All hail the Solstice.

It’s the season of the summer solstice down under, and while friends and relatives in the Northern Hemisphere turn up the radiator and pray for Just a little sunlight, please God, before I go insane, over here temperatures in some towns will be up around 120F. The locals are unlikely to be gathering around any lit fireplaces.

Which of course means that the Northern Hemisphere themed Christmas marketing juggernaut makes for an awkward clash between culture and reality: Jolly old men in red suits risk heat stroke while balancing sweaty kids on their knees; liberal dashes of fake snow adorn storefronts, despite the fact that many (most?) shoppers have never seen the real thing away from the TV; families gather to sing Christmas carols with electric candles for fear of starting unstoppable fires in tinder-dry conditions.

Differences aside, it does remain for many of us a chance to catch up with extended family, take a break from work and routine and step back and look at the year past. Small wonder that a few days later many will be making New Year’s Resolutions.

So whatever your climate, or tradition – here’s best wishes to you and yours.

I’ll start with the obligatory It’s been a while since my last post. A few months ago all the local family packed up and flew to the other side of the planet for a wedding. New family, friends and location provided a much needed perspective shift: We spent a week living in the Bitterroot Valley, enjoying a different pace away from the bustle of city life, the day job, and the hundred-and-eleven projects I’m always trying to juggle. On returning, apart from recovering from the flight (what is it with illness and airplanes, anyway?) I had some new goals, new projects (hah!) and consequently this blog sat on the backburner for a while.

But life very much goes on, and life is good.

I’ve been riding the motorcycle a lot more in the last few months; this has partly freed up some time (5 hours a week commuting instead of 12), but it’s also added to life – fresh air, a little bit of the outdoors before being cloistered in the office for the day, and the mental exercise of simply having to deal with the unexpected every day.

Routine is easy and comfortable, but I think it’s also dangerous, perhaps preventing us moving forward, seeing new ways of doing things, or even providing the breadth required to relate to others. Though perhaps that’s not just a motorcycling thing.

Being present in the here & now, as opposed to on autopilot and cruising through a routine, I’m sure can apply as much to crossing the street or watching TV as it does to riding a bike or flying a plane. But perhaps in the latter cases it’s harder to avoid – I suspect it’s hard to survive very long riding or flying without making sound conscious decisions, trying to improve, or analysing what we’re doing. (Maybe my brain is simply lazy, and it’s too easy to switch off and find routine in the other things?)

There’s something else, of course, about training myself to be present in the moment. Rather than wondering what happened, I’m fully tuned in, and the unexpected and random provide that much more flavour.

And ever since getting a helmet camera, they’re that much more shareable.

Perth has been in the news, but not for any reason I’d have hoped for. Making the news around the world since March 8 has been the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370. Despite personal concerns I might have (with colleagues in Malaysia, including one on a Malaysian Airlines flight that day), I’ve found the ongoing media reaction occasionally disappointing.

Any airline incident has the potential to be big news, and MH370 has been no different. Having done some flying myself, and with friends who fly airliners internationally for their day job, I found the immediate speculation of terrorism, pilot suicide or unprofessional behaviour to be disheartening, and incredibly disrespectful to the families of those involved. And conspiracy theories – such that the plane was shot down by the Chinese, for example – are offensive enough at the pub, but just because people posts random theories on the internet, do they need to be repeated by the media to the point that officials have to deny it to the relatives?

The problem, as I see it, is that as a society we’re training ourselves to always prefer the simple solution: Dumb it down for me. Layman’s terms, please! Give me the executive summary, Just the facts, Ma’am.

No episode of Perry Mason was ever as long as your average real murder trial. Real life is complex and drawn out. It contains minutiae, multiple motivations, probabilities. But when do you ever see an interviewee on the TV or radio talk for more than 30 seconds? The answer is either Never, or In the boring bits. Because if you can’t summarise what you have to say in 30 seconds, the editing room is going to do it for you.

Aviation incidents are long and complex. Reports of airline disasters can be hundreds of pages long and routinely detail lengthy chains of human error, conflicts of interest between profits, safety and politics, or technical or training oversights which have sometimes been at play, without incident, for decades. When we see a jet fly overhead, there’s a temptation to see a thing. An object. It’s hard to see it as a perfectly integrated mesh of moving parts, engineered to precise tolerances and being managed by sometimes hundreds of people in a day.

Rather, the real world is complex. Science is hard. It reminds me of this snippet by Louis CK, where among other things, he mentions Chesley Sullenberger’s ditching into the Hudson River. Put yourself in the shoes of a pilot: You train, multiple flights every day, for years. On every one of those flights, you review what your plan is if the engine fails here, on takeoff. Or here, during flight. Or… at any instant. You repeat simulated engine failure exercises to understand the room and time you’ll need. And when it happens you switch to that routine: Once you have a plan, it’s no longer an emergency. But as Louis CK points out, to the average punter, that’s waaaay to complicated: It’s much simpler to call it a miracle; and when we call it a miracle we do a disservice not only to the effort of the people like Sullenberger who made it happen, but to all the people who went before, who failed, and from whose sacrifices we learned and made the world a better, safer place.

I have my theories about MH370, and while they might not involve terrorism or gross malfeasance or conspiracy, I’m happy to keep them to myself and wait for the evidence.

Instead, as our local airforce base flies out a continual stream of search teams looking for MH370, I’ll be taking a moment to contemplate the scope and complexity of this undertaking. And to them, their support teams and the countless long hours spent at their thankless, unglamorous tasks, away from the media spotlight, I’ll simply say Thank you.

It’s been decision time this month in our household as we choose how best to adapt our goals to the ever changing priorities and responsibilities we find in life.

On the surface, one of the biggest changes compared to the last eighteen months is that I don’t plan on spending any time flying this year. I discussed with the gliding club taking some time off, as I don’t anticipate spending any time in the air this year at all. This was a decision that took a few months to evaluate as flying has always been a passion of mine.

Perhaps it’s the result of years of computer programming: I like the simplicity of boolean logic. Things are true or false: I don’t feel comfortable doing things half-well. I either want to do them well (or be working hard towards that goal), or I don’t want to do them at all. Perhaps that’s just part of professional development: developing the ability to focus on a task to completion, self evaluate, and improve with each successive iteration. And I’d argue that focus is a zero-sum game: the more energy we invest in one area, the less focused we are in another.

It should go without saying, but flying implies at least some minimum quota of focus. When I was doing six or seven flights every weekend, and studying flying mid-week, there was an obvious improvement in skills. That kind of focus didn’t just contribute to the first gliding club trophy I have, it also made for safer flying, and even value for money: I was getting something out of each flight.

But then a new workplace, significant time invested in a new writing project, and the continued pulls of family responsibilities started to eat into that focus. I flew less, didn’t recap the flying during the week, and felt the focus begin to evaporate.

In this context, grounded sounds like such a negative term. Yet in the big picture it really isn’t, because being grounded is also exactly the sort of focus we’re talking about here: With one less diversion to balance, I’m able to concentrate more on the day job at the day job, and my writing project, which by now has some concrete wordcount goals, will also get the focus it requires.

There will be other changes this year. Managing goals and expectations will always be a real challenge. While I can manage the extremely fragmented writing time amidst family and work life, I can’t help but compare what I manage to achieve now with what I could achieve years ago, when every minute outside the day job was my own.

But if climbing the mountain takes a little longer, then perhaps it’s only more reason to look around us and notice the vitality and hardiness of what grows on the slope around us. And if we’re climbing with others, then perhaps it’s also an opportunity to share the same observations with them.

Because for every one joule of energy I expend this year on these limited foci, I’m directing two towards my young children, whose own bright futures are grounded here, now.

It’s New Year’s day: The kids are ‘cleaning their rooms’ (which means finding all the toys they’ve secreted throughout, playing with them, and then getting more toys out to add to the playtime and result in a messier room than they started); it’s another warm, dry summer’s day outside; Disney soundtracks are playing on iTunes, and I have 50 pages of outline in front of me needing attention.

As the calendar year flips over another digit I’ve cause to reflect on what an amazing year 2013 has been. It’s been a year of big changes and broadened horizons: a new job, in a new industry, employing new concepts and technologies; riding a motorcycle again after a four year hiatus; making time to write and get productive again.

Throughout, I found myself fronting up to fears and roadblocks and forcing myself past them. Restraining a pattern of negative thinking has been a constant struggle, but it’s been worth it. At the end of the year I’ve things to show for the effort.

The last three months, when there’s been a few minutes here and there, I’ve been writing again. And now, at the end of the year and with extensive notes and an outline for a novel, I can see what the theme for 2014 is going to be.

Learning to rewrite.

In the past, rewriting has been like pulling teeth; it’s been like an opportunity for the negative thought patterns to get out and stretch their legs: Couldn’t I just tidy up the draft? If I couldn’t write a decent draft in the first place, then I’m bad at this, right? It only needs rewriting because it’s broken…

Then I started thinking about process, how it fits in with reading, and began reframing rewriting. Rewriting is the writer’s half of the reader’s re-reading. It’s a chance to grow an improved story. Add layers.

In software development we don’t tend to rewrite. It happens, but only extremely rarely. Usually, we only refactor – take a part of the whole, and restructure it to be cleaner, clearer, or more efficient if there’s some benefit to the exercise. Rewriting is avoided – because it’s horribly expensive. Subtle features in the original get forgotten in the rewrite. The rewrite takes forever. You’re losing money and productivity that could have been better spent elsewhere. Maybe business will dictate a rewrite after the product’s been around a while, but almost never will the current code be binned and something new started from scratch.

But I like the coding analogy. Coding has taught me to put my butt in the chair and hands on the keyboard, or to stick with the project and see it through, or to carefully consider structure before starting.

And so here, like many other analogies, any comparison of fiction writing to software development breaks down. They’re simply different, with different goals and audiences. As I work on a project which I enjoy being immersed in, I can see the benefit of letting go of what’s already been written, taking a fresh look, and moving the story onward and upward. Because story isn’t plot – it isn’t even what was written. It’s what we’re trying to say. It’s what we want the reader to take with them. And there’s always a better way to say it.

I hope you’ve had a magnificent 2013, and all the very best for 2014.

Some time ago I was discussing the challenges of The Day Job with a work colleague. They were the usual things that one encounters, particularly in software development: Frustrations with finishing the current task, or really getting a sense of how much more will be required, or whether requirements will change and invalidate the hard won results of difficult hours/days/weeks. His take on the subject was this: Live in the moment.

As usual, it took me a long time to figure it out.

Part of what helped was work on my current novel. As I started to refine my workflow and reap some productivity benefits from it I started to realise that I was more and more enjoying the process of writing the novel. I was becoming increasingly less concerned with the end goal of handing over a finished copy to someone.

For me this was a Big Thing. I’m generally fairly goal oriented, and a workflow that says Finish This Book In 3 Months was historically the most appealing. When I was last writing regularly, I’d look at published authors I knew. Seeing they were generating product on a regular basis, I tried to model my own process on theirs.

Which is how I burned out.

With this project, while trying to work at the pace I had before but having taken the artificial, arbitrary (and frankly stupid) deadline out of the picture, I find I’m enjoying it. More than that too, because the product of this process feels better. Higher quality. More complete. As I analyse my writing process I start to see it as a reflection of the reader’s process.

A reader doesn’t buy a product.

I don’t know how I can say that any clearer. A reader doesn’t buy a novel to own it. They don’t buy it to be seen with it. They buy it to read; to spend many hours in the process of reading – enjoying the shared experience the author created.

For an author to write with a goal of generating product I think is dishonest to the reader but perhaps not a real breakthrough intuition. But something this morning made me wonder if it’s a reflection of our culture.

I was watching Burt Rutan’s 2006 TED speech on space exploration with the family. While talking about manned spaceflight, he briefly mentioned the US setting the goal of reaching the moon, reaching the goal, and… stopping.

It ties in well, I think: For a decade, the US had a rapid, refined process for advancing manned spaceflight. Risks were taken. Innovation happened. Then, it reached its goal and, mission accomplished, the process was discarded. With that meteoric progress and innovation in manned spaceflight now firmly in the past, Rutan’s prompted to ask a question: What lofty dreams are the kids of today going to imagine for their futures? Cellphones with more features? Has that really become the milestone of achievement we’ve evolved our culture toward?

Life is a process.

We’re living it at this moment. Reading this post, in the here and now. But when we translate it into words, tell ourselves or someone else what we’re doing, we break it down into snapshots. Images. Milestones. A three dimensional picture is far easier to represent than a four dimensional one, an abstract summary easier to relate than the infinite dimensionality of the present moment.

So, as a culture, we focus on those milestones. Events. What has happened. What we hope or fear will happen in the future.

And therein lies the danger. We convince ourselves that the representation is reality. That life really is made up of these arbitrarily defined, effectively fictional, milestones. The book we’re writing is only there to be finished. Worse, the book we’re reading is there only to be finished. The project we’re completing for work exists only to be tied with a bow and shoved out of the way – hard – so we can get to the next one.

It’s terrifying, for once we’ve ascribed our life’s meaning to milestones – events which by definition have no real duration or existence themselves – we come unstuck. Because of what we haven’t defined: The undescribed space lying between the events, the multidimensional now existing between our abstract summaries. That’s where we live, and love, and breathe. By framing our reality on events, goals and achievements, we’ve devalued the very substance of life itself, made it subservient to the fiction. Meaningless.

So my colleague’s advice was something I needed to hear. I needed to recapture the moment, to stop focusing on what happened and what’s next and discover what’s now.

It was good advice, and worth sharing.

See life differently. Be daring.

Live in the moment.

Every year gets harder. I remember a friend saying this to me around ten years ago after, at about this time of year, I’d quipped that the year ending had been particularly challenging. In the example being discussed it was certainly true, but was it really true of every year? I wasn’t sure, but as a concept it gave me a lens with which to look at future years.

Ten years into the future, I suspect I’m in a position to offer commentary to the me-of-ten-years-ago on the whole thing, and my observation since is an emphatic I Hope So.

Sure, it’s possible to disengage, go live on our own somewhere and subsist, to never seek new challenges, fear change and avoid it. And from that point of view we might say that my friend’s statement clearly doesn’t apply to Every year.

But maybe it should.

If we’re cruising on autopilot, we’re not changed, we’re not growing, and we’re not able to take advantage of new and exciting possibilities. We’re stagnating, and perhaps like a hypothetical aircraft left on autopilot while its pilot takes a nap, eventually we find ourselves out of fuel and on an unavoidable final glide towards The End. I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that life’s too valuable to nap through.

But then, challenges are challenging, right? Sometimes they’re not of our making, and events outside our control make for new objectives, provide new fears, and force us to step up and face the new day when we’d rather pull ourselves further under the covers. And if the challenges are of our own making, if we’re pushing ourselves continually into new and difficult situations, then we can also become self critical in the face of real or potential failure: what possessed us with the tenacity to attempt something so bold?

And yet, whether of our own making or others, facing our fears, trying the impossible, and picking ourselves up after failure for another try is the stuff life is made of. We’re not immutable and neither is the world we live in.

So face the music, apply for the new job, and above all learn – to face the challenge, breathe deeply, stand tall; to salsa, skydive, motorcycle, fly.

And at the end of the year, if we can say it was our most difficult year yet, I think we should give ourselves a high five. Mission accomplished: Life being Lived.

It’s been a good month for the muse.

I’ve been progressing through plotting a new novel project, which I’m hoping to have largely complete by November. While there’s a temptation to think of writing at all an accomplishment of sorts (given how little fiction I’ve been producing lately), I’m trying to strenuously avoid that line of thinking. Instead, getting back into enjoying the process, enjoying the daily progression towards the goal without simply focusing on the goal and being frustrated at how far away it is, has been something I really needed to do. I might write more about this in the coming months, but I think it’s at the heart of a few problems I’ve had with my writing (and balancing famly/writing/work/life).

NaNoWriMo is coming up for its annual Novemberley madness, and while it’s certainly not for everyone, it’s encouraging to see much more local recognition of it than in past years. Several local libraries are getting behind it, so to put in a show of support and meet a few aspirant writers in the process I popped around for one of their info sessions. I last finished a NaNoWriMo novel in 2008, and while that particular project may continue to languish in pergatory awaiting a page-one rewrite, there’s no denying that learning one can write fiction quickly, to a deadline, and complete it has some merit.

Though I did conclude that libraries probably aren’t my ideal writing milieu.

Kat and I then attended a day of talks at CrimeScene 2013, a micro-convention here in Perth on the topic of Crime Fiction. Talks we attended included the differences between Australian and US law (which, given just how much US crime fiction is on our shelves or TV, is quite an eye opener), limitations of DNA evidence, firearms inaccuracies in crime fiction, and a few on the topic of writing the genre. Amusingly, I’d only even heard about the convention through Lee Battersby’s blog a few days before, but as spur of the moment decisions go, it was well worth it.

We also found time to see Gravity, which I’d studiously avoided trailers for and perhaps partly as a consequence can’t recommend highly enough. There are a great many story-telling reasons why I enjoyed this film, and while it may not have been scientifically accurate in all respects, I think films like this and Apollo 13 are incredibly important for both the hard-SF market and the future of space science.

Consider that heroism and action and rising above the mundane might motivate an audience to seek more of the subject matter after the curtain closes. If this is the case, what are they wanting more of? If they’re reading or watching SF which obviously breaks well known, accepted laws of physics, then why draw a link to and become involved with space science at all? This is where I’ve always felt hard-SF needs to stake out its market, and why despite its few technical weaknesses (which many audience members are clearly unaware of) Gravity puts forth a generally believable scenario, invests the audience in it, and plays it all out before a scenic backdrop to die for. And in a market where we might occasionally think a 3 hour movie sounds like good value for money, it shows just how much more can be done in 90 minutes with decent pacing.