Strike the Set

Yesterday was the last performance of “Out of Order,” the show I had been cast in as the lead, Richard Willey. It was… so much work and so much fun, I have a hard time putting it into words. After high school, I really didn’t think I’d act again, and when the kids were really little, it didn’t seem like I’d ever have the time again. But things came together, the wife and I agreed, and off I went to auditions.

I won’t gush about it being a transcendent experience; it certainly wasn’t. But it was fun like I haven’t had in a long time, both in the acting itself, and in the social stuff around the show. Meeting new people is always a kick for me, and I’ve met a couple at least that I hope can be friends for a long time, in and out of the community theatre scene. I enjoyed hanging out with and working with everyone on the show, though, and even if I hadn’t made new friends, then that enjoyment would have been worth it.

Now the show is done, and I’ll miss it, miss the work, miss the show itself. Thankfully I won’t have to miss the people, at least not very much. I’m sure I’ll be seeing a lot of them quite a bit more in the near future.

Cloning Kids

Cloning kids. It seemed like every other movie about teens in the 1980s and 1990s decried it. Not the actual biological cloning, but that spiritual cloning attempted by overbearing parents. The coach of the bad sports team, typically, pushing his own child into something he didn’t like when all he wanted to be was a dancer, or something. Emilio Estevez in The Breakfast Club springs to mind immediately. Or maybe its the soulless corporate business types who want their kids to go to Harvard so badly. I remember reading a short story in high school (can’t remember the name of it for the life of me) about a rich kid riding to his first day of school at a prestigious prep academy in New England somewhere, a place where he’d actually failed the entrance exam and couldn’t tell his father (a distinguished alumnus) because of the pressure from his old man.

1282653415_screen-00001I’m sure he probably just wanted to be a dancer or a painter or something.

As I’m raising my kids, I’ve been taking a strange comfort in knowing I’m not like that; I’m not rich, I was never an athlete, and while I went to war–well, like a lot of people who have gone to war, the last thing I want is for my children to do it. I went to a prestigious prep school and I want nothing of the same for my kids. So I’m doing alright, yeah? My kids are going to grow up to be eclectic nerds, just like me.

Ooh, hang on a second.

Just like me? Hm.

There’s this question that floats around sometimes among nerd-parents: When do you show them the Star Wars movies? What order do you show them in? How old should they be? How old were you when you saw them? Isn’t that a good rule of thumb?

What those questions are really getting at is this: How do I best replicate my experience with Star Wars, such that it impacts my kids in the same way? How do I clone my feelings for this great thing into their brains? Because, oh those feelings! Oh that joy! The anticipation, the glee, the sheer delight with which I approached those movies. It was wondrous, transforming, life-affirming, transcendent. It was so awesome, and I want my kids to have that too! How could I not?

I was thinking about this particularly with regards to The Princess Bride. Seeing that movie had a fairly profound effect on me, though one I can’t really put into words. And so, without really understanding what it was about the movie that had so touched me, I was wondering if I could introduce it to my kids in such a way that it would touch them, too. But then, I realized that part of what I most loved about The Princess Bride was not the movie itself (though it is great, transcendent, life-affirming, etc.), but the point at which I discovered it, and how I discovered it.

I remember the how so clearly: late night, on the little TV in the other room while the whole family was watching some treacly Disney goop, I stumbled on this movie with Andre the Giant. And… a guy with a sword, no two of them, and a beautiful princess, and… and… And it was wonderful. It was a true discovery such that I hadn’t made for myself yet, or hadn’t made often. Most of my cultural intake had been force-fed, or carefully curated. It was much the same with Douglas Adams (again, truly great, no question)–it wasn’t some hallowed member of a canon that I had been gifted with, it was just some battered paperback in the school library. Catholic school, no less.

I know, right? That’s part of what made that discovery so incredible, so dramatic and wonderful. It didn’t really matter whether I was early or late to that particular party, but I had made it to the party, I had found my own way there. I had found it through a very, very unlikely path.

And the temptation is so incredibly strong to try to guide my kids along that same path of discovery. I look at some of the things they watch and read, and I can’t imagine how it could possibly stack up to what I watched and read at their age. Star Wars! Douglas Adams! Star Trek! Isaac Asimov! So it’s my duty, to make sure they get that stuff, otherwise I’m a bad geek parent. I have to indoctrinate them, I have to make sure they do these things, and read and watch, no matter how much they don’t like it, or…

So suddenly, I see those awful, overbearing Dads in a much more sympathetic light. Not that they were doing the right thing, they certainly weren’t. But now I understand. They had become good and respected men, or at least saw themselves that way, and they wanted that same thing. Or maybe they genuinely found joy in the struggle of athletics or business or war. And they wanted that for their kids, in part perhaps because they couldn’t imagine kids being happy doing something else, in part because they saw it as a way to security and the good life.

What I’m finding now is that I’m trying to take joy in seeing my kids develop on their own, to make their own discoveries. A few months ago, my 7 year old daughter bought a 300 page book from her school book fair. It’s not a book I would ever have picked for her. But we let her buy it, and read it (to the point that she was up super late a few nights), because it… was hers. Her discovery, her joy. And I’m trying to remember that those feelings are far more important than whatever feelings might be inherent to watching Star Wars or The Princess Bride.

Bottom line, it’s not a bad thing to want my kids to have the same kinds of experiences, to find the joy that I found, that sustained me in hard times. Just as it’s not a bad thing to want to instill similar values in my kids, or to find common ground with them. It is all, of course, how I go about it, how I get there, and how much I worry about it.

That Good Ol’ Hockey Game

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The other day I was offered tickets to last night’s Detroit Red Wings games and, as soon as we made sure child care was handled, my wife and I jumped at it. It was her first Red Wings game, and my first time back at Joe Louis Arena since the early 90s. Ironically, it was her first time at Joe Louis since… Saturday when she went to one (of the two!) Garth Brooks concerts there.

The seats were absolutely excellent. Second row of the upper-bowl area, with a perfect view down into the corner. The Red Wings were attacking in our end twice, so we got to see a lot of good action, though the game winner (in overtime) was scored on the other end, and I wasn’t even really sure what happened (other than the puck going in the net) until I watched the highlights this morning on my phone. But, it was exciting, and a little bracing in the “walking around Downtown Detroit in the bitter cold” sort of way.

The only dark spot on the night was the two young-20s hockey bros behind us providing running commentary. Sadly, it was twice as inane as most color commentary in sports, and they hadn’t practiced pronouncing any of the Slavic names beforehand. Otherwise quite a lot of fun and I’d happily do it again. We’ll see if I get another chance before they build the new arena and shut down the Joe.

Free Story? Free Story

So hey, the story I mentioned yesterday? “Rules of Enchantment” written by me and Tobias Buckell? Yeah, you can read it free, right here. Baen’s E-Books site has it up as a sample chapter for the whole anthology, and I have to say, it is a pretty enticing sample, if I do say so myself. (Of course, I would though, right?) I definitely recommend picking up the whole thing, though. Glen Cook? Myke Cole? Elizabeth Moon? Seanan McGuire? How can you go wrong?

Also, posting the cover again, because that’s just a damn cool cover.

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New Story Out Today

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In other “Dave’s Creative Pursuits” news, the story I wrote with my friend Tobias Buckell, “Rules of Enchantment,” is out today. The story is appearing in the John Joseph Adams anthology, Operation Arcana, published by Baen. You can check out your buying options here.

As happens when Tobias and I sit down to write a story, we had a hell of a lot of fun, and once again we leveraged my military experience pretty heavily. (Not that I ever did anything quite like what happens in the story, natch.) This makes the fourth story I’ve written with him, and the second that JJA has bought from us.

At some point, I think there will be a free online version somewhere, but I haven’t heard exactly where that’s going to be. (The last time it was at io9.com, but I don’t know if that’s how this is going again.) So in the meantime, go on, buy it, enjoy it, and tell all your friends!

How Was Your Weekend?

I had a pretty good weekend–it’s the middle three performances of the play I’m in, with the last three coming next weekend. Had a nice time after each one hanging out with some of the folks from the cast and crew. (Me and one other person are in the running for making it to each after-show gathering.)  At one, spent a lot of time discussing science fiction and fantasy books and reading and such, and it was a strange relief to be talking about it with someone who is just a reader–not in the industry, no aspirations to be a writer, no real strong opinions on the health of the genre or anything like that. Just… a reader. As I mentioned before, I can be really sensitive to hype and over-discussion, and that was just the antidote I needed.

The longer I go into the run of this show, the more I’m convinced that this one of the best decisions I could have made. Now, I won’t be performing in the next show, but I am going to be helping out, and I’ve volunteered to get more involved in the actual running of the theatre as a whole. So I’m hoping that by keeping my hand in I can kind of expand my social circle and cement myself a little more into this particular community.

In other news, we went house-hunting this weekend and spotted a couple of really nice houses in our price range. We’ll see if anything comes of that…

RIP, Leonard Nimoy

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If I had maybe had a different blog post for the day, it was gone when I learned of Leonard Nimoy’s passing this morning. I don’t quite have the conscious, concrete connection that my friend Tobias Buckell has, but there’s still something there. Star Trek reruns were my first real exposure to science fiction, and Spock always stuck out as a very different sort of character. Nimoy brought him to life expertly.

Lately I’d been impressed by his class, and by embracing the role the kind of defined him (coming back for the reboot movies, the Audi commercial, etc.) And now, reading Twitter and such, I’m impressed by how many people he touched. Reading through them all helped me deal with my own grief, and get me to a place where I can probably work through the rest of the day without blowing my nose too much more.

Tonight, I’ll think of him when I go on stage. And again when I go to do some writing. Not just about the characters he played, but about the life he lived and how he seemed to embrace it all.

 

Thank You For Listening

I was driving around Ann Arbor today, dodging students in my nimble little car, and thinking about the stories I tell people in person. I remember, quite vividly, ranting and raging at a couple of friends in a nearby Mexican place last winter-ish about my terrible job. Not the job I have now, but the previous one, the one that first got us to move from Grand Rapids to the Metro Detroit area. That job, as I’ve told many folks, served only one purpose: to remind me how awful supposedly-great jobs can be. I won’t go into it now, since I’m pretty much over it, but suffice to say that for what looked like a decent IT job, I found myself regularly wishing I was just in one of the factories making paper plates.

That led me to realize that, given what I said recently about not talking about my current job, I’m finding it rather easy, mostly because I don’t have anything that I need to get off my chest. It’s a job, it’s got its rough bits, but usually a quick “can you believe that?” over dinner with the wife gets it out of my system. And that led me to realize that one of the reasons I tell stories is to ameliorate stress.

From there I found that I better understand why I would tell stories about Iraq. Not that I was still under the specific stress of being there, but being there had been such fantastic, unfathomable stress that I was still trying to cope with it and ameliorate it years later. It helps that the stories I often told were funny, or funny from a fairly benign perspective. I didn’t have any truly horrifying stories, and I try to be pretty scrupulous about not overstating or exaggerating things; I never fired my weapon in anger, I’m not any kind of crazy hero (and I’m not saying that just to take advantage of the meme that says that only the true badasses downplay their experiences–seriously, it just wasn’t all that).

I often thought I was telling stories to entertain and educate, but it turns out they had another purpose. So, thanks to everyone who has listened to me going on about these situations (work, war, etc.) in person. Turns out you were doing me a solid. It’s entirely possible you already knew that, in which case, a double helping of thanks.

Reading Lines

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Today’s lunch hour was mostly dedicated to reading lines for the show. I did some basic social media maintenance as well, but mostly I’ve been going over my lines, hoping to keep away the rust that might set in after five days without performing the show (as it will be by Friday when we hit the stage again). It’s a little nerve-wracking, as well, since I know my wife will be in the audience Friday. Turns out, I’m perfectly happy getting on stage and being ridiculous in front of strangers, but it’s a little different with people I know and like. I know why, of course, I wouldn’t be much of a introspective navel-gazer if I didn’t, but it’s all very boring and includes a few, “Because of this, then that, then also the other thing too.”

That aside, I am hoping to see more people I know come out to the show the next two weekends, since I’ve otherwise seen no one, which has me oscillating a bit between disappointment and relief. There’s also the possibility of a review in a local indie paper, which is all kinds of exciting.

And yeah, one of these days I’ll stop talking about this show, and anyone who is reading can have some relief. I likely won’t be trying out for anything again until auditions for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” come up in Julyish. Then it’ll all be boring talk about writing (since I think I’m contractually obligated not to talk about work). I will certainly miss it, though, even if you won’t.

Headshot

I got a new headshot over the course of the show, courtesy of one of the members of the theatre. He also took a bunch of show pics on the night of dress rehearsal. Verdict? I look fat and frumpy in the suit they have for me, but oh well. Just goes to show I a) need to further improve my diet and exercise and b) should probably get my own suit (or two). I’m lucky enough not to be in an industry that demands them, but they’re obviously good and useful things to have in your closet. One of the few things that has held me back so far has, of course, been my optimism about losing weight.

But, I guess, I could always buy something bigger and have it tailored down on that happy day where I’m more pleased with my general health and fitness level. (And yes, I know that good health & fitness don’t necessarily correlate with lower weight… but I’ve been on this roller coaster enough to know that, yeah, in my case they generally do.) We’ll see how my latest attempt to track food intake and such works out. (Haha.)

I will tell you, though, that is something that has become significantly easier with the right tools, at least for me. Now my scale talks to my phone, and my phone tracks my steps, and I keep track of my workouts on there, and track my food intake, and so on and so forth and… yeah. Way easier than all the times I would try to put that stuff into spreadsheets or notebooks. Still not utterly automatic, but… you know… close enough, maybe.

Anyway, all that to say there’s now a very recent picture of me on here, off to the right there. Bask in its glory! (Or… something.)