Imaginary Friends

I stole that title from Krista V's blog post about Fear . It got me thinking, again, about the spectrum between assembling words and really writing. (I just thought up those terms on the spot, so I'd better define them to keep them straight in my head. And yours.) Assembling words:  This is what I do when I line-edit a scene to death and back again. (Or more frequently, just to death.) It's like building a brick wall, a tower of blocks. I do it one piece at a time, carefully choosing and lining up each word, seeing only the bit I'm working on. Writing:  The fun way to tell a story. I sit down with a few thoughts and let them carry me through a scene. Most commonly done when drafting or rewriting sections, I've heard this described as the writer's trance or the zone. Now, most of what I simply sit down and write comes out badly formed and requires some assembly. When I first started going to a writing group and getting critiques from multiple people one cha

Sure, I'd rather be writing novels, but this ain't bad. I work at Autonomous Solutions, Inc. We make robots. And by "we" I mean "my coworkers." I test and write user manuals, mostly. Sometimes I get to make things like this: Automated Vehicle Warning Sticker Get the point? I was inspired by a John Deere tractor manual with a drawing of a person's entire body wrapped neatly around a driveshaft several times. No blood. No bones sticking out. Unless you're Elastigirl, you can imagine how uncomfortable it would be. Our robots aren't stationary industrial robots. They're mobile. Most have steering wheels, which means they were originally meant to be driven by humans. Most retain that capability, and can switch between manual and auto modes. In auto mode, actuators work the brakes, gas pedal, and gear shift. A motor of one sort or another turns the steering wheel much faster than a person ever could. We've automated everything from golf

By way of introduction, I'm taking part in the LDS Writer Blogfest today. (LDS = Latter Day Saint, as in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.) For this blogfest, I picked a favorite talk from the church's most recent General Conference, and now I'm going to write about it. I chose the talk given by Elder Kent F. Richards called "The Atonement Covers All Pain," and you can read, listen to, or watch it at LDS.org. So, yeah. Pain. Dang, this is harder than I thought it would be. I've written the beginning of this post five times, deleting each approach. I ought to forget trying to be clever and just say what I need to say. I've hurt. So badly I wanted to die. So bad I nearly killed myself to end it. For several years, I dealt with depression ranging from moderate to severe. Ten years ago when I was twenty-one, my illness faded quietly away for the last time. My life now is sweeter than I could imagine during my darkest years. I've b

We used to have two geese. They were always together. They swam around the pond together. They waddled up the hill and pooped on our sidewalk and lawn together. They honked in harmony in the middle of the night. They took turns dipping their long necks into the feed bucket. They got rather playful in the pond occasionally. (Daddy, the geese are trying to drown each other!) One day, I noticed they hadn't eaten their food. When I stopped to think about it, I didn't remember seeing them at all in the previous few days. The next day, my wife and little boy put on their boots and went looking for them. Their was still snow on the ground, so they followed two sets of goose prints up the hill from the far end of the pond, through a hay field, and down into another nearby pond. And they found the geese. One was dead. The other was standing by her body, which was in the water near the shore. All that day and the next, the remaining goose stayed by its mate, swimming around the small

You ever been watching a movie or TV show, and you know there's a dangerous, evil beast lurking somewhere, and the characters  ought to know it too because they just discovered a mangled body or something and the door's ripped off its hinges and broken into matchstick-sized pieces and you can hear breathing from the darkness, either inside or outside—and the idiot in the movie picks up a butter knife to defend himself and walks through the freakin' doorway ANYWAY, and you just want to scream DON'T GO IN/OUT THERE YOU IDIOT, but you don't, because you no longer care what happens to that character because he's too stupid to live, and the only tension is because you know there's blood and screaming and crunching noises coming in the near future and frankly, it kind of grosses you out? *pant pant* That was a looong sentence. Have you ever noticed that? I see it all the time. It's a standard part of television, like montages and laugh tracks. And like m