Writing as a Diffuse Thinker

Tags

books, camp-nanowrimo, creative-writing, difuse thinking, editing, focused thinking, learning how to learn, Literary, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

I learned the term diffuse thinking from Barbara Oakley in her online course Learning How to Learn which is available for free on Coursera. Recent statistics show that 3.95 million people have enrolled in this course. I have recommended it to many people. It has been a life changer for moi. Diffuse thinking is the daydreaming thinking mode where you play over scenarios. The other mode is direct thinking where you focus on a subject.

In my experience, balanced thinkers, those who can move back and forth between both modes, are most likely to be intellectual leaders. Primarily focused thinkers tend to be called stupid or Dunning Kruger cohorts. They make quick decisions they are sure are correct, yet they are not even capable of challenging their own thoughts because they cannot easily bring other thoughts into their limited memory slots. Focused thinking is physically limited to either 2 or 4 data items while diffuse thinking has access to the whole memory matrix. Diffuse thinkers, or introverts, are considered ineffectual because we cannot make decisions. Back to the balanced thinkers: these people can assess a range of conceptual elements and also make rational decisions.

I am quite capable of being in the focused thinking mode. I was a professional accountant and computer programmer. I now write. I have completed 15 NaNoWriMo novels because of my focused thinking ability. I just have difficulty staying there long and transitioning between that focused mode and my preferred diffuse mode.

When I write or edit, I can easily focus on one aspect or element of my piece, but I cannot easily access my diffuse side while doing so which I believe enables one to multitask. If I want to switch my focus, I need to get away from the piece and let myself drift. When I programmed, I remember many times being stuck on a problem for hours, and no matter how hard I worked, I could not solve it. Frustrated, I would join the smokers outside and chat about random nothings. When I returned to my desk, I inevitably solved the problem with little effort. This happened many times and became my go-to method for problem solving. The other day I laid down for a nap and gave my brain a specific problem to ponder: What is Dave’s transition? I immediately fell asleep, yet I helf-slept, semi-dreaming of Dave and his story. His transition appeared like lightning. I woke up and said, aha! But too often. I may start writing something like this blog post and inexplicably find myself somewhere else like playing a computer game or watching TV or trying to paint or reading a book or making coffee or whatever.

After 60+ years of living in a diffuse world, I think I am very strong in this area. In 1989 I joined a small management consulting firm. They said, John, we have never met anyone like you. We can put you in a strange organization you know nothing about and you can see the problems. You just cannot articulate them well. So they matched me up with balanced thinkers who could do that. I discovered many problems in my three years there and also learned about articulation. I still suck at articulation.

I recently received feedback on a piece of writing. The main point was on my world-building. “I did not feel a sense of place. I was not drawn into your world.”

Fair enough.

That simple comment made on a walk home triggered a slew of sensual reminders. I’ve read through those passages several times and updated them, and each time I did so, I recall feeling lost, that I too had no sense of place. It happened a few other times later in the story. Each time it happened, I passed over my feelings. I was focused on something else, and the importance of the feeling did not overpower my need to stay focused. I’ll look at that later, my internal editor said unconsciously, and I continued on with whatever had my attention.

I’ve reflected on my writing process many times. I am not yet ready to completely delineate it, but it is basically a stepped-down process where I focus on big-picture items before smaller details. Build the bones of the house before plastering the walls.

1. Just write the scene. Have an idea of intent and resistance, but just write it.
2. Define the action, resistance, and outcome. A scene (and story) is objective meets resistance, so what is the main objective, what (up to 3) actions do the MC attempt, and what gets in the way of each? Finally, how do they fail?
3. A tension edit. I examine the wording for its accentuation of tension. This is a big topic, but I look for tension in structure such as every action needs a reaction, every push needs a pull, every colour needs an inverse colour, etc. I examine comparisons and contrasts, direct but-construction resistance, and non-structural oppositions. Does every paragraph and dialogue section have a climax? Do I maintain suspense appropriately? Do I say no without saying no?
4. More nebulous and detailed edits: Efficient wording, sense of place, sense of being, character traits, overuse of words or techniques. Inappropriate use of words or techniques such as stative verbs, illogical participles, pronoun attribution, over-reliance on prepositional phrases, and the rest of the topics found in mostly unread pages of pedantic writing books.

I have tried many times to do step 4 early and have failed. Even step 3. If I am line editing and I see a point of tension that needs strengthening or a missing storyline, my mind will snap itself out of focused mode and begin delving into that missing element. I may even completely forget I had even attempted a line edit. I have learned from hard experience that I have to complete the bigger things before the smalle ones, even if the smaller ones are as important.

This morning I addressed the worldbuilding of my opening scene. The feedback was correct. Reading through it felt very empty. I attacked it with passion and focus and was not pulled away by some bigger issue. I will revisit this scene several more times today and maybe tomorrow as there are things still in my diffuse brain that have not been addressed — the condition of the steel beams if you are one of my readers. But is that even important?

NoNoWriMo (Formerly known as NaNoWriMo) Day 19

Tags

books, chess, fiction, Writing, writing-tips

I am on track! This is my 15th NoNoWriMo (November Novel Writing Month). I did not abandon them, they abandoned me with their misdirected, fishy control endeavours. I don’t pay attention to anything smacking of administration. Being on track is unusual for me. I am typically 3k to 5k words behind by now. It’s that dreaded middle, that wasteland of ideas. I have always struggled to find direction. You’d think I’d have learned by now, but let me tell you something true: writing is hard!

The opening was easy: just follow the Hero’s Journey. The Ordinary Worl, Call To Adventure, and Refusal of the Call are too easy to even talk about. I always rip these off in my novels and my short stories. Meeting the Mentor and Crossing the First threshold are a bit more difficult. For some reason, I do not naturally write this. When I read my notes, they make so much sense, and I write them easily. But, when I freestyle, I don’t get these right. I drift.

I said, I drift. It is one of my weaknesses as a writer. I drift through things. I think most of us do, but I have come to recognize my leanings. I avoid conflict, and talking to a mentor to me is conflict. Do it on your own, Bud. Work it out for yourself. It’s the best way.

If you think that, just close the page and delete your accounts.

It is the Tests, Allies, and Enemies phases that get me. This is where the plot thickens, and thick heads like mine cannot find a good path. If you’ve attempted to write a novel, you know. This middle of the story is a wasteland where authors die. Beginnings and endings are easy. The middle game is hard!

yes, I am also talking about the game of chess. I have played 300 over-the-board games and have achieved a 1900 CFC rating. I know from experience and kibitzing with many chess players. The middle game is the hardest phase. Pawn structures, piece placement and development, space control, center control, and more. All the complexities of the game of chess come together to make finding the right moves the difference between master and class player, between master and IM, between IM and GM, and between GM and world champion. understanding and finding the correct middlegame is what wins most serious chess games.

The same is true for writing novels.

So what are the keys?

1. Understand what story is. Story is objective meets resistance. Thank you Douglas Glover for that wisdom. Thank you genetics for making it hard to sink in.
2. Put things in the way of the protagonist. This is a rewording of point #1.
3. Don’t just put things in the way, don’t just make things difficult, and don’t glide over things. Make things hard! Make things so hard you wish you never began the story.
4. Make things harder. Threaten to name or kill someone. Do something bad like break their legs, steal all their money, or… things I won’t mention in a blog and probably won’t write about. I mean, I write about it, the threat of it, but I won’t write it.
5. Say no a lot without saying no. Keep the tension. You cannot say yes and you cannot say no. You can’t send your incel dweeb home with no hope of ever getting laid. Say, I’m busy, I got things to do, I have a boyfriend. Lie, cheat, steal, but don’t kill the tension you worked so hard to create.
6. Transition. Things change. People have to change. When our characters change (preferably for the better), satisfaction sinks in, the story dons an air of completeness, and hopefully, both reader and author become satisfied.

That’s where I feel like I am. I don’t know my storylines yet, but I know what I need to do. I am staying on track and writing through this most difficult phase with some level of satisfaction. The story is moving forward and the tension is slowly building, if not in words at least in my head. I am sure I missed things.

NoNoWriMo Day 4

Tags

books, creative-writing, editing, fiction, Literary, nanowrimo, novel, Writing

My friends are calling this November Novel Writing Month or NoNoWriMo. It’s a doubletake on the rejection of the NaNoWriMo folks while retaining the spirit of the contest.

Whatever.

I did not write any new scenes on day 4. Instead, I read over what I wrote the first three days, did some research, changed some things in my story, added some things, and reworded some things. The NoNo writers out there are pulling their hair at what I just wrote and screaming: just write the damned thing, you can fix it later!

I’ve tried that. I prefer to have something of at least marginal quality when I begin phase 2. I’d like to have a story that is more or less complete and makes sense. I’ve yet to achieve this goal in 14 NoNos.

I write thin drafts. I try to create a very brief outline of the scene: objective, resistance, and outcome. That’s it. If I have those, I make up the rest on the fly: setting, character, details, etc. As I write, I focus on the big picture, the resistance. Without resistance, there is no story. Story is resistance. As the just-write-it proponents say, write it and worry about the quality later. But I miss things. We all do.

But you have to get that word count up! You don’t want to fall behind!

In the grand scheme of things, word count is at the bottom of my worry list. I’ve won this thing 14 straight times. Don’t lecture me on word count.

So, I am writing a post-apocalyptic dystopian story. I have never read one of these before. I am reading some this month, slowly, painfully, and I am not enjoying most of the short stories I’ve read. The collection is called, Wastelands – The New Apocalypse. I am also dabbling into The Wasteland Saga by Nick Cole. Nothing so far is remotely close to my world. Many of the short stories seem focused on Lesbian relationships. Nothing wrong with that, but they seem like shallow attempts to create drama. I have set a goal to focus on the resistance elements and not so much on character ones. Let character flow out of resistance. Nobody is gay yet, but it is early. I have mentioned monthly orgies.

My writing has been very YA in tone. I have swearing and sex already but nothing explicit. The swearing is mild and warranted. Maybe. Getting the world right has been a challenge. I have to get the water and food right or the whole verisimilitude aspect crumbles like my fictional world. What do people eat in a Doomsday bunker 65 years after the disaster? How do they get water when it hasn’t rained in 65 years? I spent yesterday working things out. I have more research to do.

Yesterday, I wrote 1500 words. Hardly a waste of time.

NaNoWriMo 2024 – Day 1

Tags

books, camp-nanowrimo, creative-writing, First Person, Literary, nanowrimo, novel, reported Speach, Sci-Fi, Voice, Writing

This is my 15th year doing NaNo. It might be my last.

A lot of problems over at NaNoland. All the forums are locked, all the MLs have been fired, and nobody seems to be running the show. Locally, independent Novermber-Write-A-Novel groups have popped up. I’ve seen new websites, new Discord servers, and new chatter. I ignore it all.

I want to write novels, and I want to be good at it. Camaraderie is nice but it’s not necessary. I have my own support network. I take my writing seriously. I am not about to hang a shingle on the big-bad-everything store and claim I’m an author. I will be an author when others insist I am. There is a difference, oh vanity heads. Spending years like I have to learn this trade, I will not be satisfied with my name buried among millions of others with 50 sales a year to family, friends, and people who just want me to go away. So I have chosen my support network carefully. If you do not add to my objective, I will not worry about your existence. NaNoWriMo has never been part of my support network, even though I have won it fourteen times.

I began writing around 2 am this morning. I rifled off a thousand words, thought about them briefly, and went back to bed. I rolled into the kitchen for a coffee as someone was making their lunch. yesterday, I shovelled out my compost bin which was invaded by roots. That’s what I get for not turning it in three years. Anyway, it was good soil, and I hauled 15 large buckets to various gardens, some through the house to the front. *we live in a centre townhouse. My quads and hammies complained all night. I slept well.

So, my novel. It’s a post-apocalyptic wasteland story. No Zombies or vampires, no plagues, no nuclear war, not even conventional global warming, just an interstellar collision that literally changes the world. My Arkansas Doomsday bunker heroes are now living in a desert. Their food and water supplies are exhausted, and so are they. Time to get the hell out. Nothing spectacular but enough of a twist to make it unique.

ChatGPT Generated (laughable) Image

I am withholding twists.

My dilemma this morning is the voice I have chosen. Do I stick with the first-person reported speech or deep dive into a hoard of characters? I have just finished a deep-dive novel that sits at 120,800 words. It’s an alpha version, so more cutting is expected but not much. I began it for NaNoWriMo 2020. I am tired of deep diving. Give me millions of sales and a team of researchers, and I’ll do it again. Maybe. Likely not.

So, an objective is to keep things simple, the prose lean, and the story on a one-line track. I am not sure my voice does that, but at least I only have one voice. I am thinking of Miram Toews‘ novels such as “A Complicated Kindness”, “The Flying Troutmans”, and “The Summer of My Amazing Luck”. Most of her novels, I think, use the first person and reported speech. Very simple voices that attack complex issues. In various online writing groups, I’ve seen posts where such speech is considered too weird. Some say it’s unreadable. I’ve seen it called hack writing. All I can say is these people have never read Miriam Toews, Governor General Award winning author Miriam Toews. The movie adaptation of her book “Women Talking” won an Academy Award plus many other awards!

Still, there would be resistance in Science Fiction and Dystopia readers.

Hell, It’s NaNoWriMo #15. Just do it!

A time nexus in the web of dao

Tags

concurrency, concurrent, congruency, Dune, Frank Herbert, parallelism, participle, past participle, progressive verbs, time nexus, web of dao

I found this grammatically incorrect sentence in the novel Dune by Frank Herbert on page 4, the 2nd page of the narrative in my edition. Yes, I said it. The sentence is grammatically incorrect. We know what it means: the Reverend Mother pushed Paul’s mother out of the doorway, closed the door with a thump, and disappeared. We read it so quickly and quietly that we visualize what is happening and move on. We pass over it without a second thought, or it passes over us and only we remain.

That was a joke, son.

A few writer friends of mine, a couple of who are professional writers, took no exception with the sentence when I asked if they saw anything wrong with it. I’ve followed online conversations on similar constructs elsewhere in the interwebs, and most writers take no exception with what I am about to claim. And this sentence did not bother me in my four or five previous reads of the book dating back to 1979. As far as I can find via searching online, no other reader has questioned this sentence.

I recently criticized a fellow writer’s misuse of participle clauses. I have read about their proneness to logic and congruency errors in grammar books and blogs, and I re-read some of these in preparing my last feedback, so these types of sentences and their problems were fresh in my mind. Frank’s sentence jumped out like a grammatical sandworm, and I cringed. I wondered how such a celebrated author could write such an incorrect sentence, especially as I consider the book extremely well written. I have yet to find other such errors in his writing.

In progressive verb constructions, the -ing verb form is preceded by the helping verb to be – was pushing, was closing. The helping verb was is omitted for each progressive verb here but can be implied: And she was gone, she was pushing his mother out, and she was closing the door with a solid thump.

Another other way of reading this sentence is to refer to the progressive verbs as participles. In this interpretation, it might read, And she was gone while pushing his mother out and while closing the door with a solid thump.

Either way, pushing and closing are in progressive tense. Progressive tense shows action that is ongoing and has not been completed or, in a higher sense, action not necessarily happening then but happens regularly. Their action occurs concurrently with the main verb of the sentence.

One problem with this sentence is that the main verb of the sentence has no action. It is a stative linking verb. The object, gone, defines the state of the subject, she. She was gone. This inactive construct cannot be paired with action verbs as it breaks the rule of parallelism which states that corresponding clauses must have equivalent syntactical constructions. Frank’s sentence is like saying she was dead while washing the dishes and mopping the floor. These things cannot happen.

Likewise, with a thump is an adverb that follows an action, but the thump cannot occur until the door closes. In the sentence, the door is only closing; it never closes. These progressive tense verbs are never completed.

Note: I have not covered the most common error with such sentences, actions that cannot be performed simultaneously. Often writers will write something like while she washed the dishes, she was drying them and opening the window to let fresh air in. It is impossible to wash and dry dishes at the same time, at least not effectively, and it is certainly not possible to open a window at the same time unless you have three hands. In the Dune sentence, it is possible to be pushing someone out and closing the door at the same time. The with a thump clause may make it seem impossible, but it’s the thump that is the problem as stated above and not concurrency logic.

It might seem amazing that Frank could have penned such a sentence, but such errors are missed all the time by both writers and editors. I see them in self-published novels, vanity novels, and even traditionally published novels. I see them in my friends’ writing, and no matter how hard I complain, they keep popping up. Even I am guilty of abusing these constructs. And as I wrote, we all understand what happened, and the sentence is so innocent we read right over it. Who even notices but me?

So how should the sentence read? I like using short, declarative sentences to put actions in sequence:

She pushed Jessica out of the doorway, closed the door with a solid thump, and was gone.

Or

After she pushed Jessica out of the doorway and closed the door with a solid thump, she was gone.

These examples are clear and precise, and the verbs are congruous. There is no ambiguity. But they are also boring! Frank’s sentence is much more condensed and visually impactful, so maybe the sacrificed correctness is worth it. Even though Frank’s sentence grates me, would I change it if I were his editor? Not likely.

One of the main themes in Dune is prescience. The essence of the series is a power struggle over controlling not only seeing the future but controlling time, controlling the future of everyone in the universe. The ultimate power struggle. All three people in this scene, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, Jessica, and Paul are involved in the Bene Gesserit breeding program of the Kwisatz Haderach who is hoped to be the ultimate controller of time. The characters are the director, breeder, and subject respectively.

This sentence exhibits a subtle hint of time-shifting: past, present, and future. It is a meta-sentence where form exhibits the theme. The Reverend Mother was gone, a past tense construct, is the final future event that happened before pushing Jessica out and closing the door in which the solid thump floats timelessly. Perhaps this sentence is one of Frank’s hints of prescience, maybe a time nexus in the web of dao. The early chapters where this sentence is found are rife with subtle hints of prescient abilities and the nature of time. I won’t get into them here as that’s a subject for future blog posts, but if this sentence is also a foreshadowing of time structures, it fits nicely here.

I wish I could read Frank Herbert’s personal notes. Maybe he has jotted marginalia nobody understands. Maybe I have discovered the key to that note.

Regardless of intent, any day of the week I will allow style and substance to override correctness, which is why my Grammarly scores are so low. By the way, neither Grammarly nor Microsoft Word complains about the sentence.

Bill C-18, a fools’ legislation.

Tags

advertising, Bill C-18, CBC, control, CTV, free, Internet, Libtards, links, Open Web, pay for use, paywall, smell of soup, sound of money

Unpaid-for links:

Bill C-18 at Justice.ca

CTV’s Explanation

Read more: Bill C-18, a fools’ legislation.

A Turkish folktale tells of a beggar attempting to capture the smell of a vendor’s cooking soup with his last piece of stale bread. The shopkeeper demanded payment, but the beggar had no money. The town’s judge decided the shopkeeper’s smell of soup should be paid with the sound of money, so he took two coins out of his own pocket and rattled them. Today, the Canadian government has demanded that large internet companies like Meta and Google that share Canadian news content pay news companies for sharing links to their news. It is very much like trying to force them to pay for the smell of soup.

When I share news online, I typically copy the hyperlink to the news story and paste it on my Facebook page. An image and lead are generated. When someone clicks on my post, they are redirected to the news story on the news site. The news story is not copied into Facebook’s post, there is no text, there is no content, there is no plagiarism, and there is no copyright infringement. There is only a hyperlink back to the source material. It is virtually no different than me telling someone verbally, “Hey, check out the news story about Bill C-18 on CBC’s website.” or CTV’s. or The Globe and Mail’s. or wherever I tell them to go. I am not sharing news; I am not printing out the story and peddling it on a street corner; I am just saying, hey, you might want to check it out and here’s where to go. Nobody would ever dream of making me pay CBC for sharing that information. Meta and Google are not sharing news content; they are sharing links to information. Links are the sound of that information.

The free sharing of links is how the internet works. This Open Web concept is deeply ingrained, and it works to everyone’s benefit. Information is made more available and easier to find, discussion, debate, and of course the associated trolling are enhanced, and the world is much more connected than before the web. Bill C-18 levies a price on the sharing of information. Imagine a world where all links need to be compensated. It would be the end of the Open Web as we know it.

If you do not want your online presence freely shared, you build your own paywall (or firewall) to control the flow and sharing. Anyone is free to do this. It is your information, you can control access to it. You can even prevent sharing of it. You can tell your internet service to only accept direct requests and block any hits from other sites. This is rarely done, because sites want traffic. News sites do not do this because they want as many visits as they can get.

*Did you know that copying a news article for a school paper or project is considered plagiarism but sharing a link to the source is not? That’s because a link is the sound or smell of information, not the information itself.

Proponents of the C-18 Bill complain that Meta and Google earn money from sharing news links through advertising revenue and have become multi-billion-dollar companies doing so, but Canadian news providers are struggling to exist. It’s unfair for Meta and Google to earn money on the backs of news companies’ links.

And why should Meta and Google have to pay for only news material? Why shouldn’t they have to pay me for my blog articles? I’ve had a few hits; I’ve generated revenue for Facebook and Instagram. Why should they not pay me for the images I create? And why not pay me for my opinions and local observations? I mean, dozens of hits are generated every time I post something of my own. Why shouldn’t they pay me for discussing American football or nutrition science or the latest political cretin’s speech? My activity makes them money. Shouldn’t they share their ad revenue with me?

If every link had to be paid for, that would be the end of the internet as we know it. Do I really need to say any more? An internet where every link needs to be compensated is the opposite of open sharing. Bill C-18 is on one hell of a slippery slope.

I am not against earning money with web content. Many do it. Meta and Google are multi-billion dollar companies because of it. But money, whether it is advertising, a paywall, or sales should be generated at the source of the information. If Canadian news services are struggling, they need to look at their own practices. We cannot suffer an ignorant government breaking the internet.

Have you visited CBC’s website? CTV’s? any Canadian newspapers? How much advertising did you find? How many paywalls did you hit? I visited many sites. Some sites like the Telegraph Journal in New Brunswick are fully paywalled, some sites like the Globe and Mail have paywall restrictions where you have to pay for premium content, some sites have some advertising but nothing like in American news sites, and some news sites have any no advertising at all, including CBC and CTV, Canada’s two biggest news sources. Why don’t news companies in Canada advertise? Is it too demeaning? Is it too American? Does it make their pages ugly? Why should they receive money from Meta’s advertising efforts when they won’t do any of the work themselves?

There will be unintended consequences of such a bill.

• The biggest risk is other governments will try the same. Give this movement enough momentum, the free sharing of information could be in jeopardy. The internet as we know it today could cease to exist and we’d be living in a glorified 1970’s view of the world where only the wealthy can afford to find anything online.
• Have you ever seen online robot posts? I am in some Facebook food groups, and every such group has robotic members that constantly post recipes that are found on their own pay-for-view sites where their advertisers pay for hit frequency – the more people that visit their page the more they earn. These fake accounts generate massive amounts of links to their site. Once Meta and Google are required to pay for the sound of news, you can be sure the pernicious news providers – and according to many conspiracy theorists, CBC is the most pernicious – will create robotic accounts to generate post after post after post to their content. Why would Meta and Google make a contract for something like this that they cannot control?
• And why just Meta and Google? Why shouldn’t everyone who shares news links have to pay? Email a news link to friends, and your email provider should be charged; post a link in a blog, and the blog host should have to pay — if that were the case, I sure wouldn’t be allowed to post the two informative links at the top of this blog; text news to a friend, and your phone company should have to pay; yell the story from a street corner, cough up some cash. When sharing services have to pay, we’ll all have to pay. Again, the free-sharing of information would come to an end.
• Pick-and-choose laws like this will not stand up in court. If you apply a standard of payment to one service or industry, you are obligated to apply that standard to all such services and industries. It cannot be done without destroying the open web, and hopefully, this bill will die in the first court it gets challenged in.

The World Wide Web was designed for the free sharing of information and links. It has enabled access to huge audiences for information providers, and companies like Google and Meta have certainly cashed in on that accessibility. But don’t punish success; only we users will suffer.

Meta and Google have greatly expanded traffic to news provider sites. If news organizations are struggling to survive, maybe they should try advertising on their own sites and maybe they should be expanding their own online presence.

Meta has done the right thing by not allowing links to news for Canadians. If the Canadian government wants to charge them for the link to news, Meta has said we’ll pay you with the sound of clicks. It cannot allow a journey down this dark path to a paywalled web.

Inflation – Good Luck Fed!

Tags

commodities, demand, economics, equillibrium, gas, Inflation, oil, prices, supply, wages

Inflation is making the news, but nobody seems to have a firm handle on what is causing it and how it will play out. Many have said supply disruptions due to Covid are the reason. It is certainly a concern. In the summer of 2020, I watched the price of a 2×4 stud rise from C$4.25 to C$12.50 because mills had been shut down. I looked a while ago and saw them at $4.28. As I type this, they are back up to $8.89 as lumber prices have soared again. If you listen to conservatives in America, it’s all Joe Biden’s fault for his support programs and infrastructure bills. Valid points, but while these do add inflationary pressure, they are not nearly enough to drive us into the 5% range let alone the 10% range which we are now beginning to see.

Inflation is the general increase in consumer prices at an unhealthy level. Our capitalist economies are founded on the principle of growth: we need to grow. You see this message everywhere. Our GDP is expected to grow by a healthy 2% next year. We need to bring in more immigrants so our city can grow. Whether this is right or wrong is a topic I won’t discuss further here. It is what it is.

Picture the economy as a train locomotive. It chugs relentlessly along the tracks transporting goods and making our lives great. But sometimes forces push this growth train a little too fast and if not curtailed, it runs out of control. A runaway train is inflation: prices rise then workers say we need more pay. When the workers have more, they spend more, prices rise, and the workers demand even more pay. And the cycle continues, chug, chug, chug, unabated until someone slams on the breaks.

The main tool our western governments use to slow down the inflationary train is interest rates. Wait a minute, both consumers and producers say, the cost of doing business just got higher. The cost of owning my home just got higher. The cost of borrowing to buy that new car just got higher. You want that much for using my credit card? Well, I’m cutting it up. High-interest rates throttle back demand, and prices eventually stabilize. At least that’s the theory. It worked in the 1980s, but my goodness it hurt. People were faced with 18% mortgage rates and 20% or higher credit card rates. People lost homes and went bankrupt. Businesses disappeared. But it stopped inflation in its tracks. Governments around the world are contemplating raising interest rates to dampen the current growth.

Our current inflation is not due to a runaway train. We are at the tail end of a pandemic and economies around the world are nowhere near their pre-pandemic levels. There has not been a robust let alone over-robust economic cycle to fuel inflation, yet stock markets have risen quite high, commodities have soared, and consumer prices and wages are steadily rising. We are also seeing wage increases.

One of the acknowledged forces driving inflation is supply. In supply and demand theory when you reduce supply, prices rise. If you watch car shows you’ll see comments like, oh, they produced a hundred thousand of those things, they aren’t very rare, I’ll pay you five-hundred bucks for it. Yet for the next car, you might hear, oh, they only made fifty of those, and I can’t afford to buy it from you. When supply of a product or service is low, people are willing to spend more to acquire it. This is because of competition. Picture a hundred people trying to buy the last loaf of bread and perhaps the last loaf any of them will see for a month. The person willing to spend the most for the loaf would get it. A bidding war. Then picture a single person wanting to buy a loaf from a store with shelves full of spoiling bread. Here, take two. When you lower supply, you make your goods rare and the price for it rises.

Raising interest rates will have no effect on this inflationary force. As I have shown, raising interest rates curtails demand, but it has no effect on short supply. If anything, it makes goods more expensive to make and lowers supply further. If we have closed lumber mills, do we really want to make it harder for companies to open them back up by increasing their cost of borrowing? And we do see this hesitancy in central banks around the world. Talk is we will see modest rates but no striking rises.

Supply has been reduced for several reasons. The main one is Covid. Besides lumber mills and operations, we have seen poultry and beef processing plants shut down for periods in Canada. These shutdowns reduce supply. We’ve seen international workers unable to travel. A friend of mine works in the mining industry, and what is normally a busy life of international travel has become a sedentary life of reading books and sipping bourbon. Meanwhile whatever he digs from the ground isn’t getting dug. Raw material production and manufacturing are coming back, but supply around the world is still low. Keep in mind, the USA is now largely open for business, but it’s the only country in the world that is. Most nations are still living with restrictions that reduce supplies. Again, raising interest rates will not get people back to work to reduce these inflationary forces.

There is an oil shortage in the world and while some of it may be due to Covid and even diminishing reserves, most attribute it to diminished exploration. And most attribute this reduced exploration to environmental concerns. The rabid environmentalists view oil as evil, and much money has been redirected away from oil. Group pensions for example not investing in oil companies to appease their members. Anyway, you can read a lot about this and I won’t get into the details. The only point I want to make is that oil supply shortages are here, will likely remain, and this is an incredible inflationary force. Everyone, even the rabid environmentalists, uses products made from oil.

The final force at play, and perhaps the most significant and least understood, is the money supply. The basic premise is the more money there is in the economic system, the more there is to spend, and this equates to increased demand for goods and services. It pushes the demand curve upward on the supply and demand graph and the equilibrium price follows. Inflation. If I put an extra $1,000 in your pocket, you are going to buy more of whatever it is you buy. You might go for a few extra meals, you might go on a vacation, you might buy whatever. And you might stow it away for a rainy day. Give it to someone else to invest and then hopefully pay you for that down the road. Mutual funds are the primary investment tool today as interest-bearing securities pay nothing anymore. But all that does is shift money around. It temporarily takes it from your pocket and moves it to someone else’s. That investment firm you gave it to bought shares in companies. More increased demand for those shares makes their prices rise, so the value of your mutual funds rise. Then buddy down the road cashes in his gains and buys a new car. The lines are not always clear but rising money supply results in increased demand which raises prices.

The problem for inflationary control is this money supply will be spent regardless of interest rate hikes. It’s out there in the system and fundamentally equates to permanent demand. It needs to be spent and it will be spent, interest rates be damned.

In March 2020 the U.S. Federal Reserve bought some $12 trillion worth of bonds. That basically means they pumped that much money into the economy. They created an extra $12 trillion out of nothing as shown in the M1 money supply graph. That’s $12 trillion that needs to be spent. Now M1 is not the best measure, and this amount is somewhat hyperbolic. A more meaningful measure is the M2 money supply. It only rose about $3 trillion at that time. Still, that’s a lot of coin to be spent. And they haven’t stopped. The latest numbers show M1 up about $4 trillion more, and M2 up about $1.5 trillion. That’s a $4.5 trillion movement of the demand curve upward. Prices have to follow.

Not only has the U.S. federal reserve thrown gas on the inflationary fire, but so have policymakers around the world. Every country has expanded and extended unemployment programs, given out business support loans and grants, implemented infrastructure programs, business incentive programs, and other unplanned incentives to kickstart their economies. Yes, they were needed to stave off mass unemployment, starvation, home loss, and general rioting, but they added to the inflationary train push. Many of us have been sitting around, paying down our debts, and waiting to get back to spending mode. And when we all do, it will be with a vengeance. Kinetic inflationary pressure is put into play. We’re just getting started down this very steep inflationary slope.

This current inflation is not due to a runaway train but a fundamental shifting of the supply and demand curves. The supply curve can and will eventually be corrected back to equilibrium levels, but it will take time. Many nations that supply raw materials have very low vaccine rates. Oil shortages are now pretty much entrenched until greenhouse energy takes over or more oil is found and exploited. At today’s prices, the monetary incentive is there for it if the environmental appeasement isn’t. Most importantly, the excess money created will remain created. This is a demand-pull that cannot be easily shifted back without taking money out of the economy. And nobody wants depression. In my opinion, it’s a perfect inflationary storm, so hold on tight.

National Poetry Month: another PAD completed

Tags

PAD, poetry

2021 is my 10th completion of Robert Lee Brewer’s Poem A Day (PAD) challenge. That’s 300 poems written. I also do most of Robert’s weekly prompts, most of his November PADs, and I write poems on my own, occasionally. A conservative estimate is maybe 80 poems a year (30+30+20) over ten years or 800 poems.

800 poems in a life is a lot of poems. 800 in a decade may seem excessive. Really though, it’s hardly enough. I do not call myself a poet. I write poetry to learn about writing, about poetry but also prose. To me, poetry is focused wording, focused imagery, condensed lyricism. I consider myself a prose writer, and I want to have lyrical elements in my stories, I want strong imagery, I want to tell stories without telling them, all things poetry does.

Usually I am happy with something like a dozen of my 30 poems during these events. This month I was happy with two. Here is one of them.

All Our Futures

It’s not so much he only cared for himself
          some of the greatest leaders, inventors, and innovators were narcissists
it’s not so much his morality was lacking
          even the holiest can have their bad days
it’s not so much he stole all their money
          they would have just wasted it anyway
it’s not so much he lied through his teeth
          who hasn’t told a fib now and then?
it’s not so bad he cheats at golf
          really, who hasn’t kicked his own ball back in the fairway?
what’s so bad is he stole so many minds
          when truth is denied, the future is lost

The prompt for the day was Villain. It employs the rhetorical device called Anaphora which is the repetition of words at the begging of each phrase or sentence. Anaphora emphasizes each phrase and adds effective rhythm. The poem is a commentary on the present day political divide. Of course it’s aimed at #45, but he is such an easy target. Most of the literary world is against him, most who read widely are against him, so of course people liked this poem. I am not happy with the last line as it’s a retelling of the 4th line. But even if I change it, this is still a rather trite poem. I feel no inclination to expand or polish it. It was fun to write, but it will likely die in my cloud.

Most of my poems this month were rather prosaic. I’ve been reading Billy Collins’ poetry and he has a rather conversational narrative style. If you’ve never read him, please do so. He’s inspired my month of bad poems. I am afraid I fail at emulating his style.

I don’t yet know if I am happy with the following poem, but I had fun writing it. I won’t know if I’m happy with most of my poems until I put them to bed and wake them up some months later. Maybe in late summer I’ll discover a line or phrase, maybe a whole stanza, maybe a whole poem or even a series of poems that demand further work. But that time is not yet here. So just read it and feel my brain churn as I wrote this mess. It is an untitled Ekphrastic poem

There is a woman in it
that much I am sure of
the rest of it is, well
a mess is the easy euphemism.

She might be holding a vase
A rat gaping at cherries — or is that a fish?
Or an English hedgehog —  
and leaping from the white glass.

Only the woman and the vase,
the hedgehog, a rose, something
that looks like an otter’s head
and cherries are white, all else is blue

With bits of green, yellow,
and blobs of red. The tall stalagmite —
or maybe it’s a cactus or a stalk —
has two giant strawberries

Not dangling like normal strawberries
but embedded like stained glass
you can’t even see through, any of it
all of it, abstract and senseless.

That otter sniffing the rose
which is held by the red stumpy
watermelon man with no rind
and drips down on two men

Yellow, watching a backwards elephant
sneeze laundry and kites, and a green
elephant at the bottom sniffing Australia
which is also green so you know it has to be not real, But it’s the giant cargo ship
thrusting out of a map Puget Sound
like an alien from a belly that the girls attention.
You know it has to mean something.

The painting I wrote to is by Chelle Stein and can be found at her blog,

There is one poem I am quite pleased with. I am so happy with it, I already submitted it to the 2021 Canada Writes Poetry Contest. When I don’t win that, I will submit it somewhere for publication. Rattle Maybe. I did not post any of it at the PAD site, and I am not posting any of it here. It needs to remain unpublished. It is my practice to not publish my good poems online. It’s immediate disqualification for most literary considerations. Sorry.

I wrote this fantabulous poem to the prompt Waiting. It was April 17th so about ten days after the completion of The Masters golf tournament. I immediately pictured the pro golfers standing on Augusta’s 12th tee looking up at the tree tops and waiting for the wind to let up long enough to put their ball on the green instead of into Ray’s Creek. Oh the drama! The night before I had watched PBS’s Poetry In America episode on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem One Art. I fell in love with this poem, and I had the Villanelle form firmly implanted in my head. I wrote a first stanza, said “Dang, this is strong,” and I quickly opened Rhyme Zone. It then sucked five days out of my life, I quickly sought and found some feedback from the Seaside Scribes writing group I belong to, and I zipped it up tight and sent it off. I think it is a solid poem, a real solid poem, but it’s about golf and it’s about the esoteric struggles a golfer faces on the course with his friends in the wind. A golfer will love it. A poetry judge may just say, “Huh?”

I did not so much have fun this month as push through with my head down. I wrote a poem or two every day, I posted most, and I filled 37 pages of my current poetry journal. As I work away at my novel, I feel myself trying to write richer prose, so in that regard it’s a success.

Hey You! [my personal pronoun]

Tags

mainsplain, male, mansplainer, peronsal pronouns, poetry, Politically correct, pronouns, social media, white, white male, Workshop, Writing, Zoom

I attended a writing workshop yesterday. On Zoom. It was hosted by the University of Manitoba which is, according to that search engine and map, 3,178 kilometers from my home and a 33 hour drive. The proposed route leads me across Quebec from Montréal to Timmins ON, a route I would never consider driving in winter let alone summer. So make that a 40 hour drive. But I digress. I attended a pretty good workshop I probably never could have attended before the pandemic.

I’ve come to love Zoom. I am on calls every week, and it’s my only contact outside my home and Pete’s Fruitique in the City Market where buddy calls me Buddy: “Hey Buddy, is that everything?” I find myself wanting to tell him my name: “I am not your buddy.” Like a woman saying, “I’m not a deer!” And then last week a young lady was in the checkout line ahead of me and buddy said to her, “Hey Buddy, is that everything?”

Over Zoom, I’ve come virtually face-to-face with people in Ontario, Mexico, Portugal, Egypt, New York, Tennessee, North Carolina, Victoria BC, Toronto, Nairobi — I bet nobody else has had a Kenyan Cow bomb their Zoom meetings! — and now Winnipeg (and wherever these participants lived.) *One of them actually lives in my city. I didn’t know them and made friends with them on Facebook during the call. They could literally be my neighbour, met 3,178 km away.

Anyway, the Zoom writing workshop was on poetry and was led by a graduate student who I believe identifies as gay. His bio contained several LGBQ keywords, and… whatever. He seemed qualified to lead it, so I joined. Honestly, I don’t care about people’s sexual leanings. What you do is your business, and what I do is mine. It’s something we don’t need to talk about.

The session had about a dozen participants: the young, gay-identifying leader who had a trim beard, more than a single screen of participants I would describe as female, a couple of pictures with no picture at all but with female names, and me, the now senior-citizen-white-male. I like to know people. I am a people watcher. I am a people voyeur. I want to know everything about everyone. So I typed the full names (some used only their first name to keep stalkers like me off their tail) into Facebook search to see what came up. The first thing I noticed when I began reading the participants’ names were pronouns in parenthesis after their names, such as “Janet Smith (she/her).”

Cute, I thought, but why? I could find suitable pronouns to match their names/pictures, couldn’t I? I acknowledged that my visual cues might be incorrect, that one of these John-identified-females might actually identify as… whatever. Like sexual leanings, your personal sexual identification doesn’t concern me. Then, as my mind tends to do, I played out conversations that might take place where I might use these pronouns. “She said this, but I disagree.” I shook my head. These were conversations I would not undertake.

The leader gave his — his was his chosen personal pronoun, or I would have written their — housekeeping rules. Good leader! I rarely give any rules in my meetings. In fact, I tell participants in my prompt-writing there are no rules. Anyway, he said please pick your personal pronouns. I watched the remaining screen names expand to include “(she/her/they/etc.)”. I wasn’t sure what he was asking. Pick my own pronouns? The Paul Simon song, “You Can Call Me Al,” played through my head. I did not change my name.

This was a new experience for me. I assume the participants who had their pronouns already designated were familiar with this exercise. Extrapolations ran through my head. Is this some new practice being adopted in social media? I haven’t seen bracketed pronouns in any of my social media circles: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Zoom. Should I look closer? Is this a trend? If I ever get business cards printed, should I add my pronouns to my name and title? John Hanson, Writer. (Male binary he/him/his) My brief research since then indicates this is more of an academia and workplace practice. I am not involved in either.

The leader scanned his screen, probably saw that I had no personal pronouns designated, then went into a spiel about how to change your name in Zoom. And he/him looked right at me on the screen! I bet he/him thought I was the socially ignorant white senior male just getting his feet wet in social media — we will ignore the fact that I began using email around 1987, was a BBS junkie in the early nineties before finally getting on the internet in 1994, and have coded many complex websites and applications in my previous career. I sighed deeply and appended “(hey you!)” to my name. No, I don’t give a shit what you call me. I am the white, senior-citizen mansplainer stuck in his tropes. I have a dozen participants to refer to, to pick pronouns for, but I have trouble finding words to say about subject matter at the best of times. I have no time in a discussion to scan all the names to be politically correct. “I think the volta is this line, and I think… just a sec… her… no, she was wrong.” I have come to use “they” when referring to anyone: they/them/theirs. If they/them/their bothers you, I can’t wait to read your blog.

During the two hours and fifteen minutes, only one reference was made to another participant by a participant, and they used the person’s name. The leader referred to several of us but always used our names or the pronoun you. “What did you think of that?”

Nobody said, “Hey you!” to me.

Black History Month 2021

Tags

Adichie, Black Author, Black History Month, books, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half a Yellow Sun, reading

I try to read a black-authored book during February., and it bothers me. It bothers me because I have to even protest such nonsense. The nonsense: why we cannot treat everyone the same. But I do. It’s not so much to add my voice to any protest but to reaffirm in myself that racism is a problem and if you’re not part of the solution … I suppose this is my meager contribution to solutions. I have countered many many idiots who claimed I need to watch better news or buy a gun or whatever nonsense they were spewing with my advice, “try reading a book.” I am convinced if we all became regular and varied readers, we’d all by much better off.

In the past few years for BHM I have read Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, Henry Louis Gates Jr’s Colored People, W.A. Spray’s The Blacks of New Brunswick, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and the short story collection Children of the Night edited by Gloria Naylor. I read all but Dhalgren for the purpose of reading black authors. Last year it was the end of February and I said damn, I should really read a black author. Then I stuck my head back into that beast of a book and never minded who wrote it. That’s a good thing, right? When you don’t even notice who the author is? It wasn’t till I got to a part he talked about a gang with blacks and whites in it and nobody cared that I realized he was black and I laughed at myself.

Black authors I’ve read outside of BHM. I think this is an important point to make. I read books for many reasons, and except for BHM, I do not read or pan books based on the author’s demographics, values, politics, religion, or anything else. I read Ender’s Game knowing full well the author was a bigot. I read Ayn Rand knowing full well that she was a nutcase. I am sorry to say I have to search for black authors I’ve read outside of BHM: Andre Alexis’ Fifteen Dogs, Lawrence Hill’s The Illegal, Adwoa Badoe’s Between Sisters, Alice Walker’s The Way Forward Is A Broken Heart, and of course Toni Morrison: Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula. I plan on reading more Morrison this year.

For 2021 I am reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. This has been high on my TBR list anyway, and I think I can honestly say I am not reading this because she is black. I am reading it because she’s been highly recommended by a literary friend and it’s long past the time I gave her a go. I have also watched a number of her YouTube videos where I have learned things about racism that I did not know. For example, I no longer ask people of color where their ancestral home is. I only did that because of their skin color and accent, but I never did that for new white friends. I know Adichie is a very intelligent and gifted writer and I am really looking forward to this read, especially after reading the first page: … how the bungalows here were painted the color of the sky and sat side by side like polite, well-dressed men … Yeah, this author can write!