Keep the Ideas Coming Two: Try Something Completely Different

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Keep the Ideas Coming Two: Try Something Completely Different

You may feel in a rut for new writing ideas, but a great way to give your creativity a boost is to do something else creative – but totally different.

There’s actually a merit badge for this.

Photography. Painting. Dancing. Piano. Even if you aren’t creating through writing, anything that flexes your mental muscles will keep your brain working and active. These new pathways in your brain will often unlock ideas that were hidden when you actively hunted for them. Knit or build a model or put together a puzzle. Build with Legos or blocks with your children to keep your mind working. Going on a hike or bike riding gives you exercise while clearing out clutter and stress.

Writing something completely different helps just as much. Are you a fiction writer? Try writing poetry about a scene in your current or a past work. Write newspaper copy about a current event, or an event in your story. You don’t have to concentrate on quality for these pieces. This effort is to take your mind out of the familiar and tackle creativity in a different way.

Your focus may be writing, but writing isn’t the only way to be creative or to find ideas. Make sure your mind gets variety, and you’ll be surprised how well your trove of ideas starts to fill.

I Thought The Supreme Court Was Conservative

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Last week was a great week to be a liberal. It was a great week to be black, uninsured, sick, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning. The Confederate flag is coming down (a step in the right direction).The Supreme Court ruled Obamacare is still legal and that LGBT partners can marry. These are not only liberal victories, these are the RIGHT THINGS TO DO.

This sums up the weekOMG HOW DID THEY GET THE DOORS OPEN?!

All of these topics the Republican party stands against. (The Confederate flag may be an exception to this, but topics like no gun control and no such thing as white privilege are certainly Republican tenets.)

Obamacare has been upheld at least twice by the Supreme Court. Gay marriage is now the law of the land, and I cried when I read Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion. And this is from a Court with a majority of conservative justices.

A conservative Supreme Court has been a champion of liberal values in the past week. It has gone against some of the bedrocks of the Republican party’s platform. What does that say about the Republican platform?

This should be a signal to the GOP. They are out of step with the Constitution. They are out of step with public opinion. They are on the wrong side of history. They need to figure out what being a conservative means in the current world, and what their constituencies really want.

I am far too cynical about politics to believe this will happen. But the signs are there. Please don’t ignore them.

But for now, I’m all like Everything Is Awesome.

Don’t Let The Confederate Flag Be a Distraction

Check out my previous Musings From a Geek Dad blogs here! Updated every Monday.

Don’t Let The Confederate Flag Be a Distraction

Don’t get me wrong. The Confederate flag is a powerful symbol of racism that should be done away with. Kudos to Walmart et al for stopping its sale.

I started this post titled “The Confederate Flag belongs only on the roof of the General Lee,” but even that is not true.

However, I don’t want its removal (hopefully from South Carolina as well) to distract from the two equally valid and important problems the shootings expose: Racism and guns. I don’t want us to fool ourselves into thinking we’ve “fixed” the issues of the SC church shootings simply by taking care of the flag problem.

The Confederate flag is a symptom of racism. Flying the flag of a nation born of slavery above a state capitol is the equivalent of flying the swastika. But barring its use does not mean the underlying issues have been resolved. And SC gave us yet another mass shooting, which seem to crop up now every few months.

Racism still exists. Largely unregulated gun access still exists. These are the important issues we still struggle with. I am proud we’re slowly getting rid of the Confederate flag, but this is a bullet point under the bold heading of racism. Minority incarceration, racial bias and income inequality in an environment already plagued with income inequality are much bigger issues that are harder, but much more important, to fix.

And guns? I’m sick of hearing about another mass shooting every few months, gun suicides, travesties of justice and the NRA’s morally bankrupt excuses. We need serious gun regulation, as the much-misconstrued second amendment itself states.

Walmart, Amazon and others get kudos for dropping the Confederate flag from their stores. But when they stop selling guns, then I’ll stand up and cheer.

A Remodel Ain’t A Remodel Without Pestilence

You may remember from a previous blog that our house is trying to kill us. We found this out before our remodel. Now, the offending vinyl (shown below… two flavors!) has been removed and we’re down to the sub-floor. The cabinets have been demolished and our kitchen now looks like the photo at the top of the article.

Who needs new floors with classy 60s asbestos death vinyl like this?

So we are now kitchenless. And furniture-less. We pulled up all the carpet and molding to get to the hardwoods underneath and will be painting while the furniture is in the garage. There are nails, staples, tack strips and dust on every surface except in the bedrooms and bathrooms. Hence the dining on PB&J using boxes in the garage as a table. Today the electricians and plumbers are doing further destruction in the name of making the house less of a forbidden zone. Oh, did I mention the guest bathroom toilet has been plugged for the past few weeks? Good times.

It’s like camping! In our own garage! Eating on a box!

However, Life decided living in a gutted house wasn’t quite enough of a challenge. During the asbestos removal, the abatement company cut a hot water pipe and we had no hot water for a couple days. Keep in mind everything was dusty during demolition, with now no ability to shower. Then on Thursday, my two year old Sebby came down with pink eye. This quickly moved to a chest cold, which he proceeded to spread to his sister and mother. Then, to top it all off, I had an MS flare up kick in Thursday night. This means that, for a brief period of time, my MS symptoms are cranked up to 11. I could barely get out of bed Friday morning.

So in addition to a house with no furniture, no kitchen, no hot water and no laundry room, four of the five family members were put out of commission due to illness. Remodeling FTW.

The silver lining is that treatment for an MS flare up is a three-day course of steroid infusions. Which means that 1) I feel much better than normal afterward, and 2) I don’t sleep for three days. Saturday night I used our shop vac to clean up the insulation, paint chips and nails in the kitchen and laundry/utility rooms. Last night I swept the living room, dining room and hallway starting at ten, and still had energy to pick up molding and watch the Game of Thrones premiere. So I guess having a day of MS suck was probably worth it in the end, after all.

Ideas: Give a guy a break here

Ideas beget ideas.

That’s probably the best reason to write all the time. When your mind is engaged and in writing mode, it doesn’t stop with what you’re working on. But this idea churn can be annoying, especially for writers like me.

I’m working on my novel, which is slow-going anyway being a stay-at-home dad with three kids. But when my muse (a mix of caffeine and insomnia) speaks up, she doesn’t contend herself with one topic. In fact, sometime the bitch needs Ritalin. During my time writing my novel, I have also written short pieces about demonic pirates, time dilation, colonization and jealousy via time travel.

A more disciplined writer would stick to her novel and file the new ideas under future projects. Unfortunately, I do not. Whether I’m right or not (usually not), I am convinced the new idea is amazing and world-changing and I must work on it immediately.

Take my latest story idea, which has nothing to do with the demonic urban fantasy I’m currently writing. I read the books Guns, Germs and Steel and 1491, which point out (in terms much more detailed than my description here) that a more worldly or advanced society tends to kill off one less so upon first encounter due to disease. Because of this, I’ve always held that War of the Worlds had it backward. I also believe that if time travel does exist, it can’t change history because history is already written and incorporates the results of the trip. (Sorry, that does mean every attempt on Hitler’s life has failed.) I combined these two ideas and realized that future time travelers could have sparked every extinction and pandemic in world history.

That idea at this point isn’t close to being a story. For starters, it lacks characters, situation or plot, which any idea needs before it can become a story. But I thought the idea was great. So great that, well, now I’m outlining it to get all the things that make an idea into a story. And temporarily derailing my work on my novel once again.

In the end, however, I think this subconscious idea factory is a good thing. It allows me to get a breath of fresh air from a longer work, which at least in my case is a good thing. I can experiment with different characters and different voices. Also, it keeps your creative muscles engaged. Either you’re working on multiple projects or you have a writing hopper to dig into when you finish your current project.

I wish I were a writer that could consign new ideas to the future. Meanwhile, muse, stay off the pharmaceuticals. Brew up another cup of joe. I’d rather have too many ideas, even crappy ones, than too few.

In the 60s they built houses out of things that kill you

My wife and I are in the midst of remodeling the house we bought a year ago. The kitchen needs updating, the playroom needs more adult focus for its “play” theme (think bar, TV, wine fridge and possibly a mini Thunderdome), and the carpet needs to be pulled up to so we can refinish the hardwoods underneath that someone thought were a good idea to cover. This is potentially our forever home, and we want to make sure it has all the amenities we want to live with for the next few decades.

However, once we started the remodel process, we learned that our house, like most houses built in the 60s, is a death trap.

The layers of laminate under the carpet – an archaeological dig of our house’s historic record – is lined with pure cancer (err, asbestos). Our wiring features the valuable “burn your house down if your load is too high” early-warning system. The pipes are not so much pipes as pipe-shaped tubes of rust. Some of the windows are potentially lead-lined, presumably because of Superman. Everyone knows Supes was a peeping Tom before Crisis on Infinite Earths retconned that character flaw in 1985.

Yes, sir, building on an Indian burial ground is standard for your modern 1960s home. We funnel supernatural energy through your certified radioactive waste foundation to cut your heating bills in half!

We’ve learned valuable things with this remodel. Between the two of us we’ve bought five houses over the years, and uncovering unforeseen problems like this is pretty standard. Any remodel should have at least 25% added to the cost estimate, filed under “Fixing stuff your house is trying to murder your family with.” And despite all the short-term pain, our house will be better on the other side.

Superman just better keep his distance. The creep.

William Reid

Speculative Fiction Author

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