Suicide Watch

I've heard it said that the holidays are the time when most people decide to off themselves. I think it's probably true. People with nothing, or who used to have somebody but now have nobody, or people who don't want to be with anybody and can't find a way out--these are the particularly susceptible ones.

It strikes me that those kinds of people are very sad...

Okay. Now that I got that ridiculously obvious observation out of my system, I have a story for you.

A couple weeks ago I was on Facebook, since I do that again, and decided to try out some new apps. There was this one app, a hilarious-looking piece of work called suicide test. Since I had just read A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, and he talked about suicide tests, I decided to try it out.

And I answered the questions as honestly as I could.

And it told me I was at medium risk for suicide.

Bullshit.

That was the first thing that went through my mind. I'm one of the happiest people I know. I have never even considered suicide. Never even joked about it for more than a couple seconds at a time. I've never manipulated girls into liking me or staying with me by saying that I would kill myself. I've never even made emergency plans, like, "If I'm not where I want to be in life by the time I'm thirty-two, I'll start to consider self murder as an option." I'm just not like that.

And the second thing that went through my mind was, "This is a terrible app." It had just posted that I'd scored a medium risk of suicide to all my friends. What are they supposed to do about that? It's just a terribly awkward situation. It looks like a cry for help, or a call for pity, and I can't hold with that nonsense. If I need help, I know where to get it. The liquor store.

That was half of a joke.

Seriously, though, that app should be banned. Personally, I don't want to know if someone is thinking about killing themselves. If they do it, then I'll be sorry, but most people don't, and that's just another thing to worry about.

Maybe I should discuss sometime soon about how people mistakenly perceive that I have a lack of empathy.

I swear, if I see...

Another blog with nothing but pictures of adorable, cherubic little kids, and some title like "The Cutest Family Ever Blogs Here," I think I will do something violent.

And you know what? I won't feel guilty.

Better Than (3)

So now we come to the ugly truth. Most people think they are better than everyone else. If they don't, they have inferiority problems, and need help. It could also be that they have the tendency to think they're better, and are simply really good at fighting it. I envy the people in the second category, but I don't think it exists. I only list it here as a hypothetical example for any who want to say I'm being too broad with my categories.

Ego is part of us. And it's needed, just like every other part. But if it's not balanced, then it becomes too much. Our opinion of ourselves, to a great degree, dictates our aspirations and ambitions. It really does. The people who have no opinions of themselves, or low ones, are fakers or in nut houses. If it is possible to get rid of a good opinion of ourselves, through years of inhumane treatment, which isn't fun at all, I'm guessing, then our spirits get taken as well. Where does our will go? Our obstinacy? We become the teacup poodles and golden retrievers of the human world.

So this is why I'm mad that some people can boldly (read, immaturely) say that whole groups of people are beneath them. Yeah, so, everyone thinks in some way they're better than others. That doesn't do the person on the receiving end very good.

The fact is, everyone is better than everyone else, and this is not a contradiction, no matter how it might sound. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses, and when compared to another person, these make for great combinations. If everyone was a writer, I'd be out of luck. If everyone was a lover, nothing would get done. Etc. You know what I'm getting at.

The person who's writing their first novel doesn't need to have their balls busted at every opportunity, just because someone else can't get their novel off the ground. They don't need to be told it's simply perfect and that nothing added or taken away from it could make it any better--that would be pandering, and won't give them any help.

I guess that's what I was getting at.

Better Than (2)

I have enemies, yes. I didn't have enemies for a long while, then I thought what fun it might be to have some. So I got some. And they're great. They really help me with my life.

Okay. That's shit. All of it. I got enemies the old fashioned way-- by getting on peoples' bad sides. Yeah. And some people, it seems, have large bad sides when I'm involved.

Anyway, an enemy of mine told me once, in the guise of helping me out, that my family feels it is better than other families, and this isn't justified. I asked this enemy what they meant by it not being justified, and they said my family is poor, my family doesn't do socially acceptable things (aka, we're inferior), and my family, for the most part, doesn't have an education. Well, we all have an education of some sort, but it's not the standard college education that people really look at when deciding if someone is worth knowing or not.

So my enemy must have felt that my family is completely deluded, believing that they are something when really they're quite the opposite of it. How sad. I can't believe we could be that thick!

Hold on. Since when does an enemy try to help you out?

This calls for further thought. First, are we better than other people? I think the answer is no. Okay, I'm sure the answer is no.

But-- do we think we're better than other people? This is a more difficult question, and it has to be answered by a history lesson. We, for a long time, not because of our family, but because of our "church" environment, were judgmental. Now, the great thing about Christians being judgmental is that they are, but at the same time, they know it's wrong. So I know we were judgmental because I was judgmental, and I felt the guilt, and I hated myself, while at the same time hating others.

Now we're out from that, and free to be who we want to be. I think that my family is just a bunch of really nice, terribly scarred people now. We have problems, but we're learning that we let stuff define us for so long when it never should have defined us, and we're learning to define ourselves as we really are. I don't think we're judgmental anymore.

So never listen to what enemies say about you. When you start letting people read your writing you'll find that there are two kinds of people: The good critics and the bad ones. The good critics will tell you what you're doing wrong, and then they will give you suggestions on how to fix it. The bad ones will tell you that your work is shit. They are poisonous, and if you listen to them, you're hurting yourself big time.

The sad thing is, you'll have to find that out on your own, because enemies rarely come out and say that they're enemies.

Now this is definitely going somewhere...

Better Than (1)

I buy a lot of crap. Crap, for my purposes, is simply a term for things I don't need. I buy an awful lot of things I don't need.

I bought two books yesterday. I love books. It's hard to justify spending upwards of thirty-three dollars on new books, however, when I have many books I haven't read, I know about Amazon, and I know about book sales. I felt kind of bad about it, but at least I'll have something to do this weekend. I want to buy a Kindle. I think buying a Kindle will make me a real boy, but my secret fear is that I won't use it and it will be 260 dollars gone to waste. I want to buy a new laptop, too, because mine is old news. 2005. That's too old. I need to upgrade. Right?

I was going to buy another coat yesterday. That would make five coats. That's a lot of coats, considering I can probably only wear at the most two at a time. I decided against it--not because I had any discipline, because I don't, but because I decided it was a tiny bit too large, and I'm always looking for the perfect fit.

What's my excuse? How can I buy crap when I'm not rich? Okay, I'm downright poor. Broke as a joke.

I buy things and it becomes a way for me to feel not poor, at least for a while, because I can put it on credit and then the credit card companies will love me even more. But it's funny, because buying things prevents me from actually saving money, which in turn makes it harder for me to be anything but poor.

Everyone needs to buy things, and I guess that means me too. But do I need luxuries? Do I need the crap I fill my life with? If luxuries make me feel like a person, you could make an argument that I do need luxuries. But who needs to feel like a person? Silly question. I guess everyone does. I don't want them to feel like animals, that's for sure. So everyone should have luxuries, not just the rich.

Great. So I'm supposed to buy crap I don't need.

One could argue, though, that my luxuries will never compare to a rich person's luxuries. My luxuries are very small, indeed. And small luxuries, since they never give me what I want, will just make me more upset in the end. They will just make me more and more jealous at not being able to have what I can't afford.

I could scream right now.

Whatever happened to the virtues of suffering? What if all of these small luxuries are just anaesthetizing me from my actual condition? I'm sure it's possible for the poor to be happy, just like the rich are sometimes sad, but I'm not sure people are supposed to be happy with their condition.

I'm sure this is leading somewhere.

People I will never lend books to again.

1. Chrissie Bailey. 21.95 +tax, omnibus edition of The Chronicles of Narnia, borrowed in December, 2005.
2. Michele Jancie. 16.00 +tax, paperback copy of On the Road, borrowed in February, 2007.

You can keep them, ladies. I have new copies. Doesn't mean I will ever let you borrow from me again.

Which Type of Writer Am I?

So if I don't want to write shite science-fiction novels, what do I want to write? I mean, what else is there? It's not that science-fiction is bad, it's just not for me to write about something when I hate half of its name (science). And it's not that I hate science, either, it's just, well, I'm not too good at it and I don't think people want to read my ignorant ideas about how spaceships work, although they could possibly be entertaining. Can you imagine a squirrel-powered spaceship? I can. That's really the sad thing. Douglas Adams imagined a bistromathic spaceship, and it was awesome, but I'm not as awesome as he is. But I do have the advantage of still being alive, so that does make me more awesome on at least one count. Too soon?

I don't hate the other half of the name (fiction. We're still talking about science-fiction here. Pay attention). Which is not to say that I'm terribly good at writing fiction, which is why I'm still in school, but we already covered that. I am good at making shit up, however, and lying is one of the key elements of being an author. The trick is to lie consistently and with good grammar, and then you're in.

So I want to write fiction, but what types. Genre fiction? I don't know. I've toyed with the science-fiction, but I don't want to write it as a career, because it's a hobby thing with me, like how some people play video games. I've heard that some "serious" writers start writing romance novels because they're easy and zero stress. I guess that's me with other types of writing. I started a fantasy novel and got quite a long way in it (75,000 words, no joke). I have outlines for quite a few projects that one would consider being science-fiction or fantasy. That's another thing I do as a hobby- I write outlines. The more complicated the better. For the book I started writing for NaNoWriMo, my outline was thirty pages long, and consisted of 150 chapters, in five parts, which is part of the reason I was calling it "War and Peace and Starships."

So the books in which I don't have to know about anything are the potentially longer ones, if I ever get around to writing them, and the books which I want to write will end up being tiny, because I know nothing about anything serious. Wow. This is depressing. I do have life experience-- as much as a twenty-something year-old should have. I pity the people with more than me. And I'm constantly gathering more, so that's fun. I'm not worried about the future, I guess I'm just worried about right now. I want to be doing and writing, and I'm stuck at the moment, because I'm a good student.

Maybe I will write something over Christmas break. I don't know. I don't know anything.

I want to write meaningful fiction, I do. I want to write books that stand the test of time. Is that too big a wish? Am I asking too much?

The other unique thing about me (I think) is that I would actually like to be a success while I write. I'm not one of those annoying bastard artist types who rejects every chance of making money. I'm just a regular annoying bastard. I'll take money, but I won't stop doing what I need to do, which is write meaningful stuff. I think the less consequential can exist right next to the consequential, and the literary can be accessible. That's my aim. I think that's fair.

Priorities (3)

So I'm in college, back in the school I went to first, before I decided to become a person with religious zeal and drop out of college and go to a new, worse college, and then get dissatisfied with that college, come back home, get a dead-end job, and decide, four years later that i should go back to college again at the first one. Breathe, Drew. Long sentences weren't designed for people of limited intelligence.

And the question of writing keeps coming into my mind. None of my credits transferred from the worse college. I wasn't expecting them to, but that leaves me as a freshman again. I have a lot of general education requirements to get out of the way, and some of them are as dull as dirt. I thought this semester would be easy, with classes that perfectly re-acclimated me into the college mindset. Turns out, no. I'm stuck doing hard work in classes that have nothing to do with what I want to do.

The spoiled person's mindset would say, "I don't care. I'll find a way to take the classes I want to take and leave the boring ones out, and fuck the degree." I have a friend who did that. The problem is, those kinds of people don't last. They really don't. He does nothing, and he doesn't plan on doing anything.

In the end, getting spoiled doesn't give one anything, does it? I mean, I could do that, but what would I get? Would I get a degree? No. Would I learn self-discipline? No. I would end up thousands of dollars in debt with nothing to show, and that would put me farther away from where I want to be.

So I have to take the shit classes, don't I? Yes, Drew, you do. Even if by taking them it means I can't write as much as I'd like--in the short term. Yes, Drew, it does.

This sucks. It's funny how, four months into the thing, I'm just picking up on the fact that it sucks. But it's necessary, to do what I want to do in life.

Dreams, dreams are tough animals. They either become your best friends or your continual torturers. If you do what it takes to achieve them you get the satisfaction of moving on and knowing you're going in a good direction. If you don't, you go crazy. I've been going crazy for four years. I might be crazy now, but I'm going back to sanity. Slowly. But I'm going there.

So that's what started me on this line of thinking. I started writing a novel for National Novel Writing Month. And guess what? It took over my life, made my school suffer, made me not care about the crap classes. It did that for a week, then I started thinking, and had to think about it for about three days before I came to a decision. What kind of writer do I want to be? A science-fiction writer? Because that's what the book was about. I don't want to be a science-fiction writer. It's fun to do stuff like that once in a while, but really, letting it take over your life? Letting yourself get sucked into something that will never go anywhere, and letting it ruin your actual life in the process?

National Novel Writing Month is a great thing, I'm sure, but not while I'm in school. Right now I have to keep focused on the goal. The thoughts that berate me now are the same thoughts I had seven years ago, when I was first in school. I dropped out (basically) after one semester. This time I want to go to completion. The future is at stake. How many more chances are there, for someone my age? I don't want to get married right now, I don't want to have kids. If I'm going to do anything, I still have a chance now, and I'd better do it. That's it. That's the end. No matter how unpleasant the situation might be, no matter how hectic my life might get, I need to stick with it, because the future is at stake.

Priorities (2)

When I say that I thought I was another Steinbeck, Hemingway, or Kerouac, it's not to say that I thought I was as good as them. It's to say that I thought what would work for them would work for me. If I just followed the Steinbeck plan for success... blah blah blah. Yeah. That's what won't work. That's what I was trying to get to in my last post. For so long I'd been simply floating, content to be passive and think that by soaking in life I could get what I wanted. The life around me was getting stale, though, and that's no kind of life.

So, if my last blog was too sappy, I apologize. Really. I don't want you to be the victim of excess sappiness, oh hypothetical reader.

But there is a larger point to be made. The point of priorities. I knew I was not a good writer. Or, I knew that I was better than some, but with obvious flaws, and these flaws would prevent me from doing something with any sort of talent I'd been given. When I started writing again, seriously, last year in the autumn, I was not as good as I am now. In another year, I will look back and say this fall was not such a good time. It will be a continual improvement.

Last January I decided to take a book that I had, about writing fiction, and read a chapter every week and do the exercises, and this would make me an awesome writer. Things happened. I got through to about week six (out of twelve) and then stopped. Don't worry. I quit most things. I get bored. And then hopeless. I was writing a lot at the time so I figured I didn't need it, anyway.

Then I wrote my first novel, and did a re-write, and then another, and then another, and thought it would go somewhere, and it didn't. Because, really, I'm no Steinbeck.

When a person who rents himself out as a proofreader/editor talked to me on Writer's Cafe, he told me that I was good, but not great. Maybe 85% better than anyone else on the site (which isn't saying much--the site is fun, but not great literature). 85% sounded fine, until I realized that it was a "B." And nobody gets published with a "Competent," "Satisfactory," or "Eh, Good, After a While," ranking. It has to be excellent. Now, this person was not a liar or a fraud. I've worked with him and I've enjoyed it and it has been helpful. I've taken the ranking, which was given off hand, and made it my challenge. Ten percent better. At 95%, publishers could do a hell of a lot worse.

So what do I do to get to 95%? I go to college. I avoid the bullshit as much as I can and take what valuable things I can get. As much as I hate the thought, degrees count. Nobody likes the fact that what other people think of them actually matters, but at the end of the day, it's true.

It's very true. And the college question will have to be left for another post.

Priorities (1)

So I know nothing. I know that now. I've known it before at various times, but I know it now, too. I need to tell a story, so please oblige me. It won't take long. This story is a confession. It's been told many times in many ways, and the only time a story is told more than once is because it's true in some way. I've never told this story before. I've never told anything true. But I want to. I want to do one true thing. This story is a true thing.

I'm a 26 year-old who hasn't done anything with his life yet. Other 26 year-olds have. I'm kind of slow when it comes to achievement, perhaps. What was I thinking? Did I really think that I could make a name for myself without some kind of training? Was I thinking that I could get away with not having a bachelor's degree? I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, Steinbeck dropped out of college.....

Jesus, who's Steinbeck? He wrote some good novels and died. I'm not Steinbeck. I'm someone else. Dropping out of college worked for him. It didn't work for me.

So it's taken me a while to get out of the mindset that I am another Steinbeck, or Hemingway, or Kerouac, or anyone else among the writers I love. I'm a Wade. Goddamnit, I'm a Wade. No Wade, as far as I know, has ever been a writer. But ever since I was a little kid I wanted to be one. Seriously, in First Grade I was writing books about Native Americans. I'm not even kidding. I loved them, but more importantly, I loved writing about them.

Maybe I'm alone among Wade's. My mother's mother, a Wellman, loves books--mysteries, romances, historical romances, etc. She's read thousands of them in her time. But there's something wrong with her, something that makes me so sad. She's never written anything except grocery lists and letters. A person who's read that much, and lived that long, must have something wrong with them not to write. I mean, there must not be a connection being made. Or maybe I'm the weird one that I do have a connection. Like eating and crapping, reading and writing go together for me. Maybe they don't go together for her.

I once asked her why she doesn't write anything. She said, "What would I write about?" Er.. Umm. A mystery, perhaps? A romance, perhaps? I know she'd be good at it. But she doesn't think she can, and that just kills me.

My mom--my mom used to write stories, when she was younger than me. I asked her one time what kinds of stories she wrote, and she told me she couldn't remember. All she remembered was that she enjoyed writing them. And then I asked her why she stopped, and she said she doesn't know enough, and she's not in the habit, and she doesn't have enough time. Excuses. Excuses all. But there's nothing I can do about it. That falls on her.

I can't do anything about anything. The only thing I can do is (try to) take care of myself.

If I'm going to ever be a success in life, I can't wait for some ship to come in. I have to get better at my chosen field. I have to take the opportunities I'm given. I have to fight and never give up and keep fighting, and if I fail, then I will fail miserably. But at least I will know I failed, and won't have to live the rest of my life without ever having done anything, wondering what would have happened if I had tried.

I'm not saying I will be a success in life, but I hope to be. More on this later.

War and Peace and Starships.

Time for a new post. So what has been happening with me? Good question. I'm glad you asked.

I've found out about a couple of contests. The first is this three day novel writing contest, and it takes place on Labor Day every year. I'm already training for it, by participating in... The National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo), which isn't really a contest, but what the heck, I'll call it that because I can.

I already knew about nanowrimo, but I wasn't interested in it until yesterday. Now I'm in, for better or for worse, with a five day handicap and a chip on my shoulder. Just kidding about the chip, but really, yes, it's there.

And the wonderful piece of literature I've chosen for this month? A science fiction novel. Umm. Err. Why? I don't know. Because I wrote an outline three years ago and knew I'd never get around to it until something extraordinary presented itself, and, well, look what's presented itself. My goal is twenty-five hundred words a day, which I'm easily surpassing in the second day, but there's a lot of time left, and I can easily slip up if I so choose.

Anyway.

The novel is untitled, but I'm calling it War and Peace and Starships for now, as a shout out to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Don't worry. It's not going to stay that way, but I wish the latter book had never been written because it's a great title. Let's face it. The addition of something almost entirely unrelated gives a book a certain charm.

Meanwhile, I'm on Facebook again, finishing up this semester at school, and wondering what to do over Christmas break. Why the heck couldn't the organizers of NaNoWriMo do it then? I don't know. Maybe some college people should get together and do something like that. It would be fun, sort of a miniature Wonder Boys, or whatever that movie was called. The kid wrote an amazing novel over Christmas break. Hey, I wonder...