“How could you loose an entire squadron of elves, and half a contingent of reindeer in one night?  Do you have any idea how much your little stunt is going to cost me?  What were you thinking?  An unauthorized fly by, in a major metropolitan area, during the day, in November for cripes sake!  Hundreds of people saw you Zant! How are we going to explain this one?  The US military is already up my ass about the sightings last Christmas over Des Moines, and now this? Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

Kringle was angry.  His broad face, usually happy, was drawn up.  His eyes twinkled, but not with merriment.  The man was known for shaking when he laughed, and Zant couldn’t help but notice that his belly shook just as much like a bowl full of jelly when he yelled. This wasn’t the first time Kringle had yelled at him.  There was the mistake in Cairo, and that time in Sydney.  Not to mention the week in London where Zant had lost his toy bag.  Fortunately he was able to find it, but not after a well meaning charity organization had given away nearly everything inside it.  Which was impressive considering bags like his held hundreds of thousands of gifts.

“I’m sorry Mr. Kringle.  I just thought that if I got some more flight time in that I could make the roster this year.  I’ve been practicing on the simulator, but it’s just not the same, you know?  I need to feel the wind on my face, really guide that sleigh through some sweet maneuvers.” Zant waved his hand in a flying motion, simulating the sleigh ducking and weaving.  Half-way through his third barrel roll he realized he was only making matters worse. He got off Kringle’s desk, and sat down.

Kringle glared at him.  He was silent for a long while before letting out a heavy sigh. He stood and walked over to the bay window overlooking the factory floor.  “Zant, please understand.  What we do here is important.  The humans, they need this. They have so much misery in their lives, so much hate and anger.  The Holiday season is the one time during the year that they manage to try and be happy.  Sure, not all of them get into it, but the ones that do, well, they need our help.  Without us spreading Cheer and Joy, and delivering those gifts, well, this planet would tear itself apart.  Right now our numbers are down.  Only thirty percent of the world’s population participates in some sort of Holiday activity.  Our Christmas and Hanukkah numbers are down.  The Kwanza numbers are up, but they are starting to plateau.  If we loose any more people to disbelief and misery, well, we might end up loosing the contract on Earth.  And if we pulled out, do you know what would happen?”

Zant thought for a moment, trying desperately to come up with the right answer, “Um, we would, uh, loose the contract to the Trillians?”

Kringle chuckled, “No my boy. Perhaps a few decades ago another company could have come in and taken over, but the numbers are just too low these days.  If we pulled out, there would be no more Holiday.  No more Cheer.  No more gift deliveries.  Humanity would fall completely into the abyss of disbelief.”

“I don’t think I understand what this has to do with me.” Zant said.

“My boy, humans are tricky creatures.  They all say that in order to believe in something that they must first see it.  But do you know what happens when they see something? They explain it away. They rationalize it. They push it further in to disbelief.  Part of what we rely on is faith.  We need these folks to believe in us, without seeing us, because that’s what gives them strength. If they can find it within themselves to believe in something they can’t see, like us, then they allow themselves the possibility to believe in other things they can’t see, like the goodness in their fellow man.

“Your stunt last night, well, that lost us a lot of good people.  By allowing yourself to be seen in broad daylight, you allowed them to activate their rationalizations.  Yes, they saw a sleigh flying through the air, being pulled by reindeer, but their rational minds just won’t allow them to believe that’s really what happened. Look here, read this.”

Kringle walked over to his desk and rifled through a stack of newspapers until he found the one he was looking for and handed it to Zant.

Zant looked it over and read the headline, “Flying Reindeer.  Military experiment, or Macy’s marketing stunt?” He looked up at Kringle. “But, they saw me! With their own eyes! How could they not believe?”

“That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you my boy. Humanity has been through so much in the last century that they simply cannot believe in something so outright, especially if it claims to be doing good.  They will look for the hidden agenda, the secret scam. Sure, they may want to believe that there is good in the world, but when directly confronted with goodness, for some reason, they simply have a hard time accepting it.  Which is why we use such a light touch.  We want people to be effected by what we do, but in little ways.

“Which is why, my boy, that I think it’s time you returned to the home world.  I just don’t think you’re cut out to be a Claus.”

Zant was crushed.  Being a Claus was all he’d ever wanted since he was young. The problem was, he was a screw up. He hadn’t done very well on his entrance exams, and his flight test had been near disastrous. The only reason he had gotten accepted to the academy was because of his family connection to Kringle. He always thought that once he was actually at the North pole that things would be different. That being around other Clauses would give him the drive and the focus to improve.

“Mr. Kringle I–”

“You’re flight points are low, you can’t make it down a chimney without getting stuck, you’ve only got a sixty percent gift delivery accuracy rate, and on top of it all, you still don’t know the names of the Eight.”

“But uncle–”

“No but’s Zant. It’s time you went home. There’s a transport ship leaving tomorrow, and I want you to be on it.”

“Tomorrow? But that means I’ll miss the Season this year! Please, uncle, I mean, Mr. Kringle, please let me stay until after Christmas. If I’m going to be sent home, at least let me have one more holiday.” Zant did his best not to cry.  Being a Claus was all he had wanted since he was young.  He had to convince Kringle to let him stay. If he could stay one more Christmas, he was sure that he could figure out a way to prove that he was worth of being a Claus.

“Zant, I–”

“Please, just one more Christmas,” Zant couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “Please…” He lay his head in his hands and sobbed.

“Alright Zant. One more Christmas. But you’re on the next transport after New Years, got it?”

Zant looked up, “Really? Oh thank you sir! Thank you!” He ran over to give his uncle a hug. “You don’t know how much this means to me! I promise, I won’t let you down. No more screw ups from now on.”

Kringle peeled Zant’s arms from around his waist, “Alright my boy, alright, that’s quite enough. Report to Trixin in the morning. And you better know all the names of the Eight and be able to tell them apart”

“Yes sir!” Zant started towards the door.

“Zant?”

“Yes Mr. Kringle?”

“Forgetting something?” Kringle held up Zant’s toy bag.

“Oh, of course. Sorry sir. Won’t happen again. No more screw ups from now on.”

So far, I have managed to scrape together about 6,000 words, which puts me pretty dang far behind.  I’m having a couple of problems:

1) Turning off the internal editor/critic.

2) Finding time to write.

3) Staying motivated.

First and foremost is the problem of ol’ Dick.  (Go read this post to find out more about my internal critic.)  Forcing myself to just write without worrying about whether it makes sense, forms a good story, and is any good is damn near impossible.  I know that the idea is to just allow yourself the freedom to write, but in many ways that freedom can be paralyzing. I will write something out and Dick will want to edit it and change it and fix it until it’s perfect.  But I can’t stop for that.  But he won’t let up.  So my mind gets locked in this internal battle and I end up just getting frustrated and I stop writing altogether.

I am also finding it extremely difficult some days to find a solid chunk of time to sit down and actually write anything.  I work long days, and often don’t get home until midnight or later, and I’ll be honest, the last thing I’ll want to do is sit down at the computer and write.  When I get home I want to unwind.  Have some dinner, watch tv, talk with my wife for a little while (if she’s managed to stay awake past 10:30).  Or, all I will want to do is go to sleep.  I’ll give myself excuses like “Oh well, it will be better for my health and well being if I just go to bed.” Or sometimes I’ll try to play the fence and say, “I’ll just lie down for an hour, and then I’ll get up and write.” That always ends up with me waking up at 8:00 am with a backache and severe regret about not writing the night before.

Both the previous problems, turning off my internal editor/critic and finding time to write contribute significantly to my third problem: staying motivated.  The further I get into this challenge the less it feels like I will be able to accomplish 50,000 words in 30 days.  And the less I feel like I can accomplish it, the less I want to do it. Last week at one of the NaNoWriMo writing group meet-ups I overheard a couple other NaNo’s talking about their word counts.  They were bemoaning the fact that they didn’t feel like they were going to be able to accomplish their goals and that they would have to end up cramming most of their writing in at the end.

At first this made me feel much better about myself because clearly other people were struggling to make the 50k mark.  But no.  These people had already hit the 50k mark.  They were worried about getting to 100k.  One girl was talking about how she made 50k in the first week, but she didn’t feel like she’d ever make it to 200k.  I packed up my laptop right then and there and went home.  And for the next three days didn’t write a single thing.

These are my reasons for why I’m not further along.  And while I imagine they are pretty common, it sure feels like I’m the only one two weeks in and stuck at 6k words.

So, should I just give up?  Do I admit defeat? Should I pack up my laptop and go home?

If I was trying to do this project a year ago, I probably would have given up.  And I probably would have given up on the third day.

But now? No. I’m not giving up.  It’s difficult, sometimes almost impossible to stay motivated, but you know what keeps me going? There isn’t one secret thing that I turn to every time I need motivation and inspiration.  I have to make the choice every single day to keep going.  But while there isn’t one secret thing that fires me up, there are a number of smaller things that keep my motivation warm.

First, I want to be a writer.  I want to move from amateur to professional.  I want to be able to make a living at this.  So that keeps me motivated.  Also, I really like writing.  Regardless of how good my stuff is or who I’m writing for/to, I really enjoy writing.  It’s fun!  And finally, the biggest motivating factor is my wife.  That woman is amazing, and is absolutely my biggest cheerleader.  The fact that she’s willing to put up with my melodramatic moments and my ‘this is crap, it’s all crap, it will never be anything more than crap’ and yet still manages to encourage me, well, that motivates me.  If she can still believe in me despite all my nonsense, well, maybe I really can do it.

And yes, it’s hard to find time.  Anything that is worth doing takes a significant amount of time, and any skill that needs to be learned will take years to master.  But those skills can only be mastered if they are practiced regularly.  So I have to make the choice.  If this is really what I want to be doing with my life, then I have to make the choice to prioritize my writing time above other things like ‘winding down time’ or ‘sleep’. I have no delusions about it being easy, but I do know that if I want to move away from amateur hour then I have to practice.  Every day.  No excuses.

To that end I have decided that at a minimum I am going to write for one hour every day.  Fifteen minutes will be devoted to a Write-or-Die style writing prompt (I’ll explain that in a later post).  The other forty-five minutes will be devoted to NaNoWriMo.  Once November is over I’ll readjust how I divide up that hour, but for now that’s what I’m going with.  And an hour is just the minimum.  If I’m really going to hit that 50k mark I’ll have to devote a lot more time to it.

As far as Dick goes…well, I still don’t have any satisfactory solutions on how to turn him off aside from just writing every single day, and consciously choosing to turn the editor off for now and just write.

So that’s what I’ll do. Just write.

[Insert clever sign off phrase here]

At the beginning of the episode Doctor Crusher is trying to save the Captains life after he was attacked on an away mission. She is loosing him.  Picard seemingly passes to the ‘afterlife’ where he is greeted by Q.  Q informs him that he is dead, that this is the afterlife that he (Q) is God and so forth.  They go back and forth for a bit with their dry repartee.  Q tells Picard he died because his mechanical heart failed, and asks, “By the way, how did you lose yours anyway?”

“A mistake.” Picard says flatly.

“Is that a regret I hear?” Q asks, mockingly.

“I regret many things from those days.” Picard replies.

Picard sees a vision of a bar fight, in which a Nausicaan stabs him in the back.  He laments for a while about how he was young and foolish and arrogant and so forth. Q asks him if he had it all to live over again, would he?  Picard replies in the affirmative, and suddenly finds himself transported back in time, to his 21-year old self.

It is a moment in Picard’s life shortly before he gets into that bar fight with a Nausicaan.  Q informs him that he now gets to relive his life and after having to making extensive assurances that nothing he does or doesn’t do will affect the timeline (“You’re not that important [Jean-Luc]!”), Picard goes on his merry way, determined to correct all the foolhardy mistakes he made as an arrogant youth.

Picard avoids the fight and Q whisks him back to the future.  He’s not dying on the operating table, but he is neither is he Captain of the Enterprise.  In fact he finds himself a Lt. Junior Grade in the astrophysics department.  His entire life has changed.

Jean-Luc Picard changes that one event in his life and it completely rewrites who he is an entire person.  He’s no longer passionate, bold, imaginative, capable of command or willing to take chances of any kind.  He never learned to move beyond himself, to achieve great things.  Picard demands that Q return things to normal.  Q informs him that if events are corrected that Picard will die on the operating table.  The Captain says, “I would rather die as the man I was, that live one more day in that life.”  Q sends Picard back so that he can get stabbed in the bar fight.  He is returned to the sickbay in the future (or, rather, his present) and then deciding Picard has learned his lesson, Q allows him to live.

Alright so now that we’ve gotten that out of the way…

It got me thinking about the choices I’ve made in my life, and how often I’ve wished that I could go back and rewrite portions of it.  I would say there are very very few things from my past that I’m ashamed of.  But I would be lying if I said that there are very few things that I regret or am embarrassed by.  Some of the things that I regret aren’t even so much based on mistakes I made, but by just being in the wrong place and the wrong time.

I’m going to share three quick examples. One I’m embarrassed by, one I regret, and one that I simply wished I could have changed the surrounding circumstances.

The first story, Embarrassment: During my freshman year at college I met this very cute girl at the bookstore. We were standing in line to pick up our required textbooks and syllabi. We talked and flirted and bemoaned the price of textbooks. It was exciting and fun, especially because flirting was not something that came naturally to me and the fact that an actual girl flirting with me was a concept as foreign to me as the inner workings of the Serbian economy.

Eventually we got to the front of the line, got our printout of what books we needed and went our separate ways. Aside from leaving the bookstore much happier than one normally might after spending that much money on textbooks, I didn’t think much of the experience and quickly put it out of my mind. And it probably would have stayed that way, except that the very next Tuesday I discovered that not only was she in the same lecture hall as me, but she remembered who I was.

I really wanted to be brave and actually ask this girl out.  Every Monday evening for 4 Mondays in a row I would tell myself that the next morning in class I would ask her out.  And every Tuesday morning for 4 weeks in a row, I chickened out.  Luckily, I caught a break.  Our professor wanted us to go see a play off in Brooklyn, and then write a report about it.  The tickets were free, all we had to do was put in for what day we wanted to go.  It was the perfect ‘in’.  We both had to see it, it was free, and it was all the way in Brooklyn, which for college freshmen in New York City automatically meant ‘evening adventure’.

Oh, did I mention that she lived in the same dorm as me?  Because that’s an important part of the story.

Later that Tuesday evening (after the assignment to see the show had been given out), I arrived home to find that my roommate and his girlfriend had made 12 loaves of banana bread.  I don’t remember why which is a shame, because one can’t help but wonder, why in the world would someone make 12 loaves of banana bread?  I guess we can only speculate.  Anyway, I decided to use the banana bread as an opportunity to head over to this girls dorm room and finally ask her out.

I picked the nicest looking loaf, took a shower, shaved, put on my nicest T shirt and cleanest shorts, mustered all my courage and headed out.  I was almost too chicken to get out of the elevator.  But I did.  I rang the bell and the door suddenly swung wide open.  I was greeted not by the tall, pretty redhead from class, but a small, dark haired, scary looking emo girl.  Needless to say, I was a little surprised.  I asked her if her roommate was home and she demanded to know who I was.  I started to tell her, but she interrupted me by saying, “Oh! You’re the guy from her lecture hall!”

She got this look on her face that was a mixture of excitement and horror.  Like when you’ve been standing in line for that roller-coaster that you drove 40 miles just to ride, and you finally get to the front of the line, when suddenly your stomach informs you that “you are going to have diarrhea”.  She called back for her roommate who came out of the side room, sporting a similar facial expression, though with less “oh, yay!” and more “oh, shit!”.  We stood awkwardly in the doorway and made small talk for a minute or two, and I offered her the banana bread.  Her roommate took up a spectator seat  on the couch right by the door and watched.  Looking back, I’m a little surprised she didn’t make popcorn.  Anyway, I was just about to ask her on the big date when this guy appears from the kitchen.  In his cross from the kitchen to the bedrooms he paused briefly enough to give me a long, hard stink eye.

It threw me off for a second, but I managed to get the question out.  Her face lit up, like I just handed her a box, and when she opened it up she discovered it was full of puppies.  But then, she grew pale, and sort of sad, like she realized that puppies, while cute and awesome, cause cancer if you touch them. She didn’t say no.  Instead she tried to change the subject.

Stupidly, I asked her, “who was that guy with the wicked stink eye?”

She looked at me like she was the President of the United states I had just asked her for America’s nuclear launch codes.

“He’s just a friend of mine,” she replied with a concerted effort of dismissal.

I tried asking her again if she was interested in going to the show with me, not saying anything about it being a date, just using the excuse that since we both had to go see the show, it might be fun to go together.  She waffled back and forth for a minute and said something like, “well I think I was already planning on going with a group of friends already.”  She was being evasive, so I doubled down.  This time I was going to be clear about wanting it to be a date.  I said, “alright, well, I’m really interested in getting to know you better, and would love to take you out sometime.  I think you’re beautiful, enchanting, and intelligent.  I think that we’ve got a really good chance at something special here, and all it takes is for you to say yes to going out with me on Friday night.”  Or… something to that effect.  I’m sure that I was totally charming and suave, and not awkward and weird in any way.

She started moving towards the door in that way that says, “we should take this into the hallway,” when Sergeant Stink Eye walked out of the bedroom area and stopped in the hall.  He wasn’t close enough to be considered in the room or as if he was part of the conversation, but he was close enough to assert his presence.

I couldn’t help myself.  If only I’d kept my big fat mouth shut, we might have had that date that Friday.  But we didn’t.  Because I didn’t.  Instead, I opened my aforementioned big fat mouth and asked, “So, wait a minute, who is that guy, really?”

Her roommate snorted back a laugh.  The poor girl was stuck.  She looked at me and sighed, “Well, I guess… I guess he’s sorta, kinda my boyfriend.”  I was so embarrassed.  Not only had I asked this girl out in front of her boyfriend twice, but her roommate got to see the whole thing.  On top of that I had to watch Sergeant Stink Eye get called this girls’, “sort of boyfriend” in a tone that clearly indicated this was likely to change fairly soon, possibly within the next 20 minutes.  I vaguely remember mumbling something about seeing her in class and hightailed it out of there as fast as humanly possible.

Now, as mortifying as that experience was, I wouldn’t change anything about it.  It took a lot of courage to ask that girl out.  And despite the awkwardness that ensued, it was important for me to know that I could be brave and do something like that.