Inner voices

There are certain inner voices we all share. There's one that lurks in the shower and plays back to us stupid things we have said at parties or other public gatherings--the little inner voice that makes us punch the shower-stall wall.

Another voice common to most of us starts to whisper just as we are finally getting hold of the first tendril of a good night's sleep. That voice tells us what we should have said, the clinching phrase that would have swayed the meeting to our side in the debate, silenced the bully, stifled the person telling racist jokes on the bus. So witty, so incisive...and so impossibly too late. And, of course, after that voice has spoken we are too annoyed with ourselves to go to sleep easily.

I have other inner voices that are more welcome, though. My dad died a few years ago; but he had throat cancer early and most of his voice died in 1963 as a by-product of the surgery that saved his life. He had a hearty whisper from then on, but not the remarkable, rich baritone he had had before the operation. When I was small and we all crammed into the car for family trips, he would sometimes sing to amuse us (when he wasn't making up cribbage hands from the letters and numbers on the license plates of the cars ahead of us). Sometimes if I sing "Bye, Bye, Blackbird" I can sort of hear him singing along with me. That's a precious inner voice.

And there are other inner voices that just plain puzzle me. Back before I moved from guitar to banjo, I used to play a lot of Renaissance pieces that had originally been composed for the lute. I have the remains of the music book I wore to tatters over many years of practicing that must have been a sad trial for anyone within range.

Adrian Denss wrote one of those pieces, a "ronde", in 1594. Here's a snippet of it:

I plucked away at this thing off and on for a week or so, and finally had the fingering worked out. Then, the first time I tried to play it through without pausing, a voice spoke in my head when I got to the measure I have put in a red rectangle. Between the little run and the chord, the voice said, "Wouldn't it have been better if, rather than trying to capture more of the enemy, they had figured out how to take care of those they had already captured?"

I don't know what it meant, or what it means. And, of course, after the first time, the words were there as if printed on the page whenever I played that piece and got to that measure.

Maybe that's why I moved over to banjo.

Back before computers

I was hunting through a file drawer for something else entirely, and came across an artifact from a political campaign from about thirty years back. It's a sort of script I developed for doing a phone or door-to-door survey of voters in the first canvass during an election.

I typed this thing out five or six times before I had it the way I wanted, and then got out what must have been a purple felt-tip to draw the flow arrows.

Nowadays, of course, I would just fire up Gliffy or one of its online design cousins and drag-n-drop until I had the flow I wanted, in a chart I could edit as needed. And then I could launch Apache Flex (or the technology of your choice) and build a little app for mobile devices to display the script in an interactive form so the campaign worker wouldn't have to struggle with clipboard and paper and the app could throw survey responses back to a central database.

Time to run off the newsletter!

But I'm glad I had the chance to write on a manual typewriter with correction fluid near to hand, to painstakingly carve text into a stencil and then run off copies of key documents on a Gestetner duplicator. Since it was so hard to correct something once it got typed or drawn, you learned to compose in your head to near-final quality, rather than just flinging words at the screen and editing afterwards. You might even write things out by hand with a pen and a pad of paper before turning to the typing machine.

I think having to do mental composition, and then the tactile exercise of forming the words in ink, before typing what others might see helped me think more clearly about what I was writing and why I was writing it. It also means I have an endless stock of boring pre-computer stories to stun younger people with.

Lost in the maps

I have been working on a fun freelance project for a UK company, Anquet. Part of my work has involved creating image maps off huge images of Britain, Scotland, and Wales. You can click on a sector on the image to download a detailed map of that sector.

The client just told me the first feature is live, so I went to check it out and am having fun both with the map and the company's downloadable app. Next time I'm in UK, I'll have this on my tablet.

One of the delights of the project was running into all sorts of obscure-to-me place names in the British Isles, names I had heard at some point in the past and filed without quite knowing where in the country they were. Some few I have visited, but the majority of these odd but old friends I know from historical novels and other sources.

Or, of course, from the Flanders and Swann song, "The Slow Train", made up of names of now-closed train stations across England:

Passionate

I've added "Passionate" to the short story page.

 I had a drive-by review of this story once. I had read/performed it as part of an evening of storytelling put together by Image Theater in Lowell, Massachusetts. The next day we were crossing the parking lot at a mall on our way to the grocery store. A car zoomed toward us and screeched to a halt, and the driver stuck his head out--it was a guy who had been at the show, an author of several books. "Loved that story, loved it!" he said. "New Yorker quality." Then he zoomed away.

Short Story page

I've added a short story page that will have links to stories I have written and am happy with, but that for some reason have not had a lot of circulation.

As your Advent treat, the first story added is "Proper Tennis". I hope you enjoy it!

Freelance page updated

My adventures in freelance-land are continuing, and continuing happily. As soon as I can catch my breath after completing the current fascinating jobs I will share the fun with you.

In the meantime--one of my clients asked me for a detailed list of what writing services I offer, so I have updated my writer and editor page. Have a look!

Message management

To my mind there are a few key elements to a message or marketing strategy. In rough order of priority, the key elements are:

1. Learn and listen to your audience before you speak. When you talk about what you find important, you have to connect it to what they find important.
2. Provide the value proposition: a clear, deliverable message that says what you want to say in a way your audience can hear it. The value proposition should identify a pain point for your audience and explain how you, or what you offer, will help make the pain go away.
3. Include a call to action (do this, contribute that). The action should be clear, do-able (“sign this petition” not “end injustice!”) and if possible make the audience member who acts feel good for having acted and more ready to act again.
4. Persist, but don’t pester. For each audience there is an ideal frequency of communications so that each contact reinforces your message and strengthens your connection with that audience. Less than that, and you drop out of memory; more than that, and you are a stalker.
5. Follow through (technical excellence, in that your communication should be of the highest quality you can achieve; timeliness, so you aren’t talking about stuff that’s going to happen so soon on the heels of you talking about it that your audience can’t react) and follow up. When people respond to your message (with a question, a suggestion, a contribution) you need to be ready to respond right back (with thanks, thoughtful response, suggestion of a way to become more active…). Keep a record of what you said, and what got a good (or a bad!) response.
6. Maintain message discipline. Everyone should stay on-message, without sounding like echoes. If you get asked a tricky question, it may be to trick you into an exploitable answer. We don’t need to be the first hose at every fire--it’s often better to get the facts right and make sure what you’re going to say meshes what the campaign is saying, rather than flail in front of the microphones. If you’re not an official spokesperson but you must speak out, make clear you are speaking for yourself.

I started to write this some time back, as I became more and more concerned about the messaging by a group that is very important to me. The current leadership of that group seems to focus obsessively on maintaining message discipline, which is the least important element of them all. The focus, after all, should be on communicating, not on controlling. 

If you are truly communicating, you have to be open to surprises. If what you have to say is important, it will survive occasional errors in the way you say it.

Scribble, scribble

I have somewhere an unfinished screenplay about the life of a freelance writer. I hear you yawning already. But there was a very funny scene with the client who...well, I guess you had to be there.

I will say, though, that working for a wide range of clients and potential clients is super agility exercise for the brain. I am currently working on economic news for the Persian Gulf, business plans for a British company, a screenplay about a hit man with no head for finance, a study guide for those preparing for a standardized exam, and a children's book set in West Africa. I am in conversations about possible jobs with five or six other clients, and not one of the jobs matches any other that I am currently working on or trying to get.

Although I have spent years and years multi-tasking, I am by nature a bear of very little brain. I value being able to contemplate the task, or the task just done, for a little while to understand the full savor of it, rather than just churning along. But the consolation of extended freelancing is that it is never dull.

And there is no point trying to complete that screenplay. The website Clients from Hell catalogs the freelancer's life much better than I ever could.

Not that any of my own clients would ever, ever appear on that site...

We're in Act 2B

A very wise person was just reading to me about Rose Schneiderman, a prominent labor leader in the US in the 20th century. She coined the phrase "bread and roses" to explain what the workers wanted. My wise friend read out from the Wikipedia entry, "Her platform had called for the construction of nonprofit housing for workers, improved neighborhood schools, publicly owned power utilities and staple food markets, and state-funded health and unemployment insurance for all Americans," and then said, "We're fighting the same battles she was a hundred years ago."

Some of the details have changed, but indeed this period is even more gilded than the Gilded Age, with the wealthy owning a bigger share than ever before and resenting the not-wealthy for owning anything at all. The "commons" of our shared assets as a people keep shrinking: as an example, the chairman of Nestle, one of the largest food companies in the world, is on record as saying that access to clean water is not a right.

I have to remind myself that the struggle for equity, for the greatest good possible for all people, is not a struggle against nothing, and it's not a struggle against what always must be. It's a struggle against well-financed interests who see nothing in common with average folks, much less with the truly poor and oppressed.

And I have to hope that we are in Act 2B.

What I mean is this: the classic movie follows a "three" act structure--really four acts of roughly equal length, but generally labeled 1, 2, 2B, and 3.

• In act 1 we see just enough of the hero's normal life to understand what he or she thinks is normal...and then the hero gets knocked off that stance by some event, intrusion, outrage, or opportunity. 
• In act 2 the hero starts trying to get back into balance by beating the bad guys, rescuing the prince or princess, winning the race, finding the cure, diverting the meteor, or finding true love. This is sometimes called the "fun and games" act, where it looks like the plot will be foiled or the true love will become available, or the bad guys will be conquered.
• Ah, but act 2b is when the bad guys roar back. The gains of act 2 turn into losses, the hero's best friend dies or turns out to be a traitor, the friendly wizard disappears, the starship runs out of fuel. The hero enters the long dark night of the soul when all seems to be lost--is there even any reason to keep trying?
• Why yes, there is! It's act 3, where somehow the broken threads of the story get knotted together into a net that catches the bad guys, scores the winning goal, stops the auto-destruct with just two seconds to go, and brings the hero face-to-face with the one true love. The dark clouds scatter and the hero finds a new balance and a new understanding. Cue the credits.

The super-powerful and super-heartless have roared back from the "setbacks" of the New Deal and financial regulation and are doing everything they can to reduce the commons, restrict possibilities for all but the already-wealthy, and use up everything the earth has to offer in one orgy of converting the wonder that sustains us into dollars. This is grim and heart-rending.

And yet, act 3 is just around the corner. You, I, and all the other heroes of our multi-faceted movie need to make the effort to overcome adversity, confound the bad guys, and get to the happy ending.

How do we make that happen? I'm counting on you to help me figure it out.

Tidal chess ratings

I love chess rather more than chess loves me. I love playing the game as a relentless amateur, but I don't love it enough to do the sort of careful study that would lead me to any sort of mastery. When it comes to strategy, I am forever saying, like Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, "What was the part in the middle?"

Back before computers, I used to belong to the Canadian Correspondence Chess Association. We played chess by postcard, one move per card. A game of any decent length could take 18 months to play. I had a fancy folder of flat game boards with little flat pieces that could be stuck into place, to track the 20 or so interminable games I had going.

Now it is shiny modern times, and if I wanted, I could go online whenever I want and play lightning chess games where each player has a timebank of maybe two minutes. That is a bit fast for my brain, however.

For the past decade I have been playing most of my chess on a site with the fetching name of Red Hot Pawn, You can play casual games, join tournaments, or even be on a team in a league. I usually have 30 or so games going at any given time.

I was looking over my game history, and I see I have won just a few more games than I have lost over this decade. This is reasonable, since as you win games your ratings improve, and they match you up with players with higher ratings than the players you were beating before. You get more ratings points when you beat a player who has a higher rating than you do, and fewer when you beat a lower-rated opponent.

But what has always puzzled me are the peaks and troughs--the winning streaks and the bleak weeks--of my game history. Over and over again I win a bunch of games and my rating climbs like the pitch of a roof, and then I go into a tailspin for five, eight, ten games. You would think the outcomes would be more evenly distributed, as at the left of the timeline, rather than clumping so much, so often:

Perhaps it is related to C.S Lewis' great insight in The Screwtape Letters about the Law of Undulation. As the senior devil in the book explains to the trainee devil:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal. (The Enemy’s determination to produce such a revolting hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support from Him.) As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty. The dryness and dullness through which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are merely a natural phenomenon which will do us no good unless you make a good use of it.

Not sure how this insight helps me play better chess, but it helps me (a little bit) reconcile to my timeline.

Small victories

Of course I would like to have wealth and lots of pairs of socks and clean underwear and a cello banjo and renown and to have made my mark on the world. I know I can't have them all every day...but on good days I have some of them, or one. Today was a good day, because I helped make a little tiny mark on the world.

The matter was the documentation and onscreen texts for a little application someone has made for mobile devices. It's an earnest effort, and was being handicapped by the somewhat shaky English of the app's description and instructions. I was happy to spend a few hours suggesting alternatives, and today I see the revised text in the online store. The app's creator is happy, and presumably the app's users are less mystified.

Your day has its little victories, too, and as I cherish quiet delight in mine I hope you do in yours. You can build an interesting and useful life by carefully piling up many, many, little tiny victories; and for most of us the chance to operate on a larger scale comes rarely.

Onward, now. I have another editing task: the second part of a children's book about a woman in West Africa and an elephant caught in a trap. I can't wait to see how it (the book, the elephant; maybe both) comes out!