but some of these relics are still around, probably even one in your home town) has books on drawing and animation. I promise you. Your iPad can serve up even more of them, to say nothing of YouTube. If you think you can’t draw, that’s because you’re not thinking straight. Of course you can draw. Everyone can draw. I can draw. I went to a Disney animation class instead of Space Mountain, and they taught me to draw. I’m 45. I can’t draw a bath. But if you come visit me, I’ll show you what I did, and you’ll know I’m not making this up. You can do it. It’s fun. You know it’s fun because it’s a thing they stop you from doing when you’re in class and they catch you at it. Which brings me to

Writing. When I was in junior high, I had a geometry class that I loathed because the teacher was awful (it had to be the teacher – geometry is cool, I find out to my shock, thanks to Sal Khan), and I spent my time writing a post-nuclear disaster novel wherein a guy who looked and acted a lot like me got to pair off with a girl who looked and acted a lot like Dena Christiansen, whom I met at a dance and who never gave me the time of day until the world ended and I was the only one with a bomb-proof shelter. Haha. Anyway, although I didn’t do well in the class, I have become a writer, so it wasn’t a total loss. Writing is also work; ask anyone that has tried to put 70,000 words together all in a row. But it’s not like work work, because if you tell someone you’re a writer they will say, “but what do you do for money?” or if they are a concerned aunt “when are you going to get a real job?” So you know it’s mostly play.

There are hundreds of other things, like learning Sanskrit, fixing sprinklers, weeding (the weeds are evil. They must be hunted and destroyed), and cleaning your room (channel your inner Mary Poppins here) that don’t sound like fun but really are. And the great secret of people who are never bored, of course, is reading, which is actually another word for joy.

These are real things, young friends. Real things last, and lead to power and knowledge and satisfaction, all things of much greater durability than fun. You will need those things – they’re like vitamins and minerals for becoming Interesting. You want to be interesting. You want it much more than you want to have fun. Paradoxically, though, you will have fun becoming interesting. Call it a bonus, and you’re welcome.

This is my contribution to your wonderful summer. If these ideas don’t suit you, you’re not seriously trying, but I will take pity on you and make you this offer: send me an email to chris@iamchrisjones.com, and tell me your tragic plight, and I will give you three things to do that will not bore you. One-time offer, so use it wisely, but never let it be said that Mr. C is only about school. I love summer even more than you do. I’m here to help.

See you in the fall. Be a better person when you get there. I will be, too.

There’s Something Happening Here…

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

But I have some updates to the Top of the World post of a couple weeks ago. It appears I have acquired some new disciplinary muscles. I can make myself do things I couldn’t, once upon a time. That has resulted in some mighty interesting stuff going on here.

Ideas have never been a problem. Execution is my problem. I’m a grasshopper, not an ant, so planning so much as a five-year-old’s birthday party is really hard work for me. Still, apparently it’s a skill that can be acquired. So here’s what I’ve been doing with the muscles I’ve developed:

This last quarter, I’ve written seven short works. Three of them are short stories, two are novelettes, and two are novellas.
Last Monday, I had an idea for a different way of distributing my work, one that might pay, and that might take advantage of some of the new technology that has often been blamed for killing literature. What if I could use it to make more? So in five days, I wrote two short stories, built a Facebook page, put up a web form and took fifteen beta subscriptions, all of which have tested out successfully. Monday we go live with the beta. If you want in, incidentally, hit me with a comment.
This is probably not going anywhere, but Lehi needs a pizza joint, a real, sit-down pizza place for hanging out after the game. The Wingers’ just 100 yards from my office is for sale. It would take about $1,000,000 to buy the place and get it open, but if we could do it, the L Yeah Pizza place would blow up the central district. I’ve never run a restaurant, but if I can find a backer, I flat guarantee that what we’d do with this place would make solid money and be a Lehi landmark inside of six months. Absolutely guarantee it. I know this town and this school and this area. It deserves a place like this would be. Anyhow, I don’t have a million, but I’m trying to find it, building spreadsheets and penciling out ideas. Because, you know, why not?
I’m negotiating to essentially triple my teaching load in the fall, working with two different educational establishments to put together a class schedule. There will be online and on-site classes, and video recordings, and a host of things.
The mortgage business is perking along. Not as well as it could, but as well as I want it to. It’s a full-time job, never mind all of the above.
And we’re moving the office. Just shifting within the same building, but we are relocating to make room for American Promotions, which is taking a chunk of the space. It’s a very good thing. Theron Harmon, esteemed proprietor, is a genius and one of my true friends. Good things will come of this.

I couldn’t have handled this even six months ago. Now, it’s surely possible that nothing of great import will come from any of the above. I have no idea. But that actually doesn’t matter much to me, oddly. Yes, I’m going to throw all I have at these things, because they’re a wheelbarrow full of fun, but I can only do what I can do, and sometimes it isn’t enough.

But I have learned how to move my feet and not just my jaws. These things may produce nothing but flaming-haired enjoyment for me and my partners in crime, financially, but they will all produce opportunity for me to learn and to grow, and that’s all any of it has to do anyway. It’s worth doing if that’s all there is.

I have a hunch, though, that one of these things, maybe more than one, is going to be a big deal.

I’ll keep you posted.

Why AM I wasting my life doing mortgages?

First off, I’m not wasting it, not exactly. You could argue – many do – that I am not using my life to its highest and best purpose while doing mortgages, but before we get all judgmental on that, maybe we should understand some things together.

I’m a man of faith. I believe that I have a heavenly Father that sent me to this place to learn things and to become more like He is. He did not send me here to marvel at the brilliant creations of my mind and fingers, fun as they are. He could do everything I do much better than I do it.

So what is the point of my doing anything at all, then? Well, I have to learn to walk for myself. My children all had to learn it, and I was right there, and I could walk just fine, and I could even carry them, but what’s the good of that? So I let them do it, because THEY needed to, not because I did. God behaves just like this. I need to do things because I need to learn to do them. I will suck at many of them, and will be perfect at none of them, but they are critical to do, just like homework exercises. I’m not being graded. I’m learning lessons. The point is to get better.

One of the things I’m not very good at is focus, and another is self-discipline. True story: when I began in this business, I had never had a job that lasted more than four years, and only one of those. The previous five years I had run a presidential campaign, been a sales director with a dotcom, curated a museum, been retired, and sold virtual tours of real estate. My resume was a train wreck. My sister, bless her dear heart, was my assistant the first few months of my mortgage career. She bet me dinner I wouldn’t last one year as a loan officer. She had every reason to believe she would win that bet handily. That was my track record. [Aside: I collected on that bet with great relish.]

Modern society talks a lot about “following your muse” and “doing what you love”, and other such things. I’ve written about them. I have little patience with such things, though you’d reasonably expect me to be entirely in favor of them. They fit right in with my personal proclivities. And that is exactly the problem: they run in the direction of my biggest weaknesses.

Since I am not here to indulge myself, nor am I here to build anything material, for none of that lasts, I must be here to become something better, and that means hard work, and I don’t care if it’s doing something I dearly love, the part that will get it from theory to practice is WORK, because it always is. Everything of value is created with blood and sweat and time. [Aside: yes, this includes love, because "falling in love" is destructive without actual love, which is usually cleverly disguised as hard work.]

I love my family. I want things for them, and I commit to them that I will deliver certain things. To do that, I needed to find a career that would pay me money and leave me flexibility to spend time with them. That left out a lot of possibilities, because I have a lot of kids – on purpose (yes, funny man, I do know what causes that, and I like it. A lot.) – and that means money and acres of time. So mortgages was a place I could go that I could get those things, and if there were things about the job I disliked, what job wasn’t going to have that? I wanted a job that 1) I was good at, 2) that paid, and 3) that I liked. In approximately that order. I don’t think that it mattered to my Father what that was. I know it didn’t matter much to anyone else what it was.

I chose mortgages, and for a long time I got all three of those things. Increasingly, in a vain attempt to prevent stupid greedy people from being stupid and greedy, government regulation of the industry has choked the third thing out. But I’ve learned what I came to learn. It is impossible to survive in this business, let alone thrive in it, without focus and discipline, without meticulous attention to detail, without sheer bloody-minded hard, possibly pointless work in the face of nearly certain disaster. When I arrived as a loan officer, I had none of those things. Now, I do.

What I’ve built here is nothing special, in the worldly sense. I will never be on the cover of a magazine. I will not speak at TED, barring a miracle (for which I still hope, sometimes). My little operation is nothing to take note of in the halls of business. But it has made me someone better. It has been a refuge for many people that were lost and needing help, and not just clients, either. It has been a place of laughter and joy and heartbreak and suffering and splendid courage. Those that come here feel at home, and leave better than they arrived.

THAT is why I’m “wasting” my life as a mortgage agent. Because my life’s purpose is not money or books (hard to write that down, there) or offices or even houses and loans. My life’s purpose is to become the best person I can be. This crazy, awful, gut-wrenching ride has done much to move me in that direction.

All that said (and thank you for reading this far, Mom), there comes a time. This might be it. For now, I’m here, still beavering away on mortgages and doing my best to make them as painless for my clients as possible. But it may be time to take these things I’ve learned back to the things I am good at, and that I love, now that I have much more ability to respect and do honor to them.

We shall see.

Back from the Dead

I’ve been waiting to smile, hey, been holding it in for a while, hey…

Music having been such a huge part of my life for so long, it’s not surprising that my resurrection came with a soundtrack, some lyrics provided above. It was at a Rotary event, where we saw a family movie that used this lovely and exuberant Imagine Dragons song as backing track. For some reason I, who search actively for uplifting and joyous music, had never heard the song before. Moments later, the magic of Steve Jobs and Spotify combined to give me a song I could play at truly inappropriate volume as I cruised down I-15 with the top down on my aging-but-still-ridiculously-fun convertible, the very first morning of the year one could realistically do such a thing without risking pneumonia.

I’ve been dead. I’m back.

I’ll try to explain, without a lot of confidence that I can do so to anyone, least of all myself.

Several years ago, my father read a short story I wrote. I think it was Miss Mabel Regrets, which you can read on this very site, but it might have been something else, and that doesn’t matter. My father is sparing with his compliments (with me), and often thrifty with words, and he sent me a one-line review: “Why are you wasting your life as a mortgage agent?”

Like much of my father’s commentary, it required some parsing to figure out what he was actually saying. Once I did, though, I filed it with the most wonderful compliments I’d ever been given. He was not saying I was a bad loan officer – though I’ve been that, at times, over my career – he was saying that if I could write like that it was a tragedy that I didn’t do more of it.

Apropos of this, I recall a line from the original Superman movie:

: Lois, Clark Kent may seem like just a mild-mannered reporter, but listen, not only does he know how to treat his editor-in-chief with the proper respect, not only does he have a snappy, punchy prose style, but he is, in my forty years in this business, the fastest typist I’ve ever seen.

In other words, he wasn’t a bad reporter. He probably could work at the Planet for a long time, and get some decent notoriety, make a cozy living (until the Internet destroyed his paper), all things that everyone with sense would tell him to do, and that would be terrific life choices if he weren’t also, you know, Superman.

Except for Batman, whose super power is unimaginable wealth, superheroes have jobs. Maybe that’s a clue I should have got a very long time ago, but I didn’t get it until a month or so back, when God essentially used a combination of the aftershocks of the real estate crisis, draconian bureaucratic overreach, and an illness that robbed me of my voice to clock me upside the head and communicate to me that if I wanted to have a job, that was okay, but He was going to be very upset and increasingly intrusive into my comfort if I didn’t at least start sneaking out periodically to check the police scanner to see if it might be time for some thrilling heroics.

I have a job I don’t like much. Don’t get me wrong, all you clients of mine, I love you, and I’m happy that in most cases I’ve been able to do you a service. I like getting paid, though the pay isn’t all that wonderful at the level of success I’m at. But it’s become increasingly hard to do this work with any pretense that it’s fun. Once upon a time, the pie chart of Mortgage Work looked like this:

The split was close enough to 50-50 that I could hire people to do a lot of the red stuff and keep myself sane. Then 2007 happened. Now, people like me have been blamed for Ushering in the Apocalypse, and we’ve created whole new branches of bureaucracy to “make sure it doesn’t happen again”, so the chart looks like this:

And that is into the realm of the soul-crushing, well beyond my ability to hire defenders against. I found myself hating that I had to do things like direct plays and sing opera, and several people, not least my wife, conducted what can only be termed an intervention one weekend not very long ago, and told me to shape up.

For a man who’s spent the better part of his life trying to find ways to evade doing real work, it was vaguely surreal to have so many hardworking, intelligent people tell me to spend a lot more time writing and singing, no matter what the financial consequences turned out to be. It was a struggle to process that. I believe strongly in honest work, even work that truly sucks, the ranks of which mortgage work has absolutely joined. My religious and social culture is ant, not grasshopper, and I grew up being told to apply myself and focus and stop daydreaming, so to have the ants come to me and tell me to stop trying to gather grain and go back to fiddling seemed…impossible.

I haven’t entirely come to terms with it yet. But I have started moving that way, though there is no “responsible” way to do it, no way to write more and read the FNMA Seller Guide less that doesn’t feel like cheating, like staying out on the playground when recess is over and everyone else has to go take a math quiz. Still, I’m doing it: More writing. Letting my schools know that I want to teach more next year. Re-upping with the opera troupe for yet another season. Saying yes to storytelling festivals, instead of “I regret that my schedule doesn’t permit.” And writing all manner of things, from short stories to novels to essays.

What ultimately comes of this, I have no idea. I’m still doing mortgage loans, in about the same volume as before. I think it likely I’ll continue doing that until the government reaches out and snuffs the candle, which it surely will, but working with the people I work with at City 1st, that’s no bad fate. I love my clients as much as ever.

No, that’s not true. What’s true is that when I’m writing short stories about two assassins that work for Death, finishing a novel about what really happened at the burning of the Library of Alexandria, teaching kids about economic theory, telling a story about Alastair McQuackers and the Cannibal Crackers, and directing a farcical melodrama, I love my clients more. I can love them, because there is love in me that isn’t there when I don’t do those things.

Which leads to me flying down the freeway belting out a song I just learned to sing. Or rather, just learned to sing this way, because the song itself, that song has been in my heart for an age.

I’m on top of the world, hey, waiting on this for a while now…

Been dreaming of this since a child…

On Marriage, Love, and Whether the Two are Compatible

Love and Marriage, love and marriage, go together like a horse and carriage,

This I tell ya brother, you can’t have one without the other.

-Frank Sinatra

With all due respect to the immortal Frankie, this song is wrong. You most certainly can. I wonder sometimes whether it would be better if you did.

English (and most other languages of which I’m aware) needs a new word to distinguish the emotion of love from the action of it. The two are occasionally, but fairly randomly, coincidental, it seems to me. The affection two people have that leads them to contemplate marriage to one another is nothing like the reality of being married – not terribly unlike the two halves of a politician: the campaigner and the legislator. It’s very rare to find someone that excels at both; it’s very common to regret electing the former because of his subsequent terrible performance at the job for which he auditioned so brilliantly.

Marriage can be a foundation for a loving relationship, but doesn’t have to be. This is not just poorly understood, it seems to me from recent conversations I’ve had and things I’ve read to be completely ignored, and even sometimes flatly rejected. One of the greatest lies of the twentieth century (and this started in the nineteenth) is that falling in love is the reason people should get married, and that falling out of love is good and sufficient reason to end the marriage.

As someone married for over 20 years to the same woman, it might seem a bit odd for me to be writing that love isn’t necessary for marriage, but that might be because (in this case) I use love in this sense the way the world does – meaning a feeling of affection one has for someone else. That sort of love is a catalyst for marriage these days, but it’s almost completely irrelevant to marriage being successful. The destruction of marriage as a permanent institution coincides perfectly with the rise of the idea that marriage is like a protective shell you put around the attraction two people feel for one another. Then the attraction goes away – which at some point it absolutely always does – and all that is left is the shell, and what’s that worth?

But really, to marry someone for this reason alone is insane. These days, you wouldn’t buy a vacuum or a pair of pants this way. Can you imagine someone buying a really sketchy laptop based on the feeling he got when he was walking by it? Based on sharing a cup of coffee and feeling a powerful attraction? Without looking up the service record of the thing, and seeing what other people had to say about it, and weighing alternative options? But in this case, hey, we’re going to make a lifelong commitment – and more, we’re going to grant someone permanent access in perpetuity to our finances, privacy, and future – based on a really strong feeling we have and the way that person discusses Love Actually. Come on. This is flat nuts. Yet this is what modern culture tells us is the way to go.

If you started a business this way, your attorney would refuse to have anything to do with the paperwork. A marriage is a business arrangement that can last the rest of your life, and reach from your boardroom to your bedroom. It is, if anything, MORE important to do thorough due diligence on a marriage partner than a business partner. But we pick up marriage relationships like drive-thru fast food. No wonder we have buyer’s remorse so often and so fast.

The solution to this is not, as most advice columns seem to assert, long walks on the beach and “space to find oneself”. The solution is to realize that love is essential for marriage,  but not the sort of love that Hollywood is so fond of showing us. Not affection, not attraction, not the zing of meeting someone and being powerfully motivated to sleep with them. I mean love as a chosen action, not a chemical reaction.

Love is rarely spoken of this way. We are fond of speaking of “being in love”, roughly the same thinking as “having a cold”. One doesn’t choose such a thing. It comes on at inconvenient times and causes all manner of problems when it does. It is nonetheless spoken of in reverent tones (“I have to find the One for Me”), and it is given as the justification for dishonesty (Me and Mrs. Jones, a particularly repulsive song, being just one example), for infidelity, for homewrecking and behavior that ruins lives and reputations. The modern attitude is that one simply can’t help it, even that one shouldn’t help it. Love is paramount. It is what makes life worth living. Everything else must be sacrificed to it.

Again, I agree, but only when we talk of love as something one chooses. “You can’t choose whom you fall in love with,” I hear you saying, but that’s nonsense in the first place and irrelevant in the second. Not only can you indeed choose with whom you fall in love – or at least with whom you do NOT fall in love – “falling in love” with someone is beside the point. I didn’t marry Jeanette because I fell in love with her. Let me repeat that. I didn’t marry Jeanette because I fell in love with her. I did, indeed, feel very attracted to her before we were married (and, since we have eight children, you might well imagine that I continued to be attracted to her afterward), but that’s not why I married her. I married her because I decided that she was someone I could love, and that I wanted to love, and that it would make sense for me to commit to loving. The commitment was the most important part, not the feeling.

This distinction is important. I had half a hundred girlfriends before Jeanette, and none after. I cheated (to spare you imagining, in Mormon culture this almost never means sex) on every single one of them before her, and not one time after her. We’ve been married half my life. After I turned twelve, only when I was an LDS missionary did I go more than a couple of months without kissing a new girl; since I got engaged to Jeanette I’ve never kissed another woman. When I tell you that you can, indeed, choose love or choose not to, I’m not talking theory. I did it myself.

And my wife will tell you, it’s not because I’ve stopped being attracted to other women. I’m every bit as attracted as I ever was. The pheromones work. I’m a man. They work on me. But within the falling in love there is a point where one transitions to choosing to love, and I choose Jeanette, to the exclusion of all others, so no attraction to anyone else goes beyond the sort of admiration I feel for a fine three-point shot or a pretty sunset.

Our marriage is not perfect. It is often very hard. I am not an easy man to live with, being routinely selfish, always busy, and frequently broke. She is quite easy to live with, so I have much the better of the jobs in our marriage, but it’s also certainly the case that I am much easier to live with now than I ever was before, and that is a direct result of the work I’ve chosen to do as a husband and father. In other words, the emotion of love led me to date Jeanette, and the work of love has made me worth loving back. Marriage is the framework into which I have welded myself, and in doing so made myself someone else. When I say that Jeanette is half my soul, I mean that, not because of an emotion – though I feel that – but because I hold nothing back from her nor she from me, and therefore I cannot separate any of what I do from her. She is in and through everything I do, everything I am, all I have or ever hope to have.

There is no way to have this kind of marriage without the commitment to love. Not the affection – that’s far too weak to last through what we’ve seen over twenty three years together – but the commitment, the choice. A friend a day or so ago lamented that his parents have a loveless marriage. Okay, I said, but I wish they’d chosen not to. Right, he said, I’ve been telling them to divorce for years. No, I said, you misunderstand me. I’m not saying to end the marriage, I’m saying to end the lovelessness. He looked at me like I’d sprouted antlers. You can’t just end it, he said. They don’t love each other. Precisely, I said. They should start. He never could see what I meant, however I tried to explain.

But you can, absolutely, love anyone you choose to. I’m a Christian, and I believe that when Christ said to love God and love your neighbor, what he called the two great commandments, the ones on which all the law and the prophets hang, he wasn’t talking about manufacturing some kind of emotion toward God and our neighbor. He was calling for us to LOVE them, meaning doing things for them, caring for them, paying them attention and concerning ourselves with their well-being, making their wishes more important than our own. Many will tell you that if you do this, you’ll feel the emotion all right, and I’ve seen it myself and won’t disagree, but the emotion is the by-product, the icing, not the cake. I choose to love God, so I do love Him. I choose to love Jeanette, so I do love her. It isn’t complicated, though of course it is difficult to do. I’m not very good at it. But I’m good enough to know that it works, and the better I get at it the better it makes my life and my marriage.

Lost in the modern debate about gay marriage and the meaning of marriage itself is that marriage never was much more than a practical union throughout history. To marry for love was even seen as a type of mental instability, though people always did it anyway. More often, though, far more often historically, is the marriage of “Do You Love Me?” from Fiddler on the Roof. Arranged marriages work. They work every bit as well as any other kind of marriage, and for exactly the same reasons. I have a child getting married now, and I’ve never asked him whether he loves his fiancee. I don’t care. The question isn’t does he love her, but will he love her? Will he commit to her? If he will, the marriage will likely work (she, of course, will need to do the same), and if he doesn’t, it won’t. Commitment can do all that affection can and so critically much that it can’t.

It’s not very romantic, I’ll allow, to tell Jeanette that I choose her, that I am not out of my mind with love for her, that I am not helpless to resist her charms. I am actually quite capable of resisting them, even when she employs them to the full, and she resists mine without a second thought. But we have chosen to love each other, to express love to each other in a thousand ways large and small. That choice is far more powerful and permanent than any attraction we might have felt for one another. When she is sick and eight months pregnant, with the remnants of an overflown diaper on her robe, at two in the morning, she is not very attractive. I love her anyway – meaning, I get up and rub her back, and take the baby, and offer to get her clean clothes and wash the dirties, not “I swoon at her touch.” Personally, I prefer that. She seems to, as well. It’s an awful lot more reliable than the alternative. And since I am not very attractive even at my best, I would far rather have her commitment than her deep sighs and fluttery eyebrows.

So on Valentine’s Day, you will find us going out to dinner, but you’ll also find me at work and her at the washing, me making the bed and her making sure the kids get to school. Maybe there will be notes hidden in pockets and maybe there won’t, but whatever she does, I will know she is loving me by doing it, and I’ll do all I can to make sure she knows the same about me. That’s what a marriage means – it’s the best place for us to love each other. We will, that day and every day. Anyone can.

Because I Love Jordan McCollum, and Because She Can Bleeping WRITE.

We’re celebrating the launch of Mr. Nice Spy, a prequel novella to the novel I, Spy! Read on to find out more about the book, get a cool spy tip for your daily life and download a free copy! You can also find Mr. Nice Spy on Amazon, Kobo, and JordanMcCollum.com!

About the Book

Canada is probably the last place you’d expect to find an American spy. CIA operative Elliott Monteith has made it work, just like he’s made things work with his longtime fiancée Shanna. Until Shanna lays out an ultimatum: move forward or move on. Meanwhile, Elliott and his best friend and fellow operative, Talia Reynolds, try to track an elusive leak at the American embassy.

But something changes between Elliott and Talia as they close in on the man selling out his country. Professional and personal lines blur and Elliott has to choose—his fiancée or his best friend.

More about Mr. Nice Spy | Add Mr. Nice Spy to your Goodreads to-read list!

I, Spy

Mr. Nice Spy is a prequel to the novel I, Spy, available now. To save her country and her secrets, CIA operative Talia Reynolds will have to sacrifice the man she loves.



More about I, Spy.

About the author

An award-winning author, Jordan McCollum can’t resist a story where good defeats evil and true love conquers all. In her day job, she coerces people to do things they don’t want to, elicits information and generally manipulates the people she loves most—she’s a mom.

Jordan holds a degree in American Studies and Linguistics from Brigham Young University. When she catches a spare minute, her hobbies include reading, knitting and music. She lives with her husband and four children in Utah.

Hone your spy skills

When asked about using spy skills, Chris said, “I’m a father with three teenagers. I use spy skills every day. I’ve bugged phone conversations, intercepted texts, tailed prom dates. You never know when those lock picking skills will come in handy.

“I’m trained. I’m relentless. I’m a Dad.”

In honor of your Dad-itude, I award you this:

Everyone else can further hone your spy skills by reading Mr. Nice Spy!

The clue!

As part of the debut of Mr. Nice Spy, Jordan is hosting a contest to figure out the “theme” song for the story. Collect clues at each blog stop and use your spy skills to piece together the clues to win a $25 Amazon gift card! How to enter

The clue for this stop is:

The Mr. Nice Spy song was written after a fight with the singer’s girlfriend. He realized she was right.


The freebie!

Thanks for participating in this launch tour! As a free gift this week, Jordan is giving out free copies of Mr. Nice Spy! Simply to go http://JordanMcCollum.com/store/. You can also get 40% off I, Spy!

Some Stats, and Other Relevant Things

I love reading about the writing process others go through. It’s so personal, so individual, and yet reading about how everyone else does it makes me want to try their way to see if it will work for me, or, I guess, work better for me. Dean Smith, in a workshop I was in, said something like “don’t ever say ‘I can’t write that way’ until you’ve actually tried to write that way. Until you have ten novels under your belt, you don’t have a clue how you can and cannot write.”

He was talking about “pantsing” versus “planning”, if I recall, but it doesn’t matter. I tell my students they should spend their lives trying to find out if there’s anything they can’t do. It’s that way with writing, for me. I want to know if I can’t do it, because a lot of the time I can, and I just don’t know it. So in case you’re curious about how I write, here are some stats, and some other observations, relevant especially because this month is Camp NaNoWriMo, and I’ll be finishing Knights of Insanity, my fourth (or fifth, depending on whether Repairers edits out to two novels instead of one) (or sixth, depending on whether you count Some Things are Faster than Light, which is really a novella/novelette at about 16,000 words) (and depending on whether you consider The Polka-Dot Door a novel, because it’s really a children’s book, and mostly pictures)

I write about 1600 words an hour, when I’m in the right environment. If I’m excited about what I’m doing, I have gotten to 1850.
I type about 45 words a minute, give or take, and my accuracy is about 90%.
I revise as I go for spelling and grammar.
I do not do plot revisions, although if I change a major element of the novel, I’ll often go back and fix a couple places where that makes a glaring difference.
I have never written a novel to an outline. All four of my completed novels to date are written entirely pantsed.
Knights will be outlined. Never say you can’t do it until you try. Also, the first three novels were so bloated by word content that I think it might be well to try reining myself in.
“the right environment” means by myself, in a room with soft lighting. I can play music (and often do), but I cannot have anyone there talking to me, and the TV cannot be on.
I write often in rooms that are less than ideal, and when I do I write about half as fast. In front of a baseball or soccer game, about 1000 words an hour, in front of football or basketball, 700 or so. I write nothing at all in front of Doctor Who or Sherlock. I mean, who could?
I have a writer’s notebook in which I record ideas for stories. I have so many I will never get them all written even if I never have another one. My physical notebook is leather-bound with creamy pages, and my virtual notebook is Evernote, which I access on my phone or iPad.

That will do for now. 47,977 words remaining to reach Camp NaNo success and finish this book.

You can’t lose them all.

I like contests. I enter them because I love to win, but I also love to compete, as long as I have my head on straight.

If you’re a writer, and you enter contests, you are going to lose. This is a given. Nobody wins all the time. Stephen King could enter some of the contests I know of and he’d get murdered. Metaphorically speaking. So much of the contest is the judges, what they like and don’t like, that it’s impossible for anyone to win very often, and very difficult to win at all. I know this first hand. I won some contests (well, took second and third) when I was at BYU – this is a thing which at the time I did not appreciate – but nothing since. I’m 0-for-everything since I became a serious writer last spring.

Not anymore.

The terrific writing organization My Writer’s Circle held a competition called the OlympInks over the last two weeks. It’s a very interesting mix of competitions, from poetry to fiction to nonfiction, across many genres and with lots of different themes and lengths. I learned a tremendous amount from having participated, and I can tell that it has made me a better writer.

And I won! Well, I won three of the nine events I entered, and took silver in three more. I won the Torch Relay, which was a nonfiction travel review, and the Steeplechase, which was a flash fiction contest (no more than 750 words) writing in a genre outside your normal (I wrote a sci-fi comedy). And then I won the Dialogue Sprint – 250 word story, dialogue only. No narration, not even “he said”. That was the one I really wanted. I do dialogue. I think I’m good at it. I told my wife I was going to win that one, and I did.

I came silver in the Poetry Triathlon (very fun, and VERY hard for me) and the Short Story Marathon (up to 2500 words), where I was the popular vote winner but lost in the judging. I’m told I was silver in the 100-word Dash as well, with stories no longer than 100 words. I wrote three of those, and submitted the last of the three. In retrospect, I should have sent in a different one. But you can tell me in the comments which one is your fave.

I didn’t do so well in the Bullseye (25 words!), the Spectator Sport (nonfiction novel review), or the Slalom (anagrams. I got trussed up like a Christmas ham). But all of the events sharpened parts of my game. I have to give credit here to Dean Wesley Smith‘s workshop on Idea into Story that I took over December and January. I’ve always had trouble making stories out of ideas. I have ideas in plenty, but I have struggled to make tales out of them. He showed me how to do that, and it was a good thing for this contest, because on some of these all we got was an idea, or even just a word, and we had to go from there. For instance, the Poetry Triathlon was about “time”. That was the theme. The Dialogue Sprint was “two people meet in a bar.” The 100-word Dash was “hold”. That’s what you get, then you write a story from it. Well, Dean showed me how. One of those workshop stories was The Green Knight, the popular vote winner in the Marathon. His stuff works. And I did it. And I won.

More importantly, I won because I tried and because I learned how to be better. I’m grateful for the wins and the losses. All of the stories were so, so valuable to me.

Looking forward to the next one.