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Author Archives: Pavowski


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for #SoCS Nov. 28/15

*Wakes up, knocks over a turkey carcass*

*Burps up a miasma of stuffing, gravy, and green-bean casserole*

*Stumbles to the bathroom to try to put last night’s orgy of gluttony behind him*

So, it’s Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. If you live in the States, like I do, I need say no more. If you don’t, for some reason we ‘Muricans pronounce the fourth Thursday in November a turkey Holocaust and gorge ourselves on everything in sight, presumably to fuel ourselves for the capitalist bacchanalia to come on Black Friday.

With that in mind, there’s only really one prompt that I’ve been able to think of for today, this Black Friday which will find me nestled cozily in bed. (Just kidding, I’ll be driving the 7 hours back to Atlanta, but a guy can dream.)

That prompt is “stuff.” Simple, right? Ehh, maybe, maybe not. You could go direct: literal, basic. Stuff as a thing is pretty ubiquitous. Or you could go all metaphorical, even symbolic. You might even, if you’re feeling saucy, use “stuff” as a root and wander into the wild realms of the participle (stuffed) or the progressive (stuffing) or even the gerund (also stuffing, sorry for the English Teacher wheelies). One request: whether you feel saucy or not, please don’t actually mention sauce. Or do, but be prepared that I might hork all over your blog if you do.

Point is: It’s #SoCS day. Go stuff yourselves.

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!

To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!

SoCS badge 2015

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” “Begin with the word ‘The’,” or simply a single word to get your started.

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. As a suggestion, tag your post “SoCS” and/or “#SoCS” for more exposure and more views.

8. Have fun!


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Writing vs. Parenting: A Handy Comparison

Everything is connected.

One of my favorite quotes comes from the illustrious Neil deGrasse Tyson:

We are part of this universe; we are in this universe, but perhaps more important than both of those facts, is that the universe is in us.

The underlying truth? The molecules, the bits and pieces that make you up, were present at the moment of the universe’s creation; they’ve just been rearranged millions of times over to cast you as the imperfect robot that you are. And that means, in a sort of beautiful way, that all things are connected. And if all the things are connected, that means all the things we do are connected.

Here, then, are 11 ways that writing is like parenting, and — more obviously — 11 ways in which they aren’t alike at all. Why 11? Why not just pick the top ten and go with those like a normal, order-conscious human?

Because this list goes to eleven.

 

Writing is like Parenting a Toddler

  1. You birth your creation, for all intents and purposes, out of sheer will and a bit of sweat.
  2. Either one is a good way to find out who you really are.
  3. Your creation will occasionally wake you up in the middle of the night for a bit of attention.
  4. You will find that your creation wanders into your thoughts without prompting at all hours of the day, regardless of whether you’re directly involved with it, or if it’s even around at the time.
  5. You will spend an inordinate amount of time cleaning up messes that your creation has made: dangling or unresolved plot lines, refrigerator empties onto the floor, characters behaving badly, toilet paper unspooled all over the house and watered with cranberry juice…
  6. Sometimes the best thing to do for your creation is to take it for a walk and get it some fresh air.
  7. Pretty much anybody can write a story or become a parent just by deciding they want to do it. Or sometimes even by accident.
  8. But writing a good story, much like raising a good kid, requires a heck of a lot more planning, thought, and hours than you can probably conceive of at the outset.
  9. Your story, like your toddler, will seem to have unexplainable mood swings all its own; you have to learn how to weather the storm.
  10. When it’s going well, you feel absolutely bulletproof.
  11. When it’s going poorly, you feel eaten by sharks.

Writing is not at all like Parenting a Toddler

  1. It’s pretty unlikely that any problem involving your child can be solved with any amount of ink or word processing power. In fact, adding ink to a situation involving your child is probably a recipe for disaster.
  2. Your story will never literally barf in your shoes.
  3. Or dunk your favorite tie in the toilet.
  4. Or paint with salsa on the carpet.
  5. Society is pretty forgiving to writers who drink. In a lot of cases, writers are almost expected to drink; it’s part of their craft. Parents, on the other hand…
  6. New parents get a free pass to show off pictures and talk about their kids at every opportunity. Nobody wants to see or hear about a writer’s unfinished story.
  7. If your story gets on your nerves, you can shut it down and forget about it entirely for a few days.
  8. Your story will only grow and improve with your active participation. Your kid will grow and learn things entirely on her own. (Usually the wrong things, if you’re not careful.)
  9. Your story probably won’t throw a tantrum in the toy aisle of the Target, earning you the sympathetic glances of fellow writers and the disapproving stares of non-writers.
  10. You only get to pick your kid’s name once.
  11. If you screw your story up, you can throw it out and rewrite it from scratch as many times as you want.

There you have it. A perfectly scientific comparison of two things that totally make sense together. Bear this information in mind when you’re deciding whether you would rather be a writer or a parent. Because you obviously can’t do both at the same time.


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Hide Your Valuables: Guest Poster, Pavowski

The internet is this wonderful place where you can meet new people, engage in scintillating conversation, build a lovely virtual community, and then hand over the keys to a lunatic to house-sit for you while you take a long weekend.

The lunatic would be me. I’m sure Linda will pardon all the selfies I take as I put all her furniture into compromising positions. And these vomit stains will wash right out, I’m sure. Also, the bullet holes were totally already in the siding before I got here. And let’s not discuss details, but you might want to take all your potted plants outside and burn them, for their own good. We’ll just say that they’ve seen things that the average botanical ought not see. (I blame Helen Espinosa for that, actually. Do you even vet your guest hosts at all?)

Anyway, I’m taking over this joint for the week, and more to the point, I’m in the driver’s seat for Stream of Consciousness Saturday this weekend, so, you know, brace for impact and hide your kids and all that. You will probably also see an unrelated ramble from me of the sort I usually post at my own nest of iniquity. If you like what you see, feel free to stop on by and pay a visit to the cubby I knocked out of the drywall where I do my own not-quite-daily driveling at Accidentally Inspired. If you don’t like what you see, well, uh, I’m sure there’s some bleach around here somewhere. Or at least, there was, before I had to clean up after Helen. (I’m pretty sure she killed a guy in the basement, Linda. It definitely wasn’t me. Either way, uh, sorry about the corpse in the basement.)

It occurs to me that you might be curious who I am, just in case you need to make a description for the authorities later. I’m a jack of many trades, master of maybe a quarter of one. I’m a father of two, husband of one, and I sometimes write about that. I teach English at public high school just outside of Atlanta (fear for the future), and I rarely write about that. I run often, for escape and inspiration and to prepare for the zombie apocalypse, and I write about that probably more than the average person cares. Finally, I’m a writer, with two novels drafted and in various stages of editing, and about a thousand more ideas kicking around inside my skull, looking for a way out.

That’s what my blog is really all about — the day-to-day trivialities of the average Pav, working a full-time job and more or less meeting the criteria of a dad and trying like hell to write good stories that might, one day, get published, so that you could hold a book of my work with my name on it, and so that I might hopefully get a couple of dollars for my trouble.

So, yeah. That’s me, and you’re you, and if you’ll just sign these non-disclosure agreements and your life-and-limb waivers, we’ll get started.


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The Friday Reminder and Prompt for SoCS December 12/14

Greetings. I’m the second of your Linda’s Christmas Holiday Substitute Teachers. Eyes front. No hall passes.

I have a sort of preoccupation with things I don’t understand, like time and space and Black Friday and the minds of toddlers and why the English language has words like “kerfuffle” (utterly useless) but no answer for the German “schadenfreude” (I would use that word EVERY DAMN DAY). Also, Helen’s prompt gave me a certain kind of nudge in a certain kind of direction, and I find that when you feel nudged, the thing to do is nudge back, unless of course you’re a senator nudging toes in a bathroom stall at the airport.

Er, right. The prompt. I had about a thousand variations on a theme that I pondered for the prompt, from the highfalutin to the plebeian (and, see, now I’m just doing wheelies on my vocabulary bicycle since I’m playing in somebody else’s sandbox). But as intrigued as I was by some of those ideas, I ultimately came to the conclusion that simpler is better, and I, for one, could use a dose of simplicity after the week I’ve had. Let the distractions and the stresses fall away. Take a step back.

So, for this week your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is one word: “Back.” Use it however you’d like: as a standalone, as a prefix, a suffix, noun, verb, or adverb (can you tell I’m an English teacher in my daytime life?); just make sure you have fun and enjoy the words flowing onto your screen so you can share them with us!

After you’ve written your Saturday post tomorrow, please link it here at this week’s prompt page and check to make sure it’s here in the comments so others can find it and see your awesome Stream of Consciousness post. Anyone can join in!

To make your post more visible, use the SoCS badge! Just paste it in your Saturday post so people browsing the reader will immediately know your post is stream of consciousness and/or pin it as a widget to your site to show you’re a participant. Wear it with pride!!

socs-badge

Badge by: Doobster @ Mindful Digressions

Here are the rules:

1. Your post must be stream of consciousness writing, meaning no editing, (typos can be fixed) and minimal planning on what you’re going to write.

2. Your post can be as long or as short as you want it to be. One sentence – one thousand words. Fact, fiction, poetry – it doesn’t matter. Just let the words carry you along until you’re ready to stop.

3. There will be a prompt every week. I will post the prompt here on my blog on Friday, along with a reminder for you to join in. The prompt will be one random thing, but it will not be a subject. For instance, I will not say “Write about dogs”; the prompt will be more like, “Make your first sentence a question,” or “Begin with the word ‘The’.”

4. Ping back! It’s important, so that I and other people can come and read your post! For example, in your post you can write “This post is part of SoCS:” and then copy and paste the URL found in your address bar at the top of this post into yours.  Your link will show up in my comments, for everyone to see. The most recent pingbacks will be found at the top.

5. Read at least one other person’s blog who has linked back their post. Even better, read everyone’s! If you’re the first person to link back, you can check back later, or go to the previous week, by following my category, “Stream of Consciousness Saturday,” which you’ll find right below the “Like” button on my post.

6. Copy and paste the rules (if you’d like to) in your post. The more people who join in, the more new bloggers you’ll meet and the bigger your community will get!

7. Have fun!


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Bamboo Patience

I’ve just read a fascinating article (which is always dangerous) and I went and generalized it (which is always entirely justifiable… maybe not) and made it about me (which… come on, I’m a blogger, what do you expect).

An article about bamboo.

I’m not a gardener. In fact, if the word “gardener” has a polar opposite, then I’m that. (Blighter? Destroyer of things green? Seriously, you should see my front yard. By which I mean, my front collection of weeds.) But through the whimsy of the internet, I found myself reading this article about bamboo farmers and success. It’s worth five minutes of your time, but here’s the quickly-generalized, me-centric summation of the article.

Bamboo is one of the fastest-growing plants on the planet. It grows so quickly and so prolifically, and is so incredibly strong (it has a tensile strength close to that of steel) that it seems miraculous. Some species can grow as much as three feet in 24 hours. (I picture the analogue of my son sprouting up to my height overnight and it gives me the shivering willies.) Yet many people who try to grow bamboo get frustrated and give up and never see it achieve that growth, because the first five years of the seeds’ growth is entirely underground.

Imagine it.

  • Day one, plant a seed.
  • Day two, water, check for growth, nothing.
  • Day three, water, check for growth, nothing.
  • Day four, water, check for growth, nothing.
  • Day five, water, check for growth, nothing.

Wash, rinse, repeat, until …

  • Day 1828, water, check for growth, nothing.
  • Day 1829, water, check for growth, nothing.
  • Day 1830, water, HOLY SHARKNADO THERE’S A FOREST OF BAMBOO IN MY BACKYARD.

That’s a heck of a lot of days, a heck of a lot of faith, and an ungodly amount of patience and tenacity: an untold amount of time spent doing a simple but time-consuming thing (watering the plant every day) with not an ounce of feedback that the thing you’re doing is useful, worthwhile, or even productive in any way. For all you know, on day seven the seeds died and turned to dust in the ground, and you might very well be wasting your time. But if you don’t keep working, the seeds will definitely wither and crumble.

And this is a little like writing, innit? Or maybe a lot like writing. Actually, make it a metaphor for whatever you like, but I think it’s particularly fitted for writing. Because we writers do our work underground. We have the inspiration to write and plant that seed deep in the loamy earth of our minds. We enclose ourselves in our batcaves, our secret chambers, our dark enclosures isolated from all human contact, and the words spill out of us like so much irrigation on the soil of our precious ideas. For days, weeks, months we toil in quiet and fear and clandestine hope that our pet projects, our favorite characters, our brilliant plot lines, will take root and spring forth, filling the world with color and the sweet scent of our inspiration … but we have no idea if it’s going to happen. Whether that field of bamboo represents simply getting published, or penning a bestseller, or even just finishing a draft, the finish line can feel so far away it might as well not even exist.

We see the bamboo fields that have sprung up in other authors’ backyards, and that gives us hope–I could have that, too!–but it simultaneously fills us with doubt–will it happen for me? And we don’t have a master gardener standing over our shoulder, telling us to keep our heads down, keep watering the seeds, keep fertilizing the soil, and all will be well. We don’t even have that five-year guarantee that bamboo has. For some, it may happen faster: they’ll have a backyard full of bamboo in the space of a year or two. For others, it may take longer: their garden may take a decade or more to sprout. For still others it may never happen.

But regardless of the speed at which the garden grows, I think any gardener will tell you that it’s not all about the end result. Sure, the rows of tomatoes and the baskets full of roses are the ideal, but even without them, the work is not a total loss. Because the work is therapeutic. Kneeling in the soil, breathing the unprocessed air of the outdoors, feeling the sun on your back, working your fingers in the dirt, plucking the weeds… the work means something in its own right. Likewise, forcing the words onto the page, exploring the characters, designing new plot lines… it means something. Yes, it’s about making the seeds grow, but throughout the process, you learn, you grow. And then, on day 1831, whether your bamboo has pierced through the ground striving for the sky or not, you come back ready to water it again. And again. And again.

Trust in the knowledge that the work matters, whether the bamboo grows or not. You have to be your own feedback. You have to fling your vision forward into the future and visualize those steely shoots springing out of the ground now, starting today, and let that vision sustain you, because the fruits of your labor are just going to be invisible until they happen.

Trust in the bamboo. Keep watering.

Thanks to Linda for allowing me to guest post while she’s out. For more drivel like this, check out my homepage over at Pavorisms.


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Party Crasher Pav

Greetings from Pavorisms.

Starting in a few days, your regularly scheduled operator will be unavailable for a couple of weeks, and she wanted to leave some of her regular features in capable hands to make sure you felt warm and snuggly knowing that your regular Stream of Consciousness Saturday posts would go uninterrupted.

But we all make mistakes in life, and she picked me as one of the stand-ins. You’ll be getting a prompt from me in a couple of weeks, and if things really go sideways, you may end up seeing some of my regular content here as well. If that happens, I recommend you just keep your head down. I can’t guarantee that there won’t be baby bodily fluids involved. I, uh… I brought a tarp. I left it somewhere around here. Just huddle up and make a friend, okay?

Am I qualified to stand in at a writing blog with a readership far beyond my normal, tiny circle? Here’s the skinny: When I was in high school I wrote prolifically. Awful short stories, horrible poetry, a really ill-advised novel, and a play that was maybe not so terrible. Then I stopped. I don’t know why. I think I knew my writing was about as appealing as a pile of badger droppings and decided I’d do the world a favor and stop dropping those little nuggets.

Then, in college, I picked it up again. This time, I stuck to plays, and I wrote a pretty good one and a handful of not-so-bad ones. A couple of them saw production at high schools and community theaters, and though I never made a dime off any of them, they convinced me that maybe I wasn’t entirely devoid of talent. But then I stopped again. Probably that badger droppings feel again, possibly the disillusionment with my chosen field of study, likely a total lack of confidence.

A few years have passed, now, and something inspired me to pick up the pen again. Starting in March of this year, I began the transcontinental trek of adapting my pretty good play into a full length novel, and peppered that with an (almost) weekly short story and a heck of a lot of reflection about writing and parenting and running, all of which I do with dogged regularity. Something clicked, and now I can’t stop. As a result, I’ve got a manuscript of about 96,000 words (yeah, I get a little obsessed with word-count) that I’m waist-deep in editing, and, oh, probably about 150,000 words of drivel not unlike what you’re currently reading over at my blog, Pavorisms. (If you’re curious about what I tongue-in-cheekly refer to as my capital “W” Writing, you can find my collection of short stories there as well.) In short, it’s been a productive year. (Whether or not any of what I’ve “produced” qualifies as readable, entertaining, or fit to print on toilet paper remains to be seen. I mean, badgers “produce” poop, as we’ve already established.)

So, uh, am I qualified to be here standing in for Linda? Meh, maybe not, but as Jules said in Pulp Fiction, “I’m tryin’ real hard to be the shepherd.” I don’t know what herding sheep has to do with the current situation, but it’s Samuel L. Jackson speaking there, and we all know you don’t fargo with that motherfargoer.

At any rate, I’ll be providing you with a prompt at next week’s end and maybe a few tidbits besides. In the meantime, if you felt like heading my way and giving me a read, that’d be super, too.

And, of course, my thanks to Linda for handing me the keys to the car while you’re out. I promise that I will kick it into reverse when I’m done with it and run all the miles back off before you get home. Don’t worry about the dents in the chrome, those will buff right out. Also, I don’t know anything about the scratches on the side panels, the crack in the windshield, or the bits of gore in the grille.

In fact, let’s just pretend I was never here.