The Surprise of Writing

I've just finished the last draft of a story I've been working on for three months. After proofing it and doing the final tweaks, it should be up as a Kindle single by the end of March. I am always amazed at the surprises that the creative process holds and it is a process. For all the outlines and all the character sketches, a literary work has a life of its own. This is just a mystery, but the 'just' is qualified by the great writers who have turned their hand to this genre, Dashiell Hammett to name my favorite (I write nothing like him except we both do noir) or A. Conan Doyle to name an immortal.

I had no sooner rejected my first draft as inadequate and started on the second draft when the story began to tell itself, the mark of a good tale. It took me through twists and turns with its own curious logic and soon it was its own creature. That's the joy and surprise of creation, being an instrument of the Muse. I never tire of it.

Do good and be well.

Information Overload and Change

Information overload, information that has not been processed and integrated into the cognitive and neural structure of our brains, induces a mild dementia that may well be the genesis of the American malaise, neurasthenia. If you're searching your diagnostic manual for that word, give up. It's no longer in there. Wiser minds than mine, I'm sure.

Consider the technological changes made in the last ten years, the smart phone, the tablet, and streaming have now become common. All of these changes have to be integrated into our lives and into our cognitive and neural structures or there will be consequences. The brain does not like cognitive dissonance or anything like it. Living in rapidly changing technological environments is extremely difficult on the human psyche.

The light at the end of the tunnel is that by the ad hoc logic of doing what is technically elegant as it appears in the development of our technology, we are describing and creating a complementary mix of gadgets and capabilities that themselves describe a stable baseline of technology. There will always be a leading edge, but for most of us the end of change is realizable and with it an end to information overload and we can return to integrating annual reports and economic conditions which is normally a comprehensible degree of brain rewiring.

Do good and be well.