Mother’s Day

Photo Credit: midnightcomm @ Flickr.com

“You must be a mother,” the man said. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Ellie smiled politely. She was used to complete strangers approaching her and wanting to see her baby. It was hard to say what might motivate that sort of behavior in people – somehow, you just seemed to become more approachable when you were wheeling around a stroller. It was certainly not what she’d expected. Her husband, Mark, had always complained that parents had eyed him suspiciously when he’d show any interest towards their children, as if they feared that any man who spoke to a child must be trying to harm them. Ellie had found very little reason to be suspicious of people, and was more annoyed by the attention than paranoid about their intentions.

“How old is your baby?” the man asked.

“About a month old,” she said, and began wheeling her stroller through the parking lot towards the Target store entrance. The man walked along beside them, though not close enough that Ellie was concerned. He was a large man with short brown hair, wearing dress slacks, a plaid shirt and thick plastic glasses. He wore a smile that seemed to be a regular feature on his face. By all appearances, he seemed rather harmless.

“I’ll bet you’re ready for her to sleep through the night,” the man said, and laughed.

Ellie laughed too, out of politeness. “Oh, yeah,” she intoned. “I used to think I know what it meant to be tired. And then we had a baby.”

They were approaching the entrance now, and the man began walking faster. “Enjoy your day,” he said, and vanished into the store.

Ellie went about her business, too, picking up a desperately-needed nursing bra and some snacks. She crossed paths with the man twice, both times making polite eye contact and offering a nod. By the time she was done and on her way to the register, she saw him again, this time speaking to another woman with a stroller.

“You must be a mother,” he was saying to her. “Happy Mother’s Day.”

Ellie wasn’t certain why it bothered her so much for the man to be saying that to another woman who was obviously a mother. But as she passed by and made her way to the checkout lane, she felt a twinge of disappointment building within her, like this odd interaction should have been hers and hers alone.

“Are you having a Happy Mother’s Day?” the cashier asked her as she checked out.

“I suppose so,” said Ellie. And she wanted to add, but I wish I didn’t have to share it.

Blank Canvas

Photo Credit: Trina Baker (Flickr.com)

The canvas was blank.

The artist stared at his hand.

It wasn’t that he was looking for inspiration – after all, he knew exactly what it was that he wanted to paint. The problem wasn’t in the idea.

It was in finding the right place to start.

His eyes followed the lines on the inside of his palm. It was like looking at a river on a map – he could trace each line, and see it branch out into tributaries, streams and creeks. He could see the delta up near his index finger, and the stronger, deeper, more powerful line it formed. He wondered which way the water would flow on his hand – towards his thumb, or towards the outer edge of his palm.

He thought about spitting on his hand, just to see how the liquid would flow, but no—that would defeat the purpose of the exercise. He wasn’t supposed to be thinking; just staring.

He turned his vision to a small piece of calloused skin that had turned white and flaky. Underneath it, his hand was smooth, free of the wrinkles and creases he could see elsewhere. The hard skin on the top wore its ridges much more deeply than the skin around it. It was as if the top layer removed all signs of age as it came off his skin; the bottom layer was fresh and new, wrinkle-free and able to be molded into something new. He wondered if the texture of the paintbrush would start to shape it. Perhaps his hand would take on the smooth polish of the wood. Perhaps it would even start to feel smooth, like the wood, and give the brush a point on his hand on which he might lose control. That would be unfortunate. He could see himself now, painting and slipping just a bit. A slip of the brush could cost him hours of work if it was too severe.

He sighed and turned his hand over. The purpose of this exercise was to put the mind in a creative place, not to stifle his creative energy with thoughts of failure. The back of his hand – now that was an interesting place, far more worthy of creative consideration. He flexed his fingers, watching the muscles of his knuckle push up the mountainous bones that controlled his fingers, along with the skeletal structures under the skin that seemed to pop up. His gaze went deeper into the flesh, admiring the individual craters that made up the surface of the skin. Some of them had fine blond hairs sticking out, but most didn’t seem to have any hair at all. He wondered if the craters were supposed to be hair follicles, or if they were just tiny dimples in the skin.

He’d heard, once, that the reason human fingers were so dexterous was because they had tiny, eye-like sensory organs in their tips. They weren’t eyes in the conventional sense, but more like sensors that could see with a sort of blind sight – aware of things, but not conscious of them.

He stretched his fingers up under his eyes and studied them carefully. The light overhead gleamed off their tips. One would think, if there were any eyes on the fingers, you would be able to see them wincing in that light. He turned his gaze slight away from his fingers, but watched them in his peripheral vision, waiting to see if he could detect some sort of motion – some sign of eyes opening and closing. He waited, watching, and thought, for a moment, that perhaps he’d seen something. But he realized it was more likely a trick of the light, or an error of his eye.

His eye flitted to the canvas in front of him, and suddenly, he knew exactly where to begin. The entire plan seemed to appear on the canvas in front of him, almost like a paint-by numbers picture stacked upon other layers.

He picked up his brush, and he began to paint.

Car Repair

Photo Credit: Aussiegall (Flickr.com)

“I don’t know what’s wrong with it,” confessed Chris. He pulled his head out from underneath the car’s hood. “I mean, I have some ideas, but I don’t really know enough about cars to say.”

The car had been lost power during his commute, and he’d barely gotten it home. It was a weird problem — the battery seemed to have no problems at low speeds, but completely went out during high speeds. If he was driving locally, the car was fine. If he was on the highway, the dashboard would go out, the air would turn off, and the car would have trouble accelerating.

“Well, take it to a mechanic,” said Alice.

“I can’t afford it,” said Chris. “I just had to replace my starter last month.”

“Charge it, then,” she said. “You’ve got to have a car. It’s not like you can get to work without one.”

She was right about that. But Chris was reluctant to tell her that his credit cards were already maxed, and that he was already worried he might have to declare bankruptcy if, God forbid, he lost his job. It wasn’t that Chris was bad with money, per se – it was just that he hadn’t slowed his spending down quickly enough, when he’d been cut back to a part-time position, and he hadn’t considered how quickly his credit card balances would shoot up.

So, he was in a precarious position now. He’d hoped it would be something simple that he could fix himself. But as he stared at the engine, schematics in hand, he realized that he had no idea of how to fix the blasted thing. He’d had to make a few repairs in the past, but they’d always been very minor things. This problem was far out of his realm of repair consciousness.

He cursed. “I hate feeling like this,” he said.

“What do you mean?” asked Alice.

“Helpless. Incompetent. Stupid,” he said. “Car repair seems like one of those basic skills everyone should have to learn. Why don’t they teach this stuff in high school?”

“They do, I think,” said Alice. “I mean, I think they did at my school, anyway.”

“Well, not at mine, and if they did, I didn’t take it,” fumed Chris. “It should have been a required class. Why don’t they make you learn stuff you actually need to know instead of stuff you don’t even care about?”

“That makes sense,” said Alice, her smile slightly wry. “Your car breaks down, and so of course it’s the educational system’s fault and not yours.”

“Don’t get all defensive,” Chris said. “Just because you’re a teacher doesn’t mean you know what’s best.”

Now Alice’s smile dropped into a dangerous frown. “I know a hell of a lot more about education than you do,” she said. “I’ve got a master’s degree. You never even finished college.”

“Right, let’s just bring that back up,” said Chris. He slammed his screwdriver down on the ground in anger. “Chris is a failure. He can’t finish anything he starts.”

“I never said that!” shouted Alice. “I never said that. All I said was that you need to finish one day.”

“Once again, because you think you know better than me!” Chris fired back. He yanked the car hood down now and stepped towards her. “If you think I’m such a failure, you fix the car!”

“Fix your own car!” Alice said. “At least I can afford to keep mine running! Maybe if you’d go get a job that didn’t require a nametag, you’d be able to keep your bills paid.”

Chris felt like he’d been sucker-punched. “That was low,” he said quietly. “You know it’s been a rough year.”

“And yet somehow, I’ve managed!” shouted Alice. “They’re cutting jobs left and right in my field, but I’ve held on!”

Chris stormed inside the house as she said it, leaving her out in the garage. She didn’t follow him in, and he assumed she’d gone home when he looked out the window a few minutes later and saw that her car was no longer there.

He felt boiled over, with no ambition to do anything but sit in front of the TV and fume. The car wasn’t getting fixed today. That much he knew. But the whole experience had been a reminder that he had plenty of other things in his life that were broken as well.

Weight Loss

Photo Credit: Mike Baird (Flickr.com)

George let out a heavy sigh as he stared as his naked body in the mirror. From the front, it looked find. But when he started to turn even slightly to the side, it became clear that his figure wasn’t as flat as he wanted to believe.

“When did this happen?” he asked his wife, Elli, who was busy showering behind him. “I was thin when we got married, wasn’t I?”

“That was ten years ago, George,” Elli said, her voice raised slightly to cut through the noise of the falling water. “You were a lot more active then.”

“I don’t think I was,” said George. “The kids and the dogs wear me out. I think I’m probably more active now than I was then.”

“Well, it’s your metabolism, then,” Elli called. “I don’t know. Maybe if you’d quit eating hamburgers and hot dogs for lunch every day, you’d be better off. Or lay off the beer when you get home.”

“I don’t know,” said George. “I’m skeptical that it has much to do with my diet.”

It took Elli a moment to respond — it sounded like she was in the midst of washing her hair – and George turned to the other side, and clutched his gut. It wasn’t huge, and it didn’t even really feel like fat. He could feel his ribcage underneath his slightly sagging breasts.

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Elli said. “Either eat less or exercise more. It’s up to you.”

“I don’t know,” said George. He released his gut, and watched it jiggle. “I guess I could start eating more salad.”

“That’s probably a good start,” said his wife.

George started to dress. “It’s just… I don’t know,” he said. “You cover salad in meat and dressing and cheese, and you might as well just be eating a pizza, you know?”

“Then why don’t you use our gym membership?” Elli asked. “We’re paying for you to go, and you never use it.”

“I hate the gym,” George said. “It just doesn’t seem natural to me.”

Elli turned off the shower and pulled a towel behind the curtain. “You look fine, George,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind if you lost a little weight, but really, when you’re dressed, you look fine. Don’t be so self-conscious about it.”

George didn’t believe a word of it, of course. Elli cared. She had to. She just didn’t want to get into an argument and was trying to end the conversation. George knew full well that she’d complained about his weight to one of her friends.

“There’s got to be a better way,” he mused. “But what is it? Why is it so hard for us, with everything we can do with technology today, to lose weight?”

Elli didn’t have an answer. And George realized, as he buttoned up his shirt, that he didn’t either.

The New Game

Photo Credit: Duane Brown (Flickr.com)

“I don’t understand it at all,” said Joseph. “I’ve been developing video games for years, and this just doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Well, the problem is that you see video games as being structured in a traditional way,” said Amir. “You expect to see them on a disc, or in a cartridge, packaged for sale and put on a store shelf, or available to buy online somewhere. You expect them to come with a manual, or to teach you how to play, and you expect them to have some sort of goal at the end.”

“Yeah, that pretty much sounds exactly like a video game to me,” confessed Joseph. “At least, one you plan to make money off of.”

“Well, we’ve figured out another way,” said Amir. “One that circumvents all of that. One that gets right to the heart of why people are playing.”

“Fun?” suggested Joseph.

Amir smiled in an almost patronizing fashion. Joseph had been his teacher, once. The irony of the situation was amusing. The fact that they were having lunch at an expensive bistro instead of a quick service stop, all at Amir’s expense, was a testament to the difference between the results of their two philosophies.

“Fun has nothing to do with it,” said Amir. “Video games are rarely fun for long.”

“I disagree,” said Joseph. “If a game stops being fun at some fundamental level, the player will move on to something else. You know that.”

Amir shook his head dismissively. “Fun is what gets the player in the door,” he said. “That’s all. Once the player has been engaged, once the experience has started out fun, a game becomes about work. It stops being about fun, and it becomes something far more important.”

“Achievement?” Joseph asked.

“Progression,” said Amir. “The player must move towards some objective, no matter how arbitrary or difficult it is.”

“True, but you have to reward the player, eventually,” said Joseph. “If the game’s impossible, they’ll stop playing.”

Amir smiled at this. “Really?” he asked.”Do you truly believe that?”

“I can’t not believe it,” said Joseph. “It’ s a fundamental of game design.”

“It’s a fallacy,” said Amir. “What keeps the player engaged is not whether or not the goal can be achieved, but whether or not he or she becomes frustrated in achieving it. A goal can be across an endless chasm, impossible to reach, but so long as the player believes that the chasm can be crossed, somehow, and the game leads the player to believe that wholeheartedly, he or she will search for a way.”

“So, that’s the secret to CastleTown, then?” asked Joseph. “People love it because it can’t be won?”

“Precisely,” said Amir with a smile.

Joseph shook his head. “That shouldn’t work,” he said.

“I agree, with a conventional game,” said Amir. “But CastleTown has something other games lack.”

“Oh?” said Joseph. “Enlighten me.”

“Social repercussions,” said Amir. “If you stop playing CastleTown, your peasants will leave and your castle will erode. But your friends who are playing need your Castle to exist. They can allocate a small portion of their resources to keep your Castle intact. And because you are costing them something in the game, they are likely to convince you to come back and continue playing.”

“Well, sure, but what if you just tell them, ‘no?’” Joseph asked. “They’ll quit too, eventually, right?”

Amir shook his head. “You think of the gamer as a solitary, lonely person looking out for his own interests,” he said. “That has been the paradigm of the last thirty years. But the truth is that gamers are people. They want to please other people. It is far easier for them to keep playing and to help their friends work towards that next achievement than it is to leave their friends crippled in the game world. We have data that shows that 90% of gamers will return to the game if a friend asks them to do so.”

Joseph’s eyes widened. “That’s just… sort of evil,” he said. “You’re preying upon peoples’ desire to be liked so they’ll play your game.”

Amir smiled broadly. “We give the game away for free, and we offer the players the opportunity to take shortcuts for a small fee,” he said. “We sell small items to make the gamers stand out amongst their peers, and we host contests that they can pay to enter to win special items they would not be able to earn otherwise. None of this costs us a penny, you understand — whatever we can create for the game, the players want. The quality of the game, the richness of the experience, the power of the graphics — none of those things are important to us. We developed CastleTown in a month and had over 20,000 users in a single day, each of them recruiting their friends to join.”

“And all in the pursuit of an impossible goal,” mused Joseph. “What is the goal, by the way?”

Amir leaned forward. “Whatever the player perceives it to be,” he said quietly.

Joseph felt a chill roll down his back. Amir had stumbled upon something here, something powerful and raw and important where human nature was concerned. And Joseph could not help feeling that it would one day be looked upon as the beginning of a dark era for humanity — a new manipulation, subtle and seemingly harmless, but able to direct large groups of people to give up large sums of money without ever realizing what was happening to them.

[The Creative Process] – Yes, No and Wait: Three Answers You’re Bound to Hear (and How To Respond To Each of Them)

I grew up in a churchgoing household, and often had to suffer through Sunday School and Vacation Bible School sessions that were more than a little dumbed down. And when we’d talk about praying to the Big G, our teachers would always tell us that He wouldn’t respond in words, but rather with one of three messages: “Yes,” “No” or “Wait.”

Personally, I never liked that aspect of religion — as far as I was concerned, if God gave me a mouth to speak and ears to hear, why couldn’t He just talk to me directly? It’s a mystery I still don’t have an answer to. But as it happens, “Yes,” “No” and “Wait” are the three types of answers you’ll hear any time you are asking another human being or organization for support of some kind,  especially when it comes to creative works. Sadly, while I’ve seen many articles that tell aspiring writers how to elicit a “yes,” I haven’t seen many talking about what it means to “wait” or receive the all-too-common “no.”

And while this article might not be too helpful to those seeking spiritual answers from the Big Guy in Charge, it should be quite helpful to those seeking practical knowledge about gaining traction in the world of publishing.

Read more »

[Journal] – I’m Busier Than I Thought I’d Be…

So let’s be honest here –I never set up this blog with the intention of updating it every single day. But now that some of my articles are starting to get picked up by search engines and linked by readers, I’m seeing a lot more traffic than I used to.

So, it’s time for me to start updating again with more of my latest research.

But in the meantime, here’s a quick update on what I’m doing these days.

First of all, I’ve been quietly building up marketing momentum for my next book, Code of the Wild: North American Wolverine Vs. Timber Wolf, which is hand-painted by the incredible Jason Maranto. You can read all about the book at http://www.codeofthewild.com, but you can also check out this cool video I made to get a glimpse of the first book:

I’m also credited in the upcoming seriesDog Eaters, which I adpted from the screenplay by Malcolm Wong. It’s coming out as a 6-part comic book series in November, and a graphic novel next spring. You can read more about it at http://www.dogeaters-manga.com.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve had a big change in my life lately as I’ve transitioned from earning my undergraduate degree in business administration to working towards my Master’s in Marketing Research. It’s time-intensive, but one of the perks of the program is that I was placed in an internship with a small marketing research firm in St. Louis called The Research & Planning Group. It’s taken me a few weeks to get adjusted to the new schedule (particularly since I’ve been taking some time to make adjustments to my personal life as well by exercising more and devoting more time to reading), and I’ve had a hard time staying focused on the publishing side of things.

But the good news is that I’ve been writing fragments of articles in OneNote over the last month, and I’m ready to start finishing them up and posting them. I think a lot of them will be very valuable to aspiring publishers, especially my pieces about STP (Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning) and the Blue Ocean Strategy (which comes from a book I just read). I’ve also been clipping articles about the Amazon Kindle, comics as an educational tool, and the future of the publishing industry, all of which I intend to discuss in upcoming pieces.

I do want to thank those who have taken the time to approach me for work as of late. I apologize that I’ve had to turn some of you away, but as my next article will discuss, sometimes, being told “no” is the best thing that can happen to a creative person… and sometimes, being told to “wait” is one of the worst!

With that said, enough about me. Onto the articles!

-SJJ