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Day 3: Purple Sky of Towering Clouds Over a Far-off City

Day 6: Appreciating Difficulty, Harnessing its Momentum

Day 7: The Word for World is Earth

Day 8: It’s About The Dreaming, Not The Dream

Day 9: Moments of Presence: CWC Interview (Writer Laura Goode)

Moments of Presence: Writer Laura Goode

September 9, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

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Laura Goode and I studied Creative Writing together ten years ago, and have several mutual friends, but had never really met or talked shop — until now!

Check out the latest episode of Coffee with Creatives to hear Laura’s take on such topics as:

How to juggle multiple projects, of varying genre or medium
How to find ways to get credit for stuff you’re going to do anyway
Why it can be a blessing to fail early — or a curse to succeed early
Why she took two years to develop the script for her indie feature film, Farah Goes Bang, along with the film’s director and co-writer Meera Menon
The process of raising over $80,000 in production funds for Farah Goes Bang, in the earlier days of Kickstarter
The fallacy of the lottery ticket mentality in film, literature and elsewhere
Respecting political conservatism within a liberal-friendly narrative, and
How a five year fight with a friend led to the publication of Become A Name, her first book of poetry

If you enjoy this episode, read Become a Name, watch Farah Goes Bang, and follow Laura on Twitter.

As reminders, you can also subscribe to Coffee with Creatives on iTunes and/or support the podcast on Patreon.

It’s About The Dreaming, Not The Dream

September 8, 2016September 8, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

This is part eight of a thirty day trial, during which I am going to write and publish a post every day. No refunds. Comments welcome and encouraged!

—

Big yellow thing in sky wake up Michael from dream.

I slept soundly. I dreamed, but memories of those dreams elude me.

I can feel them still, the dreams, lingering in the fog of the morning. They recede, though.

It always saddens me, to lose a dream, or to be in the process of losing one. It doesn’t often happen, does it, the way it does with other memories — we can often ultimately find our way back to an unremembered fact, or name, or other such thing.

It’s rarer to snatch a dream from the depths of forgetfulness.

They’re too ethereal, aren’t they? But still we reach for them. I do at least. I want to remember my dream.

The process, if not the result, feels important. Dreams always feel just a bit more important, somehow, than mere facts.

The memory of the dream, that it had been there, disappears rapidly now. I’ve been up for several minutes. The sun has burned from red to orange. I’ve been sipping tea.

The day begins, and the dreaming ends — at least, the real pure stuff — until tonight.

But we can dream awake, can’t we? We can relax back, and breathe, and wander through our mind, and grasp after strands of what comes more readily to us in sleep.

This helps, I think. Pursuing dreams awake.

And I don’t mean striving after goals, necessarily. I’m talking about keeping up with that pursuit, that chasing after what lit up our minds and souls while all else was quiet — however fruitless such efforts might prove.

There’s something about dreams — even, I think, those dripping with the stuff of fear — that soothe us.

Their poetry simplifies, clarifies, by mixing the usual and the understood with the distinctly familiar but unknowable. In this way, despite their frequent opacity, despite our inability to break them down into the rational, the actionable — dreams ground us. Don’t they?

I think they do, if we let them. If we continue the chase, continuing trying to hold on, at the same time that we acknowledge that dreams are temporary, fleeting, insubstantial.

No wonder we grasp after them, in the waking world. And yet it seems fitting that the grasping should go on, rather than the dream. Perhaps the dreaming itself is more the point, and the pursuit, of the most-personal of stories, than the content.

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Day 3: Purple Sky of Towering Clouds Over a Far-off City

Day 6: Appreciating Difficulty, Harnessing its Momentum

Day 7: The Word for World is Earth

The Word for World is Earth (Day 7 of 30)

September 7, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

This is part seven of a thirty day trial, during which I am going to write and publish a post every day. No refunds. Comments welcome and encouraged!

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There’s a chill in the air, this morning. Fall approaches.

I like the fall. I like every season, I think, when it first arrives. There’s something about the change of season that seems built into our DNA, into our long, deep relationship with the world.

I wonder what it must feel like, to have the timing of seasons switched or shuffled — to move from one side of the world to another for an extended period of time. Perhaps one gets used to it, when it’s a long-term shift, the quarterly change more ultimately important than any one order of change at any one time.

I was thinking about Earth yesterday.

I’m reading a book — The Word for World is Forest — by the incomparable Ursula K. Le Guin. It’s a science fiction novel, taking place in a universe where man has traveled to, has even evolved separately on, planets across the universe. Like any good works of science fiction, however, Le Guin’s books reflect our own world more than its fictional counterpoint(s).

I encountered this one moment in the book, in reading before bed last night, wherein a main character is reflecting upon the legacy and etymology of our planet. Specifically, he notes the shared name, Earth/earth, that we have given to the world based on the stuff of which it is comprised.

While this particular book appears concerned, like some others in the genre, in raising question of ecology and sustainability, Le Guin often has a beautiful knack for distilling her environmentalist and/or her humanist warnings into fine examples not necessarily of direct warning — but of the beauty, that would be lost, if we aren’t careful.

That small detail, that the character in question would be so touched in recollecting the similarities between his home world, and the one on which the story takes place — where he lives as an alien, and where the native word for the lush wooded planet on which the book takes place is the same as their word for forest — stands out all the more acutely, when combined with the fact that the future Earth of Le Guin’s universe in the book, is a place nearly barren of vegetation.

A place no longer itself, if we are to follow with the example of identifying name with substance of origin.

There are a few ways in which this can be viewed, I think. To be sure, it’s a warning to think conservatively, economically, about ecology, to consider sustainability. The fact is, there’s a very real possibility that we’ll deplete this planet’s resources beyond their ability to safely sustain human life — before we’re ready and able to spread to other planets. Count me among those concerned with this possibility.

In the more immediate sense — though linked to this larger scenario — there’s the question of natural and unnatural (human/technological) change.

How do we view and compare the change of seasons, the relationship of man to Earth, when our lives are increasingly dependent not only on food, water and shelter — but also information?

Has it always been so? Are we humans simply maximizing efficiency, reaching new heights of speed and achievement as a social species? Or have our technologies set us on a path towards the super-human?

There’s a side to that second possibility that seems romantic, given our current obsessions with youth, virility, long-livedness and physical or mental perfection.

Who wouldn’t want to be super-human? And yet, in pushing the boundaries of the natural, are we dooming ourselves to an eventual loss of the very humanity we originally sought to embody, protect, and maintain?

So long as we remain mammals that need food, shelter, water — even as we strive further and further away from these basic needs and responsibilities in terms of focus, leaving behind whole swaths of the world population in the pursuit of knowledge — we remain, at our core, naturally human. But do we endanger this core identity, as we continue to grant equal or greater importance to other, less intrinsic needs, both on the personal and societal levels?

I don’t know. I have tended towards more optimistic views, in recent years. I want to believe the change of seasons will always remain generally the same, that as we strive and leverage the gifts of this planet and of science — that we will continue to enable ourselves to focus more completely on what it means to be human, to pursue knowledge and civilization as we make living easier through technology.

But there are warnings that we could, collectively, yet fail at this.

I also worry about apparent shifts in the seasons, no doubt at least a combination of human intervention as well as natural flux. I still worry about general trends that put the greed of the few ahead of the needs of the many.

Despite my hopefulness, it still sometimes seems just as possible that we’ll eventually face of day of reckoning, in regards to our relationship with this Earth, which we deign to have mastered but will always, more accurately, depend upon for everything.

We are of this beautiful place. It deserves our due respect, our love.

—

Day 3: Purple Sky of Towering Clouds Over a Far-off City

Day 6: Appreciating Difficulty, Harnessing its Momentum

Appreciating Difficulty, Harnessing its Momentum (Day 6 of 30)

September 6, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

This is part six of a thirty day trial, during which I am going to write and publish a post every day. No refunds. Comments welcome and encouraged!

—

This script in the process of being razed and re-built upon the holy site of its death. — This script is in the process of being razed and re-built upon the holy site of its own prior destruction.

I’m trying to employ an appreciation for difficulty.

It’s been coming up often, lately, as I go about discovering and pursuing “next steps”, following completion of The Videoblogs.

I’m still gathering energy, still resting, after the insanity of the last few years spent producing the film. I think I mentioned that on Day 1 of this project.

I need to do this. But I can’t burn out. I don’t want to burn out. It will prevent me from doing this.

Such have been my thoughts, in summary.

But I also don’t want to remain static. So, I’ve been working, slowly, on The Next Thing.

The idea behind The Next Thing is big. Unwieldy. Complex. Every time I think I have the core of it figured out — I think again, and realize that I’m just not there yet. The puzzle pieces continue to fall into place.

While they do, life goes on. I remain, overall, still feeling a bit low on creative energy. I find myself having to spend wisely.

The sheer amount of energy it takes to both buttress The Next Thing against feelings of fear of failure and despair — such that it might grow and thrive, away from such poison — and yet also allow the ideas behind it the mobility and mutability they need to develop organically…is great.

Under ideal circumstances, this project would be my only focus right now, other than matters of general living. But not only aren’t circumstances ever ideal (and to be fair, in actuality they could be far more difficult) — I’m not even sure that space is what the idea needs.

And so, we return to the role of difficulty in all this.

I use the term loosely, to be clear. When I say “difficulty” I mostly mean anything that it might be easy to decry as being “in the way” of whatever The Next Thing might be.

Daily responsibilities. Commitments of livelihood. Fears and insecurities, or the historical traumas or inherited circumstances that feel always out of our power (because they are) but also firmly in the way of pursuing or addressing what we know or believe we need to pursue or address.

As I have gotten a little older, however, I’ve grown more able to appreciate these challenges for what they are — steps on the journey. Small victories or failures for re-feeding life what it needs in order to access and process the mysterious part of me, or of us, that engenders creativity or otherworldly exploration.

More than space, for me at least, ideas need time, and life-stuff to chew on.

Yesterday, I focused on presence. On not only practicalities (What Needed to Get Done) but relaxation, and needs of the body and spirit. At one point, an important piece, of the puzzle that is The Next Thing, seemed to fall into place.

Later, I questioned whether that piece was the right fit.

This is common. What excites us as a real breakthrough in a project, creative or otherwise, can sometimes fail us later on in its lifecycle (as soon as a couple of hours or minutes). This can be disappointing, but with practice I have learned that it’s all simply part of the process of ideation and iteration.

Whereas in the past, I would have brooded on such a “failure”, now I am able, usually, to mourn the excitement of the idea and to leave the rest to tomorrow, when perhaps I’ll have the proper perspective to identify the new strand of the idea as neither the one piece of the puzzle that brings it all into focus, or a completely false match.

It’s rarely one or the other, despite what we might want, or how we might have been led to believe it at works, in mine of any other profession.

I have a different measure, now, of progress. When that moment arrived yesterday, I went deep into the idea. I explored it fully. The process lasted minutes, but afterwards I felt changed. I felt tired. As if I had traveled a great distance.

When I later began to question the actual usefulness of the new idea, to the story of The Next Thing — I paused. The judgment felt premature. I forced myself to, once again, let go.

This was difficult. My compulsion was to seize the idea, to poke and prod it, to turn it constantly over in search of an answer, once and for all, as to whether the entire endeavor — of which it was only a part — was worthy and excellent.

It hurt, to know that I couldn’t get such an answer from one mere piece of the whole, and to realize that it was going to take many more such days to arrive at an acceptable answer to this crucial question, that had nothing to do with this small piece of the thing but which nonetheless plagues me daily, co-opting and yet spurring on all progress — is this truly The Next Thing?

But, as I said, I let it go. As best I could.

Later, the small piece of the idea came back to me, of its own accord. When this happened, because I had been patient, had ridden out the difficult feelings…it engendered some clarity.

This particular piece of the puzzle might, in fact, become a permanent, fundamental fixture of this story. But it is too soon to tell.

Still, handling the natural process of creativity in this way did allow the practical side of my brain had the freedom to take over when its turns came up in the rotation.

Let’s try it. See what happens. If it works, great. We’ll be on our way. If it doesn’t, great. We’ll know that this way isn’t the right one, and perhaps we’ll gain more clues as to where to go next.

I don’t know that we can win such clarity, harness such momentum, if we don’t ride out the difficulty. It takes courage and patience, perhaps, but at least as each small journey is ended along the way, we’re left certain that we’ve done what we could — for the right reasons.

—

Day 3: Purple Sky of Towering Clouds Over a Far-off City

On The Future of Labor (Day 5 of 30)

September 5, 2016September 5, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

This is part five of a thirty day trial, during which I am going to write and publish a post every day. No refunds. Comments welcome and encouraged!

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What I love about film is that it combines physical work with mental/emotional work. — What I love about film — how it combines physical work with mental/emotional work. What I don’t love about it — how accurately the typical production (and general industry culture) often reflects American inequality.

Today is that day that was invariably going to come along, in regards to this project of posting here every day for the month on September. I’m not sure what to write about.

This make me slightly sad, because it’s Labor Day.

Am I glad to have a day off? Yes.

Am I proud to be an American worker? In a way, yes.

Do I celebrate the contributions of laborers more active and resilient than me? Yes.

Is one day enough, to make up for decades-long general trends that have made life more difficult for laborers, more complicated, even as those at the very top have continued to do very well for themselves?

No, I don’t think it is.

We live in strange times. It’s no secret that I’ve wondered at length about them, about what’s next, about where we’re headed, what it will look like. I think this is why I’ve gravitated back to science fiction, where I started as a young avid content consumer (reader).

What does a robotic future look like for labor? Likely, not great. Is anything going to stop automation from replacing manual work, in the real, tactile world? I don’t think so.

Given the choice, would we completely want to stop this from happening? I think that depends on who you are, and how you make a living.

Where is the line between accepting change and demanding your fair due, based on contributions of the past — that built the foundations of today? Do we still even respect legacy in this way?

I know the world is always changing, but it seems to be changing quickly, now.

Some of this change seems inevitable and, perhaps, ultimately helpful. Some of it seems short-sighted, greedy, or at least of the sort that could be checked, slowed, made to respect the potential or very real damage it can and does cause to human life and happiness at large.

I’m a knowledge worker, and a content creator, in today’s parlance. On the one hand, I am soothed by the fact that mine is a specialized skill-set. We’ll always need stories, and I’m a storyteller. I even believe I could be of use in the zombie apocalypse. Anyone who has survived past hour twelve on a film shoot would be of service in the zombie apocalypse.

But I do worry about these things, as I wonder about them.

I worry that there’s no turning back, or checking the rush of the tide of technological change, this time — if there ever was a way to do either of these things. I worry that as technology cheapens everything, we’re headed towards decay and dysfunction for the majority, in service of growth and ascension for the minority — of the increasingly other-worldly wealthy elite.

Labor Day is not meant, I don’t think, to be a day of remembrance. It’s supposed to celebrate the contributions of labor to our prosperity both then and now. This is still, of course, a worthy use of our time.

But I believe our workers, myself among them, deserve more. We deserve ongoing respect, both for what we do and what we endure, what we’ve done, and how those contributions have laid (continue to lay) the groundwork for future growth and prosperity.

A well-deserved day off is a good opportunity to rest. It can also be a good time to not only appreciate ourselves and our peers, but also to take some time to reflect.

We are all of us essentially equal — so says our social contract. I think it’s acceptable, if not crucial, that we not only celebrate labor’s role in securing today’s prosperity as well as tomorrow’s, but also question our role in that tomorrow, and how that role is influenced, diminished, or manipulated by those in control of both our livelihoods and our news.

Whether we like it or not, we may also have to think how we might both accept this reality and yet challenge its assumptions (and ours).

Change doesn’t only happen. We can also enact it. That’s the beautiful thing about working towards the future. We’ll never get there, but we can look back after a while and see where all the chasing after it has gotten us.

I guess I found something to write about.

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Day 3: Purple Sky of Towering Clouds Over a Far-off City

Circle Up and Laugh (Day 4 of 30)

September 4, 2016 michaeldibiasio Leave a comment

This is part four of a thirty day trial, during which I am going to write and publish a post every day. No refunds. Comments welcome and encouraged!

—

We threw a small party last night and, for much of it, everyone sat in a wide circle that pretty much covered the entire living room.

It was a good time, that lasted well into the wee hours of this morning, but more than the individual laughs or the general merriment — I’m grateful for that circle.

It’s not an entirely common thing to have happen, even at a small party. We were playing games, which necessitated the assembly into a group or groups — but as the night rolled on and the good times continued it really became, for me, more about the palpable connection, ease, mutual relaxation and enjoyment, that lit up the room.

No one spent much time on their phones. Side conversations developed and then dissipated into the ongoing general laughter. In-jokes were born, new acquaintances developed, few of us seemed to want it to end until it just ended.

I mention all this because — I cherish that easiness. It’s still something of a new sensation for me. I’ve had fun in the past, but there was often a tension to it, a desperation even.

Perhaps its growth, maturity, or luck. The right mix of people at the right time. Whatever the reason, I’m glad to have been part of the circle for a few precious hours.

We need such moments, to ground us, to remind us of how simple our needs are, how easily met if we show up, surround ourselves with good people, relax, and trust in customs that have been around since the beginning.

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