Good Riddance, 2012

By lytspeed Posted in Family, General, Poetry, Writing Leave a reply

Every year is a mixture of good and bad, but I’ll be particularly glad to see 2012 pass into history.

The year wasn’t all bad; we did manage to move into a house that we love, even if the circumstances forcing the move were stressful.  I started working on material for a new band with my pal Hal, and I feel like I’m growing as a musician because of it.  Most importantly, Lannette’s ovarian cancer scare at the beginning of the year turned out to be just a scare, not the real thing.

However, the year has been overshadowed by the death of my mom in March.  When family members die, I tend to grieve very slowly and it usually doesn’t hit me hard until long after they have passed.  When my brother died on January 1, 1996, I didn’t really deal with it until well into 1997, when I was able to write this poem to say goodbye to him and deal with my own guilt about pulling the plug.

When my last grandparent died (I was 12), it wasn’t until months later that I was flooded with grief and loss while sitting on the couch, watching TV.  I just suddenly started crying, scaring my parents.

I have no idea when that cathartic moment will happen in regard to my mom’s death.  I certainly miss her, and I wish she wasn’t gone, but I haven’t broken down yet.  I wish it would happen, though, because waiting for the shoe to drop is stressful, and I suspect that my state of semi-grief has affected my relationships with family, friends, and coworkers over the last few months.  My anxiety has been elevated all year, and I’m convinced that’s partially due to not having dealt with her passing yet.

Here’s hoping 2013 is a happy year for everyone, myself included.

MileHiCon 44

By lytspeed Posted in Conventions, Geek, Poetry, Writing 1 Reply

As promised, here is my schedule for MileHiCon 44.  The convention is taking place at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the Denver Tech Center from Friday, October 19th through Sunday, October 21st.

Saturday

Online Alphabet Soup, Grand Mesa B-C, 11:00 AM
This promises to be a fun panel about SOPA, PIPA, CISPA, and various other attempts to control the Internet. I’ll be in the esteemed company of Andrew Burt (former SFWA vice president, notorious Critter Captain, founder of the world’s first ISP, and e-publisher of out-of-print works by Ben Bova, among others), Marie DesJardin (technical writer and author of For the Time Being), Arlen Feldman (software developer, computer book author, and recovering costumer), and Doris Beetem (a longtime fixture of MileHiCon and short story author.)

Playing with Participants, Atrium, Table 2, 2 PM
This is an opportunity to sit down for an hour or so and play a game of … something … with me.  Assuming I can find them in the sea of boxes that materialized after my recent move, I’m likely to bring along some of my old Magic: The Gathering decks or my Car Wars boxed edition.  Any takers?

Sunday

Falling Skies, Terra Nova, and Primeval, Mesa Verde A, 12 PM
Join me, Daniel Dvorkin (the writer, not the Chicagoan who hired a hitman to kill a rival businessman), Patrick Hester (from the Hugo nominated Functional Nerds podcast), Christopher M. Salas (Colorado Springs author and martial arts expert), and SFWA Grand Master Connie Willis (!!!) as we discuss the above television shows.  I followed Terra Nova all the way through its short run, and enjoyed it quite a bit, but I’m going to have to brush up on the other two a bit.

Poetry Fantastique, Wind River A, 3 PM
I have the honor of moderating the poetry panel this year, and with guests like Gail R. Barton (who read some wonderful poetry last year), Daniel Landes (Westword writer), Dr. Rob S. Rice (historian specializing in ancient and military history, poet, fiction writer, non-fiction writer, and steampunk fan), and anyone else who happens to show up (Owen Allen and Laura Deal, I’m looking your way), it should be a great hour of poetry. I may even get up the guts to read the steampunk rewrite of “The Windhover” that’s been rolling around in my brain.  (Imagine if Gerard Manley Hopkins had never entered the priesthood, and instead became an early Vorticist or Pre-Raphaelite.  Does your brain hurt yet?)

When I’m not on panels, I’ll probably be checking out other people’s panels, getting books signed, or wandering around with my lovely steampunk-bedecked wife.  I’m looking forward to it!

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

By lytspeed Posted in General, Writing 2 Replies

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. I took a business trip to Atlanta and got sick in the middle of it, then when I got back, we fell into an opportunity to move into a brick Tudor Revival house that we have loved for years. So, for the last week, we’ve been frantically moving stuff from the old mobile home to the new house, and now that everything’s moved, we begin the process of unboxing and evaluating how much of this stuff we actually need.  (Yeah, I know, it’s a bit backwards, but we didn’t have a lot of time to go through things before moving.)

As always, there are casualties in moving. For me, the biggest casualty has been my signed first-edition hardback of Contact, by Carl Sagan.  It was destroyed by water damage while in storage at the old house.  The book is was worth a fair amount of money, but the sentimental value of the book was much greater to me because it was given to me by a writing group friend a decade or so ago.  There were other signed hardbacks in the same box, by authors like Dan Simmons and Leslie Marmon Silko, and my beloved trade paperback of Silko’s Ceremony was ruined as well, but none of those books held the same emotional attachment for me that Contact did.  Ah, well.

I received my preliminary schedule for MileHiCon 44 today, and will post that later, but for now, I wanted to take the time to just write something on this long-neglected blog.

On the Death of Ray Bradbury

By lytspeed Posted in Fiction, Writing Leave a reply

When NPR first announced their “This I Believe” series, I jumped at the chance to show the world why an early introduction to science fiction was essential to my creative development. My essay wasn’t picked for broadcast, but it is archived on their site, along with all the others that didn’t make the cut.

With the passing today of Ray Bradbury, I’ve decided to reprint that essay on my website, because Bradbury and Heinlein were my primary introductions to science fiction.  Bradbury was especially important to me because my favorite form of writing is the short story, and he was a master of that form.

 

I don’t remember which one I saw first. It was either Bradbury’s R is for Rocket or Heinlein’s Red Planet, but the sequence doesn’t really matter. What matters is that I took them both home from the public library and read them, sitting on my brown beanbag throne, flanked by tidy bookshelves like Centurion guards. In that space I discovered the alternate worlds of “A Sound of Thunder”, “The Foghorn” and Willis, the Martian roundhead, and I was hooked on science fiction.

Later, I stalked the arid dunes of Arrakis with blue-eyed Paul Atreides and cried when I learned that Ellison’s Jeffty was still five, and had never lost his Captain Midnight Decoder Ring. Science fiction crossed over into fantasy and I found myself lost in Mordor with Frodo and Sam, then combing the treasure room of Atuan with Ged, seeking to restore the ring of Erreth-Akbe, and with it, worldly balance. And Thomas Covenant, unwilling tutor that he was, reminded me that the real world was of prime importance, and that I was lucky to be in it.

When Dungeons and Dragons came along in the late 1970s, my friends and I were naturally hooked, and spent every Sunday afternoon in the library’s basement conference room, crawling through each other’s imaginations, solving puzzles and laughing at our own absurdity, bundles of creativity wrapped in cloaks of innocence.

Now, I’m nearing middle age. The marathon D&D sessions have morphed into occasional afternoon strategy games with the same lifelong friends. Books (when they aren’t in boxes) don’t come off the shelves nearly enough, and I seem to need more sleep than I ever did when I was younger. But the sparks of creativity and imagination that burst into life with Bradbury’s Rocket still smolder. Occasionally one will ignite and float skyward with the completion of a poem or short story. A flurry might crackle and spit into being while I play guitar with my band. More sparks glow when I read a sonnet to the woman I love, asking her to marry me beside a high country lake.

I believe that creativity is vital to the soul. It connects us to others in ways we don’t expect or understand. It builds self-confidence and teaches us to find solutions to problems no one can predict. It helps us to explore other worlds, mindsets, and cultural ideas. And in the visual and musical arts, creativity helps us express that which has no words.

If not for the sparks of wonder that I found in the Bradburys and Heinleins of the world, I might never have known what it’s like to feel the joys of creativity and imagination. I might have never learned to play guitar, or to appreciate the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. I might have never gazed at the Milky Way above timberline and wondered who else was Out There.

And, worst of all, I might never have known the importance of Captain Midnight Decoder Rings.

Originally appeared on NPR’s “This I Believe” website, dated June 14, 2005

Godspeed, Ray Bradbury. Enjoy your train ride to the afterlife, because I know you won’t take a plane.

On Not Being a Writer

By lytspeed Posted in General, Writing 2 Replies

I came to grips with something at the end of 2011: I’m not a writer.

Sure, I have some writing skills, and my thirty-odd non-fiction articles and a few published poems bear that out. But having skills is different than using them. Knowing some things about writing is not the same as writing, and that’s where I consistently fall short.  Writing is active; knowledge is passive, and knowledge fades with lack of use.

So, if I’m not a writer, what am I? I’m a husband/father/computer technician/sole breadwinner. In the past, I have also been a writer/reader/amateur musician/gamer, but in the last few years, I have engaged in precious few of those artistic and entertainment pursuits, and that lack of creativity is wearing on me.

Some of the above responsibilities are not flexible.  I can’t very well stop being a husband or father, nor do I want to. Being the sole breadwinner sometimes becomes tiring, but that’s not really negotiable. Lannette and I learned a number of years ago that her particular combination of disabilities make her incompatible with the 9-5 corporate working world, so the responsibility for regular income falls to me only.

The computer technician portion is the responsibility that I have the most control over, and still seems to intrude the most on my everyday life.  It’s my job, for one thing, but it’s also my hobby and an occasional source of outside income.  I never charge market value for my computer consulting work, not because I don’t think I’m worth it, but because I think the prices for service in the computer industry are wildly overinflated, especially compared to the worth of the machines themselves. I don’t make much from computer consulting, but I do get a good feeling from knowing that I’ve helped someone solve a problem while saving them money. That “Mr. Goodwrench” feeling only goes so far, though, and more often than not, when I have my head stuck in the side of a computer, or I’m trying to wrap my brain around some bit of confusing PHP code while the clock ticks and a client’s website delivers database errors, I find myself wishing I was doing something else entirely.

I think it’s time to cut back on the computer consulting.  I won’t drop my current web hosting and regular consulting clients, but I’m not going to take on new clients. If clients drop off for reasons of their own, I won’t look to replace them right away, if at all. I need to build some creativity and entertainment time back into my schedule, and when I get there, I need to own and enforce it.

By this time next year, I hope I can look back and say that I’ve written a few more short stories and poems, made some progress on that mythical novel, and learned to play some songs that I’ve always wanted to learn on guitar. Maybe I will have even sold a piece of fiction or two, if I’m lucky.