GET TO THE WRITING POINT

People who feel like their head might explode in the middle of the night because their brain won’t calm down need to get to the writing point.

No writer has ever felt the internal pressure in their mind because they’ve already gone over things.

Gone over, and over, and over, and over.

Let me rewrite that into, “Gone over, and over in the process of getting to the end of a piece of work.”

Yep, that sounds about right.

Too often people forget that everything they see on any screen in front of their face started with writing, be it writing code, writing proposals, writing queries.

You see or hear the end product after it’s passed through edits and offices and legal consultations.

All of the repetition puts most people off. And it should.

There’s nothing exciting and sexy about moving words already written into better position.

Google AI says:

 

Just like no one pays to go to band practice, just concerts, readers want an affirmation of a writer’s worth, which usually means passing through edits, offices, and legal consultations, along with a book cover or a magazine page.

If you find some interesting writing in the New Yorker it must be worth your time to read?

At the very least you might learn a few new words while being introduced to current fiction, opinion, opinions and fiction, and in-depth reporting that goes on an on, page after page, and it’s not filler.

When someone gets to the writing point you feel it and they leave you wanting more?

Mission accomplished.

 

For Non-Writers?

Non-writers get to the writing point when their kids start school and go through some of the same things they did.

How to help? Write helpful things. And start early.

Do it and the concern on the direction of public education is less when changes seem to fall one after another in no particular order.

Mom and Dad are the two most important teachers any kid will have, if they take up the challenge.

You can’t cruise through year after year on auto-pilot then wonder why your kid turned out the way they did.

Little baby boomer kids lived under constant surveillance from their over-attentive parents.

At least that was my experience.

They let us know they knew the town police chief, even arranged for a tour of the local jail.

When one of us decided to rob momma’s jewelry box, and we got confronted about a missing coin and a missing garnet gemstone, we took a drive to their State Police friend who had a lie detecter machine at home set up to find the culprit.

Each of us were given a gold dollar minted one hundred years before of our birthdays. One was missing. Mine.

They came from a coin collecting relative. We were too young to understand the value, so Ma held them until she felt we were old enough, which made the discovery of theft even worse.

I know who did it, they know who did it, but no one got publicly blamed and my coin was lost forever.

I think about that when I look at my Grandpa Gillaspie’s railroad watch on my fireplace mantel.

 

The Written Memory Of A Shared History

I’ve been watching a series about life behind the Iron Curtain, which were the countries the Soviets saved from German occupation after WWII.

The story includes the incremental take over of the cultural and social institutions of nations swept back and forth between the Germans, then Russians, in accordance with the Yalta Conference.

Free and democratic elections were part of the agreement.

The Soviets went along and everything looked good at first in the later 40’s, but they controlled the national security and local police forces.

They organized their party in every country and answered any opposition with the largest army in the world.

After the inhumane behavior tolerated in WWII, anything less was acceptable.

But the Russian grip tightened and Stalin proved to be another cruel and ruthless leader with arrests, executions, and imprisonment.

He worked on conspiracies and ethnic cleansing and re-writing history with little pushback.

A joke from those times has one man coming home from the gulag after five years.

His friend said, “Five years? What did you do?”

The man said, “Nothing. If I had done anything it would have been twenty years.”

 

 

Since then the days of a dictatorial leader hell bent on seeding discord and suspicion are gone.

Some over-cooked son of a bitch demanding things go ‘my way, or the highway’ are finished.

We will never see the likes of one jack-ass feeling his omnipotence go unopposed.

The laws and order of the United States are the guardrails against some sick-fuck in love with themselves from following the Stalin playbook.

 

PS: AI Google says, “Stalin maintained control of the Soviet Union through a brutal and pervasive system characterized by state terror, a massive cult of personality, and the centralized control of the economy.

 

PSS: These methods allowed him to eliminate opposition, enforce his policies, and ensure total obedience.

Then he died.