We are afraid of some things. Often, however, the heart of the fear is not the stated fear. Finding the source of fear can help us cope with it.

Am I afraid of heights?

No, but I am afraid of falling off a tall building.

Many of us have fears. There is a long list of fears or -phobias. Look at this online list. Surely, you can find something on here that fits. But like acrophobia (fear of heights), the phobia is described incorrectly.

Once the fear is described correctly, it makes much better sense. See my example above. Falling off a tall building is fatal.

Consider

Ballistophobia – fear of bullets or missiles.

I am not afraid of bullets. I am afraid of being struck by a speeding bullet. Again, usually a fatal result.

Now let’s move to art and writing and fear. We have

Scriptophobia – the fear of writing in public.

Many writers are paralyzed by fear. Are they afraid of writing? I doubt it. What is the real fear? That probably varies with the individual. Here are a few reactions to your writing. Writers can be afraid of these reactions:

• Someone will laugh at you
• Someone will call you “stupid”
• Someone will make red marks all over your writing
• No one will read what you have written

Then these reactions would bring different fears depending on who “someone” is. Is someone a stranger? A family member? A close friend?

Conclusion:

I don’t have a good conclusion. The topic of fear is a deep and complex one. Many people are afraid of the topic of fear. Hence, they won’t discuss it and surely won’t read this blog post.

I look at a couple of methods of storing information to be used in fiction writing: mediawiki software and good old HTML.

Writing a large piece of fiction, like a novel, can be messy. How do you keep track of characters, places, dates, and all that stuff?

The answer for many writers is that you don’t keep track of all that stuff. That stuff isn’t important. That is all about organization and novel writers don’t need to be stifled by organization.

Well, I need to be organized. It is part of my temperament.

My favorite way to keep all this unstructured information is in a wiki using mediawiki software. The information is:

• easy to enter
• easy to search

But, and there must be a but, mediawiki software is:

• hard to install
• hard to move the information from machine to machine

To install, I must first install that MAMP or WAMP software to have a server or something like a server running on my computer. I don’t like that. And then there is moving the information from machine to machine. I still can’t find the ASCII information on the disk drive. I am told that the information is in a SQL database somewhere. Where? Someone find it for me, please!

Another method to enter unstructured data and link it all together is through good old HTML (no links for that because, well because). HTML is:

• easy to enter
• easy to install (you don’t install it)
• easy to move the files from machine to machine

But, yes, there is a but here as well, HTML is:

• hard to search

Yes, I can use Windows and OS X tools to search files, but that is messy.

I wonder if I can run mediawiki and keep the information on DropBox or some cloud service like that? If anyone knows how to do that, I would appreciate the information.

It is often better to replace a piece of troubled writing than to fix or revise it.

Once again, I was talking to a person who had written a large item. The item wasn’t good. It had little focus, and most people walked away from it wondering, “what was that about?” The writer looked at me, sighed in frustration, and said, “Well, what I was trying to say was…X”

The writer had written the piece and then revised it several dozen times over several months. They fixed this part and fixed that part and fixed another part and fixed the whole thing over and again. As I wrote earlier, the writer concluded with what they were trying to say.

My reaction was, “get a new piece of paper and write X.” In other words, stop fixing and replace.

The writer struggled with a common malady of many writers. We want to revise a bit here and there, fix this, fix that, and be finished.

Revising has an important place in writing, and so does replacing.

I am an engineer. I often write about engineering topics. I work with other engineers and with their writing.  Engineers solve problems, i.e., we fix things. It is painful for an engineer to discard a problem and submit a new item. That would waste all prior effort.

We should get over it. We should replace our troubled writing instead of trying to fix it.

The blank sheet of paper is a wonderful invention. Try it.

The rich-poor gap widens in the area of travel. Seeing other places and other people is a big experience that the rich enjoy and the poor lack.

I live in Fairfax County, Virginia. This is one of the richest counties in America. I noticed recently that the kids in high school and college in Fairfax County travel to other countries.

When I graduated college, I had been to Tijuana to shop for novelties. I was poor in experience and knowledge of other places and other peoples. About the only way that the poor in America travel to other countries is to go fight a war. That isn’t much fun and seems to present a one-dimensional view of other people.

Is this a big deal? In some ways it is. Should we do something about it, i.e., should we have government travel subsidies for the poor? I don’t think so. I do think we should recognize what is happening and understand how this affects the outlook of people.

Lacking something means that you have learned to live without it. That knowledge is a resource.

I know many people who lack many things. Their resources are inadequate to do some things. Observing some of these people has helped me realize:

Inadequate resources is a resource.

Here are some examples.

• A person who has lived below the poverty level (inadequate income) has “lived.” They have not perished. Hence, they know how to live on much less money that many others.
• A person who cannot drive a car has lived, i.e., not perished. Hence, they know how to live without driving a car.
• A person who cannot hear has lived. Hence, they know how to live without the sense of hearing.
• A person who has not attended college has lived. Hence, they know how to live without a college education.

These people with inadequate resources know things. Seek them and learn from them.

I learn that I need to learn more words.

Over the holiday season I spent time with relatives in Louisiana. One evening, some of the relatives were playing a word game: Bananagrams. It seems this is a famous game, especially on Facebook or something.

I had never played the game and wasn’t interested in playing it that night. Somehow, someone convinced me to sit and play. This would be easy. I am the writer of books and such.

I was wrong.

During the course of the games, I would look in the dictionary to see if some of the words that people spelled were actually words. (Someone, who will remain nameless, was trying to spell the letter “t” as a word.) Reading through a few pages of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary surprised me. It contained many words that I didn’t recognize.

Yikes. I learned that I had a lot of words to learn. This year, I will read those writer’s blog posts about words and such.

Thank you Kodak for making the simple, affordable cameras that allowed America’s working class to capture the last half of the 20th century for their grandchildren.

My Aunt Mabel died about a week before Christmas 2011. She was 85 and died from the affects of a major stroke.

We attended her funeral in the southwest Louisiana town of Jennings. The funeral service began with a slide show, a music video of photographs that her children had scanned and set to music (thank you iPhoto or similar software).

The photographs were simple family remembrances. Many of them had turned a generation of yellow. The were the format, size, shape of the Kodak Instamatic camera and the 110 film. Kodak made these cameras and film for working class people. They really couldn’t afford a 35mm camera or the film or the processing fees. They never dreamed of having a dark room and developing their own film.

The generation of my late aunt had one photograph of themselves as a child and a few high school senior photos. That was it for their depression-era childhood. After surviving the depression and WW II, they had their own families. Their kids, me, were captured on the affordable Kodak cameras like the Instamatic with its 110 film. Their young grandkids were captured on similar cameras loaded with disc film. The operation was simple, the printing inexpensive at Photo-Mat and K-Mart, and yes, they turned yellow in the daylight, but held their color if kept in the dark of end table drawers.

The photographs recorded working class life in America for the second half of the 20th century.

Kodak is in trouble as a company. They didn’t make the shift to digital photography fast enough. That is a shame as they invented the digital camera. I doubt that Kodak will be making cameras and film in any format in 2020.

Kodak made lots of money off my parents and aunts and uncles. Kodak also allowed them to save what we looked like for several decades. For that recording of history and of our families, I thank Kodak.

Football players are not weapons. Please stop being so lazy as to call them such.

The National Football League playoffs are in full stride. I like to watch, but I hate to listen to the ladies and gentlemen who talk during the games and on the sports shows during the week.

One of the things that upsets me is the phrase:

The quarterback has a lot of weapons at his disposal.

This refers to the players on the team that are talented at catching passes and running after the catch. Somehow, these players are now “weapons.” Sigh. Football players are not weapons; they are people playing a game.

Back in the fall of 2001, soon after the September 11th attacks, much of the warfare metaphors ceased for a while. Real people were actually dying in real warfare. The stupidity and laziness of relating a game to a war hit people hard enough to cause them to think a while and speak English.

Time has passed, and the stupidity and laziness has returned. This all reminds me of Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” (see Wikipedia for a discussion and links to the essay). Broadcasters and commentators babble to fill air time and speak in cliches. Lazy. Stupid.

One of the reasons I hate this is that is spreads the stereotype that athletes and sports fans are stupid.

If anyone in the sports media business is reading this, please stop the war metaphors. Please stop the cliches. Please speak English. Say what you mean and mean what you say.

Smashwords, and other ePublishing outlets, have become the place to go. My income from Smashwords short stories is in the same order of magnitude as engineering management books from traditional publishers.

In early 2011, I put a few dozen short stories on Smashwords. I wrote those stories in 2008. I have written a dozen more since summer and put those online. Here is a previous post on the subject.

Time marches on, and guess what?

I’m making about as much money with the short stories as I am with engineering management books.

I have made about $250 this year with short stories. This is not a big number, but this is on par with the royalties from my engineering management books that were published on paper a couple of years ago. (See here for the good old books.)

Now what do I do? Some options:

1. do nothing
2. continue to write short stories for Smashwords and leave engineering management alone
3. start writing engineering management topics for Smashwords
4. write short stories and engineering management topics  for Smashwords

Option 1 is the easiest. Well, really it isn’t. I think I would go crazy if I did nothing for more than a few days. Option 3 is the biggest change. Hence, it is unlikely. Option 2 is fine, but boring. That leaves option 4, and I guess that is what I will do in the coming months, unless a movie producer loves one of my short stories and pays me a million dollars for the movie rights (possible, but not probable).

I finally realize why I can’t watch the news on television: the information flow is relatively slow.

I haven’t watched news on television in years. I stay abreast of the issues of the day via reading from the Internet. I scan probably a dozen major news sites as well as about a hundred blogs every day.

Over the holidays, I spent a week with relatives. They still watch the news on television. I would sit through maybe the first two minutes before I could stand it no longer and would leave the room. Most of the stories were silly (man bites dog); all the stories were poorly reported.

I realized the problem in this situation: the information flows too slowly on television news, at least too slowly for my taste. A person reporting the news can only speak so fast. I can read or scan text news much faster and in the past several years I have grown accustomed to that speed. Listening to someone read the news hurts my head.

Given the slow speed of speech, the news stations can only report a little news in their 22 minutes (8 minutes of commercials per half hour). The big cable networks state a story and then host an “in-depth discussion of four experts.” Each expert has about two minutes to comment on the story. They speak slowly as well. During the ten-minute discussion I can scan half a dozen well written analyses of the story written from as many countries.

Alas, one day television news may switch to a form of speed speaking or something so that they information flow rises to the standard of the Internet.