329. Deadlines, Datelines, Dead Lines, Date Lines

At the time of writing, I have completed 5 of 7 submissions. Out of the 2, I only have time to develop 1, and that’s if and only if sudden inspiration strikes.

(where’s the bus?)

While the mystical public bus of inspiration does not show up, I still have pressing matters at hand: a 5,000-word report that needs to be submitted tomorrow. Out of the 5,000 words, I have written… Oh, 2,000. Not too shabby. But remember: due tomorrow.

As much as I’d like to adopt a first-in-first-out system for dealing with deadlines, human nature dictates that I put everything off until the last minute, and then binge-complete all the things that I have to do within the last 3 days in a panicked frenzy. It has happened before, it will happen again.

There’s just no helping it.

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A dateline is what you’d see at the beginning of a news report, or an article. It’s the time stamp that tells you when the essay was published. In my case, if by some miracle my lecturer decides that my work is somehow publication-worthy, everyone would be able to see that there were only 2 days between the date of writing and the research dateline.

It’s not a very pretty thing to show, but I can only give what I have.

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1 out of the 2 submissions that I’m not likely to complete is called “Mary Marcel’s Magic Mirror”, a tale about a woman… and her magic mirror. It doesn’t get any more creative than that.

These are the days when I wonder if I should just pack and pursue my childhood dream of being an accountant in a bank.

There are about 3,300 written words so far, and I honestly have no idea where the story is heading. I only wish I could be like Mr. Gaiman, who takes his sweet time with every story – some even taking years to complete – but I am only mortal. So the pages are filled with lines and lines of dead words, which pretty much adds up to paragraphs and paragraphs of dead lines. Lines that stay as pretty words strung together, never quite having the energy, or life, to leap up from the page and into the reader’s mind.

I try not to write dead lines. A doctor also tries not to kill his patients. We will both fail.

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The international date line is the line that runs from the North Pole to the South pole along the latitude line, and is found between the United States and Russia. This is useful for a number of reasons:

1. It tells us exactly where does a new day begin, which happened to be Phileas Fogg’s saving grace in “Around The World In Eighty Days”.
2. It tells us where to split the globe for a 2D representation of the world map, establishing our notions of what is “East” and what is “West”.
3. It helps the United States stay as far away as they possibly can from Russia. Only virtually, but as they would have you believe it, it’s the thought that counts.

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Get it right.

248. The Librarian Threshold

Take the number of books you bought last year. Minus that with the number of books you’ve given away. Now divide it by the number of books you’ve finished reading last year. The number you get is your Reader Index.

If your Reader Index number is more than 10, you’ve passed the Librarian Threshold.

(that’s okay, I’ve passed it a long time ago)

I’m not sure about you guys in other countries, or even in the other parts of Malaysia. But where I live in the Klang Valley, the people here buy a lot of books. I’m talking about volumes and entire series – like how I’ve heard people go Netflix binging, the denizens of the Klang Valley go on book-buying binges. With one trip to the bookstore, they’ll emerge with about 10 titles in 2 plastic bags, and most of this usually happens just before April.

Because, y’know, tax deductions and stuff.

It gets even more egregious when this certain sale called the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale comes around. When you walk into the space, you’re given a box – A BOX – to load up with books, and people usually do load their box (or boxes) full of books, because every volume is going at an average price of RM8 (that’s about USD 2.50). Why? Why not?

But books bought do not equal books read. If you took all the books in my house and stacked them one on top of the other, I’m pretty sure the stack will be twice the height of the double-storeyed terrace house in which I live. If the stack doesn’t first fall over and kill someone.

(what annoys me: when word processors do not recognize the word “storey”. My house never had 2 stories told about it – it’s not a 2-story house. It’s a 2-storeyed house, for goodness’ sake!)

I bought Mr. Gaiman’s American Gods so many years ago that the pages have turned yellow. It was only earlier this year that I found the willpower to read it from start to finish. In fact, I think in the last 3 months of being offensively bored at work, I have finished more books than I had in all of 2013. To recap:

• Neverwhere
• American Gods
• KL Noir: Red
• The Dark Tower
• Fragile Things
• The Storyteller
• On Writing
• The Wind Through The Keyhole
• Wintersmith
• KL Noir: White
• The Ocean At The End Of The Lane

There’s actually double digits there. I’m happy.

(and if it looks like I’ve been reading a lot of Gaiman… Yes, I have. And I’m proud of it)

But there still remains many books that I have bought just last year: the first 5 books of A Song Of Ice And Fire; 4 anthologies; a collection of Mr. Pinter’s works; Bambi Vs. Godzilla by Mr. Mamet; The Stand and The Green Mile by Mr. King; Hidden Empire by Mr. Card; and all of John Green’s novels, minus the one titled Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

And later this evening, I will be heading out to Bangsar South to hoard more books for my collection.

As long as the volume of books purchased (after subtracting the number of books given away) exceeds the volume of books read, the unread books are just going to continue piling up, at the rate indicated by your Reader Index number. If your Reader Index number exceeded the Librarian Threshold, in no time, you’ll be fit to start a mini-library of your own, loaning books that you’ve never read away for a small fee.

(actually, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea)

When you head out, as I will later this evening, to binge-buy books, remember your Reader Index number, and consider your proximity to the Librarian Threshold. If sitting behind a desk, reading a novel, and waiting for the late fees to roll in sounds like a great career to you, by all means, binge-buy away.

As for me, I’ll have to start working to push my Reader Index number to <1.

236. Research, Research, Research

I’m still working on that steampunk story.

In truth, I had opened up a blank document file in my excitement, typed out a sentence, and struggled to write a second one after that. And then I left it alone and kept the project away at the back of my mind.

And I wonder why I keep missing deadlines.

I think I’ve been writing too much fantasy. The thing about me is that I can keep pretty good consistent internal logic. I have trouble, however, conforming to preexisting patterns of thought.

For example, the Cameron Highlands story that I was writing? It had a black hole in it; and though I’ve handwaved the existence of a solid black hole through the use of fantasy storytelling, I knew I had to research into actual black holes to see how the story would unfold around it. To this day, 30,000 words into the story, I still have no idea what the black hole should do.

God I hate research.

If I wanted to do research, I’d be a journalist, not a fiction writer. I like to make things up, not figure out how things can come together in a useful way. I like shortcuts through logic. But research all too often comes up as a necessity for writing intelligent stories.

A part of me tells me that I can ignore the research and make shit up. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I can stomach being willfully wrong – to thumb my nose at the facts because they’re in the way of a good story. But I will not be able to live with myself if I wrote out of ignorance.

I don’t want to be ignorant, but I don’t want to do research either. Nnngghh.

So I’m 2,500 words into the steampunk story (it should come up to 10,000 words for the 1st draft), and I’ve already spent like 2 solid hours just on researching. The Victorian age accelerated, steam technology advanced, leaving electricity and the internal combustion engine in the dust. What kind of world do we end up with? What does their history sound like?

So far so good:

• The British Empire never let go of their colonies, and has begun to clamp down on the punk movement with laws that have an Orweillian foretaste to them.
• The rapid advance of industry meant that Nikola Tesla had a better fighting chance, and successfully marketed his weapon designs to the US military, causing The Manhattan Project to be about perfecting his teleforce design instead of building the atom bomb.
• Einstein and Feynman remain core contributors to the project, but on a lesser scale, and are more scientists than celebrities.
• Nazi Germany took the design for the internal combustion engine and perfected it for their tanks, and their subsequent defeat and demonization caused the world to shun the internal combustion engine as Nazi technology.
• People are just as wary of electrical technology because of the destructive power of the teleforce.
• Nuclear physics is almost unheard of, due to its late advancement after being pushed aside for Tesla’s electric-based superweapon.

Phew.

All of that for 2,500 words of text, and that’s not even including what I had to research for a coffee delivery service that went around in a zeppelin, and the world of steampunk Britain-Malaysia. (Bangsar is still the Bunge-Grisar Estate, for exaple.)

And I still have 7,500 words to go. God knows how much more research I’ll have to do to shape this story into something believable.

But at least I’m not writing out of ignorance. I can at least sleep happy tonight.

191. Warning: Contains Maths

I’ve never quite understood the trouble people have with maths.

“That’s easy for you to say, Joseph, because you’re smart,” a friend from college once said. Far from it – I have known smart people in the past 23 years of living, and I am nothing like them. I’m just a guy who likes to show off the limited knowledge that I have – and unfortunately, this braggadocio usually communicates that I’m somehow smarter than the rest.

(or maybe they’re really saying, “Shut up, Joseph, and stop being so arrogant”, but I’ve never been good at reading between the lines. See? Not smart)

I mean – what about maths is so difficult? 2 + 2 is 4, and 2 + 2 + 2 is 6. Throw in subtraction, multiplication, and division (which I’m sure – or I hope – everyone with a reasonable education knows), and you get all the maths you’ll ever have to do in one lifetime.

Well, there’s also algebra and calculus, but I think algebra has more real-world significance.

Earlier this week, I shared with a writer’s group a short story I write in 2012, titled “Malfunction!”, which was about two scientists trying to salvage a situation caused by a malfunctioning time machine. Most of the comments that came back more or less said: “Oh God. Maths. Cool story, though.”

Which I didn’t get. It’s alright if they didn’t catch the technobabble about the nature of space/time, or the rotation of the earth, or the tenets of general relativity. That’s fine – I didn’t understand many of those things either, until some weeks ago, when I became bored enough to look them up.

(I suppose I could learn to do just about anything with the free time that I have at work – but what the hell, I like writing)

But maths! It’s just a string of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing numbers. Chop the long equation up into small parts, and the average 12-year old would be able to solve it!

I’ve never understood what was so difficult about maths – until I reached Form 4 and was forced to take Additional Mathematics as a subject.

Boy, that didn’t go well.

For most of my Form 4 and Form 5 career, up until 2 months before the government exam, I didn’t understand a thing from Additional Mathematics. It was like the knowledge of how to ride a bike – those who knew how to do it sped ahead like it was nothing. The rest of us who didn’t know how to do it were left in the dirt, wondering what sorcery it took to make such devilishly complicated things work.

I failed my Additional Mathematics paper every single time. When the forecast results came out, they didn’t expect me to get anything better than a pass.

But hell, I didn’t believe I couldn’t understand Additional Mathematics.

So one day, I sat down, created a 2.5 hours playlist on the computer, and as the songs played, I made myself learn Additional Mathematics. When I reached the end of the playlist, I started over from the top, and only when the the last song finished playing for the second time did I stop doing maths for the day.

I did this for a month. The government exam came and went, and I got an A1 for my troubles.

See, I don’t believe there’s such a thing as an inherent inability to do maths. Dance, maybe – some people can’t get a groove to save their lives. Singing, maybe – some people are just not as sensitive to notes and chords. But maths relies on one’s basic ability to understand rules and to apply them – the same skill that tells you not to touch the fire because it is hot.

The difference is that maths doesn’t burn you when you get it wrong.

I believe if you tried long enough, hard enough, and didn’t give up and conclude that you’re just not a maths person, you can do maths just as well as any other person. Maybe maths is not your thing – it isn’t mine, either – but maths is definitely not something that’s only doable by the intellectually gifted.

The next time you come across a maths problem, grab that damn problem and wrestle it to the ground. It’s an intimidating-looking fellow, but really a softie who gives up pretty easily.

Besides, whoever said that you aren’t intellectually gifted?

156. Bored to Metaphoric Death

Reporting live from work: I am going to set fire to the pantry if nothing interesting happens soon.

It’s a belief of mine that the best thing you can do to a writer is to bore him to metaphoric death. Deny him entertainment. Starve him of stimuli. Cut off the supply of distraction. When he’s doing thrashing around the empty room, and when you’ve helped him to patch up his skull that’s been broken after one too many hits against the wall, he’ll thank you.

Because when you take everything away, the writer turns to his only remaining source of entertainment: his imagination. If there’s a good substitute for last-minute panic to inspire some creativity and productivity, it’s dreadful, soul-crushing boredom.

(though this only works as far as creative work is concerned. The typical response to attempts to bore a person into doing tedious work is: “I’m bored, not desperate”)

Sitting at the desk right now, my whole body feeling like it’s going to burst from inactivity, I realize that boredom is also the worst thing that can happen to me. To illustrate, first a science lesson:

You know why deep-sea divers wear full-bodied suits when they dive. Water pressure increases exponentially with depth, and if you dive deep enough, the water pressure will first make it uncomfortable to even stay at that depth. Go deeper, and it becomes increasingly difficult, then eventually impossible to breath. Go even deeper, your blood will stop flowing. You’ll be long dead, of course; but in the chance that you manage to go even deeper than that, the water pressure can and will become strong enough to crush your bones.

But the opposite happens in space. Outer space, to be exact. In outer space, the pressure you have to worry about isn’t coming from the outside – it’s coming from inside your body.

The mixture of air that makes up the comfortable layer of atmosphere that we breathe in is at that perfect pressure for our bodily functions to work properly. It allows for the exchange of gases in your lungs as your breathe. It keeps your eyeballs from popping out of their sockets. As you travel into the higher levels of the atmosphere and out of it, however, this pressure around you drops – and you will be literally bursting out of your skin. Your blood doesn’t flow correctly. You can’t breathe properly.

It’s why high-altitude jet pilots wear full-body suits and full-faced masks. It’s why airplanes have pressurized cabins. It’s also why astronauts need such big, cumbersome suits.

The perfect work environment balances pressure from the outside – deadlines, tasks to be completed, audits, etc – with the innate pressure on the inside of us to bloody do something. Too much pressure on the outside, ad it’ll crush you. Take it all away, leaving you in an activity vacuum, and you get what I’m feeling right now.

On second thought, boring a writer to death probably isn’t the best thing you can do for him. Just give him drugs and have it done with.