Showmen’s Museum, Riverview FL…finished Killing Critical Voice class…releasing the past
Another backed-up post…
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I need to get my head on straight, so I’m typing out the stuff that’s clogging me up. It’s long; I kept putting this off “because I didn’t have time.” Eeeeeyeah, I should know better by now.
What’s up:
–Trip to Showmen’s Museum, Riverview FL.
–Killing Critical Voice class: done!
–Other stuff.
Earlier last weekend, I had one goal, to do the homework for one of my classes, Advanced Voice. We’re working on developing character voice and author voice.
Assignment: go out and overhear someone’s conversation, transcribe it with full um and ahs, then write it out as fiction. Results: successful, even though I didn’t feel like I was doing it right at the time; I was supposed to track at least five minutes of conversation and ended up getting maybe a minute or two on the longest one, and I didn’t get THAT one written out in time. Instead I wrote out half a dozen shorter examples (and posted the cutest one online). The actual, real-life “conversation” on the cutest one was about six lines long and mostly one-sided, but took 250 words or so to write out as proper dialogue, mostly because I had to give setting, establish my own narrative perspective, and suggest enough context so the reader could follow along with what *I* surmised from what I overheard.
It was interesting: part of my brain was trying to be “objective” and keep it short, but the rest of me wasn’t having it. I didn’t *know* for sure what the people were talking about, but I added meaning anyway, so that I could imply a full “story” based on the little snippet of conversation. Fiction writers, we’re full of shit, and quite possibly addicted to creating meaning where there is none. C’est la guerre.
Anyway, I started at the Village Inn, thinking it would be an easy place to obtain a) pie, and b) conversation. There was a huge downpour right before I got there, though, and it took a while for anyone to get there. What conversations there were, ran short. It ended up being fine (this was where I pulled my examples from) but I didn’t feel like I’d worked hard enough for it, so decided to buy a pie and keep going.
Perhaps the Manatee Viewing Area at the Apollo Beach Power Station? And some adorable conversations about manatees?
Perhaps not. The viewing area, and in fact *all* the paths around it, are only open from November to April. Manatees only cluster around the hot water leaving the power station when it’s cold out. Or as cold out as it gets in Florida, anyway.
Bleah. Disappointing.
As I left, I pulled over to take some pictures of the main power station buildings, but got chased off by a security guard who said photography was forbidden because the buildings were secure. I felt like he had to be pulling my leg; there weren’t any signs or anything. But okay. I left; he didn’t make me delete the pictures I’d already taken. He told me that they didn’t have tours or anything, either, because of course I asked after he told me to leave, mostly just to be perverse.
Aaand…I forgot to write any of that down. Shit.
Next I went to the Showmen’s Museum in Riverside, a neat little museum about the circus. Cool stuff:
–Circuses used to have days where they’d just hold “spectacles,” or recreations of things like “the fall of Rome.” Everyone in the big circus trains would participate. There might be like a thousand participants. If you’re watching one of the old black and white movies and there’s a CAST OF THOUSANDS, this is probably where it came from.
–One of the last sideshow acts to die out was the dance review, a Vegas showgirl-style show before there were Vegas showgirls.
–PT Barnum started out not with the circus (he only started when he was sixty) but in MUSEUMS. But his museum, in NYC, was more like a multi-story sideshow, with live animals, human exhibits of “freaks” and “natives,” and what we’d consider more normal museum exhibits. After like the third time his museum burned down, Barnum turned to the circus. It wasn’t really until he joined up with Bailey, a competitor, that the European-style acts of derring do, were integrated.
Not a lot of conversations overheard at the museum, although I did talk to the woman running the front desk afterwards. She’s from a local circus/curiosity family, grew up in that life, and was telling me a story about a guy with flippers for hands and feet, who would do a family-friendly act locally in the daytime, but then go out to local bars and drink, and do a more “adult” act in the evenings, for drinks. He had had everything in his house and a car set up for him to use and didn’t have any issues getting around town, playing guitar, etc. She said she only realized why he was doing the adult act in the evenings recently–as advertising. Guys at the bar would see him perform, then go home and tell their friends and families about the act, and go see the act in the daytime.–I was gonna ask questions but we got interrupted. Nice place, very laid back, small. Recommend, $10 at the door for a couple hours’ entertainment.
I *also* didn’t write any of it down. Because duh.
I finally went to a coffee shop in Riverside and wrote down most of a conversation (the two-minute one), where I couldn’t hear two of the four people speaking, yet which still gave me the creeps the longer I listened to it.
It SOUNDED like a couple was asking for a homeopathic test for Down Syndrome, and trying to get Tricare to pay for it.
I couldn’t wrap my head around it. Then I took a mental step back and realized that a lot of my distress was coming from subtle cues about the coffee shop that added up to one of those places run by Christian cult-y types who don’t know shit about coffee. Like, fuck. I have blue hair now; I can’t totally pass anymore. I have the rainbows and shit. People were staring at me. There were zero Black or Hispanic people, that I could tell; just white and Asian. I’m usually more clued in on this stuff now, but I wasn’t thinking. The food came in a to-go box when I asked for it for here; the “dry cappuccino” I requested had no foam on it and was made with burnt beans in a to-go cup; the interior of the shop was light blue, white, and gray with fake barnwood and Tesla bulbs. Mottos everywhere; local artwork and/or pictures of coffee farmers nowhere. No grimy kids’ toys, no bookshelf with weird donated books and/or a chess set. A guy’s shirt with the motto DON’T LET AGE CHANGE YOU, CHANGE THE WAY YOU AGE. Immortality and “goodness” seekers, afraid of life and afraid of difference. If you know what a coffee shop is supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to sound like, what it’s supposed to smell like, the fake ones are extremely offputting and feel like danger zones. This was protective coloration for something else.
I stayed for a few more minutes just to be perverse, then got the hell out.
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Killing the Critical Voice class: this was a Kris & Dean/WMG Class. I listened to some of the class videos while I was at Village Inn and ended up just getting wrecked over a side note that Dean mentioned: he lives a pretty fearless life, just kind of naturally; the hallmark of a good Dean story is that the listeners say, “Dean. How are you not DEAD?!?” at the end of it. He’s covered a lot of different professions, too; it’s not like he was ever just a writer. Even now he’s training for marathons.–He said something about why he’s with Kris, like, “There’s a reason why my two ex-wives are ex-wives; Kris just goes, ‘That’s just Dean’ and off I go.”
For some reason it just hit me how much of my life has been spent under the control of people who were scared to cut loose, scared to play, scared to travel, scared to experiment, scared to even learn something new. And, more importantly, scared to let me do so, either. I’m not Dean; I don’t need to defy death on a regular basis. But I’m never going to settle again for someone that every damn thing is at best a low-key fight to defend my choices and desire to explore.–Now, one of the ways that the ex “got” me was by pretending to love the things I did, including exploring and learning, but of course the only things he really wanted to do were the things where he’d look good and feel comfortable doing. He just lied about it until I was good and hooked.
A good green flag for the people I keep around me might include a willingness to risk discomfort, embarrassment, failure, or at least let ME do so without trying to put a chokehold on me about it. (The “De, did you think about xxxx?” conversations are fine.) I’ve lived a life where I let people tell me I couldn’t do things because it was stupid/a waste of time when it was about them and their egos; I’ve been poking around in various forms of “yes” lately and it’s been quite nice.
I tried to explain this to the ex sooooo many times. “I try hard to never say no to you.” It sounds terrible–boundaries are good things–but the things I was saying yes to were the harmless things he wanted but wouldn’t let himself have or do or ask for; he only trusted what he could manipulate or bully other people into giving him. Gifts turned his stomach, quite literally if food was involved. It was only when he had power over other people that he could cope with being around them for any length of time. His “you owe me, so you have to do what I want” attitude couldn’t cope with my “sounds interesting, let’s try it and see what happens.”
But back to the class. The final assignment was to write down 400-800 words of something that we wanted to do but weren’t, because of social expectations or internal bullshit. I expected to find half a dozen things to write about.
Instead what I found was stuff about writing and publishing (the stuff I’m working on in this class). The rest of it…I’ve dealt with it. I’ve faced most of my current set of fears, expectations, and resistances, at least, to the extent that I can do so on my own, with my own resources. Some stuff, like traveling out of the country, I need to get Ray up to speed on, because I want to bring her, too. Other stuff I’m not doing because I only have so many spoons, although now that I have my body somewhat functional again (after almost wrecking it, before I got fired) I’m thinking about taking on some other projects as I wrap up old ones.
But I’m not living in fear. I take chances with people, with traveling and exploring, with learning, with embarrassing myself and facing discomfort, even with just accepting myself as a flawed human being–that is, with the things *I* value.
I hadn’t really realized it. A couple of people have called me fearless lately and I just don’t see it. But then I’ve met people like Dean and then some; one whole side of my family is a bunch of damn reckless idiots, given the right circumstances, and I’m not the worst of them. I’ve seen actual fearless people! And wow am I not that! But that I don’t make decisions solely based on the fear of getting punished by the people around me, *that* I can lay claim to.
It was a weird thought.
But I still have a lot of writing things to work on. The last few days, I’ve been working on releasing the things I’m scared of around writing. My WIP is serious stuff, very important…release it. I need to do a good job writing, or else bad things will happen…release it. I have to be focused in order to write…release it. I have to keep my mouth shut and act like a Real Professional Writer online…release it. I have to not brag or be arrogant…release it. I have to be so-and-so much productive…release it. I have to have everything be perfectly accurate and researched (or be tortured about not doing so)…release it. I have to know WHY I put something in a scene…release it. I can’t write stuff if I don’t know ahead of time that it’s going to work.
Release it.
So far so good. The going is slow. I can feel myself being extremely tentative, waiting for something (me, honestly) to lash out at me about the chances that I’m taking. But I’m not taking chances. I’m just screwing around and having fun.–Which somehow, out of the corner of my eye, means I’m taking some pretty sharp chances indeed. I found a new way to say nasty things about the inherent corruption of Christian-cult-oriented businesses yesterday and ran it hard and obvious.
But that’s the writing side. I need to work on the publishing side, too, but I’ve told myself that I don’t need to worry about it until I get the upcoming in-person class wrapped up. (That’s soon, and in Vegas.) After that: call me on it.
Highly recommend this class. Your mileage may vary; I’ve somehow become used to taking risks, once I’ve identified the ways I’ve been backing away from them.
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Other stuff.
–I was reminded recently that the whole “release it” mentality was part of what got me out of the horrible pit I was in after leaving the ex. I kept trying to find the ultimate meaning of what happened to me: what could I have done to prevent it? to control what was happening? to be 100% safe in the moment and for the future? The fact that I had done my best with what I had, and had worked the miracle of realizing what was going on and breaking the spell, that didn’t matter. I was destroying myself, little by little, trying to find an answer or at least a sense of security. There was no answer that could possibly satisfy me; I was trying to retcon my past, to find a way of rewriting reality so that it wouldn’t have happened. The real answer was that there was no answer. Bad shit happened. I did my best. Even after I got out, I was beating myself up. Endlessly. But I got some good advice that I didn’t want to hear, and have been working on releasing the need to have everything make perfect sense, be perfectly defensible, be perfectly timed and executed. More fuckups; less fear. Working on this over the last year and change has been interesting, to say the least. I’m not sure why I didn’t apply the same ideas to writing that I’ve been testing to failure in the rest of my life, but eh, I’m running and gunning it now.
–Ray’s struggling with stuff again. It’s been coming on for the last week or so, and finally came to a head today. It takes her a long time to, I don’t know, bring emotions into her conscious brain. When they arrive they’re doozies. I tried bugging her about her feeling not-okay a few days ago and she put me off. (Fair.) She tried to do the same thing today, then had a small meltdown when I called her on it. It is TRULY uncomfortable for me to be around people who are “Fine!” when they obviously aren’t. I feel like I’m being lied to. Which I hate. At any rate, she needs help picking next semester’s courses and has put it off until it’s hard to get the in-person classes she wants, which means she wants to keep putting it off even longer. She talked through it and is going to go to an in-person counselor tomorrow to get advice. We had to go around in circles a few times before she got that far. She doesn’t want to know how freaked out she is. She swerves around stuff, does the bare minimum needed to get me to stop worrying about her.–Then gets upset when I’m still worried, freaks out, tries again, etc. I go, “Making ME happy isn’t the point. Jumping through hoops that I set for you isn’t the point. The point is that you’re jumping through the school’s hoops for the sake of the people you’re going to meet, and so you can have the kind of future you want to have. You’re never going to get the college classes that you want, truly meaningful classes with good instructors. [We both laughed at that; she’s had issues with her teachers sometimes being full of shit.] You’re always going to have to compromise and jump through hoops and find ways to get done what you actually want to do, aside from whatever the school says you have to do. And you’re going to do it because you’ll be learning how to do something you love, that you can do to be independent and secure, and so you can meet people who value you more than as some kind of puppy dog that does whatever they want.” I hadn’t planned to say it or anything but I was proud of it. That IS why she’s doing this, what motivates her: human contact. She’s such a good person. She gets so overwhelmed. I’m proud of her. I also have to give her shit: “You’re not broken. You’re being a dumbass. It’s gonna be harder for you than it was for me, just because you’re not me. But also you’re a dumbass.” She laughed. She cried. I held her and gave her head pets. I hope at least part of it helps.
–Vegas trip! I’m going to be going to Vegas soon. (This post is friends-locked, and I’ll delete this info before I post it on Substack–at least I PLAN to delete this part.) I’ll be gone all next week. This is a Kris & Dean class for writing fantasy-thriller stories; I’ve been to a bunch of these classes, both because I’m addicted to learning and because these are the kinds of classes I grok. I’m not supposed to talk about the class while I’m there, and I’ll be writing my fucking ass off, so I will likely disappear for a bit, or at least act like I’m being mind-controlled by aliens. I will be fine…but I’m often NOT fine during the class, because my brains will be getting scrambled. Please excuse lack of response/witty repartee, and gently nurse me along with a few bad puns if I seem like I’m suffering. Thanks. Plan is to go to Meow Wolf again, too. Ray’s gonna be with <3
–AHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Okay. I’m not sure what part of that made me feel better, but I do feel better. Tsch, better out than in, as the saying goes. Back to classes; I probably won’t get to do all the writing I want to mess around with today, but I’ll sneak back in for at least a few more minutes.
May your time creating stuff be a series of “yesses” today, even if they are grim ones.–Someone just sent me a lovely but messed-up picture of a girl mutating into several wolves, or vice versa.
Just so; whatever makes your weird little hearts yawn, stretch, and grin.
See you on the other side of Vegas <3
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From the main floor of the Showmen’s Museum!
Midjourney image trying to craft an image to describe a poem—a failure in terms of the poem but a lovely image nevertheless.