In-spire

I crossed over forty thousand words in the latest novel, just after realizing I had made a huge oversight in the underpinning themes of the story's construction. It's difficult for me to express how stunned I was. A friend of mine, years back, engaged me in a thought exercise where we unraveled words and reconstructed them based on their roots. Dumbfounded is the one I always come back to. I think it's appropriate here, because I was very surprised. But it was also a very short-sighted mistake. Dumb-founded. I spent a week looking at it from a few different angles, and decided to push on. In an ironic turn of events, realizing I had made the error actually helped me move forward. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't still stuck in my craw. Craw?

In another bout of introspection, I realized that I am not a gamer. I like games; they make up the majority of my favorite hobbies. I play a moderate amount, but it isn't important to me to have the newest system, or be the first to try the newest games. Nor do I espouse any currency to possessing particularly old products. I'm actually very happy to wait for all the kinks to get ironed out, bugs and patches and overhauls. I'm also good avoiding the ridiculous prices. If I find something I like, I will typically play it until it stops working. I recently downloaded my first mod to a game I'd been playing, trying to squeeze more blood out of that particular stone. I'd heard of mods, even knew a little bit about how and why they'd become so popular. When it came down to it, I made my decision because of story. Because "modifications" are tacked into a game that someone not wholly unlike me has played, experienced, and made decisions about how to change it for the better. When I internalized that, I was pretty excited about the opportunity.

It was very similar to the internship I did earlier this year, the first writing team I'd ever been apart of, not brief and flaky partnerships and not flimsy and tenuous plans. The scripts we put together weren't for shows I would have liked personally, but the process was very interesting to me. Like normal, there wasn't quite enough interaction for me; I didn't get the opportunity to really ask why, about the characters or dialog or anything else, but even without that, it was a process I found fascinating. In the same way, experiencing the mod of this group was like opening a secret door. Because with a mod, one has to choose every detail in the environment. What it looks like to where it is to how it behaves. And even deciding to leave things out is a choice, even if it's because of laziness or disinterest. It was a lot like poking around inside someone else's manuscript. Again, there was no way to have a conversation over coffee or anything like that, just an email address for feedback. The product had its flaws, but I wasn't much interested in criticism as much as I wanted to talk shop with the designers.

All of that coincided with the resurfacing of an aspiration I had thought I'd discarded, or at best forgotten. A position to teach fiction fell into my lap, and even in the face of a horrendous commute I didn't hesitate at all before applying. It gave me tingles to think about the possibilities. I spend a lot of time conforming my mind to the details of whatever job I'm working, because if I can mentally engage then most of the difficult work is done for me. It doesn't always take a lot of imagination, but a lot of the time I have to consider what I'm doing and how I'm doing it and why, to inhabit the role, as it were. In the same way, I do have to push myself to engage. Much like the shove it takes to get out of the bed most mornings before it's quite a humane hour. It isn't a big push, but it is a necessary push. But with this there was none of that. It was a nice feeling.

All of that is to say, I was surprised this week. I didn't see any of it coming, and it wasn't all bad.