It’s time get the year off to a creative start—and make some resolutions you’ll actually keep in the process.

The rules are simple:

• List ten things you resolve not to do in the upcoming year.
• Be as creative as possible.

To get thing rolling, here are…

My 2010 New Year’s Anti-Resolutions

• I will not free up room to take in borders by convincing my kids to sleep in more “convenient” places—like the oven or bathtub.
• I will not try to spice up the Winter Olympics in my house, by convincing each family member that they were adopted from various cold-weather countries.
• I will not open job interviews by asking if I should have listed my RockBand Drum skills on my resume.
• I will not try to push day-glo sombreros as the next fashion trend.
• I will not hang around the seafood section of the grocery store trying to convince the patrons to throw their “catches” back.
• I will not attempt to create balance in the universe by making only left hand turns.
• I will not try to addict my kids to crystal-meth in order to take wagers on who can resist the longest.
• I will not try use my old boxer shorts as material for a “more interesting” type of quilt.
• I will not try to become famous by faking an Easter Bunny sighting by supplying a fake pelt as evidence.
• I will not use the ridiculous number of Slurpees I buy Jeni as justification to initiate a hostile takeover of the nearby convenience store.

Originally posted on where six writers talk about the trials and tribulations of their writing lives. And each Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

It’s been a while since I have published anything on this blog. There’s a a very simple reason for this, but one I’ve been reluctant to talk about publicly—I’m depressed. That’s a simplification of my emotional state for the last several months, however it is accurate.

I know that I’m one of those individuals who is prone to depression. In part it runs in my family (on my father’s side I can trace back undiagnosed depression for several generations, including a great-grandmother who killed herself), and in part there has been a huge confluence of events in the last year that hes held me down in my funk.

1. For more than nine months now I have been unemployed. Ever since moving to North Carolina I’ve had trouble finding lasting employment, but until this year I’ve managed to keep myself working on a string of contracts that helped keep us afloat. But as the recession worsened earlier this year, the contract jobs dried up, and since then we’ve been keeping this family of six alive on unemployment and food stamps. There are quite a few politicians who would say that I’m coasting through life by sleeping and slyly collecting unemployment as a way to sponge off the hard-working people of this state. But I can tell you from first hand experience that there is nothing relaxing about living on less than one-fourth of what I was living on last year, and there is nothing vacation-like about wondering why no one seems to find your skills valuable any longer.
2. About ten months ago a good friend passed away. It wasn’t exactly suddenly, but neither was it expected. His son was 17, the same age I was when my own father died. His death affected my family in a host of ways. Not only did it bring back a lot of unresolved emotion regarding my own father’s death, but it was also the first death Jeni or the kids had to deal with up close and personal. And there is nothing easy about explaining to a six-year-old that his “Uncle” wouldn’t be around anymore.
3. Now a common response when someone has a bad string of luck is to offer, “At least you still have your health,” but even this advice is moot our household this year. When our friend got sick, and ultimately died, Jeni got sick as well. She got a nasty case of pneumonia that took over six months to completely go away, but not before it gave her a, thankfully temporary, heart condition. She had her gall bladder removed in an emergency surgery, and for the last four months has had a constant migraine headache that prevents her from eating more than a few bites at a time, and has interfered with her sleep almost every night. This is on top of her bad back, and doesn’t even touch the cancer scare—those pink ribbons are all over our house this year.
4. And not to be outdone, I’ve had my own battle with headaches this year. If you’ve never heard of cluster headaches, take a moment to pull it up on wiki. They are called suicide headaches because it’s not uncommon for those who get the worst of the headaches to kill themselves in a logic-clouded attempt to stop the pain. Last year I was diagnosed with cluster headaches by my GP, who proceeded to give me six injections into my skull to try to alleviate some of the pain (it didn’t help in the slightest). But this year the headaches worsened significantly. There are some treatments that work for some cluster headache sufferers, but with my health insurance lapsing along with my unemployment, I’m forced to treat the headaches with Coca-Cola and Advil. During one rather traumatic visit to the ER (for my youngest) I had a sudden attack that crippled me and scared the hell out of my kid and the hospital staff who said they’d never seen an attack like that.

You may read the list above and roll your eyes, thinking that I’m just complaining to get some sympathy. While many who have had the year I have would do that, I still (most days) have the perspective to understand that there are many people (and a few I know personally) who have had a worse year than I. The young man who lost his father also lost his grandfather and two of his teenage friends…that’s a pretty bad year. Another online acquaintance, who suffers from cluster headaches, took his own life after the hospital refused to treat his headaches, instead claiming that he was just looking for a fix.

Yes, we are still a family, and yes, for the time being we still have our home, but that doesn’t give me a whole lot to fall back on when I’m looking for a reason to be introspective or creative. And that is the crux of why I’ve been so quiet. When I’m depressed I always assume that one else will want to hear my problems. In my head I know this is ridiculous logic, but that’s the danger of depression…what we know is the truth often doesn’t feel like the truth, and we just pull even further into ourselves.

All this is not meant to say that 2009 was all bad—although in just under a week when the calendars change over, I will not, for a single second, mourn the passing of this year.

I started a new hobby—I’m learning to play the harmonica. Nothing formal yet. I’ve bought a few how-to books and a few entry-level harps, and I satisfy my musical inner child with painful honking and accidental chords. But it is fun, and it’s an instrument with a lot of online support, so it’s easy to take the first few steps at my own pace, and free of charge.

Also this year, a couple of my fellow columnists at Write Anything approached me about contributing a story to an anthology. I accepted with a great deal of reluctance, not because of the venture, but because of my depression I wasn’t sure I could get my creativity up and on a deadline to boot. But it turned out that the biggest hurdle to completing a new story was to overcome my cluster headaches, which peaked during the time I should have been revising my story. I still owe my editors a huge thank you for sticking with me even when I pushed my deadlines to the max. The Chinese Whisperings Red Book is due out January 1, 2010.

So that’s my 2009, and that’s why I’ve been so quiet.

Dialogue is difficult to get just right. Most of the those I’ve worked with through my years of writing—whether it be through collaboration, writer’s groups or simple friendly socialization—have, at one time or another, wrestled with the demon that is realistic dialogue.

Right now, I’m working on a short story that’s giving me some trouble—for those of you playing along at home, this story is part of a compilation/collaboration with a few other authors on this site. The dialogue is tricky because…well, without getting into too much detail, it involves some characters that aren’t all there. This is all particularly maddening for two reasons. First, I usually have little trouble with dialogue. Second, this story relies almost entirely on dialogue, so if I can’t get the dialogue to work, the story will fall flat.

Generally, I don’t have too much trouble with my characters and what they say. Oh, the overall story may be giving me trouble, but that’s more of a story-direction problem than it is a problem of speech not sounding authentic.

So what’s an author to do? Aside from the most obvious solution—keep tinkering with the dialogue—I’ve come up with a few techniques to help myself out. Unfortunately, they’ve all fallen just as flat as my character’s voices. But a couple of days ago I stumbled upon a technique that’s helping quite a bit. And even if it’s not solving the problem, it’s making the tinkering much easier.

Several years back, someone in an online writing group I was part of posted an exercise: Write a short story of indeterminate length, with two characters, and nothing but dialogue—not even dialogue tags. The only attribution we were allowed was to write the story in play format—minus any stage directions (the results of that exercise can be seen here). I had quite a bit of fun with that exercise, and over the years I have tackled several writing prompts with the same approach.

So, a couple of days ago, on a whim, I decided to try this approach with my current draft. I spent a couple of hours stripping away everything except the spoken word. And once that was done, it was obvious why the story wasn’t quite up to snuff—the dialogue was flat in several places. Where I thought there was cute banter, there was nothing more than dry Q&A. Where I thought I was being circumspect, I wasn’t.

So now the problem is clear. My dialogue seems not-quite-up-to-snuff because I’m relying on exposition and narration to get me through the rough spots.

But now, stripped of all it’s cruft (it’s a techie term, look it up if you need to—call it a word for the day) not only were the problem spots apparent, but fixing them became drastically easier. Now, if I need to change what Character-X says I don’t have to worry about what it does to my precious sentence that I’m so attached to—that decision will come later.

So far it hasn’t been a panacea, but it’s given me an avenue of attack.

If you have a talk-heavy story that’s got you banging your head against a wall, try it out. I’d be terribly interested to know how it works for you.

Aside from fighting with the dialogue in his current story, Dale is also fighting a nasty bout of cluster headaches. If anyone thinks they have a future as a superhero who fights uninspired prose AND crippling headaches, he’s happily accepting applications.

Originally posted on where six writers talk about the trials and tribulations of their writing lives. And each Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

By September 11, 2001 Lt. Col. Karen Wagner had been in uniform for 17 years, however with growing up in a military family and ROTC while at UNLV, she’d really been serving for much longer.

Although she’s just accepted a promotion to Deputy Chief of Staff in the Army of the Army Surgeon General, she was already looking into what she would do with the next chapter of her life.

Wagner’s many Army postings included serving as adjutant for the 85th Medical Evacuation Hospital at Fort Lee, Va.; executive officer and company commander of D Company in the 187th Medical Battalion at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio; and chief of personnel for the 57th Evacuation Hospital in Wuerzburg, Germany. She also headed the personnel services branch at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

According to her sister, Kim she spoke often of teaching overseas. But quietly, the two of them used to dream about hosting a television cooking show together.

“Her shtick was baking; mine was cooking,” said Kim. “Our hope was that we could retire at the same time. If we decided to teach school, we were going to get our experience in Texas and try to go abroad.”
Athletics had long been part of her life. She liked to relieve stress by taking long run sand while at UNLV she played guard on the university’s women’s basketball team.

She made strong connections with people, especially children, her sister, Kim, recalled.

“She never met a stranger,” her sister said. “She was the kind of person who, when you met her, she would never forget you. She would talk to you like she’d known you forever.”

Karen J. Wagner High School in San Antonio Texas, was named in her honor…

Go Thunderbirds!!!

Information for this post pulled from:
The Washington Post
Wagner High School