Motivated

This year, I find myself doing the "Movember" thing, again. And, I could really do with a donation. I'm lagging, in a big way. Click here to donate to my Mo.

The rest of this post is copied from the Movember website, to give you an idea of what Movember is all about:

Campaign Strategy & Goals:
We will get men to grow moustaches and the community to support them by creating an innovative, fun and engaging annual Movember campaign that results in:
• Funds for men's health program investment
• Conversations about men's health that lead to:
- Greater awareness and understanding of the health risks men face
- Men taking action to remain well
- When men are sick they know what to do and take action

Program Goals:
Living with and Beyond Cancer
Men living with prostate or testicular cancer have the care needed to be physically and mentally well.

Staying Mentally Healthy, Living with and Beyond Mental Illness
• Men are mentally healthy and take action to remain well
• When men experience mental illness they take action early
• Men are not treated differently when they experience a mental illness

Men's Health Research
We will fund innovative research that builds powerful, collaborative teams that accelerate:
• Improved clinical tests and treatments for prostate and testicular cancer
• Improved physical and mental health outcomes for men            

Metaphor or Hyperbole?

Here's an engineering term applied in a less convential way (I like to call that "original"):

In those moments after he first saw her he was overwhelmed by her beauty. His heart ran faster and faster until it began to cavitate. He was in love.

Is it a metaphor to apply a pumping term to what is in fact, a pump? Since hearts don't generally cavitate due to their ingenious design and the ample suction head available, I guess it's hyperbole.

Silly Cow

I haven’t tried a Three Word Wednesday for a while. This week’s words are brutal, grope and transfer.

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It was a fact of life that in the copy room, the corridors and the work functions he would come on to the women, and brush too close, and have a grope when he could. He was the boss.

The women in the office policed each other, preventing complaint or dissent. If one of the girls didn’t accept things, the results were brutal. Name-calling and isolation were immediate. Reports came to the boss of things she’d said about him, some of them true. Life became hell for the silly cow, until she left the company. She wouldn’t dare ask for a reference.

There was no way out. Tiffany tried; she was a single mum, and couldn’t afford too much dignity. She asked for a transfer within the company, and was offered a role in Mongolia. She shrugged and took it. Her career took off from there, and she eventually became the VP of Human Resources, global. Things started to change.

Lack of Attention to Detail

The wheels of the Landcruiser ute spun in the dirt for just a second as Tim left the light vehicle go-line. He knew he shouldn’t have done it, but it gave him at least some satisfaction. He’d just had what his boss George had called a “Performance coaching discussion”. It had felt to Tim more like a good old-fashioned chewing out.

Unfair. That was the best word to describe it. There were other, harsher, cruder words that came to his mind, and to his lips, but “unfair” was what stuck with him. What was the exact phrase? Carelessness – that was it, no – “lack of attention to detail”. How many details were there to pay attention to when you pushed dirt and rock and coal around with a D11 bulldozer?

Tim felt the back-end go sideways – just a little – as he turned left onto the haul road. He realised as he did it that he hadn’t looked right, at all. He checked his mirror quickly, and saw no vehicles. Lucky. He slammed it into second.

“At least something’s going my way today,” he said aloud, to himself. He shook his head at his own stupidity. Any one of the rear-dump trucks driving along the haul road could easily have squashed him and his ute to just a few inches thick, if it’d been there to run him over.

Soon enough, Tim was complaining to himself about his boss again. “Inattention to detail,” he muttered to himself, shaking his head. “Where does she get this stuff from?”

Suddenly Tim grabbed the two-way radio, and called up the OCE, and told him he was entering the pit area. White lie, of course. Entering – entered – it was a grey area.

He tried to relax as he drove down the haul road. It was hard to relax. With things the way they were at home: first with the kids, and now with the wife talking about “taking some time to re-evaluate things,” – Tim muttered that phrase to himself again. Yeah, he thought, it’s bad enough at home, without George making a mountain out of a molehill. She was normally okay, but then, nobody’s perfect. What a way to come back onto shift from his days off.

Tim was looking forward to the solitude of working on the dozer. He’d probably even have crib on the machine today, he thought, the way he was feeling about people in general.

He pulled up behind his dozer, grabbed his crib bag and went up onto the machine. He snatched up the pre-start book, hoping it’d been done for the shift already, which it hadn’t. He got out of the cab, checked the oil and coolant in the engine bay and then glanced at the tracks. He got back into the machine and ticked off the rest of the prestart. If it was okay last shift, it’ll be okay now. He copied some comment about a problem with the mirror from the last prestart sheet. He tossed the pre-start book aside and then started up the engine. The throbbing of the diesel engine made him feel better almost immediately. After a minute to warm up the beast, he opened up the throttle, and smiled for the first time that day.

He looked out at the job in front of him: just a whole lot of cleaning up of the coal seam, really. Good, solitary work – no-one to mess things up for him. Tim lifted the blade, and then checked his mirrors before backing up. Once he’d gone back about as far as he thought he needed, he looked back in front of him and saw something that he didn’t recognise at first; not for about five seconds. Then he realised that the odd-shaped little thing was what used to be a Landcruiser ute. The ute he’d parked there himself.

“So that,” he said to himself, as he shook his head, “Is what she meant by ‘lack of attention to detail’.”

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This story first appeared in Shift Miner Magazine.

Free Enough to Deam

I’ve stopped writing fiction for about a year now. I want to start again; I am starting again. I’ve been thinking why I stopped and I what I want from the process.

Fundamentally, I got disillusioned by the publication rejection process. Who doesn’t, sometimes? There was one major turning point on this road. I’d felt I’d really nailed a particular story. It wasn’t accepted. I learned then that the force of rejection is proportional to the square of how great you think your story is. It’s about that gap between how good you think it is, and what the response is.

I’ve heard it said many time that you need to write fiction primarily for yourself, the writer. That’s never made a lot of sense to me, because I try to write for the audience. Now it does make sense. Writing for yourself is about why you write, not how. The how is about using words to communicate with your audience. After some time of focussing on the how, it becomes the why. What I mean is this: the response of your audience becomes your reason for writing, and that’s a very dangerous place to be.

So now the why is for me, the how is for you.

As I’ve started to write fiction again, I’m finding that the ideas don’t come as easily as they once did. Putting ideas into words still works well, because I never really stopped writing. In my work I’m always distilling my thoughts, arguments and concepts into reports, e-mails and graphs. But it’s always about something that’s happened, not something I’ve imagined. I know ideas are cheap, and they will come again.

I just need my imagination to feel free enough to dream again.