The creative process is really just the way our minds (or souls…or what have you) filter, combine, splice, recombine, marinade, and ferment the various inputs, in the attempt to create something interesting. And while we do control the output to some degree, it’s also directly affected by what we choose to put into ourselves.

By design, this blog tends to focus on the output of the creative process; nurturing the fragile writer’s ego, to help us output something we will be happy with. But we shouldn’t neglect the input side of the equation. As writers the easiest way for us to influence the input into the creative process is by choosing what we read.

How do you choose what you read? Are you one of those who carefully choose the next few books? Or do you zip off in new directions on a whim? Is your reading list guided by the random fluctuations of the local library? Do you stick to one genre, or move freely between the sections of the bookstore?

There is a idiom in writing that you should read what you want to write, so it follows that if you want to write something particular, you should read books that will nudge you in that direction.

I tend to read in mad bursts. I’ve always been a heavy reader. Several years back—out of college, but before I had a family—I kept track of my reading for one year, and it amounted to 276 books. But from the time I arrived in Raleigh until April of last year I read almost nothing. Right now I’m on a tear, averaging about a book a day. If I find an author I like, I’ll probably read everything at the bookstore by them before moving on. Often, browsing the citations of an author will send me off a wild chase through a less-traveled area of the bookstore.

This leads to a rather disorganized bookshelf. My to read shelf is crammed with wildly disparate titles. And some books that I very much want to read, will sit untouched for months as my subconscious chases down one elusive idea or another. I just counted my to read shelf—72 books.

This all leads to a wild streak in my own writing—one I have yet to tame (and truthfully, I’m not sure I want to). I will simultaneously work of a humorous sword and sorcery story, a hard sci-fi, a psychedelic story about insomnia, and a character-driven non-genre short.

So, how do you read? And how does it affect your creative output?

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

I still believe that good deeds are their own reward, but after 2008, I am also forced to accept the corollary, that no good deed goes unpunished.

I could go on for days about the criminal (and I mean that literally) way my sweetie was treated earlier this year, when several parents of the girls in her scout troop made false claims to the local council, and even though the council agreed the claims were baseless, still handed over the troop to the scheming parents to avoid the threat of bad press. But that’s not what this post is about.

About a month before Christmas, a couple that owns a home in the same community where we rent posted on the message board asking for a pet sitter. They said they could not afford the traditional pet kennels and still visit their family for the holidays. So my sweetie and I offered to sit their pets over Christmas for free.

When we met them, they and the dogs—a Shih Tzu and a Pit Bull that they kept calling a Bulldog—seemed nice enough. They gave us the keys, and instructions on how the alarm worked. So each day we walked the dogs in the morning, left the dogs out during the day, and walked and fed them each evening and crated them for the night.

On the third day the dogs started to miss their owners and the Pit Bull did some damage to the house—chewed on some window sills, eviscerated a pillow, and did some damage to a cheap area rug. So we stopped leaving them out during the day, instead leaving them crated all day.

On the final day, just a few hours before their owners returned, the Pit Bull tried to attack me. It was only by a bit of luck, that my sweetie happened to be standing on her leash, so she wouldn’t jump up on me and dirty my work clothes. Still we walked them, fed them and crated them.

As soon as the owners got home they started sending insulting emails threatening lawsuit if we didn’t pay for all the damage done to their house while they were away—and from the list of damages they provided, most of the damage was there when they left town.

Now my sweetie is trying to make nice with these ingrates by offering to split the damages, and she’s being berated by rambling emails lecturing her about how she has to take personal responsibility for what happened.

Excuse me? You don’t train your dog, and don’t warn the sitters that the dog is destructive and aggressive, all the time lying and saying it’s not a pit bull, AND you don’t bother to give instructions that you’re dog should under no circumstances be left out of the crate, and we’re the ones not accepting responsibility?

This isn’t the first time I’ve been burned, but it is the most recent. And it’s the last.

Today I officially withdraw myself from the pool of those people who give a damn about others.

No Good Deed Goes Unpunished…lesson learned.

These are really more of a writing exercise than real resolutions—a way to get the new year off to a creative start. Although, if you do it right, these resolutions should be a breeze to keep.

The rules are simple:

• List ten things you resolve not to do in the upcoming year.
• Be as creative as possible.
• Post them on your blog and leave a link in your comment below.

To get thing rolling, here are…

My 2009 New Year’s Anti-Resolutions

1. I will not get my kids hooked on coffee in an attempt to keep them little by stunting their growth.
2. I will not post my daughter in a fake auction on eBay, just to see how much I could get for her.
3. I will not go to the library and put misleading, handwritten notes in the margins of books to throw off other researchers.
4. I will not propagate an internet hoax alleging that our new president’s speeches contain secret advertising messages sold to US companies as a way to help fight the recession.
5. I will not try to convince my kids to punch up their essays for school through liberal use of the elusive seventh vowel.
6. I will not advocate the use of disposable batteries to create home electroshock therapy kits.
7. I will not subject the world to the recipe for tofu chip cookies.
8. I will not preach belief in the ancient Norse Gods as a way to return to Family Values.
9. I will not teach my six-year-old how to play craps so that he can hustle his classmates to supplement his lunch allowance.
10. I will not fake disturbing conversations over my Bluetooth headset in public, as a way of determining who is eavesdropping.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

I’m a big fan of Christopher Moore, but also of Shakespeare, humorous novels, and particularly of literary parodies; so it would be difficult for any book to be more up my alley. It would be a bit of an understatement to say that I’m looking forward to it, but before the books release in February, it seems I have a little homework to do.

You see, King Lear is one of the few Shakespeare plays I haven’t read. After Books like The Eyre Affair and To Say Nothing of the Dog, I’ve learned my lesson that literary parody is so much richer if you’ve actually read the work being lampooned (Also, once you’ve read the parody, it’s too late to read the original, because you know how the story unfolds).

So while at the bookstore for a last minute gift, I headed over to the Shakespeare section, for a copy of King Lear. And once there, I found an array of new versions of Shakespeare, written with the intention of making Shakespeare a little less intimidating.

Having read most of his plays, and seen many in movie and play form, I don’t find his work all that confusing. But I can remember a time when that wasn’t the case. So looking forward to a time in the not very distant future, when my kids will be looking for help understanding the Bard, I started browsing what was available.

I’d be shooting for dramatic understatement if I said that I was impressed with what I found; particularly with the recent additions by Spark Notes. Spark Notes started out with study guides along the lines of Cliffs Notes, generally used as a substitute for reading whatever work they summarized.

But it seems there are more robust choices now. I picked up two books, both from Spark Notes No Fear Shakespeare collection. The first is King Lear (No Fear Shakespeare) which presents the original text of the play, coupled with a line-by-line modern day translation on the facing page. This is great for anyone who wants a little help with the text, without loosing all the structure and nuance that is layered into the Bard’s plays.

The second book is Macbeth (No Fear Shakespeare Graphic Novels). This version keeps the original text but presents it as a graphic novel. This one has the advantage of preserving the wonderful language of the Bard, but presenting it with some visual context—and I know seeing the play in addition to reading it was always helpful to me. Plus it comes packaged in a graphic novel format, which many kids already enjoy.

I like the fact that these newer entries into the genre are trying to help raise the reader up to Shakespeare’s level, instead of trying to dumb him down to ours.

This post was originally posted on Write Anything—
where six writers talk about the trials and
tribulations of their writing lives. And each
Tuesday the soapbox belongs to me.

I get the social networking craze. I mean, it’s not really my cup of tea, but I understand it. But does everything need to be Twittered, FaceBooked, and MySpaced?

Last week I logged into my Yahoo! email account, an account I’ve now had for about ten years, to find that it’s trying to become more like a social networking site.

Now everytime I log in, I have to decline to send invitations to 3 random contacts pulled from the thousands of emails I have saved in various folders. And I’m getting damn tired of it.

You see it’s not that I’ve been frozen in ice, on a glacier on the distant edges of a lost continent of frozen tundra that recently broke off and sailed into shipping lanes, where I was discovered by the cast of Deadliest Catch, revived and brought back to life so that I am ignorant of the existence of Social Networking websites. It’s that I have elected not to join them.

I haven’t joined them because I have little interest in reconnecting with friends I have spoken to in 20 years. If I haven’t spoken to the in 20 years they probably weren’t very good friends to begin with.

Email, however is a tool. One I use dozens of times each day. And each new layer of functionality—with no opt-out possibility—you add just makes it load more slowly. I don’t want to invite all my friends to join Yahoo! Mail, because I respect their judgment and I assume if their not happy with their email service they’ll change.

Grrrrrr!

[Fiction] Friday Challenge for December 19, 2008:

Write a short scene, with exactly two characters that involves a terrible Christmas (or similar holiday) present.

That Ottis Toole was the killer is far from certain. Were he still alive, there would be sufficient evidence to charge him, though a conviction would be far from certain. The other primary suspect in the case was Jeffrey Dahmer—who lived in South Florida at the time. The killing does have certain things in common with other Dahmer murders, though one striking dissimilarity is that Adam was significantly younger than any of Dahmer’s other victims.

I’m not sure we’ll ever know, for certain who killed Adam Walsh. But both primary suspects died in prison, one by cirrhosis, one killed by another inmate. Maybe for Walsh’s parents it just seemed pointless to keep hounding the investigators. You can’t ever get justice for something like this anyway—the most you can hope for is closure.

The Adam Walsh murder changed my life. Not for any personal connection, but because the murder changed South Florida.

I lived in Hialeah, about 20 miles from the Mall where Adam disappeared. In fact, the week earlier, I had been at the very same store. I was 9 years old at the time. It was summer vacation, and that was the first summer I was allowed to stay home by myself. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere except outside to play or the houses of certain friends who lived on the same block.

The few days after Adam’s disappearance, parents naturally pulled their kids closer. Now I was allowed to go to my friends houses—inside their houses—but we couldn’t play outside unless someone’s parent was watching. And after Adam’s head was found a couple of weeks later, summer basically ended. I was to stay in the house all day, all doors locked, with my mother calling in about every hour.

When I started back to school, since I was starting 6th grade, my mother had grudgingly allowed this to be the first year that I was allowed to walk home from school, and that I didn’t have to go straight to the sitter’s house. Looking back, I can’t imagine the fretting she must have done those first few days of the school year. And now I’m sure I know why my mother made me time exactly how long it took me to walk home, and why the phone was already ringing as I unlocked the front door.

In South Florida on July 27, 1981, I daresay that 99% of parents wouldn’t have thought twice about doing exactly what Revé Walsh did—leaving her son at a video game display and walking a couple of aisles away. She was close enough to hear him shout out, after all. But on July 28, 1981 any parent doing so would have been scolded—and was, because I can remember newly hired store security guards lecturing parents on the dangers of leaving kids unattended.

That one disappearance both pulled us together as a community, but also pushed us away from the people in our community that we didn’t know well.

And for the kids my age, the kids who might have played with Adam had we lived closer, the kids who had shopped at the same Sears store, the world instantly became a dangerous place.

Police started showing up at our schools, fingerprinting us, and taking photos for IDs we were never supposed to carry. And though it was never said directly to us, it was often explained in a slightly-too-loud voice to our teachers, that it could help identify our bodies if we ever turned up missing or dead.

When parents and teachers don’t explain things to kids, they develop their own theories about things. We were convinced that kids were targets and that parents didn’t want us to know exactly how much danger we were in.

That Halloween was the first that I carried two bags for candy—one for people we know (which you can keep after I go through it) and one for everyone else (straight in the trash). And the safety hysteria didn’t let up for a few years.

Kids on milk cartons and databases of missing persons were a direct result of Adam Walsh.

Life in South Florida never really went back to the way it was before Adam’s death. The country changed as well, but on a national level I don’t know how much directly followed from Adam’s death and how much from a generally more dangerous world.

What is the best Christmas present you ever received? Not the most expensive, not the coolest; but the one that has stayed with you the longest, or meant the most—you pick the exact criteria.

I was going ask for best and worst presents, but if the worst present giver happens to read your blog…well, I didn’t want to be responsible for a holiday fracas—besides the only truly bad gift is a thoughtless gift.

Answer this question on your own blog, then leave a comment here with a quick version of your answer and a link to your post.

People have told me that I’m difficult to buy for. I don’t agree, as even when I get presents that others would consider bad, I still appreciate the thought. For instance, people NEVER buy me books, even though I’m a very eclectic reader—though I do understand that people are often wary that I will already have the book.

But I can understand why people think that I would be hard to buy for. I have weird hobbies and interests, and it’s intimidating to buy someone something that you don’t understand. For instance, I like heraldry, but were my sweetie to look on Amazon and search for books on the subject, I will have already read the first 20 results.

The best Christmas present I have ever received isn’t a single gift; rather it’s a series of gifts spread out over a few years (so far).

A few years ago, for the first Christmas we were romantically involved, Jeni got me a set of four British, signed, First Editions of the novels of Jasper Fforde. And each year since she has bought me his latest novel. Always a First Edition. Always the British edition, instead of the US. Always signed by the author. And always from the same independent bookstore in England. In fact, this will be the first year that she won’t be able to continue the tradition, because he didn’t publish a new book this year.

Now this isn’t the most expensive gift—aside from the first of the books which was a little pricey when she bought it. In fact, aside from the first year of this custom, it’s generally not even the main gift she gives me. But it’s surely one of the most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever received. Not only did she take the time to know one of my favorite authors, but she took the time to go out and get me a version that I couldn’t just walk to the bookstore and purchase for myself. I guess the part that means the most to me is that when I get these books, I know that she gets me.

Now it’s your turn. Answer this question on your own blog, then leave a comment here with a quick version of your answer and a link to your post.

Muse Flash is a new feature, where I’ll give you a topic for your own blog. I’m going to try it for a few posts and see if it has legs.

So one evening, my sweetie cornered me while the kids were busy and lit into me. Actually, that’s a little unfair…she wasn’t angry…it was more like one of those snap-out-of-it-you’re-bringing-everyone-else-down chats. After I explained to her what was bothering me, she sat me down and tried to put things in perspective for me.

When it comes to Christmas, I try to spoil her and the kids. Nothing over the top. Nothing like new furniture, or like those ridiculous commercials where people buy Cadillacs or Lexi for their spouses. But as much as my sweetie loves Christmas, she’s had some miserable ones over the years. So I try to make sure each one is special. Every year I get her some perfume—she’s a perfume junkie—and some nice, but modest jewelry, and a few other goodies picked out specially for her, and not just because they were found in the women’s section of a store.

My sweetie explained, that the kids had had some pretty bad Christmases as well, and that even though they might not ever say it, they would understand if Santa stopped by, but wasn’t as lavish as years past.

So after our long talk, she and I scrapped our planned list, and started over.

And now that I’m shopping on a budget, I’m having so much more fun. I’m no longer picking gifts based on commercials or price tags. Now I’m looking at each member of my family individually, and figuring out what they would want. Not what they would ask for, but what they would really enjoy getting. Would they still be playing with this in a week, in a month, in six months? Toys that wind up being expensive and boring after a few days, are left on the shelves. And even though the pile will be smaller, and the price tag of the holiday significantly lower, I think the kids will appreciate their gifts more.

And on the other side of things, I’m asking for things I know I will really want, or even need. My mother is getting me an eye exam and lenses for the eyeglass frames I bough off of eBay—that may not be the flashiest gift, but as I told her, that’s something I’ll appreciate every day.

So even though I’m still not getting much sleep, now it’s not due to worry, as much as it is good old-fashioned, asthma-induced difficulty in sleeping. And this year I’m not wondering if my sweetie will like her gifts—they were all so carefully chosen that I know she will.

Thank you for the perspective, my love.

WordPress 2.7 was released a couple of days ago and I have upgraded. The new interface behind the scenes is nice, but I’ve been using it on wordpress.com (for a blog I contribute to) for a couple of weeks now.

And the functionality I was looking forward to—the new way WP handles comments—is a little more complicated to implement than just installing the latest version.

Supposedly the new version included comment threading—so that I, or other visitors can respond to previous comments—and comment pagination—so posts with large numbers of comments don’t go on and on for ever.

Strictly speaking, this blog doesn’t need either of these new features—after all, in the last month I’ve gotten about 25 comments. But as someone who designs websites and blog templates here and there for a few extra bucks, I feel it’s a good idea to understand how to use the new functionality.

Well at least so far WP2.7 comments are confusing. I carefully followed the instructions provided on WordPress.org for installing the new features, and all I got was an oddly formatted version of what I already had.

I guess the best way for me to figure it out is to find a functional WP2.7 theme and dissect it.

I probably shouldn’t quit my day job.