Author: JDJPlocher

Bad Grad Habits

Graduate school is many things: an odyssey of the mind, a way to turn reading from pleasure into indentured servitude, a miserable trek toward an even bleaker destination… Okay, so it’s not all wine and roses. To the extent that it is, the wine is cheap and a means to an end, the roses probably already starting to wilt. Anyway. I come to bury graduate school, not to praise it. Erm, wait. I come today to write about three bad habits I took with me to graduate school…ones that graduate school made worse.

Letting My Life Revolve Around Deadlines

Grad school forced me to improve my time management, but mostly because it filled my days so completely. I’m a habitual procrastinator. Part of that is the way I work—especially with papers, I legitimately build them in my head before writing them fairly fast. A good bit of it, though, is just procrastination.

When you’re reading 300 pages per course per week, there’s not much leeway for procrastinating. (There’s room for skim-and-bluff, though.) Instead of encouraging working ahead, graduate school pushed me (and many of my friends) to think of work as some horrible steeplechase of deadlines. With dogs chasing us. You see the deadline in front of you, hear the dogs behind you, and clamber over as best you can so you can get to the next obstacle. (Don’t ask me how the dogs get through the obstacles. The dogs, unlike the snakes, are a metaphor.) For all the work, there’s little opportunity to plan ahead. Come to think of it, the situation is also analogous to working in a restaurant during rush: there’s always something to be done and you just hop from task to task.

It’s not a healthy way to live over the long term. More importantly, thinking about life this way can screw you over when it comes time for the dissertation. First, you might not have been thinking much about your dissertation while you were reading hundreds of pages every week. Second, you suddenly have a deadline of (depending on your program) seven years. The dogs are still chasing you, but you’re in an open field now. Maybe you forgot your compass and maybe your advisor neglected to give you a map. You just pick a direction and start running…

This one has been tough to get over. I had decades to orient my work to deadlines. I’ve had to practice setting medium term goals and being mindful of them. It’s definitely still a work in progress. (As evidence, I point to my 88% complete novel draft that’s been mostly sitting since April.)

Assuming My Work Speaks for Itself

The meritocracy problem: I went into graduate school believing that the way to succeed was to do great work. That was it. There wasn’t a recipe. You just did quality stuff and it would, I don’t know, get out there somehow. I thought that 95% of finding success was being good at your job.

In the early years of my doctoral program, the emphasis was always on work. Write good papers. Be useful (or at least clever) in seminar discussions. Be an active presence in the department. Essentially, keep being good at school. That wasn’t a problem for me. If I hadn’t been good at school, I wouldn’t still have been in it. I read (almost) everything I was supposed to, got my papers in on time, and expected that the next steps in the process would happen on their own because I was good. Academia was a meritocracy and the best work would inevitably achieve the best results.

By the time I was dissertating, I had been disabused of this notion. I’d been to enough conferences and seen enough of my friends enter the market to understand that doing good work was, at best, 50% of finding success. The rest was some combination of hustle, luck, and connections. I understood that, but I didn’t really believe it. Not until I started applying for jobs.

I can safely say that I am more over this one now than I was when I graduated. I know, for example, that if I want my blog or my novel to get traction beyond my immediate community, I will have to throw time and money at getting it out there. Being on a different kind of job market has also helped. Nobody is going to look at my resumé and decide to hire me on the spot. They have to know to look for it, which comes back to the hustle and luck bit.

Winning Arguments Rather than Solving Problems

Man, grad school, you were awful about this. Seminar rooms are too often gladiatorial arenas for pedants. Graduate programs fill them with smart people who are used to being smart, used to being right. Then the professors usually turn the students loose on each other. Sometimes it’s more egalitarian; the professor participates in the melee, too. Admitting you are wrong is too close to admitting you are stupid and don’t belong, so it’s hardly ever done.

I was lucky enough to be involved in programs where most of us liked each other. We were friends rather than competitors. And it was still pretty bad. The worst days were the ones where we dealt with anything written before about 1960…which nearly always meant “written by a powerful white male.” (Early German ethnomusicologists, I’m looking at you.) We’d argue about how much we could or should excuse via historical framing. We’d argue about whether historical framing was a legitimate excuse at all. We’d talk and talk and talk in great spirals that never went anywhere except away from the text in question. We rarely came around to the question of “what can we learn from this and use to develop our own work.” All in the service of winning arguments. (Related: 80% of conference paper “questions.”)

I’m far more cognizant of this problem than I was when I finished grad school, but I still struggle with it. Comment culture doesn’t help—I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve seen (or been) the one trying to reason a true believer around to a different point of view using all of the rhetorical bludgeons graduate school builds for you. Grad school encourages us to pick apart arguments. We find the holes, force them wide, and rush once more unto the breach. We’re led to operate at a remove from the underlying problem.

As a teacher, this is also the habit I’m working the hardest to correct. Winning an argument with a student won’t help either of us. Winning arguments seldom builds knowledge. I’m working to keep myself and my students focused on figuring out what the actual problems are so we can work on solving them.

So. Three bad habits made worse by graduate school. I continue to wrestle with them. What about you, readers? Postac, altac, or still in, what sort of school-amplified habits are you trying to shake off?

Reading for a Different Kind of Job

I finally have a library card again. Among the things I learned in this last move: I have too many books. Even just my fantasy fiction collection (diminished somewhat from the boxes I left at my parents’) fills up a whole wide shelving unit. I don’t regret having those books; the ones I’ve kept are the ones that have some combination of quality, re-readable-ness, and sentimental value. I just no longer feel the need to own the books I read.

And I need to be reading more. Graduate school turns reading into a job. There were semesters in which I was responsible for reading 500+ pages of scholarship every week. Reading stops being fun. I grew up reading for pleasure, and still do occasionally. As a writer, though, it has to be more often than occasionally, and it’s seldom just for pleasure. I’ve written about this before, but it’s something I’m reminding myself of now that my family is settling into the new house and we are shifting gears for the impending start of the school year. Reading good books makes me want to write ones like them. Reading bad books makes me want to get more good books out into the world. Win-win.

I’m pulling some inspiration on this from my former teammate Mike Dariano. Mike is one of those few people whom I feel closer to in the social media age than I did when we were actually going to the same school. This isn’t because we actually share stuff; it’s because we’ve ended up with strangely parallel lives. We’ve both put in time as adjuncts and years of being stay-at-home dads. We both write. We both try and use wiles to keep up with younger legs on the ultimate field. Mike, though, is scads more organized than I am, and works much more consciously toward improving himself and his work. He’s blogged about his projects in reading more, buying less, using Evernote, and half a dozen other things. (I’m particularly enjoying his recent stuff about incorporating Stoic principles into modern life.) Mike also has a new e-book out on building reading into your life.

Which brings me back to the library. I had a library card in Minneapolis. I got it the first week we were back in the Cities from Ohio, largely because I needed a card to use the internet at the library (a necessity until I could get internet at the apartment). When the kids were old enough, we used the library card all the time to check out children’s books. It was rare for me to check out anything for myself. Part of that was the grad school reading=work thing I mention above. Part of it was the fact that getting a toddler and an infant through the library did not leave much leeway for the lone grownup to explore the stacks. These days, my kids are old enough to look contentedly at the books they’ve picked out while dad finds a few to check out for himself. (My seven-year old is a voracious and frighteningly fast reader.)

On Thursday, the three of us went to the library here in Round Rock. The kids got five books each. I got two for myself. The first was Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, which I’ve wanted to read for ages and have never gotten around to. The second is a book I randomly grabbed from the fantasy/sci-fi section. It has a gryphon on the cover and something to do with elemental magic. That’s as much as I can recall without having it in front of me. The grab-bag is sort of the point. Every trip to the library, my plan is to make one careful selection of something generally deemed worthwhile. There are swathes of the fantasy “canon” that I haven’t touched, and some literary fiction I want to get my hands on. The other selection will be something arbitrary. I expect there will be good books and bad book and many that fall into the range my mother calls “airplane books:” good enough to read when you’re stuck in a metal tube hurling through the sky. Mostly, I need to get more novel words (ha!) through my brain to keep my own figurative fields from going fallow.

My vague plan is that posts about these books will gradually replace my writings on #postac. I’ve said before that I’ never intended that Walking Ledges become a #postac blog. I still am one, but I’m not sure I will have new things to say about it every week. I’ll still keep my annotated postac page, and I’ll continue to write about my transition from teaching nominal adults to teaching people who aren’t yet old enough for a driver’s license. For now, you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got some books to read.

Did I Fail?

[It’s August and I’m back! Mostly, anyway.]

Even outside of the Academy, there are people who truly believe “postac” and “failed academic” are synonyms. For those postacs who believe that (and it’s a persistently pernicious belief to try and overcome), there still must be a sense that being a “failed” academic is more worthwhile than continuing the struggle to find success inside the Academy. I’ve been wondering lately, though, did I fail? My answer is ‘no,’ but I still wonder why we have to ask.

What if, for example, I had spent seven years waiting tables instead of chasing a doctorate. Realizing that waiting tables is a dead end, I then decide to change careers. Who would call me a failed waiter? Anybody? What if I’d been working on a novel while I was waiting tables? Would I be a failed novelist in addition to being a failed waiter, or instead of being a failed waiter?

In raw economic terms, quitting the adjuncting racket is much more like quitting food service. The economic numbers for adjuncts are awful. The living situation is often just as precarious as in food service. (Given student debt accumulated in graduate school, it can sometimes be worse.) We don’t talk about failed waiters because we understand the economics of it. If you get out of waiting tables, the assumption is that you’ll be moving up in the world. (But treat your servers well!)

Writers are just as prone to socio-economic struggles as waiters. They don’t call ‘em “starving artists” for nothing. But there’s still an idea that you can fail at being a writer in a way we’d be reluctant to ascribe failure at waiting tables. Caveat: I grew up in a restaurant. I understand that it’s possible to be really, really bad at waiting tables. (There’s a reason I always worked in the kitchen.) We just don’t usually decide those people are failures. The difference, I think, is in ambition. Unless you’re aiming to become a master sommelier, taking people’s orders doesn’t require ambition, just endless tolerance of human shortcomings.

Being a writer—or becoming a college professor—does require ambition. To do so is to seek status, to angle for a space in the cultural field that sets you apart. Because success brings (perceived) privileges, failure matters. Being an especially good waiter does not get you much more than (hopefully) good tips. Being an especially good writer or scholar or professor does. Those are avenues to become something bigger than you once were. Ambition raises the stakes; the more success matters, the more failure matters.

I’m lucky. I don’t have to deal with the extra raft of anxieties that go with leaving while ABD. I succeeded at graduate school, more or less. I suffered a few disparaging comments about my knowledge of musical works in the wake of my comprehensives, but those didn’t bother me. I got on well with my colleagues and enjoyed being on both sides of the classroom. Most importantly, I wrote a big stonking pile about new music in New York in the 1970s and got four professors to sign off on it. I earned the right to be called Doctor Plocher (and to make “not that kind of doctor” jokes).

By the metric of meeting ambition, though, I certainly failed.  I did not go on to rock the musicology world with my ideas about music and sociology. I did not get tenure at a tier one research university nor an Ivy nor a SLAC nor even a regional directional university. I did not, in fact, get a tenure-track job at all. I gave up on adjuncting before it could devour me. (Grad school did enough of that.) If the goal was to become a tenured scholar (and it was), I failed.

I can’t help coming back around to the question of the waiter, though. Goals change. More importantly, needs change. A starving artist might happily starve herself, but decide that her new significant other is worth making stability with. Most people have different needs at 35 than they did at 25. People switch careers. Frequently. In most cases, they get to do so without being labeled failures. There’s a lesson for postacs in that. We don’t have to carry our labels out of the Academy with us.

Checking Boxes Part III

Regular readers have no doubt noticed my posts haven’t been quite as regular. I’m in the middle of moving and finishing my teaching certification. I should be back to my twice-weekly update schedule next month.

I wonder how many advocates for online education have taken classes on-line. Seriously. My alternative certification program features an online component, and it is one of the most stultifying things I’ve ever had to do. It’s not that the content is bad, but it’s delivered in 3-500 word snippets, sometimes with a video. (Sometimes that video is even related to the content.) You read through a few of these pages, then you take a quiz. If you do not answer all the questions correctly, you take the quiz again with slightly different questions. Then you start on a fresh batch of pages until the next quiz.

The quizzes are there to create accountability. Some platforms will let you skip straight to the quizzes without reading/viewing the material, but not the one my program uses. My problem is not with the quizzes. I just wonder how checking boxes online demonstrates…anything beyond a basic acquaintance with the material. The quizzes pretty closely match the ones I used to use in my college courses to make sure my students did their reading and listening.

After those quizzes, though, there was the rest of the class, the part where we actually discussed and practiced and synthesized information: the part where we learned. There has not been much of that on-line. Theoretically, I know, online courses include some sort of forum or other means for feedback or discussion. (I’ve used online portals for in-classroom classes before.) There isn’t one for my current program. Aside from the quizzes, there’s no output from my end. It’s not much different from just reading a textbook and doing the end-of-chapter activities.

The in-person sessions involve more interaction. There’s plenty of lecture…and PowerPoint…and videos…but we also talk things through in small groups. We stray off-topic. We share our experiences. The people going through an alternative certification program have diverse backgrounds. I’ve sat with former delivery drivers and other former college instructors. Many of us have subbed. Some have taught in private schools. Most of us are on at least our second career; some are in their third and fourth. None of that makes the sessions perfect. I still get bored to the edge of tears on occasion. There’s more learning, though, than just the content. We swap resources for test preparation and the job hunt. There is honest-to-FSM networking.

The qualification tests themselves have more in common with the online portions of the course. They are (mostly) checking boxes (well, ovals) on a screen. Sometimes the questions have a degree of nuance. Most of them are more like playing Jeopardy!—the questions are worded to activate the appropriate background knowledge. Once you learn Texas’s preferred pedagogy jargon, you’re more than halfway to the right answer. (I felt this particularly with the English as a Second Language supplemental exam.) Coupling common sense and rudimentary knowledge with, you know, paying attention is enough to get you through.

It’s hoop-jumping, and I’m a little concerned that becoming a teacher is merely jumping through the right hoops. I remind myself, though, that the tests explicitly check for the knowledge of beginning teachers. I’m okay with having those tests represent only the absolute baseline. I’m even more okay with going through the hoops because there’s a far more legitimate chance at a job than the one that waited for me after my dissertation.

And for now, at least, I won’t even have to teach online.

Skinny Books and Fat Books

A while back, I mentioned that my family was in the process of house-shopping. We closed on a home at the end of June. Between cleaning up after the previous owners’ rat infestation and compensating for some–ahem–puzzling choices by the contractors who redid the interior, we’ve started to pack up our apartment. That means packing books.

We have…lots of books. Before we moved from Minneapolis to Austin, I went through and removed many academic books I didn’t care about from the household library. (I also finally recycled 8 years’ worth of seminar notes.) Even after that liberation from the Academy’s lingering tyranny, we still had seventeen or eighteen boxes of books to move—north of 250 kilograms. Over the last year, most of the family’s acquisitions have been kids books, so at least we haven’t added much to our tonnage.

Packing up books is like playing Tetris without the underlying grid, but at least working at a college bookstore got me plenty of practice. After buyback, part of my job was to list and pack up hundreds and hundreds of textbooks for shipping back to the wholesalers. (The store’s book room was upstairs, too, which made things extra fun even with a good handcart.) Textbooks don’t come in standard sizes. Their sizes certainly aren’t related to standard box sizes, either. Filling boxes to their limits (but not beyond) is tricky, especially since you have to pack the books straight so their bindings aren’t damaged.

Being in the humanities and fine arts, I have not accumulated many textbooks. Instead, my collection is heavy on monographs and anthologies. They’re bound just as idiosyncratically as the big hardcover textbooks. Thin or thick, wide or tall, they’ve all got to go somewhere. I’ve discovered that the little Dover editions of philosophy are great for filling gaps. I’ve also still got a few scores around—I have no intention of giving up the Beethoven string quartets I scribbled so much analysis into. The scores are large enough they usually have to go at the bottom of a box, messing up everything that goes on top of them.

I also have literature and fantasy novels. They tend to be slightly more uniform in size—and much, much lighter—but vary in thickness. Because they’re light, they’re usually easy to pack. (It’s also nice to stumble on a light box of books while moving.) The variation in thickness, though…it got me thinking about what I like to read and how that has changed over the years.

The skinniest books in my collection are early printings of Michael Moorcock’s Eternal Champion books. Many of those are themselves collections of short stories that appeared in pulp magazines. Most don’t even hit 200 pages. Steve Brust’s Taltos books are the next category up, getting to about 250 pages—still pretty thin in the paperback printings. At the other end of the spectrum (discounting omnibuses) are Tad Williams’ Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn books. These are epics. Though published in hardcover as a trilogy, the third book had to be split into two parts for paperback (and they’re still over 800 pages). Throw in the odd trade paperback and some hardcovers, and the fantasy collection is nearly as motley in size as the academic one.

It has been a long time since I found myself immersed in an epic. I’ve read most (but not all) of George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire. It didn’t exactly grow on me.  The best books I’ve read lately have been short: Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane is one of the most beautiful gems of a book I’ve ever read, and it’s 181 pages in hardcover, including the afterword. Most of the “epics” I have left on my bookshelf are ones that I read in high school or the early part of college.

I have come to prize economy and the power of not laying everything out for the reader. (Gene Wolfe is an absolute master of this.) It’s an aesthetic principle, I know, a choice rather than some law of the universe. It’s still important to me. I think that my preference owes something to the work I’ve done in poetry and composition since I was “in to” fantasy epics. Those prize density of meaning rather than scope of narrative. They are about the right notes and the right details rather than raw volume. Some of that has certainly carried over to my fiction tastes and “serious” writing—if not my blogging, where my verbal sprawl can run amok.

There’s also the question of finding time to read. Getting reading into my day is much like getting books into boxes: my time is irregularly chunked by varying demands. Family responsibilities are like those big scores and omnibuses. They devour large quantities of time and have to go in first. It’s hard to sneak epics in around the edges or in the gaps. The skinny books, the little gems…they fit in the cracks. Perhaps after the summer, when the school calendar is again regulating my days and my kids’ days, I’ll find my way back to epics. Or perhaps I’ll just squeeze in more skinny books.

Cook, Love, Write

The other day, my wife asked me why I cook fancy meals even when I’m really busy. I’m not sure that what I cook counts as fancy most of the time, but July certainly counts as busy—moving into a new house, taking subject certification exams, finishing up the alternative certification course proper, and trying to find a job for the next school year. That doesn’t count writing or my (modest) CampNaNoWriMo project for the month. I do cook dinner three or four nights each week, and often “re-condition” leftovers on one or two of the others. (Reconditioning usually involves adding more garlic and either a different leftover or frozen vegetables.)

It takes time. It makes dirty dishes, which take more of my time later. I could totally get away with using the slow cooker of beans I make every week to do most of the meals, supplemented with pots of rice and pasta or another pot of something stewish. My kids would be happy eating only rice, noodles, and fruit. The only person in the household who is really interested in having different things for dinner most nights is…me. So why do I do it?

Mostly, my dad is to blame. He cooked dinner every night he wasn’t busy cooking at the family restaurant. It used to baffle me how he could spend 60 or 80 hours a week cooking and running a restaurant and still want to be in the kitchen when he was home. I understand it better now: my dad really, really liked to cook. He also liked to cook new dishes, things that weren’t on the restaurant menu and never would be. The kitchen was home and laboratory and studio for him.

Cooking was also important to him—and now to me—because it’s an offering to the family. You’ve probably seen articles (and listicles) about “love languages.” Cooking was one of my dad’s. He liked food, but he loved to cook for his family and friends. That’s how he showed he cared, especially when other things were going poorly. Putting something tasty on the table and getting us all to sit down to eat it together was easier for him than hugs and words.

I like words. I love writing. Despite that, I’ve never written very much for the people I love. My wife is awesome, but I’ve only written her a handful of things in the 13 years we’ve been together (unless you count the many, many e-mails that went back and forth while we were living in different states). I’ve spent many more hours cooking for her than writing for her. I might even cook too much for her. There are things she likes to eat that she also likes to cook, and I don’t always give her the chance to cook them.

When I write, I like subtlety, allusion, and implication. That’s part of the reason why it’s not always easy for me to write for (or to) the ones I love. I can’t just come out and say it, you know? Big displays of real emotion are tough. Fictional characters can channel my real emotions without it being so…blatant. The extra layer protects my raw feelings. Even here on the blog, I hide behind quasi-anonymity. Some things are easier to say in front of strangers (even if many of my friends and family do read this blog).

I would love to claim as much control over my cooking as I exercise over my language. I can’t. My “secret techniques” are mostly garlic, fresh ingredients, and knowing how to avoid overcooking things. I know my way around a spice rack and a grocery store (thanks to my dad), but not enough to have precise targets in mind when I cook. As in horseshoes and hand grenades, close usually counts. I cook edible dishes that taste good more often than not. They’re mostly healthy, and when they’re not I make sure they’re especially tasty.

Most of all, though, I cook things for the people I care about. I want us to sit down and eat together. I want us to enjoy each other’s company as much as I want us to enjoy what we’re eating. That’s even more true when we have guests. I might not be able to say “I love you, I am glad you are part of my life and at this table with me.” I might have a hard time writing my wife the poems she deserves (but I haven’t forgotten the sestina I promised you!). But I can fill a table with food, and the kids can set the places, and we can all sit and eat together. That’s why I do it: because there are some things that are easier to say with food than words.

Recycling (Literary, not Literal)

I’ve mentioned Imperial Secrets a few times before—it was a writing “game” I was part of for years and years. It was my first opportunity to spend long periods of time (and lots of words) with the same characters. I also wrote with some fantastic creators, a few of whom are published authors now. We created the world as we wrote our stories. It didn’t always make sense—the geographer in me cringed at some of the terrain juxtapositions, and the historian in me always wanted the background to be more coherent. (Weaving disparate chunks into a coherent history was one of my major projects in support of the game.)

I have almost everything I wrote for Imperial Secrets. The question is figuring out what to do with it. While my main characters are my own, as are many supporting players, there are characters in the stories that belong to others. All of the characters belong to the world. How can I remove them from what made them?

Recycling. That’s how. It’s work, though, distinct from simple re-use. Recycling a character (or a setting or a plot) involves figuring out what lies at its core. You don’t want to melt the character down completely—you might a well start from scratch at that point—you want to get it soft around the edges so you can re-mold it to a new purpose. What makes the character worth keeping? What’s compelling?

One of my unfinished novels involves a recycling of Leor Naechtweard, a character who, in Imperial Secrets, started as a noblewoman’s guard and eventually rose to something between fame and infamy as a bloodthirsty shape-shifting duke. Leor’s exploits (and the stories I dragged other players into) had him defeating demons and using a civil war to seize political power. He was also entangled with a different demoness who started as his co-guard. Leor was over the top, a character who fits a high fantasy framework that I had, by my mid-20s, abandoned. The involvement with other characters—often started because I wanted to write with their authors rather than any organic cause—made him messy to extract from L’Isle (the core setting for Imperial Secrets).

I have something like 600 single-spaced pages of Leor’s posts. To get anything out of them, I had to start stripping away external things. The first obvious thing to go was the demon sword. I’d had fun with it, but it did not fit the character’s arc at all. The political stuff could all go, too, because its origins were in Imperial Secrets promotion system. The love interest went by the wayside because I couldn’t possibly imagine replacing her author (who had all sorts of technical issues but was a fantastic storyteller).

What was left? Leor had a few key characteristics. He was ruthless but not vindictive (if I were hanging a D&D alignment on him, he’d be lawful evil). That ruthlessness went hand in hand with a nearly feral outlook. Imperial Secrets Leor was closely connected to wolves, both physically and mystically. Recycled Leor would have to develop some similar kind of connection. There were a few bits of the mystical backstory that were entirely mine and did not depend on the Imperial Secrets world—the most prominent were the Three Daughters of the Moon, a triple oracle that would appear to Leor in visions.

I eventually spun the outline for a novel out of those characteristics. I built up a shell of a world around them and wrote about three chapters before grad school ate my capacity to sustain nonacademic projects. The character translated beautifully to a low-fantasy setting of isolated wilderness villages and dangerous spirit-pacts. I might go back there some day.

I’m undergoing the same process with one of my other characters right now for the project I was supposed to launch three weeks ago. It’s an interesting process. There’s nothing like going through ten-year old work to make you grimace at your tastes and linguistic stumbles. There were some good moments, too, even if the character often behaved like an abstraction rather than a person. Trying to figure out what to “keep” has become more like trying to figure out what to “take.” Like Leor, this character (Hallas) had intimate ties to the Imperial Secrets setting. The character was concocted at an early moment in the game’s history when we had an overwhelming majority of evil characters and we felt we needed a white knight. So…I created a white knight who would, in fact, literally lead an order called the White Knights. (Those were another player’s creation, but the founding character had become a vampire. It’s complicated.) The stuff I’m working on now is high fantasy, but it’s much more nuanced than Imperial Secrets was at that age. I’m trying to keep only the best stuff.

Next question: is this even worth it? Why create new versions of old characters rather than concocting ones who will wholly fit a new project? It’s a valid concern. For Leor, but more particularly for Hallas, I feel like their stories weren’t done. There’s more to tell. Hallas, canonically, is dead. I martyred him to help end some metaplot stuff as Imperial Secrets was on its last legs. He was just getting interesting, though. I spent a lot of Imperial Secrets using him as a paladin who, while not lawful stupid, was nearly saintly in his piety and purity. On his penultimate story arc, he ran into some things that had the potential to complicate him. That’s what I want to explore going forward. What does a somewhat more realistic version of Hallas look like? How does he react to moral grey areas?

There’s another concern—is this “original?” Creatives tend to fetishize originality and, more often, raw novelty. We want to make something new. Recycled characters aren’t new. But we re-use ideas all the time. Composers do it constantly. (I did it occasionally as a composer; the tone row I used loosely in my master’s thesis was one that I’d first made for part of my undergraduate honors project.) Visual artists revisit the same subjects over and over again. I don’t feel bad about recycling old ideas…as long as I’m actually breaking them down and building them into something that fits.

Recycling literal waste takes energy. Artistic recycling—like any art-making—does, too.

Knowing is Half the Something Something

G.I. Joe taught me that knowing is half the battle. The Joes were suspiciously silent on what the other half might be…maybe it was “fight enemies with extraordinarily poor depth perception.” Two different events this weekend, though, got me thinking about what I know, what other people know, and what I sometimes expect other people to know.

Saturday: The Known Knowns

Most of the time, I think that signing up for the face-to-face teacher training sessions was a good thing. There’s legitimate networking that happens at the classes, the people are nice, and the air conditioning keeps the conference rooms colder than I can responsibly keep my apartment. (I also can’t put them off as easily as the purely on-line sections of the training.) By the end of Saturday, I was not so sure.

The material, taken out of context, is often interesting. Primary and secondary educators like to dabble in neuroscience, taking bits and pieces of things (like different loci of activity for different kind of learning) and concocting theories to support them (like “learning styles,” which do not actually work the way you might think). There are practical tips about applying for jobs and navigating state mandates once you’ve got one. We spent time addressing the standards that go with the state’s academic achievement exams. We also discussed how to convert those into objectives for one or more lessons.

That’s where things went off the rails. The distinction between items on the state guidelines and objectives for lessons just…escaped…some members of the class. First the instructor, then other members of the class, tried to guide the lost back to clarity. No dice. For forty-five minutes, we circled and circled what was basically a question of semantics.

It reminded me of graduate school.

Actually, it reminded me more keenly of some of my undergraduate classes. Those drove me crazy when we had to go over material more than once. Most of the time, I got it on the first pass and had little sympathy for anybody who needed to repeat it. By the time we hit the third or fourth repetition, I had generally begun writing nasty things directly into my notes or into the doodles that fill the margin. Until this last weekend, I hadn’t thought of those moments for years. As a room full of aspiring teachers tried to restate the information in as many different forms as possible, I found myself writing unkind things in my notes. (In German, even.) Intellectually, I don’t blame them. Asking questions is the responsible thing to do, especially when understanding the answers will affect how you deal with the young people you’ll be responsible for. Emotionally? Man, was I bad at mustering sympathy. That’s one of many things I need to practice.

I wrote a while back about being “the smartest one in the room.” There are some very smart people taking this alternative certification course, but it’s a much truer cross-section of the population than graduate school was. It is taking some time and effort to adjust to that, to sort out what I know because I’ve taught before, what I know because of my general level of education and, most importantly, what I only think I know. That’s the vital part for me, because I, too, am going to be responsible for young people. It doesn’t matter if I already know 75-90% of what we spend any given Saturday plowing through; it matters that I get a grasp on the 10-25% I don’t. In this case, the other half of the battle is biting my tongue and keeping my attention in the right place.

Sunday: The Unknown Knowns

I spent all day Saturday in class. I spent most of Sunday doing other things—first dishes, then a day trip out to  visit some friends. On the way home from that day trip, I caught the tail end of the local folk music show. The guest host was doing a special episode with, of all things, a musicologist. Even better, the show’s focus was on Texas music in the 1970s (particularly the “cosmic cowboy” scene in Austin). My daughter really wanted me to turn it off, but I couldn’t.

The last musicological thing I did was a book review that may never see the light of day; that was back in December. Hearing a musicologist on the radio, one who studied the same historical period I dissertated on, was awesome. I was familiar with some of the broad historical background the musicologist discussed, but the details about the Texas scenes were new to me. The interview was broken up with appropriate music. It was interesting, practice-oriented musicology. I loved every moment of it.

This was what I knew. This was the kind of discussion that I had spent years of my life training to participate in. I could have talked just as fluently about my own work on New York. Even better, it was quality scholarship pitched for an interested but general audience…the kind of thing I’ve always particularly enjoyed.

It would fit the narrative to say that 20 minutes on the radio awakened my old desires, that I’m again wrestling with the loss of the career I abandoned. That might be true, ephemerally. I miss doing scholarship. I miss research and I miss talking to my fellow scholars about their work. I even miss the esoteric stuff. A little. I miss them, though, like I might miss an ex-girlfriend long after the breakup. The times were good, but they’re done. I’m with somebody else now. (Happily!) Might-have-beens will linger. I can, to push the metaphor one step further than it ought to go, be Facebook friends with academia these days.

The other half of this battle? I don’t think there is one. It’s fun to know things, but I know that, for me, this particular battle is over. I’m getting better at embracing the “post” in “postac.”

Request to Join

I have a “secret” project in the works—perhaps foolishly, given all the other irons I have in the fire. Said project has numerous bits and pieces, but the one I’ve been struggling with is populating it with the right characters. I’m doing okay hammering out setting details (in part because some of them are recycled) and dealing with large-scale plot stuff. I have plans for some of the project’s general architecture. I’ve even spoken to an artist about doing some work on it.

Characters though…seriously. This is a rare problem for me. Ghosts of the Old City nearly populated itself. There have been consistency issues here and there, and I had to spend some time working out motivations at certain spots…but those problems had as much to do with structure and plot as with characterization. I can’t recall the last time I had writer’s block over characters.

Part of this is that I play role-playing games. Over the years, I have put together many, many characters. When I do them for games, the process is generally fast. In the midst of my struggles with Secret Project, I cranked out a fully-fleshed out character in the course of an afternoon…an afternoon in which I also played games with my kids and caught up on the dishes.  With the right motivation and a specific prompt, I’m fast.

With a specific prompt. Over on RPOL, new games have a “request to join” feature. The person running the game usually asks a set of questions that help give him or her a feel for both the character and the person playing it. Sometimes these RtJ prompts are detailed, sometimes they’re vague. Many game-runners request a writing sample; some require that it feature the applying character. My Secret Project isn’t a game I’m running, but…a prompt seemed like a good solution. Here’s the one I developed. These are questions that help me get a fix on my characters, tweaked for this particular project. I include a brief explanation of what the question does for me.

Name
Names are important. I hardly ever do them first, though. Usually, they come in the middle of the process, late enough to pick a name that fits what I’ve got and early enough to help anchor the rest.

Archetype/Concept
Something short, seldom even a complete sentence. Maedoc’s, for example, would be something like “bad-luck gentleman medium.” Zahra’s would be “adventurous fiddler-thief.”

What does the character do on a daily basis?
Usually, this amounts to a job description co-mingled with an overview of the character’s day. It gets me thinking about family and professional relationships. Those are important even for adventurous fantasy types. I don’t write characters without “day jobs”—even if the character’s a mercenary or professional spy, their days are not always worth being “on camera.” This question helps me think about what they’re doing during that time…and how plot conflicts can disrupt it in interesting ways.

How does the character prefer to solve problems?
Again, this helps me think about conflicts in future stories. Sometimes, the character will be able to do things the way she wants. Other times, her preferred method of conflict resolution won’t work, and I’ll get to see how she deals with backup plans or improvising.

Who does the character rely on?
Adventuring heroes too often exist in a vacuum. Sometimes it’s appropriate for a character to be a self-reliant loner. Usually, though, I like to have them tied into their social and physical environment. This question can help set the stakes for conflict. It also helps me fill in the world around the character—particularly important when I’m starting a new project.

History: Describe three incidents that set the character on his or her current course.
Fully-fleshed out life stories are overkill. They can also be constricting if you get into too much detail too early in the story process. Picking a handful of important moments is suggestive of the rest of the character’s history. Those moments also help reinforce some of the ideas deployed in answering the other questions. Again, the idea is to solidify the character enough to start writing the story proper. 

Appearance:
Physical descriptions are important. They don’t have to be photographic in their level of detail, but they do need to include the character’s prominent features. I particularly like to think about the character’s voice and way of moving. Those details help me pin down the character’s style. I find that more important than finding exactly the right word for “green” to describe a character’s eyes.

Talents:
For a game, this is where I’d actually think about numbers. For Secret Project, this is just a short list of the special things the character can do. It’s a particularly flexible section, too, because I have no qualms tweaking characters’ skills to make the plot work. Once the plot gets going, I can worry about making these consistent.

Taken together, these questions are helping me through this round of writer’s block…which is good, because drafting material for the project is my assignment for the July edition of #CampNaNoWriMo.

Checking Boxes II

Why Middle School?

My memories of middle school are mostly about bad hair and misery. I spent seven years in Catholic school (for a variety of reasons) and started middle school in seventh grade. I was smart. I was awkward—physically and socially. The only people I knew even a little were some kids I had been in daycare with years before. Academically, there was nothing to challenge me. One day my younger brother and I came home with the same homework. He was in fourth grade; I was in eighth. I became a band nerd and the eleventh-worst basketball player on the B-team. I ran track (poorly). I ransacked the middle school library for anything with swords or dragons.

If I work at it, I can remember most of my teachers from middle school. Few of them made an impression on me—probably not their fault. I came in knowing almost everything in most of their classes. I was a good student, but I was also a terrible student. Those books from the library? I’d sit in the front row of class and just read them. I wasn’t disruptive, but I felt zero need to pay attention.

I had a funny realization, though, as I was finishing up the first of my first two long sub assignments. Out of all the teachers and professors I’ve had, the one whose style I’ve come closest to adopting is my middle school math teacher, Mr. Johnson. I had Mr. Johnson for math and “computers” (this was the early 90s). He made sure we did the work. He answered our questions. As long as the work was getting done and we were learning, he was relaxed about everything else. We played computer games when we were done with our algebra assignments. The favorite among my group was a space trader simulation. You could make the most money transporting drugs, but they could also get you arrested…unless you’d purchased enough guns to defeat the police. We were in eighth grade. It was awesome. (I also played the Moria rogue-like on those back-of-the-room monocolor-monitor computers.)

There were things Mr. Johnson did not have to deal with in a small-town middle school two decades ago. Nobody had cell phones, for one. (I hate them. I really hate them. The only thing I enjoy is the utter disbelief when I show students I still use a flip phone.) That guiding ethos, though… I like that: the work matters. The learning matters. If that stuff is happening, the rest doesn’t have to be a grind. Of course, you sometimes have to make things a grind to ensure that the work and the learning happen.

I started today with “why middle school?” The answer is that interesting things result from both sides of Mr. Johnson’s approach: from pushing the students, and from giving them space. Legitimately interesting things, not just “interesting.” Sometimes they’re awful—to the teachers and to each other—but they’re also growing in every direction at once. Teaching middle school, you get to witness that growth and encourage the directions it takes to be productive.