Ruminations on Writer’s Block, Job Hunting Scams and More

For some reason, it’s been like pulling teeth to get myself to sit down and write lately. I’ve managed to write a few scenes for the fantasy novel. I managed to write an outline for a new scifi novel I’m excited to start. But it’s been two months now I’ve been trying to finish this first draft, and the lay off just seemed to tip the scales of motivation to the “none at all” status.

I finally decided to force myself to start typing in the scenes I’d hand written. One advantage of that is I end up with a second draft of those scenes in the manuscript, because I revise as I go. Doesn’t mean I won’t edit and revise them later, of course, but it does tend to make them stronger as a base. Another advantage in this case was getting a vision for the rest of the chapter which allowed me to write rough summaries of the scenes needed. This won’t be the last chapter. I envision two or three more, but if I can get past this one it will definitely be a step in the right direction.

The normal way I get past writer’s block is to keep multiple projects going at one time. If I get stuck on one, I switch to another. I also give myself permission to write crap every now and then. (It’s not really avoidable so I might as well admit it.) This multiple project approach has really been great for me. I have yet to get stuck on two projects at the same time. I’m not stuck lately, I’m just unmotivated/uninspired. It’s hard not to be in the present job market. Looking for a job is less fun than ever. The competition is fierce and companies have the upper hand.

There’s also the lovely scams like the one where they recruit you to process client payments for a ridiculous amount of money, promising you earn this by only working 2-3 hours a day. They even go so far as to set up fake, fancy corporate websites with management profiles, etc. This a major scam though. It’s called a “money mule fraud” and the email reads something like this:

My name is Russell Born and I represent NEBS Group Company.

This letter confirms that the resume that you submitted to CareerBuilder.com has been duly processed by our HR department, and your skills meet our basic requirements for the Payment Processing vacancy.

NEBS Group Inc. is a world-renowned company founded and based in the USA, which deals with IT services, matching the needs of the market with the best employees available worldwide.

Payment Processing Agent position is:
– Part-time (on average 2-3 hours a day (Monday through Friday).
– Work at home (all communication is online).

What do you need? Internet access and e-mail.

This position is offered on a probationary period basis for a period of one month. You will receive training and online support while working and being paid.

Salary for the training period is $2300/month. In addition you will be receiving 8% commission from every payment which you receive from a customer and successfully process. Total income, given the current volume of clients, will be up to $4,500 per month.

After the first 30 days the base salary will be increased up to $3,000 per month plus 8% commission, so there is significant earning potential if you are willing to work with diligence and efficiency.

You may ask for additional hours after your probationary period, when you have earned a full-time position.

If you are interested in our offer and would like to learn more about the Payment Processing Agent position, please, send the form below to [email protected]
NOTE: This is not a sales position.

Our representative will contact you within 24 hours.

++++++++FORM++++++++FORM+++++++++++
First name:_____________________
Last name:___________________________
Country of residence:__________________
Contact phone:______________________
Preferred call time:_______________________
++++++++FORM++++++++FORM+++++++++++

We have found your resume at www.careerbuilder.com. This letter confirms that your resume has been duly processed and your skills meet our basic requirements for the Payment Processing Agent vacancy.

Best regards,

Russell Born
NEBS Group Inc.

The company name, of course, changes monthly as does the website, but these guys actually expect you to use your own checking account to process customer checks, only they’ll disappear after you pay for shipments, etc. and never pay you. Don’t fall for this. Providing them with your info and bank accounts may just promote further fraud.

It’s a scary world out there, no wonder I’m fighting depression with this job hunt. Who can you trust? Daily I get offers for free resume evaluations, and they always say that I have a weak resume and need their services. In fact, the resume I used an online specialty site template to help me design, doesn’t meet their standards. They, of course, can fix it for the bargain price of several hundred dollars. Like someone selling a service is even objective, right?

Anyway, such are the joys of present life for me. For what it’s worth…

Thoughts on Characterization and Sin

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.” CS Lewis, Mere Christianity

One of the reasons I write my characters the way I do is my belief in the depravity of man, which Lewis explains well in the quote above. It’s fun to think we make choices to do bad or good, but the truth is, I think our sinful nature is far more powerful than that. I know there are times I did/do things I never thought I’d do and, in fact, had planned not to up until the very minute they occurred. If my free will is dominant, how can this be? The Scriptures tell us that even when we try to do good, we fail. The Apostle Paul writes:

“For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” Romans 7:19-24

This war inside us is a common factor in the character development arcs of fiction, whether the writer shares my belief or not. People are complicated creatures and I have seen far too many books by authors who either don’t believe this, don’t know how to write it or somehow can’t bear to represent it and thus present cardboard, watered down, unrealistic characters instead. This is not a problem restricted to Christian fiction, but I have to say it is far too prevalent there. Books like that just don’t ring true for me. In fact, they turn me off, so I won’t write characters that way. I just can’t.

In my fiction, bad guys are bad and good guys are conflicted. Beyond that, even the bad guys have some good qualities (most of them anyway) and the good guys have their bad sides. Because I want my fiction to be fit for the 12-year-old kids who are just discovering speculative fiction at the same age I did, and because of my faith beliefs, I don’t write sex scenes or foul language and I keep the violence focused on only what’s required by the story. But that also doesn’t mean my characters can’t be realistic. When a character curses, I just write “Bob cursed” and let the reader fill in the blank. We all have our favorite curse words anyway, don’t we (be honest)? And so, those would pop into our mind when we read that. Reading fiction is supposed to be interactive. That’s why over describing and telling are discouraged. The more the readers contribute from their own imaginations, the better their reading experience will be.

Besides, who can related to perfect characters? Do heroes need to express ideals we aspire to? Of course. Otherwise, they won’t be heroes because heroes are people we admire and want to emulate. But even heroes have imperfections and if we don’t write those into our stories, they won’t seem like real people.

Anyway, this is how I approach character. I am sure other writers have different thoughts on it and even different motivations but I hope most of us end up in the same place, because realistic, conflicted, imperfect characters are a lot more interesting to read about. For what it’s worth…

Five Reasons Science Fiction and Fantasy Are Important To Me

I’ve had a love affair with science fiction and fantasy since grade school. I will never forget the time my cousins dragged us to this film with the weird name “Star Wars.” Even at age 8, I was sure the title sounded dumb, but my cousin and best buddy, David, had seen the film several times already, and “you just have to see it,” he said.

The film did not disappoint. From its opening minutes aboard the Rebel Ship, I was on the edge of my seat. That opening scene remains one of my favorites of all time for any speculative fiction film. There’s nothing quite like the intensity of the battle between Rebel troops in blue shirts and leather vests against heavily armored storm troopers in the tight quarters of their ship. The intensity only increased when the heavy breathing dark menace, Vader, enters through the hole in the hull.

“Star Wars” blew me a way and opened my mind to possibilities I had never considered before. Always creative, always a dreamer, suddenly my wildest fantasies, fueled by my fascination with NASA’s space program, became real possibilities for me – maybe not for today, maybe not for tomorrow, but some day. I wanted to walk on the moon, launch in a space ship, float among the stars, visit alien planets. Even in other activities, my dreams filled my mind. When I went gliding in the alps on the engine-less glider plane, floating silently on air as we descended back down to the pad where we’d launched into the air on a giant bungee, my thoughts were of space. Was that what it would feel like on a space ship with silence all around? Was the abruptness of the launch similar to what it would be like to ride a rocket?

In high school, I had the opportunity to visit the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson and see actual NASA craft, experience astronaut training simulations, touch moon rocks and buy NASA souvenirs. The brief NASA Adopt-An-Astronaut Program allowed me to communicate with the first shuttle pilot, read about their mission, and feel personally involved. When astronaut Steve Hawley, formerly married to Sally Ride, visited my high school, his family ties to my church youth pastor allowed me closer contact and the thrill of shaking an astronaut’s hand and asking the silly questions he’d heard dozens of times that I wanted to hear answers for with my own ears.

So the first of my five reasons why science fiction and fantasy are important to me is that they opened my life to possibilities which had only seemed far fetched before I discovered them. They made me believe the hope of possibilities was a viable thing to dream about and affirmed my sense of wonder.

One of the few movies and televisions shows my father and I could enjoy together was the 1978 animated “The Hobbit,” based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel which had exploded in the 1970’s with its release to mass market paperback. Where as the “Star Wars” books were my first science fiction reads, “The Hobbit” became my first fantasy read. I devoured the book, even though I was so young I couldn’t grasp a lot of it. Soon I was reading fan magazines, checking out other books, and making up my own stories.

I became a fan of Alan Dean Foster because his “Splinter Of The Mind’s Eye” allowed me to revisit the Star Wars universe between films in a book almost like the movies. Since then I have read many more of his movie adaptations and original books, and he continues to be one of my favorite writers.

I discovered Robert Silverberg and Orson Scott Card, my two top favorites, when family members gifted me “Lord Valentine’s Castle” and “Ender’s Game” and insisted I read them. Having never heard of them, I was reluctant at first. I’d always been a picky consumer, wanting to feel confident of the likelihood I would enjoy a book or movie before investing time in it. Both books blew my mind, and since I’ve bought almost everything I can get a hold of from both authors and devoured each the same. I’ve reread both those books and experienced that thrill of first discovery all over again, then shared them with friends so they could experience it, too.

The second reason why science fiction and fantasy are important to me then is the bonds they’ve allowed me to create with friends and family. They’ve helped bring our dreams and lives together in exciting, unexpected and enriching ways, allowing us to share our wildest dreams and celebrate our future hopes.

In working in television and film and as a writer in my adulthood, I’ve heard many stories about how science fiction and fantasy have influenced not only writers of other genres, but even the development of technology. NASA once sent experts to the set of the original “Star Trek” series to discover how the producers made the doors slide open and shut when actors entered and departed rooms. The producers actually had a crewman behind the doors manually sliding them over, but today there are many doors designed to do just that in everything from office buildings to vessels. Are they exactly like the “Star Trek” doors, no, but they are modeled after the possibility. Seeing the “Star Trek” creator’s view of future possibilities inspired others to dream of how they could bring those possibilities to life and changed our world, the third reason why science fiction and fantasy are important to me.

I will always remember the first time I turned to the Sci-Fi Channel and discovered the new “Battlestar Galactic.” I had certainly heard of it, but like many fans of the original, had not liked what I’d heard about the “reinvention” and changes made by the new writers. To my great dismay, I loved it. It was darker and more serious than the original had ever strived to be, but it also provided an amazing commentary on our times, examining political and moral issues being faced at this moment in countries around the world. Like the original “Star Trek,” under the guise of “science fiction,” the new “Battlestar” was able to confront issues head on which most writers would never dare to.

The result was a compelling and inspiring television series, and one of the most respected and admired speculative fiction series ever created. So my fourth reason why science fiction and fantasy are important to me is that they can speak to issues in our own world and cultures in ways that contemporary works cannot, forcing us to think about things in a new light and consider possibilities we would never accept if they weren’t presented as “other world” instead of our own.

The final reason why science fiction and fantasy are important to me is that without the possibility of dreams and imagination, my life would have been unhappy and incomplete.

My dreams and imagination have taken me from a small Kansas town to the tribal villages of Africa, from the slums of Rio De Janeiro to the cobblestone streets of Europe and everywhere in between. Without being a dreamer, I would have never lived the life of risks I have lived in the thirty-two years since I discovered “Star Wars.” I would never have worked in film and television, written stories and scripts, released three CDs and a national single, or toured the world to speak, teach and sing. Some of those dreams had never occurred to me in Kansas, while others were the same ones my colleagues and classmates laughed at and mocked when I first mentioned them.

Ironically, at our 10th High School reunion, they all seemed to know where I’d been and what I’d been doing and instead of laughter, offered their admiration. I’d lived the life I said I’d wanted to. I chased my dreams and even caught some of them. None of that would have happened, if science fiction and fantasy hadn’t taught me to dream. And there are many others just like me.