War Post: May 2nd Mashup & ROW Goals

Today should be a Insecure Writers Support Group post.  But I decided to make it just a Mashup and Goals like usual.  Why you might ask?  Because I wrote something separate for the IWSG.  I realized that it needed to be separate, and it was a blog post all of its own, so check it out if you are into that kind of thing.  Let's rock this Mashup and Goals peeps!

Scott Ashton made my week when I discovered his blog about Brandon Sanderson's creative writing class.  Check it out at: "Write about Dragons."

Ava Jae wrote about the challenge of Finishing in: "How to Finish Writing a Novel."

If you ever wanted to find out how many millionaires are paying in a lower tax bracket than you check out: "The Buffett Rule."

Larry Correia shares a little about how ridiculous our administration can be in: "Freaking ridiculous, child labor laws coming to family farms." (And if you want to read more go here.)

At Spirit of Ilithyia a story about the way birth is handled in this country, tune in at: "How Birth One Hundred Years Ago Impacts Birth Today."

Stephen Foster Jr. shares the thoughtfulness of a girls father and the sensitivity of a radio personality in: "Rape Away The Gay?"

Martha Wells brings us back the past, so we can recognize the future in: "Erasing Women."

Bjorn Lomberg has great news telling us we have enough food to end world hunger, but we still need more in: "How To Get Food on Every Table."

N.K. Jemisin talks about a topic I never knew came to pass in SSF (and I'm thrilled it did) in: "Why I Think RaceFail Was The Bestest Thing Evar for SFF."

And Timothy Sexton wrote an article on similar topic in: "How Martin Luther King Kept Lt. Uhura on the Bridge of the Starship Enterprise."

And for our laugh of the day I thought, let's watch Leonard Nimoy be lazy for a day. 

This week has been so much more productive than the last several.  I'm so thankful for smaller goals.  However as I was about to do a lot better, I had a friend in the National Guard take his own life.  It kinda ruined the end of the week for me.  Still here's a taste of what I accomplished in the last week.
1. Finishing Chapter Two and starting Chapter Threeof "Crimes of the Umbramancer by next week.     I wanted to finish up Chapter Two, but unfortunately after the news I've become both depressed and busy.  Hopefully I'll finish up this week, but we'll have to see what happens at this point.
2. Write seven thousand words per week. (Between blog & fiction.)     Well counting what I write on Twitter, Writing Group, my Scene, and getting a Blog Buffer, I have managed to get at least seven thousand in the last week.  Which I'm very grateful for.
3. Exercise five times a week.     The end of the week I didn't make running at all.  Though I have managed to get a fair amount of walking in on Friday and Saturday, but it just doesn't get me the work out I need.  Still working this goal.
4. Finishing up my school work from my last semester in College.

     Ever have a professor tell you how hard it is to get students to do work after the semester is over.  It is true, because you have the multiple pressures of being in class, having friends with you, and most importantly, a grade that is hanging over you at the end.  But remove that and you can find yourself floundering.  I wonder if this is to all help me be a great college advisor?  I've gone through pretty much every bad situation you can think of while I've been in school.  Oh, but you didn't come here to listen to me complain.

    Nothing got done this week (Thank God for a merciful teacher).  And Pride and Prejudice is still kicking my butt.  I'll get through it though.

5. Spending time everyday with a spiritual source.
     One of my cousin's gave me a little book called Morning and Evening Daily Readings by C.H. Spurgeon.  Now I received this back around the time of my wife's grandfather's funeral, but I haven't read from it much at this point.  But I picked it up thinking, it has some really good insights, and I haven't been disappointed yet.  I've been reading since Saturday and it has given a shot in the arm to my spiritual walk.

6. Finishing homework from Group Therapy.
     I have a friend who has a motto in her home of "No Secrets."  And I love this philosophy.  But I also know that to keep such a rule you also must know how to keep certain knowledge within certain circles.  It changes what you mean when you say that you trust somebody.  So I thought I would test my own ability in following this rule and admit that I'm going to Group Therapy.  It has been wonderful because they are helping me to get through some of the challenges of my childhood in an environment with other folks like me.

Well that's everything for Goals for ROW80.  If you are interested check out the sister post to this blog for the Insecure Writers Support Group.  I'm Jayrod Garrett, the First OG and here is the ROW80 bloghop.  Look it up, comment, or join us.  There aren't any cookies, but there is certainly a lot of love, growth, and thoughtfulness in our community.  Peace peeps!

The Culture Blogs: Left Brain vs Right Brain

“I am the left brain.  I am dependent on denotative language and abstraction.  I yield clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless.  I love the familiar.  Principles.  Segregation.  I am black and white.  I am organized reality.  I am your world and your views.    Morals.  Hatred.  Values.  Love.  I am the rational mind.”

                                    Versus

“I am the right brain.  I yield a world of changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world.  I am Diversity.  An open mind.  Connection.  Intertextuality.  I am so many sounds you can't comprehend them all.  So many colors you can't tell where one ends and the next begins.  And more tastes than you can bear to examine.  I am boundless imagination.  I am everything and everyone.  Art.  Mathematics.  Music.  Noise.  Infinity.  I am the intuitive mind.”

You've probably seen this picture before.  If so you are likely saying that's not what the captions beside the picture say.  And you would be right.  But when I saw this picture I immediately decided to do a little bit of research on the matter.  What I found completely blew me away.  I discovered this RSA Animate on the Divided Brain and it sparked all sorts of new ideas for me.  From why we tend to polarize in politics, religions, and in education.  It has all to do with how our brains work and the society we have developed around ourselves.

It's kinda long, but I promise its worth it!

For those of you who didn’t watch it, I’ll give ya a short recap.  Basically it shares about how we have lost sight of what the mind actually does for us.  It is entirely designed to inhibit information from one side to the other so that we can correctly interpret it.  And as we have grown as a society we have begun to focus more on the power of the left side of the brain, the rational side as opposed to the intuitive side, and we effects of that in our society are interesting.

Here’s three examples of this culture that can be used in your writing:

1. Left Brain thinking in Politics

In politics there is a great deal of hero worship and demonizing that goes on.  I see it among my friends, neighbors, and those people that I try to ignore sometimes.  President Obama is a great example of these types of thoughts.  Those who support Obama think that he is amazing and that he has been good for America.  On the other hand those who don’t support him tend to say everything he has done has been bad, and there are even those who go as far as to call him the Anti-Christ.

Now is one end the truth or the other?  Personal opinion is that he’s probably somewhere in the middle.  But if you want to be able to write fiction that is balanced and referential to our current day, you wouldn’t go wrong by using this in your political climate. 

2. Left Brain thinking in War

As a soldier allow me to tell you that this is a crucial matter for a soldier.  I was trained to seek out and destroy the enemy back in basic training.  There were times I said kill as I performed an attack so much that I hated what I was doing.  But as a soldier I cannot have right brain thinking on the battlefield about the enemy’s family: their spouse, children, and pets.  I cannot afford to humanize them, or else when it comes down life or death I might hesitate.  And then the person dead is me.

However encompassing right brain thinking into the mourning process afterwards I think is important.  Because for me it forces me to recognize the importance of human life, and how people can be on opposite sides of a conflict and still fighting for the same basic values: Government, Freedom, Family, and Religion.

3. Left Brain thinking in Education

Math is the most hated class in high school and university classes hands down.  Often folks say that Math Teachers can’t teach.  Others say Math is useless.  And the iron gates of the Left Brain shut off to Math because it is hard.

Now I’m okay at Math, not great.  But I think it is because I approach it from the perspective of a Right Brained person.  Math is a language like Spanish, Russian, or German.  And so it requires me to study like it is a language.  Meaning I have to do study groups, find applications in everyday life, and spend copious amounts of time learning it.  I suffered from the Left Brain thinking for years before I realized that.  I passed Math once I discovered that.

If you spend some time thinking about it, I’m sure there are some plots or subplots to a novel you can use this concept in.  Or perhaps you can apply it to your own life, like I did to be able to get through my Math courses.  Either way using both sides of our brain to process what we are given each day is crucial to a correct understanding of the world around us.

Think about what issues you are decided on, and then spend time listening to the arguments of the other side.  Allow both sides of your brain a chance to use everything they have.  You may stay right where you are in your opinion, but you may experience a revolution of the mind where you discover not that you are wrong, but that there are other opinions that are just as valid and right as your own.

As we are drawing close to the end of February I would love for everyone who visits my blog to leave a comment.  For every person that comments on my blog this month I am putting an entry into a hat for an opportunity to win a copy of N.K. Jemisin’s The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.  I plan on giving three of these away.  It was nominated last year for both a Hugo and a Nebula award.  And it has been a fascinating read thus far.

That’s all for now folks, my name is Jayrod Garrett and I am the First OG.  How do you use both your rational and intuitive minds together?

Yesterday you said Tomorrow.

Late.  That is exactly what I am.  I’m late for my blogging this week.  I’m late on reaching my goals seeing as I am two days behind in my writing.  I’m late in finding work to be able to support my family.  I’m late in doing what I need to take care of my career in the military.  I’m getting to sleep late and getting to my part time job late. Everything boils down to this for me this week.  I am late.

And then I saw a nike sponsored quote that gave me a little bit of hope this week: Yesterday you said Tomorrow.  Now that might sound weird, because I really haven’t been keeping up with my goals to reach my dream, but it made me feel good because I realize I haven’t put off my dreams till tomorrow.  I am working on them today.

I have met too many people who are I would refer to as broken quills.  In the grand scheme of things they are not trying to live up to their potential, they stopped chasing after what they really want in life, or it just becomes too much work to chase what they really want.  Now these people entirely could still chase after their dreams, because they still have the ability just like a broken quill can still write, but they get caught up too much in their failings and how far they have drifted away from what they should be doing to make their life what they always wanted as a young adult.

Art and our dreams sometimes equates to sacrifice.  And that sacrifice sometimes hurts or scares us.  My sacrifices of late have been full time work and sleep.  If you didn’t know I recently came back from Iraq.  This completely scared me because I couldn’t jump back into school without having a semester that I would have failed.  I know my limits and immediately before and after a deployment my grades in school are terrible.  So to go back and receive my GI Bill would have not helped me in the long run, so I chose not to return to school as of yet.  However I still work up at school in my dream job.  I work for the Nontraditional Students Center as one of their Peer Advisors which means I help students who are coming to school with families figure out the crazy animal known as college.  It is tremendously fulfilling and I enjoy working with the students a great deal.  This job came with an opportunity to run a literary journal that is run by the center.  I love managing this literary journal because I’ve learned so much about writing, and become much more courageous in the things I’m willing to write and feel.  I don’t think I would be writing the story that I’m currently working on if I didn’t work there.

But here’s where the sacrifice comes in.  I need more hours at my work.  But they can’t afford to pay me more.  I’m capped out.  So I need to seek out a second job.  So far I’ve gotten a lot of rejections, which is par for the course for Americans.  However this is only because I’ve been trying to preserve the job that I currently possess.  If I went and looked for full time work I would be able to easily get a job and my life and the schedule I’m living on would stabilize immediately.  But I can’t give up a job that is helping me to get experience in my field of writing and also in the field of working with families.  I’m going to school to get a degree in working in both fields.  So do I give in or seek after my dream?

As for my writing I’ve been working on it so much that I’ve sacrificed sleep instead of organizing my days so that I can fit writing and my religious studies in at the beginning of my day.  And now I’ve just gotten to the point that I’m burning the candle at both ends and it requires that I change something because I can’t keep up this pace.  So tonight I called a family meeting and shared with everyone my concerns and set a reasonable bedtime for myself and now I’m going to be in bed between 11PM and Midnight.  This will enable me to get up early in the morning to get my writing done before everyone in my home is awake.  Mind you this is still a sacrifice because I personally am a night owl.  I function much better at night, but I need the quiet hours in our home to be able to accomplish the work that I love.

Folks become broken quills because they aren’t willing to make sacrifices to achieve the dreams they seek after.  But sometimes you have to do something to put food on the table and keep a roof overhead.   So we as people and artists are left with decisions that can possibly break our hearts and rend us at our heartstrings.  But that tells more about the caliber of people that we hope to be.  People who sacrifice achieve their dreams, and people who settle complain for a lifetime of missed opportunities.  This isn’t to say that either one is wrong, but to say as much as not providing for my family scares me I’m not ready yet to give up my dreams to support them.  I live by faith day to day, and I believe that I am where I am in my life right now because I’ve worked hard and through the providence of God.  So to support my family I have to stretch a bit further and seek out the right job more diligently this month.  To accomplish my writing I have to get up a lot earlier.  And to achieve my dreams I have to remember: Yesterday you said Tomorrow.

ROW80 Goals for this week:

1. Finishing a single scene of “Crimes of the Umbramancer” each day.
This week I've only finished a scene and a half. I still have Saturday and Sunday to catch up though so I am annoyed, but not unable.
2. Comment on 10 different blogs in ROW80.
I haven't been to any blogs this week. That will change tomorrow morning while I'm in my writing time! Visited ten blogs Friday Morning! And a few more Thursday night! Woo!
3. Video games for only twelve hours for the week.
I only played for nine hours this week. I am gaining better control and I don't intend on playing for a couple weeks at the moment. We'll see how this develops.
4. Bedtime between 11PM and Midnight to wake up at six or seven in the morning to take advantage of the early hours to get my writing all finished each day.
This goal will begin tomorrow morning and we'll see how it goes.
5. Walking at least a mile, five days a week.
 I'm a scoutmaster and I wanted to help some of the boys who are a little less active reach for some goals. So I'm going to be doing a goal that gets me walking so I can keep him accountable cause I'm doing the same work I've asked of him.
6. Finding the perfect job within the next month.
 This will be the journey I make to finding the work that will enable me to move into the next phase of my life. It will likely require some prayer and a lot of work, but I believe that there is a reason why I'm where I'm at right now. So we'll see what happens.

Please tell me about your dreams folks. Why you dream them and what you are willing to give up to achieve them? Or even why you didn't achieve your dreams. We all have some valuable experience to share with one another and I hope this blog is a place where you might find that. Happy dream hunting all!