I get asked certain questions by young writers occasionally. They take different forms, but all come back down to a shorthand Fabulous Publisher Babe™ and I call “The Secret Handshake.”

That’s where someone is just simply convinced that there is some mystical bit of knowledge about the craft of writing that they can learn, that will suddenly make them successful and rich. I dunno about the rich part, but I’ve been successful enough that writing and publishing is my full time job these days. I don’t have an income from teaching. Nor editing. The stuff I publish for others (Blaze Ward Presents or Boundary Shock Quarterly) don’t make me much money, but both are labors of love anyway.

But they have gotten it in their heads that there is a Secret Handshake. That once they learn said handshake, they will be in the big time. I suppose that they generally get the idea from the grifters who want to sell you on some gimmick. There are a lot of those, if you pay attention and have been around long enough.

Usually, they take the form of some expensive workshop you can take, wherein some self-proclaimed guru will teach you the secret that he exploited to become famous. However, if you pay attention, you’ll note that he’s not exploiting it anymore. Usually because it doesn’t work as well as it once did. Might not work at all.

But he’ll still offer to teach you for a few hundred (or thousand) bucks. Sound familiar?

Fads come and go, and the grifters that rise with them vanish with them a few years later. All of them rely on the belief that there is some magic Secret Handshake™ that can make you rich. And then about four years later, you ask “Whatever happened to…?”

These young writers don’t ever want to hear it from my lips, when I tell them what the real Secret Handshake is.

You ready?

Persistence. Dedication. Discipline. Demand.

If you want to be famous, I can’t help you, because I’m not famous and have no idea how to get there. There are only a handful of places in the world where you might walk into a bookstore and see one of my titles on the shelf. And that’s more blind luck than anything.

I am, however doing well enough that I don’t need a day job. I don’t need a supportive spouse paying all the bills while I pursue my dream of being a writer. I don’t teach classes or offer expensive workshops. I don’t edit for cash in my spare time.

I write.

Persistence. Keep writing. You don’t have to write every day. You do have to think about writing every day of the week and commit to writing on most of them. Even 100 words adds up quickly enough.

I used to write every single day, then take a day or two off at the end of the month when I hit my word count. Then I got into a Tai Chi class Saturday mornings in the park. Frequently, I don’t do any writing on Saturdays now. What I do during the rest of the week is make up for that day off. Instead of averaging four thousand words per day, I tend to aim for five when I can, so that skipping a day just means I stay on my monthly target of 116,667+ words.

Dedication. Writing comes first. I don’t watch shows. I don’t have other businesses taking up my time. I don’t play games. I write. That is my gig. That is first on my list of priorities. Everything else is second.

I’ll ask you point blank: Where do you spend your hours each week? I write 3-5 hours, six days per week. I also edit in the evenings frequently for a few hours. I am dedicated to the writing, to the point that everything else must take second place.

Discipline. I get up, shower, (sometimes feed the cat depending on the day,) feed myself, fix coffee, check the news and the comics, then I’m writing. Usually if I wake up at 630, I’m writing by 800. And I intend to write until noon or four (five) thousand words, whichever comes first.

Writing is a muscle. I have trained that muscle to marathon, day over day. Others can barely jog to the end of the block and back, but we all start somewhere. The key is the discipline to do it even on days when the words are hard. Or the brain is kinda mushy. Or I feel yucky. Only true illness where the brain is hollow do I give myself a day off. Then I make it up later.

But I also hit my monthly word target and stop. Boom. Middle of a chapter. Maybe the middle of a paragraph, depending. Because I know I’ll pick it up tomorrow and go.

Demand. I want this more than you do. That’s evidenced by my work ethic. I’m not cleaning my neighbor’s refrigerator instead of writing. I’m not spending hours down the rabbit hole of tvtropes.org instead of creating words. I’m not making excuses for not writing.

Research is useful, but are you using it as an excuse NOT to write? If you don’t want to write, why are you trying? If you don’t want to be a writer, why do you torture yourself into writing? Why aren’t you doing something you like?

I want to be a writer, more than any other topic. I enjoy it. I thrive at it. I get paid to make shit up for a living.

What do you want most? And be honest, with yourself as well as with me.

What do you want most?

If it is to be a writer, then write. Stop making excuses for not writing. Stop prioritizing anything else ahead of your words, and write.

I can’t help you be successful with a blank piece of paper.

Further, once you write it, go learn Heinlein’s Rules for (Traditional Publishing) Writing and adapt them to your own life.

Step one: write. You take it from there.

The Secret Handshake is a gimmick to get you to buy their book or take their seminar. You haven’t failed because you did those things and weren’t successful. They aren’t successful at that gimmick these days, either, or they’d have no time to actually teach seminars all over the world because they’d be so busy making money.

The Secret Handshake, I’m sorry, is hard work. And luck.

Not all my books work. Not every novel I publish makes a lot of money. However, when I hook a new fan, they have a whole catalog of things they can go read, so now I can slowly get them to give me hundreds of dollars each. And do it legitimately, which is even better, because I am entertaining them.

And they come back month over month, because I am publishing something new. In my case usually a novel. Sometimes two.

You should start by jogging to the end of the block and back, before deciding to run to Halifax. Write a whole set of short stories, just so you learn how to write. Publish them month over month, so the advertising robots and your fans learn to look for new work from you.

Work your way up from three thousand words per month (100/day) to 120,000. If you count a novel as 40,000+ words, then you van get to where you are generating at least one novel PER MONTH. And as you speed up, they can get longer. Some of mine are 45,000. Some 65,000. Some 100,000. (I even had one at 160,000 to publish one of these days.)

Write. Only rework it to fix errors your First Reader and Copy Editor find, rather than spending YEARS revising and writing the same novel over and over again. That’s like walking to Cleveland six times, instead of ever seeing Seattle instead.

Write. That’s the Secret Handshake. Make it a lifestyle, instead of an aspiration. Make it a hobby that takes precedence over all the other hobbies. With Persistence, Dedication, Discipline, and Demand, you can turn it into the greatest job you’ll ever have.

But you have to want it more than anybody else does.

And get over the idea that some Secret Handshake will save you.

Got to go run errands with a buddy of mine the other day. He’s a martial artist student who has been committed for more than forty years. Senior kind of guy now. Stubborn. Hard-headed, even. Catches hell from others occasionally because the form of art he does (Karate) is hard on the body. Wears you down. Breaks things over time. Makes folks want to relax and take it easy some days.
Personally, I’ve started working on a much softer form of Tai Chi, but that’s because he and I are both 52 now (birthdays about 2 months apart, but he’s the old fart). My goal over the next 30-40 years is flexibility and mobility. To be able to walk easily and even bend over and tie my own shoes standing when I’m finally an old man (no comments, you in back).
He and I come from radically different backgrounds. About as far apart as two white guys can get, socially, economically, educationally, etc.
What bonds us is the work ethic.
A conversation with some artist friends Wednesday night brought that into sharp contrast, just before he and I went running into town Thursday.
I catch hell from any number of writers because I produce a lot of words. I got lucky in any number of ways, and was able to transition to writing as a full-time career. At the same time, that had been my goal on Day One (Nov 1, 2013, for those of you keeping score at home).
Hard work can overcome a lot of things. The easiest way to write a lot of words is to sit your ass down and actually write them.
At that point, writing is a muscle. You do not run a marathon on your first day. You run as far as you comfortably can, then slowly push yourself a little farther.
As my buddy notes, he’s not the prettiest at his kata. Nor the strongest, toughest, tallest, or smartest person, even in his small group of folks. Where he defeats them all is in his own work ethic.
“Nobody will outwork me today!” is the motto I probably need to have his wife paint on the wall of his home dojo.
You cannot control much. Your attitude, however, is first and foremost.
I get up in the morning and I get to go write. I don’t ‘have’ to go write to make my work count. If anything, I have to plan which words and make them count, because I am currently only allowed 118,000 words per month. (I could easily push to 150,000, and still be behind a number of folks I know who make me look like a slacker.)
I have the right attitude. I get to go write.
He gets up and gets to go out into his dojo and work. He and I have both been blessed to be able to do something we love. And neither of us will be outhustled at it. I will write. On any given day, my goal is 4,000 words. My target it Pulp Speed Three, or 116,667 words. Any given month, when I hit that mark, I write to the end of the scene, or the chapter, or some useful break, and walk away. For longer months, I get 1-2 days off every time towards the end.
Now, flip that sideways, because I have started doing Taiji Juan CPL99 in the park every Saturday morning. That means that many Saturdays I might not write at all. Instead, I pushed my weekday speed up enough that I’m either far enough ahead that I can goof Saturday off, or close enough that I can catch up on Sunday. Right this moment, I started about 1500 words from being on pace for the month, even though I didn’t do any writing yesterday. This will get me to a certain distance out, and I’ll close the gap Monday and be good.
Because I work that hard. Because I want it that much that I’m willing to make sacrifices.
In my case, The Sacrifice is television. (Streaming, whatever. You, passively staring at a screen, consuming visual stories produced by somebody else, with your brain turned off.)
How many hours do you spend watching your shows every day? Every week? I can easily produce one thousand words in that same hour. And that’s a slow pace. I have trained myself these days that I can generate two thousand words per hour easily. Did that all week while tracking it, just so I knew.
You will not outwork me, because I understand that hours at the keyboard yields words I can sell so that I don’t ever have to go back to work for someone else.
You will not outwork him when it comes time to run, lift, practice, or strike things. He has come to define himself by that work ethic. By that getting up early in order to do all these things before work.
While you sleep, he trains and I write. We both understand that there are other things we could do, but we both get to do that thing we love because we have put it first.
When people complain about my writing speed, I ask them about their priorities. If you aren’t writing, you aren’t a writer. If you are writing, you are. Simple as that.
What are you doing with your time instead of committing words to paper or training in kata?
What defines you? That’s those hours spent doing something that you have chosen for yourself. I know a lot of people who make all manner of rationalizations for why they can’t write. Or why they can’t finish a story and publish it.
That’s what those are. Excuses. He gets up on a cold morning and steps into a cold garage that he warms with his own sweat. My allergies right now are such that I maybe got about 3 hours of sleep last night, but I buckled down with coffee and a little sugar today, and set my mind to telling story. Even though I could have just as easily taken today off and told myself I would catch up later.
I don’t want to catch up later. I want to be pushing the envelope every day. Faster, farther, heavier, higher.
He will outwork you in the dojo. That’s what he does. I will outwork you on the keyboard. That’s what I do.
That’s what makes each of us who and what we are. And why we get along so well. That’s the bar he and I are competing against every single day. I don’t even pay attention to everyone else and where they are in their struggles, because I’m competing with who I was yesterday, and that son of a bitch busted his ass in order to push the novel a little closer to done, while spending time worldbuilding a whole new place he wanted to explore in his spare time.
He could do that because he’s not catching up. I’m trying to get tomorrow-me to a place where he appreciates what today-me did.
Faster, farther, heavier, higher.
I don’t judge you on your word count. Or the prettiness. Or the awards. Or the income or lack thereof.
I judge you entirely on your work ethic, and you don’t get to complain about mine until yours matches it.
Or, as we say in this business: get in, sit down, shut up, and hang on.

I was chatting online with a younger writer the other day and she had a moment of utter frustration with her current project, so I had to explain that what she was feeling was a good sign.

When you go to a con panel with writers, there is inevitably some youngster who stands up in back to ask the most banal of questions.

“Where do you get your ideas?”

I can tell such folks have taken the idea of writing [insert Pooh Bear here] extremely seriously. They’ve had college or MFA programs designed to make them authors. Mind you, I just used the word authors rather than writers. Authors, to me, are those folks who want to be famous. To get that seven-figure book deal and have the Randy Penguin spend enough marketing dollars to land them atop the New York Times bestseller list.

(A hint, that list is a mark of how many copies of the book were bought in about two dozen or so bookstores on the east coast, extrapolated out for the entire nation. It had almost no bearing on the rest of the world. There are folks who have figured our how to spoof the system. USA Today bestseller list is a little better, but folks are spoofing that as well. Adding that to your resume doesn’t usually impress me, unless I know you actually earned it. Few have.)

Getting back to young authors, they think that there is a magic handshake they can learn that turns them into pros. That’s why you see them buying every book on writing that they can. Or taking workshop after workshop and taking copious notes.

Looking for the magic handshake.

There isn’t one. What there is can best be described as work ethic. Those of us who have had some success largely owe it first to working our asses off by writing a lot of words. From there, genre matters, as navel-gazing autobiographies about how someone hates their mother only sell a lot of copies if your marketing budget it big enough to spoof the NYT. Or to get you on Oprah.

Most of them sell dozens of copies, not millions.

Luck is also a factor, as you have to somehow have the right story at the right moment for a lot of readers, and convince the advertising robots to put your name in front of them. Again, I know folks who spend $10,000 or more a month on their advertising. Their sales numbers are impressive, but only as gross income.

They get really pissy when I ask what their net income is. Frequently, its not much better than mine, when my monthly ad budget is usually $250-$400. They are running in a treadmill trying to make it, instead of building something slowly so it is durable. If they stop, they get flung off the back of the machine like in the cartoons.

So luck and hard work are the minimums necessary. Write a lot of words. Make them good ones.

Also, write a good first draft. I can’t tell you how many times some deluded fool explains to me that the only -right- way to write a novel is to spend the entire first draft wandering around and trying to figure out what story they want to tell. Then they go back and redraft the entire novel a second time. After that, maybe two or three more tries, slowly polishing it until every word sparkles. (Elapsed time measured usually in years here.)

The problem is that they have ripped out all the emotional content in the process. Pretty words. Dull book. Can’t tell you how many of those I’ve seen.

I’d rather have your first draft, warts and all, than your sixth. We can fix a few things in #1 and it will drip with anger, sorrow, or anguish. Won’t be pretty. It will be real instead. Readers react to that more than they do pretty words.

Which circles me back to the young lady complaining. She was working on a project, and all these other projects kept popping up and wanting to be written too. We call those ideas popcorn kittens (google it for the video when you have some time to giggle), because they are like active kitties, popping up to look around and then wandering off.

The question she asked wasn’t “Where do you get your ideas?” like most of them do when still filled with grand dreams of a beret and a coffee shop.

She asked “How do you make it stop?” with true anguish.

Young lady, that’s how you know you are a writer. Everything those college courses taught you was wrong. Genre fiction is where you make money. Your professor was a failed novelist writing about hating her mother and nobody wanted to read it. I’d rather read about that submarine pirate captain who is secretly a werewolf and spends all his time trying to hide it. That sounds like fun. Sounds new.

Professors don’t want to have to grade papers, so they would rather you spent your life on the same paragraph, over and over, instead of blasting out a novella every week for class.

Been there. Done that. Got the T-shirt. Nearly thirty-five years later, I still remember that vicious [redacted] of a professor and how she went her entire academic career without a male student ever—EVER—receiving an A in her creative writing course. That’s some pretty impressive sexism there. She believed that only female units could be authors.

If she wasn’t dead these days, I’d drop ship her some of my successful novels, just to be an asshole. But even Amazon balks at delivering anywhere guarded by three-headed-dogs.

So for the budding authors out there, remember just a few simple thoughts.

• There is no magic handshake. Butt in chair, fingers on keyboard. Nothing else matters.

• Genre is what you write if you would like to make money. Literary wins awards and then you go back to your job at the call center or the bookstore.

• You can’t make it stop. What you do is ignore them all as best you can. The bad ideas will eventually recede, and shouldn’t be written. The good ideas will circle back time and again until you do write them.

• Keep notes, but don’t become that fool who hangs out in a coffee ship with a notebook of ideas and never actually writes. Those are poseurs.

• Writers write. If you are not writing, you are not a writer. If you are, you can call yourself a writer.

• Anything you write is valid, even if nobody will ever read it. I have six volumes of poetry in a trunk that won’t probably ever see the light of day. I have failed novels where I realized as I got into them that I lacked the skills to pull it off, or it wasn’t as good an idea as I originally thought it would be.

So write. Given the state of modern traditional publishing (shrinking monthly if not weekly), learn how to indie publish. A $5.99 novel on Amazon nets you about $4 per sale. How many such sales do you need to replace your current job? TradPub pays about $0.10 per unit sale. You won’t ever get rich. You can win awards and accolades, and hopefully have a spouse who will support you. Or a job at the call center you can stay at until you die.

Because you can’t make it stop. Not if you are really a writer.

Nor do you want it to.

We might be seeing the impending death of social media, as it has come to define much of American culture over the last decade or so. Some of you found me on places like Facebook. I’m not planning to deactivate my account anytime soon, but over the weekend a number of friends hit their own, personal inflection points about staying.

Used to be, people could say a lot of things on those platforms without trouble. Over the last six months, the fascists in charge of the biggest one went all in on their politics. I’ve had friends who had never gotten put into social media jail suddenly start racking up time. Then more time, when the folks moderating started going back months and years and dinging them for stuff that had been acceptable then.

You will note that one party never seems to face any difficulties on that platform.

I’m not shutting down, but in the last 72 hours many of my author friends have either made their last post, or announced that the last one is coming soon. They’ll keep the account so they can talk with certain folks that they can’t reach any other way, but won’t be around much in the general conversation.

What we are seeing is the movement away from a common, public square, and back into silos of the internet. Some of you are old enough to remember the era before good search engines. Yahoo used to be a great way to find things. Then search engines let you find everyone.

The first real social media platform (MySpace) was adequate for the tools of the day. Then the other one came along and turned into a place where you could find lots of people. Complete strangers in other countries could become what we might call con-buddies. These are folks you only ever used to see at conventions in the old days, and then nothing until the next year.

D**, S**, and T** are tired of being flagged and jailed, but recognize that it is a private platform, and the fascist in charge is free to cater to his fascist friends.

They are leaving. I hope that Liker comes back. It was intended to be a left of center sort of place, but the big gorillas ganged up to try to destroy it. (I’d love to see an investigation into conspiracy to commit computer crimes, which I suspect would be fruitful.) It claims to be coming back in May 2021. We have hope.

In the meantime, my friends are leaving, and going back to their blogs, rather than posting things on the billboard at the square. Fragmenting off, so you and I will be back to rss feeds (you old enough to remember those?) and emails about blog posts from our friends. The world will be a little sadder, but it became inevitable when the bald android went all in on supporting the Trump platform and helping him attempt to overthrow the government.

What does this mean to you? I have been thinking about communications this week, after sending four different newsletters on the 1^st. Seriously. FOUR. And none of those were this blog.

As folks move away from that hive of scum and villainy, my best way to reach folks will be newsletters and blogs, but coming entirely from www.blazeward.com.

I control that platform. I get to say what is acceptable behavior. I get to police your vocabulary and politics. Since I don’t generally allow much dialogue, what you’ll see is more of my monologuing, and occasionally approving comments in order to foster conversation.

But not a lot. I don’t have time to police my boards for content, and I am not making enough money to hire someone else to do it. Plus, I have to spam a half-dozen comments a day across all of my websites, just because robots out there crawl around and try to sell things.

(I have found a couple of better plug-ins for wordpress that supposedly cut down on spam commenters. Hopefully, they work.)

So you should sign up for my newsletter. (Anti-Stodgy/Redneck Chef on the 1^st. Publishing News on the 15^th.) It still feeds out a few places, but that’s just because I’m too lazy to cut the cable on a few of them. If they fray on their own, I won’t miss them.

You should sign up for my blog here directly, so that you don’t miss anything, because obviously I need to spent more time here and less over there, as much as it might cost me in the short term for being accessible to fans and friends like you.

If anyone knows of a social media platform that is to the left of Adolf Eichmann, I would be interested in hearing about it, because the Overton Window has moved far enough to the right, thank you.

Failing that, there is always the chance that someone creates a word-press microplatform where folks can log in and chat with one another, instead of me having to navigate everything. There are a few, but they are a pain in the ass last I checked.

In my various mastermind groups, we try to anticipate what the future will look like, so we can prepare the ground to take advantage of it. We’ve talked about the end of FB as a central place, but couldn’t figure out how or when it would happen.

MySpace got bought by an Australian fascist and promptly got abandoned, because the other options weren’t immediately funding the founder of Fox News. (That came later.) The current platform is even worse, but only got there over the last two years or so.

I’m not sure that any one place will ever replace it. At least not until the government breaks up all the big players (which I doubt, considering the money available to buy politicians) and requires a better platform.

Private enterprise might go through a “Thousand Flowers Campaign” kind of thing shortly, but we all know how that worked out.

So for now, expect a lot of writers to walk. To pick up their marbles and head back to their own URL that they control. Make sure you find out where they are and sign up for their newsletters and blogs as well, because they are likely never coming back. Not in any format you’ll recognize.

Hopefully, I won’t lose to many of you as I pull back, but I can see that avalanche starting to rumble. As people on the left abandon the platform, it will move harder right. Harder than it is today.

You can imagine what that will be like.

So here’s the scenario: I put up a semi-open call for the newest Blaze Ward Presents anthology about a week ago. I only post them on FB, because that’s the only social medium I pursue beyond my own newsletter, but that newsletter is for readers, not writers. (Got a different one for artists, if you want more information.)

I immediately got several submissions, because a number of folks had been told ahead of time what the theme was going to be. I’m okay with that, as I’ve worked with all of them in the past.

One gentleman (we’ll call him Mark for now) sends me a note that I had sent something in. In the fracas, I lost track. If you send me something, I will reply when it arrives. Even something as simple as “got” just so you know I saw it.

Mark’s never came in.

About a week later, I am responding to other folks that have questions and see his original note. Check my notes and realize I have nothing from that person, so I ping him and ask him to resend.

According to his response, he does. About an hour passes, and I see nothing, so I reach out via DM and send him my email, just in case he wrote it down wrong. He sends me his, so I send a direct ping email. You can never really trust email these days. Especially not if you are through a crappy isp like comcast.

So far, so good. I’m conscientious here. Trying to reach out to someone and let them know that there seems to have been a problem at my end and can we resolve it? I’d like Mark to submit, if he has something. Even if it ends up being slush, I try to send back rejection notes that are more than “pass.”

Mark replies on FB with “Sounds like it’s not worth it.”

So, lemme tell you how rude that comes across to an editor. I might be overreacting a shade with the particular profanity that emerged, so I replayed the conversation with Fabulous Publisher Babe™ just because it can be a “measure twice, cut once” kind of thing, but she had the exact same reaction.

A professional works with an editor/publisher who is asking for help. Mark snapped his fingers in my face instead. I’m sure the grapes were already sour, as the old saying goes, but Mark here did something extra special today.

He moved himself into that special (and pretty damned short) list of artists with whom I will never work again. As he intended, suddenly even reading his emails became “not worth it.”

Not that I expect him to learn anything from the subject, because after stewing for a few hours, I just went ahead and unfriended that punk and blocked him. You don’t ever get unblocked. I just presume that I had a damned good reason to block you in the first place and would need a long and cogent apology from someone after they had begun to show public evidence of having grown up and wanting to act like an adult. (“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”)

Telling an editor that it’s not worth working them is a mark of juvenility that rubs me the wrong way. And it cuts both ways. If that’s your idea of professionalism, you and I will not be working well together at any point in the future, so we should just ahead and cut to the chase now.

And cut we did.

I won’t work with Mark. There are a lot of folks out there trying to present as professionals with whom the original response would have been somewhat less antagonistic. But unlike Mark here, I don’t believe that my shit doesn’t stink. I make mistakes. I admit them and try to make amends. That’s why I tried several times to establish a direct line of communications with the guy.

He decided that I wasn’t worth working with.

Okay. Strange response, but I’m willing to honor it. Will make sure not to work with you in the future.

Ever.

For the rest of you folks out there as accidental bystanders, I have found that starting from a presumption of innocent mistake is a much better spot. I get that folks are stressed out after a year of this shit, but in vino, veritas. If you are an asshole to a random stranger on the internet (and I have no idea who the guy is, other than he found me at some point), then I’ll assume you’re just an asshole.

It goes back to how someone treats the waitstaff at dinner. Doubly so if a mistake has been made. Do they explode in righteous indignation, or chill and remember that shit happens if the person is apologizing?

Bridges are pretty easy things to burn. Especially with me. I’m not a confrontational person. Especially with total strangers. More than a few folks have blown up in my face over the years, only to discover that the blow-out argument that they had apparently been hoping for wasn’t the outcome they got.

I’ll just walk. I do that. Communication is a two-way street, but only if I believe that I am working with an honest broker. Sour grapes don’t cut it.

Hopefully, this little PSA makes you stop and think about how you treat the folks around you. Are complete strangers left seething at your words, or thankful?

Simple as that.

Are you acting like an asshole?

We won’t find out what excuse he wants to give me if and when the emails suddenly start working, because he has become an unperson.

That’s what folks call consequences. Your behavior has them, even if you weren’t paying any attention.

Got a bit irked or maybe inspired this morning by a friend. They had a complaint about a fairly common saying that made no sense to them and went off on a rant that turned into a tirade by the time they were done. I won’t mention the topic, because that would out them too easily, but it got me to thinking about why they were so upset.

I’m pretty sure, without asking, that the subject was a colloquialism that didn’t grow up around here, wherever here happened to be for them. But the tirade was the interesting part.

I put a lot of it down to that late stretch of things when the pandemic is (hopefully) on the downhill slope. Folks are starting to get vaccines that work. The worst part of 2020 might be over. At the same time, it is not yet wise to toss your mask into the trash and go back to where you were two years ago. In Washington State, I am on a list, but I am in the LAST category that will get their shots. Before, that meant maybe as late as fall, but not it means that I ought to be able to get my shots by June 1, if all goes well.

There are still a lot of folks falling ill. And a lot of folks dying. The numbers are down, but not zero. There is time yet we have to deal with.

So folks are stressed. Stay stressed. And it comes out in frustration with the way things are now, when people see how they could be so much better, if only…

And that leads me to Chesterton’s Fence. President Kennedy liked to quote the man and his fence.

G.K. Chesterton (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton) was a giant of a man, physically as well as intellectually. He is best known, however for his fence.

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”

Translated into a more modern vernacular, it deal with folks that want to change everything, because they don’t like the way it used to be. In this case, my friend was frustrated at a lot of other things, but ranted on this topic mostly because I don’t think they understood the point of the saying that had set them off.

As a result, all things had to change, because obviously something was WRONG!

Wasn’t, but my father always told me to never argue with a fool because bystanders couldn’t tell the difference.

So when you encounter a popular saying that is extremely old, my immediate conclusion isn’t to “fix” it, but to understand where it comes from.

In the context of Chesterton’s Fence, to understand why it was put up in the first place. The saying was an old one. Popular, but not local to my friend. Didn’t mean it meant anything less. I grew up with the saying, but I also knew what it meant, whereas they hit it cold this morning and bubbled over with rage and frustration.

These are frustrating times. I get that. You can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but still have to walk there.

Something irritates you and you simply over-react.

Stop and breathe instead. Think about it. Ask yourself why the fence was built there in the first place, because somebody else had a good reason at the time. Doesn’t mean you can’t take it down, but you need to know what purpose it serves before destroying it and making things worse.

We all over-react.

However, the important lesson these days is to stop and breathe. I have told more than one person lately that each of us gets up in the morning and decides if we will be helpful or toxic.

When you got out of bed, did you decide you wanted to be nice and friendly to complete strangers, or an asshole to everyone you encounter?

You make that decision. And you make it every morning. Every afternoon. You chose to be an asshole. To be toxic. To explode all over someone who didn’t do anything to warrant your vitriol at all besides not popping you in the gob when you got mouthy.

(In the internet age, far fewer people are getting the sort of pop in the gob that would teach them better manners around strangers, but that’s another topic for another time.)

Who did you decide to be this morning? That’s what it comes down to. Did you see Chesterton’s Fence standing arrogantly athwart your path and go into a destructive rampage? Because now the cows are out and wandering all over the countryside. Did you think only of yourself, rather than stopping to ask if what you were doing was helpful to others?

Don’t let the frustration overtake you. I understand the clarion call of rage as a tool. (Oh, trust me, I truly understand that concept.) But you get judged by total strangers for it. It becomes your reputation, and then you don’t get to make a better second impression on them, because they already know you are a hothead with a temper problem.

The world will get there. Rome was not built in a day, it did not fall in a day. It fell because people thought more of themselves than of others.

What have you done today to make the world a better place? Or worse?

It used to be ten, but we’re down to eight now.

I’m speaking metaphorically, of course, before you manage to pull your undies so tight that they cut off your circulation. It used to be that I had an amount of work I could generally accomplish in a day. Write all morning. Errands in the afternoon. Editing and publishing related stuff in the evening.

It worked.

Then the pandemic hit. I held out for a while and it was fine. I’m used to sustaining my end of things through hell or high water, because I had those kinds of jobs for a good chunk of my day job career.

But lately I’m finding myself worn out sooner. I hit a point in the evening where the brain just shuts off and rolls over. Out of spoons. Other folks have gone through it, but maybe didn’t have a vocabulary that let them express it.

Stress. A straight punishment can be survived because it is predictable. You develop coping and defensive mechanisms. (And God knows I’ve got a few from my past.)

It’s the randomness that knocks you off kilter. And me. The not ever knowing what to expect next. My last couple of day jobs used to be like that, because I was a middle manager type dedicated to hunting chaos down and fixing it. Boxing it in. Limiting it. I was really good at it.

I used to say “Chaos offends me.” but at the same time, I’ve always been good at surfing chaos. (Note the F, as opposed to the V.)

But at work, that was predictable chaos, if you could call it that. I had certain channels of stupid shit that would come across my desk. Or long lead times to identify solutions when shit was going to go sideways. And I was good at fixing it.

I don’t have control here.

I can write. I can publish. I can watch my income and sales numbers bounce all over the damned place to the point I wonder if I’ll have to go get a day job of some sort. Not going back to what I had, but part-time minimum wage kinds of things, just so I can turn the brain off for a while and use muscles instead.

Predictability.

Others have talked about their feelings of recovery, now that an attempted coup has failed and we’re left cleaning up the mess from folks who have no interest in discussing their part in attempting to overthrow the government of the United States. Or the years they spent up until now trying to break it.

I was not surprised that they tried. I’ve been expecting it since I wrote a political science paper in 1988 entitled “The Fall of the American Republic in 2020.” (Yes, I really did. He gave me a B+ on it, but I don’t feel like looking him up in his retirement (or he might be dead by now) in order to say “I told you so.”)

I’m glad they failed. And a little surprised for reasons I have talked about elsewhere and which will cost you beers to have me explain later.

I need to recover. The stress has been there, but I held it down. Would not admit it. Don’t know what it will take for me to slide past all this. Probably orange jumpsuits on a few of the fuckers who deserve it.

“If more people went to prison for this shit, fewer people would go to prison for this shit.”

But I abide. Hopefully, it all starts getting better, now that we’ve passed a crest of history that will be the end of certain history books and the beginning of others.

I can survive on eight spoons, now that I have finally understood that I only have that many for now. It was the confusion as to why I was suddenly so tired all the time that threw me off. I already cut way back on the things I was trying to do, because there were certain topics I didn’t want to write about. Too dark. Too depressing. Too close to home.

Bad juju.

So now we are really at the dawn of 2021. The world gets to change again, and hopefully criminals and anarchists will be put in small, concrete boxes where we can laugh at them and taunt them like the losers they are.

There should be no mercy for attempting to overthrow the government. In the ancient times, the term used was “Neck or Crown” because if you tried to kill the king, you either succeeded or your life was forfeit. They should not get a stern talking to, any more than Julius and Ethel Rosenberg did. In fact, that is the legal precedent for aiding and abetting enemies of the state, and I feel like we need to introduce a few dozen folks to it.

Not all thousand or so who really deserve it, mind you. Most of them are weak-minded fools who honestly just need better mental health coverage to get them the help that might spring them out of their delusions. But there is a hard core of folks that are evil, and need to be dealt with.

Permanently.

I can’t go out to eat these days because folks like that refuse to take the pandemic serious. I was at the grocery the other day, and half the people I saw were without masks, in a county where the mandate is everyone. The store could have been fined $5000 per infraction, and a few have, but those fuckers don’t care for anybody but themselves. Same with the coup. They didn’t want a country where non-whites might be granted equal rights, and were willing to burn the whole damned thing down rather than share.

And that’s why I got so angry, but I can’t express that anywhere but in my writing. I have to hold it inside and just smile. Just write. Just abide.

But that takes spoons out of me. “I can do this thing, but it will cost me” is a favorite phrase of an old acquiaintance, and something I have taken to heart.

They say pick your battles, and I try not to fight that many any more. Can’t.

Just don’t have enough spoons to save the world right now.

Not sure when I will.