Weekly Briefing from the North Texas Apocalypse Bunker, 07/12/24

Clod in the Buttermilk edition

Projects that have stalled out are getting a kick in the pants here at the Apocalypse Bunker as we valiantly check things off of our seemingly endless To-Do List. Some of these projects have been writing-related and we are pleased to report that there’s been an uptick in wordsmithing in the Admin’s office lately. Without calling our shot, it would appear that he is climbing out of his depression hole and getting back to work.

We have not quite yet managed to get him into a pair of pants so that he can be seen in public, but we’re taking it one day at a time.

You can tell where I am in my journey of wellness and recovery by observing the amount of growth in the neckbeard. The more there is, the worse off I am…

From the Department of Administration’s Agency of Health and Wellness

Whenever I’m asked to speak on panels and participate in round table discussions about the “craft of writing” or the “writer’s life” or “being an artist in the modern world” I am always the person who speaks pragmatically about creating things and being a creative person. There’s a lot of mythologizing around writers’ lives, thanks to all of the suicides and alcoholics and drug users who also were brilliant at stringing words together into pleasing combinations, so much so that many people feel that in order to be creative, you’ve got to be nuts.

I reject this premise completely, because it’s a slippery slope that eventually leads to writers talking to readers and saying things like, “Well, I WANTED my plot to go one way, but then Lord Crestfall said, ‘no, I want to go over here and raise an army,’ and then I was like, ‘no, you’ve got to rescue the princess,’ and then HE was like, ‘but I don’t even like her,’ and so NOW I’m in the middle of a castle siege, asking myself why I let him boss me around like that.”

There are a couple of things wrong with this entertaining explanation of how to plot a fantasy novel. Other than the obvious seemingly schizophrenic relationship to the other side of your brain, there’s this implied idea that writers don’t come up with their own stuff, and that characters dictate everything. It’s bad enough that the people who don’t value art or expression think that what we do is at best, frivolous, and not worth the time we put into it nor the money we make for it (they are half right). But the people who do value art and creativity are treated to a distorted and intentionally mythologized interpretation of what we actually do.

Doing art is hard. That I know how to write, and that I write well, is beside the point. It’s difficult for me, and I know what I’m doing. It’s impossible for people who aren’t language-oriented, but let me assure you, I look at math problems and consider them to be grim sorcery, and I’ll have none of it. Not everyone is good at the same stuff. It’s okay to not “get” how someone comes up with a story. If we’re being honest with you, we don’t know how it happens, either. But it’s not witchcraft or divine inspiration (not like in the past, anyway). It’s a process, and it’s a feeling, and it’s a means of asking questions, and it’s all smooshed up in our brains in various percentages so that it works, but we don’t usually unpack our own subconscious to try and figure it out.

This means that some writers will default to “Oh, my characters have a mind of their own!” and I wish they wouldn’t do that. I know people want an answer to those questions, but telling the truth, i.e. “I don’t know how I do it,” doesn’t spoil the magic of it. The thing is, I want credit for the work I did. I put in the sweat equity. I read all of those comic books instead of memorizing the books of the Bible. I watched a metric shit-ton of 80s sword and sorcery movies because something inside of me compelled me to. I can’t recall how many hundred of thousands of words I’ve read in other books, for research, just to end up with a one sentence quote. I did all of that. The plot running away from me was my own brain doing it, not Lord Farquardt.

All that being said, there is a causation if not a correlation about creative people being a little bit different, sometimes a little bit “off,” and sometimes just plain out-of-whack. There are a number of things that creative people have to deal with that are by no means unique to writers and artists, but that manifest in such a way that it gets between what I want to do, like write something, and how I go about it. I’ve got a process that I need to do in order to get into that head space. Lots of things affect that head space, like financial issues, work stress, health and wellness, the seasons, what food I ate and when last I ate it, what music is playing, whether or not I’m wearing shoes, and oh, god, I sound nuts, too, don’t I?

We’ve all been there; too tired to cook. Too stressed to concentrate. Too overwhelmed to make a decision. These are problems everyone faces. But there’s a few things that are unique to the creatives in your life, like project completion paralysis, the inability to just finish one damn thing because there’s so many unfinished things; project overload, where you have so much stuff in your head that you’re carrying around, refreshing every day, and keeping straight, that you can’t focus on anything else; and my favorite, where you get so sick of looking at a thing you lose all objectivity and go into autopilot to get it done. There’s nothing worse than feeling like the thing you love doing is slowly driving a screwdriver into your temporal lobe with every strike of the keyboard. It’s transcendent. Really.

I hate that I have to be in a certain frame of mind to create stuff. People who do things like knitting or crocheting often do it while watching TV or listening to music or a podcast. People who run and swim and lift weights can kind of ‘zone out’ and focus on breathing, counting, reps, etc. Other artists can do more than one thing at a time. My buddy John Lucas likes to put on baseball while he draws and inks and makes comic book art.

Writing, conversely, is one of the most isolating creative arts a person can do. I can’t talk to you when I’m writing. I have to suspend the train of thought in my brain to answer even simple questions like, “do you want food?” I can’t even listen to a simple conversation, never mind watching television. It’s not even good for instant gratification. Someone can listen to 30 seconds of your new song, or look at your photograph, or watch you dance, or take in your painting in a heartbeat, but for a writer, you’ve got to sit down and give it your full attention. That’s if someone doesn’t say, apologetically, “Oh, I don’t read.”

It also takes a long time; I’m only as fast as I can type, and that’s when I’ve got a head of steam going and I’m not grasping clutching searching for the right word or turn of phrase, or thinking about what I’m going to say next. That means I go at top speed about 45-50 words a minute. Let’s do the math:

Average 250 words per page (manuscript style) at 50 words a minute? 5 minutes per page. A book 130,000 words long is 520 page, times 5 minutes per page? 2,600 minutes, or nearly 44 hours of typing. Just typing, at full speed. That’s not thinking, planning, drafting, making lists, doing research, or any of the things that are a vital part of the process. And that’s not including the time-wasting, the phone calls, the late-night discussions, the other things you have read that you are attempting to summon to the front of your brain, and all of the rest of it.

When I am in an up cycle, none of that matters. When I am in the dumps, it’s all I can think about: I put in all of this time, this effort, this isolation, and what do I get out of it? Fuck-all, is what. Mind you—that’s magical thinking, and I know it. Of course people read. Yes, they like my writing. I know this, within and without. But there are some days when there’s a blast door over that part of my brain and I just have to remind myself that, even though I can’t see it and hear it, there’s positive reinforcement on the other side of that barricade.

I don’t have any basis for this other than the anecdotal evidence of the large number of fellow writers of all kinds that I know in my life, but it appears to me that writers have the largest number of burnouts and bouts of creative exhaustion. Again, I’m talking out of my ass, here. But I’ve already noted the fatigue has set in from all of the extra media attention being given to our precarious political process. I recognize it, because so many of us went through it from 2016-2020.

It's only this week that I’ve felt enough like myself to be able to pick up my workflow from freaking January of this year. That’s how long this has been a thorn in my ass. Bad enough when you can’t put your finger on your existential ennui, but what’s all the more galling is when you know something’s amiss, you know what’s happening to you, but you can’t come up with the solution to undo what you’ve done.

I’ve got a friend who periodically reaches out to me on social media whenever I go quiet; he sends a quick note, a ‘pulse check’ to make sure I’m okay. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate him checking in, and it always serves to pull me up out of whatever I’m mired in for a few minutes to take breath. When I have the bandwidth, I try to do the same for other folks I know.

Checking in. Taking care of ourselves. Encouraging creativity. What else can we do?

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Weekly Report from the N.T.A.B. Division of Media Review

Note: this was not our idea. Someone in the Admin office made us do this. That is all.

Frogger (NBC/Peacock)

The venerable video game Frogger gets reimagined into an obstacle course show.

Suitable for all discerning fans of dumb slapstick.

I know how this looks, okay? No, it’s not high art. Hell, it’s not even low art. And while my disdain for reality television is well-documented, I do have two points of weakness: Top Chef, which is, to me, the spiritual successor to Iron Chef, and obstacle course shows. This is, of course, nothing new, and goes back to ABC’s Wide World of Sports in the 1970s and with their spinoff show, The Superstars, wherein athletes from different sports would compete in things like track and field and anything else that wasn’t in their wheelhouse. The obstacle course, by my way of thinking, was the great equalizer.

The Japanese versions of Wipeout and Ninja Warrior have always fascinated me, and while some of the American counterparts have been hit or miss, one of the make or break components to these shows is the commentators. This is one of two things that makes Frogger just clear the hurdle to make it an occasional filler show. Damon Wayans, Jr. and Kyle Brandt have just the right blend of snark and the fleeting attention of two bored guys at a bar watching a sport on TV that they could care less about. The other thing that makes this show work is a glancing blow of nostalgia at making an obstacle course with moving cars, logs, and alligators.

It's not highbrow entertainment. But watching someone bounce their head off of a rubberized lily pad and slide into the drink will never not be funny to me. A solid contender for chasing off boredom while you wait for House of the Dragon to drop.

Mark Finn is one of the most opinionated and influential experts on Robert E. Howard in the state of Texas. He’s an author out of largesse rather than as a vocation and writes stories because he can’t play the guitar. He loves gorillas, values a well-placed conversational movie quote, and treasures the picaresque in literature. Annoyed with people’s misunderstanding of popular culture, he took it upon himself to buy a movie theater so he could lord it over every film student on the Internet. He likes to say, “If three people tell you you’re drunk, go lie down.”