Climbing the Third Stair

I now work for a largish company doing something that involves filling out a lot of forms. It's not thrilling work, but it has its advantages and I'm pretty good at it. Yesterday an email went out informing all employees that there was a new online training available with the title "Workplace Violence Awareness", which I think is an odd title for something that's actually about what to do if an active shooter event happens in your workplace.

Because I'm me I had already given a little thought about what would happen if a shooter showed up at my workplace. I hadn't gotten further than realizing that the doors--which are locked unless you can buzz yourself in with your employee badge--would be no help at all. People are always coming and going out the doors, so it would be trivial to either shoot someone as they were coming out and go in through the door, or to shoot someone as they came out of the elevator and then take their employee badge. So while my reaction as a human being to the training was unhappiness that I lived in a world where this was necessary, my writer!brain was filled with eagerness to take the training--you never know when something like this will be handy.

The three recommended strategies for dealing with an active shooter are, in order of desirability, Run, Hide, and Fight. Fight is the absolute last resort if the other two are impossible, but explaining the various tactics you can use in fighting took up a fairly large proportion of time. This is probably because most people have a good handle on what is involved in Running and Hiding, but Fighting someone who has a very large gun and too many bullets is, shall I say, a specialist skill.

Running and Hiding did have some nuances I hadn't considered, however. When running you are advised to enourage others to evacuate with you, but not to stop or slow down to deal with someone who doesn't want to leave. This raises a thorny point for me: if I was in this situation, what would I do? Would fear for my life keep me moving, or would my instincts as a former Girl Scout Leader take over and make me want to stay and shepherd the slow-mover out? I'm not sure what I consider the good outcome here. I don't want to die of gunshot wounds, but I don't want to abandon people either. (I hope I never have to find out.)

Hiding under your desk is a bad idea. Hiding in a room that you can lock the door and/or push something heavy in front of is best. If possible turn off the lights. Turn off the ringer of your cell phone and its vibrator. This would give me trouble--I usually have my ringer turned off at work, but I'm not sure I could find the control for the vibrator in a crisis situation. On the other hand, I rarely get phone calls so probability is on my side here.

If you have to fight you are advised to improvise weapons and attack with conviction. I'm sure that both Sun Tzu and Musashi would agree on these points. One of the training videos had a dramatization of some office workers arming themselves to take on a shooter. One guy appeared to be preparing to use a computer cable as a garrote, which I consider a non-starter. I am slightly over five feet tall and I am not going to get that close to an opponent. Another grabbed a folding chair, which is more my style--I want to have some distance between me and the person I'm trying to hit. A third person had a fire extinguisher, which didn't have have the long reach of the chair but it's nice and heavy--a good swing could do real damage to the skull of an active shooter. I'm probably going to spend the next several days at work looking for potential weapons and evaluating them on reach vs damage dealt--I'm not sure if this was the point of the training.

As always, I have too much housework to do, but that will have to wait for a bit. I have a brief freelance assignment to take care of, and I intend to get the rough draft done this morning. My deadline isn't until a few weeks, but I don't want to put it off until the last moment. On the one hand, that's just a bad habit. On the other hand, I've become infatuated with a pen on the FPN classifieds and the sooner I get my money the better.

More long-term I have a few short stories I want to write and start sending off. If I intend to make money off of writing (and I do, even it is just enough for some luxuries), I need to always have a story or two out for consideration. I need to get back to the novel, but that can wait--I want to get some short-term money flowing.

November is half-over and I have a little over 8K words written. It takes very little math to see that I am very behind. I'd like to say that I think I can catch up, but given my experience from being on the writing team for L5R I don't think that's possible.

Nevertheless, I'm not depressed. I need to write this novel, need to learn how to write novels, and NaNo was a psychologically good starting point. I'm still engaged in finding out just how many words I can get done this month, so the game is still live for me. Also, I've promised myself some more ink samples when I hit 10K and an incense buying spree when I hit 20K. (The key to writing bribes, I have discovered, is to find something I want, but not want so badly that I'll just abandon the task and order the thing right away.) It's too far away to think about what the reward for finishing will be. (But I'm considering some bottles of Iroshizuku.)

I've tentatively decided that handwriting the first draft is the way to do it. Not because of some claptrap about it making me more creative, but because it makes it impossible for me to change things. If I was doing this on a computer, every time I reread what I had written I would see things I didn't like and would need to stop and change them. This is fine in a short story, but in a long project like this I need to keep moving and fix stuff in the next draft. When I see something that I think needs fixing, all I do now is grab a pen loaded with a contrasting color of ink (this totally justifies my habit of keeping about a dozen pens inked, btw) and make a note in the margin. Then I move on.

I'm planning on writing today. If there are no emergencies I should be able to order some ink samples tonight. Go me!

By Wedneday evening I had reached the 5000 word mark, which was still behind schedule if I wanted to finish on time but not impossibly so; the trick is to always keep nibbling away. Also, I had noticed I was starting to pick up some momentum, and getting more done each day.

Alas, Thursday was physically and emotionally exhausting, and I got nothing done. It was horrible, I feel horrible, I am horrible. I'm still tired, I have a bowl of oatmeal I need to eat and a half hour to do it in and I'm not sure I have that much energy. And I have to go to work and bake all day!

I didn't go to work today, having woke up with a sore throat and sinus pain. This was frustrating all around, because I could look around at all the housework that needed to be done but couldn't summon up the energy to do anything about it. My brain was frizzy as well, so I could neither write nor read anything needing concentration. It's been frustrating.

I did get a pen flushed out, the M200. I have decided that for my NaNo first draft I am going to use my Iroshizoku samples, so tomorrow when it is dry I'll choose the first one and load it up. Whee!

I woke up this morning and decided I was going to finish the outline of my novel, even if it meant I got nothing else done today. That's pretty much what happened: I got the dishes washed, took out the trash, and cooked for for the next few days, but none of the laundry got done or anything else on my list. But the outline is done.

I guess having an outline is a good thing, because now I can start writing. Maybe. I have discovered that I am the kind of writer who needs readers, and I'm not convinced I'll have any beyond my alpha and beta readers. I had readers for L5R because I had a captive audience. I've shown my non-L5R story, the one I'm shopping around, to seven friends, and of them two of them really liked it, one of them kind of liked it (I think?), one didn't like it (but admitted it wasn't his preferred genre), and three never told me what they thought of it, from which I deduce that they didn't like it at all and are taking the diplomatic way out. These are not great odds.

If I had spent the day cleaning I would have had something to show for my efforts: a cleaner home. This is widely considered praiseworthy behavior. I would rather write than clean, but if there is one thing my life has taught me, it's that my opinions and desires don't matter.

I am tired, and that doesn't make sense. I sat at my desk all day, and finishing the outline wasn't like trying to compose War and Peace. I need to get to bed regardless, because tomorrow is a work day and then I need to come home and get some of the cleaning done. At some point I'll have to talk myself into starting writing, but that pint is not now.

I'm doing this via my new tablet, so this will probably be quick. As I am not one of those people wedded to their cell phone, typing with only two fingers is slightly unnatural.

I was reading FPN over lunch and became irked at a young man who announced that he couldn't possibly date someone who used BIC pens because obviously their thoughts meant nothing to them. Having written most of my L5R fiction using a computer and cheap ballpoints I could not possibly see how this could be true. I posted a terse rebuttal which may have included the word "horse-hooey". I hope I don't get modded, but whatever.

In unrelated news, I have a new pen in the mail. I am hoping it arrives before my new Ink Drop samples do.

A few weeks ago I checked a book out of the library on writing character emotions. I finally got to skimming it Monday night. The book was organized around many short sections, with each section covering a different emotion. I was feeling ok about my ability to handle character emotions right up to the section on romantic love. "Close your eyes and remember how it felt the first time you fell in love!" the author instructed. "Well, that's not going to work," I thought. I've never fallen in love.

Which is not to say I have never loved anyone. I love my parents, and I have a small handful of friends who are not people-I-hang-out-with but people-who-I-care-deeply-about. I happen to think that friendship-as-love is every bit as important as romantic love, but as this is all that I have going for me I guess my opinion is arguably suspect.

I would have liked to have had some romantic love in my life--it seems like a good thing, in spite of its pitfalls--but this isn't something you can do alone; you need someone to love you. At one point I had looked at some books on how to attract a romantic partner and had to give it up as a lost cause. The project seems to require that I act like someone I'm not, and you don't need a masters in physics to realize that this is not a winning strategy. Sooner or later I would slip up and be me, and then the whole thing would be over.

From this vantage, it makes sense that I couldn't convince my readers that Hideshi and Beniha were having an affair: I've never had one, so how would I know? And it's funnier that the story I have completed features two characters who are, in fact, not in love with each other. I have a project in the works where I do have two characters who are in love, but that's a minor detail in the plot and now that I recognized the problem I can minimize it as much as possible. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses.

Vows, team, lovers.


It's a list of possible loyalties for a Fire Saint, ranked in order of their importance.

So far at work this week, we seem to be trying to have as many problems, disasters and generally odd things as possible. The current list contains, but is not limited to: a shipment where the produce all froze in the truck in transit, two supply trucks from our main distributor that arrived a day late, a display cooler in the store that stopped working (rendering all the products it held unfit for sale), a cooler in the deli that stopped working (rendering all the prepped deli items it held unfit for sale), a pallet of papergoods meant for a store in Indiana being delivered to us (and our pallet delivered somewhere else), and several sick employees. I am taking the position that this means we are getting all of the year's drama out of the way in the first half of January and I'm sticking to it.

Meanwhile I've come up with two possible story ideas and my brain is fixed on writing the crackier of the two first. I'm finding this a little worrisome, but I'm consoling myself with the idea that after all the years of trying to write Serious Samurai Drama it was only natural that I'd had a certain amount of crack that I had to get out of my system.

And it's Thursday already, and I don't know what happened to the rest of the week. I haven't gotten nearly as much writing done as I wanted, though I've kind of kept up with my Latin. Laundry has been a total loss, unless I get something done after my bath tonight. I haven't done any crocheting, though I have gone through some of my magazines and started a list of potential projects. Part of me wants to try something ambitious like a sweater, but I feel incapable of doing anything that grand. I'll keep looking at patterns: maybe something will cry out strongly enough to drown out my doubts.