I’m not sure exactly where I’m going with this blog site. I haven’t posted much over the last year, but that’s because I am a different person—in a sense—than I was in January 2014. I know I entitled this blog “Hope, Love, and Peace,” and I still believe in those qualities. But I also believe in authenticity, and I am more comfortable in my own skin than I have ever felt before. I want to blog more. You’re going to see a lot more of me—a lot more genuine me—probably a bit more edgy, and hopefully more inspiring. If you stick around, you might even witness me coming out some more. But you might not like it. I can’t help that last part.

Kate Schell recently published a long list of modesty “rules” that girls have to deal with, especially in religious fundamentalist families. These messages teach girls to be ashamed of their bodies, ashamed of being women, ashamed of themselves.

Her series is about messages that we send to girls. Unfortunately, boys encounter similar rules—not rules of modesty, but rules nonetheless. We all encounter messages from people who think they know who we are and who we should be. And when gentle persuasion fails to persuade us to comply with their dogmatic view of reality, they turn to judgmentalism and suppression, and push fear and shame. As self-aware adults, we know to push back. But as children, we internalize these messages as emotional triggers, and they may saddle us for the rest of our lives.

First Snow

Or to quote Lorelai Gilmore: “Ladies and gentlemen, we have flakes. Flakes have been sighted. Flakage, if you will, has begun.”

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, the season’s first snow in the Boston area (and if I recall correctly, in New England generally).

I settled in, and popped in Gilmore Girls season 1, disc 2, episode 8, “Love, War, and Snow.” Sigh.

A Motto Worth Remembering

Shared recently by a friend of mine (on one of those social networking sites), a heartbreaking story, but not for the reasons you might expect.

A pretty, young woman is riding the train, reading a book. The entire car is empty, except for her and a quiet, elderly gentleman near the back. A young man enters, his bicycle in tow, and sits down directly opposite the young woman, leans over and says, “What’ch’ya readin’?”

She glares at him, voice piercing, “Look!”

Shock.

I think my theme for this week is: life is getting better.

If you’re a Gilmore Girls fan, you might remember the episode after Rory and Dean had their affair, the one in which Dean’s wife Lindsay discovers Rory’s “heinous letter in Dean’s jacket.” Oy f***in’ vey! See, this is what happens when children grow up only on the outside.

And Rory and Lorelai, walking through the town common, almost run into Lindsay and her mother (whose name apparently is Theresa). At which point Theresa begins tearing into Rory, ignoring Lorelai’s urges to calm down, escalating her tone to the point of “You little monster!”

Are You a Twitter Bot?

I ran across this site while searching for statistics on Twitter bots: BotOrNot.net will take a Twitter username and predict, based on that user’s public timeline, whether he’s a bot or a human.

As it turns out, I’m a human—Phew! And so is Neil Shurley (ThatNeilGuy), of the blog This Week in World Robot Domination, so that’s comforting news. (I’d hate to think he was actually a saboteur whose raison d’être is to plant pro-robot agitprop into our resistance efforts!)

However, my fellow author Missy Frye is apparently a bot! Oy! As are Guy Kawasaki and Robert Scoble. Hmm.

So I’m beginning to doubt the statistic that 31% of Twitter users are “probably bot.” (However, 15% may be bots.)

Dominos, Dominos, Dominos

You may have heard of FlippyCat and his thousands and thousands of colored dominos. I had not, until one of my friends shared this video of Vincent van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” made with over 7,000 dominos. The second attempt took about 11 hours total to build.

As you may remember, after the NOKWID project several years ago, I crashed, hard, spent several months deep in depression. And I just now finally feel like I’ve climbed out of that hole, a hole I had ironically dug for myself.

I felt forever tired, forever useless, forever a burden on my family. Nothing gave me pleasure, no joy, no motivation, and I didn’t care. At one point, I even contemplated what steps I would need to take in order to make a strategic exit from this life. (Fortunately, there were too many steps, too complicated.) Oy vey! It makes sense that a demoralizing job might get me down. But that’s supposed to be temporary, not life-destroying.

Then, through the work of Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell, I found I could take steps toward rediscovering the joy and motivation I had lost from my life.

According to Dave Ramsey, money arguments are the number-one cause of marital strife.

Now, I’m not sure where he got that factoid. And I don’t actually know whether it’s true, because marriages—as all relationships—are more complex and nuanced than a single cause. Regardless, it is surely true that money arguments are a leading factor in failing marriages.

In early 2009, after a series of bad software development jobs, I sunk into a deep depression. At the time, I attributed my mood to the bankruptcy of the software industry— And I still believe the industry in general is broken in several key areas, and needs to be fixed. But I later discovered, my problem was mostly connected to my own reactions, my own thoughts, going through my own mind, what Perry Marshall calls “inner head trash."

Reading back through some of the old posts on this blog, I see a man who saw wonderful possibilities for his future, and an undiminishable drive to pursue those possibilities; a man who saw the future as his salvation, not as his curse.

What happened to that man?

He’s still inside me, beat down by patterns I’ve allowed to set over the past 6 or 7 years. He may no longer be fighting, but he still longs to escape, to live free.

Enter the Used Book Superstore. Browsing there one day in the Psychology section, I of course noticed the wanna-be-psych-textbooks, the pop psychology, the psycho-mumbo-jumbo. And then a book jumped out at me—literally, almost jumped into my hands—a hardcover entitled The Psychology of Hope: You Can Get There from Here.

They say that novelists write millions of manuscripts each year. I’m not sure what the exact number is. But I might believe any number between 1,000,000 and 25,000,000. Of these millions, less than 100,000 will make it to print.

That’s when the real fun starts. Of those, only a fraction will end up on the shelves of the local book superstore. And out of those, only a portion will sell enough copies to make any money. And out of those, only a handful of authors will be able to sustain a writing career. And those who do, they spend years working to push their books, for the privilege of handing over their copyrights to the publisher.

Given the odds, you are more likely to die from a lightning strike than to “make it” as a published author.

Why, then, does just about every writing book, resource, author, and coach out there promise to help you “get published”?

That’s like promising to help me “get naked, drenched in honey, and sit my bare butt down on an anthill.”

Finishing out these posts on character needs, extracted from Character Fiction 101: How to Write Fictional Characters and Character Stories. Today, a basic need that provides motivation for many powerful stories, the need for autonomy.

Each of us needs to feel in control over his own life and his own choices, a measure of independence and freedom, a corner of the world that is “mine, all mine, to do with as I wish.”