Where were you on 9/11/01?

Tuesday Sept 11th, 2001
Day of the Terrorist Attacks on the WTC and Pentagon

Today has been an incredible day. In describing the events that happened today, one of the teachers said that “the world has changed significantly from what it used to be.” There’s no doubt that that’s true. It’s so strange, I’m still having trouble computing it; it seems almost like a dream; that tomorrow we’ll get up and nothing will be different.

On September 10th, 2001, I resolved to keep a daily journal for one full year (and actually followed through on it until June the next year). That journal turned into a detailed account of my personal reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the most historic, world-changing event to happen in my lifetime.

September 11th was the first day of school for my junior year in high school.

I first heard the news in 2nd period, which was AP US History with Mr. Gunn. I was excited to see his class, see what the year would be like, etc. Everyone was scrambling for a test. He came in a bit late, and was visibly shaken. He told us that the test was cancelled, and then broke the news to us.

I don’t think anyone computed it right then. I know I didn’t. I heard about it, and immediately my love of storms, breaking news, and perilous events kicked in. But I knew that what had happened was big – and not cool one bit.

I choked down the impulse to get excited, but I did want to know more – a lot more. I asked several questions about what had happened, but there wasn’t much info right then. I had no idea what the incredible magnitude of the event was; I still have trouble, it’s like something from a movie or something.

Needless to say, that was the weirdest first day of school I’ve ever had. Classes went on as scheduled, except for the last period of day, which was canceled for an impromptu school-wide assembly. Everything was upside down, with teachers and students trying simultaneously to launch another school year while doing everything they could to find out what the hell was happening on the news.

I didn’t get to a TV until the mid-afternoon, during my lunch break.

CNN was on, and they were showing footage of the Trade Center and the second plane ripping through it. They showed the buildings on fire and the scene around the buildings. It was incredible; eerie…it was really then that I started to comprehend the sheer magnitude of what had happened.

I watched footage of the Trade Center as the building collapsed – that was incredible. I watched the footage reels play over and over again. There was one of someone at the very foot of the building shooting the building as it burned, then caught it as it began to collapse, and then it started jiggling around as the guy and everyone around him scrambled as fast as they could to get out of there!

It was surreal. In the middle school just across the street, kids burst out laughing when they watched the second plane hit the other tower–then looked around in frightened disbelief as they realized that it was real. I remember looking at the photographs from the New York Times the next day and thinking I was reading a superhero comic, not the newspaper. It just didn’t compute.

I had a ton of questions on my mind that day, and they generally went in this order:

1) Was anyone I personally know hurt or killed in the attack?
2) Were any of the victims friends or family of people I know?
3) Is there going to be a war?

We’re going to remember this day for years and years, it’s incredible. The world has changed; I can feel it. It seems tonight like the stuff on the news is amazing and true, but it doesn’t seem real – not in the sense that I think any of us fully understand everything that’s gone on – everything about everyone who’s been affected by this, including ourselves.

For me, it feels exciting and horrifying at the same time, and I almost feel as if it’ll be gone tomorrow, or at least people will still be reporting on it and nothing will have changed from tonight’s events. Of course, that’s not true.

Interestingly enough, I had been watching the news on an almost daily basis for over a year, waiting for something like this to happen.  When the second Palestinian intifada began in 2000, I spent all my free time at school on the internet, checking on the latest developments in the Middle East.  When the nightly news stopped covering it, I became so disgusted I stopped watching TV news.

So I already knew who Osama Bin Laden was.  I knew all about the Taliban and their egregious human rights abuses in Afghanistan.  I heard about the USS Cole only hours after it was attacked, and I was disgusted that the US government wasn’t doing more to defend us from terrorism.

So when the 9/11 attacks happened, I felt simultaneously excited and guilty.  Finally, after months and months of slow news, something BIG is happening!  But people are dying, too–thousands of people.  Is it wrong to be excited?  But I’m sad too–does that make it all right?  How should I feel about this?

I’m not scared, I’m not terrified like the terrorists want, I’m not angry about all this – I’m just in shock, waiting to see how it all plays out. This is BIG!

Of course, the mental and emotional impact of the attacks were much larger than I understood at the time.  I didn’t feel a sense of peace in my life until sometime the next week, when I watched a special LDS devotional broadcast from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.  Even then, the impact of the attacks continued to transform me in ways that I didn’t fully understand.

Before the end of the school year, I wrote a short story that amalgamated all of the ways that the events of that year had changed my life.  It was my first creative writing project since elementary school that I’d actually finished, and I found it surprisingly cathartic. If you care to read it, you can download it here:

THE DREAM DIARY Creative Commons License

The writing is terrible, the plot is cheesy, and it gets a little preachy towards the end, but it’s more honest and genuine than anything else I can possibly say.

After the shock and horror and fear and sadness, the events of that day ultimately brought me closer to God and the people around me.  It also led to a lifelong fascination of Middle Eastern cultures alien to my own–and the desire to show that no matter our background or culture, we are all equally human.

That’s the best way to defeat evil–become a better person because of it.

Yay for work!

So I found a job today, which should keep me in the black until November and help me save up enough money for World Fantasy 2010.

The job is at a warehouse for a locally based costuming company.  It only runs through October, but that’s perfect because the training for the wilderness job starts the week after.  If all goes well, I should be gainfully employed for the rest of the year.

In a blessed stroke of good fortune, I landed a normal 8 to 5 shift.  Graveyard is a good shift for writers, but only if you’re sitting at a desk spending 95% of your time doing nothing.  I doubt that’s what this job will be like.

I don’t know what this new job will do to my writing, but I tend to think it will be positive.  At the very least, it’ll give my life some much-needed structure, and at the worst, it’ll make me write as if my life (or livelihood) depended on it.

In unrelated news, my sister went into labor today.  Go Kate!  My mom texted everyone in the family–she’s way excited.  This will be her second grandchild, and my first nephew.  If all goes well, I’ll see him over Thanksgiving.  Sarah and I are already planning the road trip down to Texas–it’s going to be awesome!

Life is very, very good.

In the Realm of the Wolf by David Gemmell

Never leave home without a weapon, Dakyras taught his adopted daughter Miriel.  Though they live a quiet life alone in the mountains, death is never far from the man known as Waylander.

When the Assassin’s Guild puts out a high price on Waylander’s head, both Waylander and Miriel find themselves on the run.  With them come two ill-fated gladiators from Drenai: the loyal and steady Angel, and the arrogant and reckless Senta.  Both men vie for Miriel’s hand–and both are honor bound to kill each other.

But in the face of the evil hunting Waylander, Angel and Senta must lay aside their vendetta and take up arms against the Gothir army hunting the Wolf clan, tribe of the prophesied chieftain that will one day unite the Nadir.  For deep in the realm of the Wolf lies a castle more ancient than the three empires–a castle whose dark secrets threaten to upset the global order forever.

This book was awesome.  I loved every moment of it.  With each page, the story just got better and better, right up to the climactic finish.  If you’re looking for a rousing adventure, you can’t go wrong with David Gemmell.

One of the things I loved the most about this story was the love triangle between Miriel, Angel, and Senta.  At first, I thought I knew who was good, who was bad, and which one she’d end up with, but then things changed and I wasn’t too sure.  Even though I hated Senta at first, I spent most of the book vacillating with my feelings on him.  And the way things ended–I wasn’t disappointed.  Not one bit.

Even though the overall story conflict was much, much larger than life, Gemmell’s characters always felt very real.  Perhaps it has to do with the way their true nature always seems to come out in battle–and Gemmell gives them plenty of opportunity to show their true nature.

It also has to do with the things they’re fighting for, though–the stakes are always clear for each character, and when they’re confused what they’re fighting for, that’s made clear too.  Though the conflict itself is larger than life, the stakes for each individual character never are.

The ending really took the cake for me, though.  When I finished the book, I couldn’t help but smile.  Gemmell is a master at writing endings that make you want to stand up and cheer.

As awesome as this book was, though, the last book in the trilogy, Hero in the Shadows, is so much better.  The last scene of that book stands out so much more to me, now that I know everything about Waylander’s past.  So.  Freaking.  Epic.

But do yourself a favor: don’t read the last book first, like I did.  Start with Waylander, which is a good book–not great, but good–and read through the trilogy.  If you love stories about true heroes and epic adventures, you won’t be disappointed.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

On a stormy night off the coast of Marseilles, a local fishing trawler recovers a man with a gunshot wound to the head.  The local doctor patches him up, but when he recovers, he has no knowledge of his past life.  Even his name is a mystery.

Fortunately, he has a clue to help him get started: a microfilm surgically implanted in his hip containing an account number for a bank in Switzerland.

When he arrives in Switzerland, he finds that the account contains millions of dollars, as well as a name: Treadstone 71.  Before leaving the bank, however, a squad of hitmen attack and nearly kill him, for no reason that he can possibly understand.

On the run from people he doesn’t know for things he doesn’t remember, Jason Bourne finds himself in a struggle, not only for his life, but to find his true identity.  But the answers, he fears, are much, much darker than he can possibly accept.

Okay, to start things off, let me say that this book is NOTHING like the movie.  NOT AT ALL.  The two are completely separate stories.  The beginnings of both are similar, with the whole amnesia thing and the bank account number implanted in his hip, but after Jason leaves Marseilles, everything gets different.  EVERYTHING.

For that reason, it’s difficult to say which is better, because they both try to do very different things.  The movie is more about the action and suspense; the book is more about the intrigue and character development.  Both succeed quite well at what they respectively set out to do.

That said, I enjoyed the book at least as much, if not more than the move.  Ludlum’s writing is quite good, and he paints an excellent picture of both the exotic European setting and the complex psychological portrait of his main character.  Unlike Crichton, whose characters often fall flat, Ludlum does an excellent job creating characters who stand up on their own right.

The suspense lagged somewhat in the middle for me, when the details about Cain and Medusa came to light (that’s one thing I’ve got to say about Crichton–he’s a master of suspense), but it wasn’t enough to keep me from finishing.  The ending, however, was atrocious–not in a clumsy way, but in a too-many-loose-ends kind of way that meant that the story wouldn’t truly be resolved until the sequel.  I hate stories that do that, but oh well, what can you do?

Overall, though, the book was quite good–better than I expected.  I can see why Ludlum was such a successful writer: he created interesting, capable characters and put them in exotic, foreign settings to fight ruthless, evil villains in a desperate zero-sum struggle for survival.

Interesting characters + exotic setting + high stakes conflict + good writing = win.  Oh, and Bourne is way more awesome than Bond. Just sayin’.

Bed intruder song بالعربي

I can’t believe I just did this.

An Arabic speaker asked, in a youtube comment, for a translation of the recent Antoine Dodson rapist song meme.  Since I didn’t have anything better to do was already busy procrastinating, I went ahead and made a rough translation.  Here it is:

ومن الواضح أن لدينا في لينكولن بارك مغتصب
انه يتسلق في شباككم انه يخطف اهلكم حتى
محاول ان يغتصبهم فتحتاجوا إلى إخفاءوا أطفالكم ، إخفاءوا زوجاتكم
وإخفاءوا أزواجكم لان ثم يغتصبون جميع الاشخاص هنا
أنت لست بحاجة إلى أن تأتي وتعترف ، سنبحث عنك
سنوجدك, سنوجدك
فيمكنك ان تسار وتقول ذلك ،يا وحش
عندنا تي–شيرتك وبصماتك الاصابع وخيرها
انت غبي كثير ,ولا غبي كثير, انجد
حصل الرجل بعيدا متارك وراءه أدلة
أنا تعرضت لهجوم من قبل احمق في المشاريع
غبي غبي غبي غبي

And if you’re not confused enough already, here’s the song:

Now excuse me while I start being productive for a change.  Ahem.

Things I learned from working in a call center

Over the summer I worked part time at a local call center.  At the time, it was just what I needed: a flexible job that helped me pay the bills while figuring out where I wanted to go next.  That said, I learned very quickly that call center work is not the sort of thing I want to do for large portions of my life.

I’m glad to say I quit my job on good terms with the management, and was one of their more productive interviewers.  I don’t harbor any hard feelings against the company I worked for or any of the particular employees.

However, I do want to reflect a bit on the nature of the work itself, which was less than awesome, as well as some of the things I learned about myself in the process.  Since this has nothing to do with the company itself, I’m not going to mention it by name.  Also keep in mind that the things I have to say are heavily influenced by my own opinions, so they may not apply to you.

That said, here are some of the things I learned from working in a call center:

1) In the long run, jerks only punish themselves.

I spoke with a lot of incredibly rude people in this job.  I also spoke with a lot of people who were courteous and well-meaning.  Without exception, the jerks seemed overstressed and miserable, while only the courteous people ever seemed genuinely happy and content with their lives.

I think the way we treat others says more about ourselves than anything else.  People who are mean and nasty to each other are never truly happy.

2) A small amount of patience makes most things go faster and smoother.

I hated it when people told me “just put ten for everything.” As an interviewer, I couldn’t do that–I was required to ask every question verbatim.  Those who were patient enough to let me do that got through the survey quickly and painlessly, while the impatient people who tried to rush things almost always got upset.

I think it’s safe to say that this has a general application as well.  When we’re patient enough to let things happen the way they’re supposed to, things happen faster and more smoothly.  When we try to rush things that shouldn’t be rushed, we screw up.

3) The ability to genuinely listen is a rare skill.

I can’t tell you how many times I asked a simple question on a survey, only to find the person on the other line answering something completely different.  I didn’t expect anyone to drop everything and devote their full attention to me, but how much effort does it take to answer a simple question?

I’ve known for a long time that listening is a skill that requires work to cultivate, but apparently, it’s also one that few people have truly mastered.  If you can’t understand a straightforward question well enough to give a yes or no answer, how can you understand something as complex as another person’s feelings?

4) Political campaigns are evil.

This is a little tongue in cheek, but I stand by it one hundred percent.  Every survey we conducted for a political campaign asked questions that were clearly geared toward developing negative campaign ads and manipulating public perception.  None of them asked how the government could best serve the people.

5) Having a flexible work schedule makes writing both easier and harder.

It makes it easier because you can plan your time around other things that are going on; it makes it harder because your days generally have less structure.

I think I hit a pretty good balance by working in the morning and writing in the afternoon, then going in to work again in the evenings if I needed the hours.  Call centers are always looking for people to work in the evenings.

6) Reducing everything to numbers makes human interactions meaningless.

This was, by far, the thing I found most frustrating about my work.  I talked with hundreds of people from all over the country and didn’t connect with hardly any of them on a personally significant level.  It was all about checking off boxes, where each completed survey was just another number in the system.

This tended to be more true of the short surveys, less true of the longer ones.  For that reason, I loved it when I got a survey that took twenty or thirty minutes to complete.  It’s very hard to talk with someone for thirty minutes without making some kind of a connection with them, however fleeting.

7) If you have a love of learning, find a job that lets you use your mind.

To be perfectly honest, I never felt completely satisfied at my work.  A robot with sufficiently advanced voice recognition software could probably have done my job as well as I could (at least for the ninety second surveys).  Over time, I felt like my work was turning me into a robot.

That’s ultimately why I felt I had to get out.  Maybe I have a problem with authority, but I can’t stand being just another cog in the corporate machine.  There’s got to be a way to pay the bills and still live life meaningfully.

Image courtesy W. Lowe

Thoughts after finishing In the Realm of the Wolf

Wow.  I just finished In the Realm of the Wolf by David Gemmell a couple hours ago, and it was AMAZING.  So amazing, in fact, that I want to write a post examining my reaction to it before I write the review.

You know that ecstatic, otherworldly feeling you get when you finish an amazingly good book?  Where you feel like you just came home from a long, epic journey and you can’t stop thinking about it?  Where your mind is racing with all sorts of new and beautiful ideas, as if you’ve opened your eyes for the first time?

That’s how I felt after finishing this book.

As a writer, I want more than anything for my readers to have the same experience when reading my books.  I don’t expect everyone will, but I want to be able to connect with a good chunk of my readers this way.  David Gemmell does this for me, and my main question is therefore: how does he do it?

Looking back, I’ve got to say that the book started good and steadily got better, right up until the awesome finish.  The first two chapters were good, but around the third chapter, my expectations started to be exceeded.  It wasn’t until the last half of the book that I realized just how much I was connecting with the characters, and when the climaxes hit, I found myself rooting for them more than I usually do.

So I guess escalation had something to do with it.  Gemmell starts with a pretty simple plot: Waylander has to evade a bunch of guild assassins out to kill him, but he doesn’t want to because his wife just died and he’s depressed.  Then more and more characters get involved, and the stakes steadily grew until the fate of global empires hung in the balance.

Yet throughout it all, the focus was always on the personal conflicts and the impact of the events on the individual characters.  The vast armies sweeping the land were more of a background setting element than anything else; the real story lay in the choices the characters made and why they made them. And when the characters started confronting their demons, I rooted for them as if they were my close, personal friends–or more than friends.

Yet Waylander himself is very much a larger-than-life character.  He’s a better hunter and tracker than the Sathuli tribesmen, a better swordsman than most of his opponents, by far the best crossbowman in the Drenai saga, and a cold, efficient killer with a body-count of hundreds.  Not only is he rich enough to support the bankrupt king of Drenai singlehandedly with his vast financial assets, but in each of the three books in his trilogy, he plays the most pivotal role of any character in the rise and fall of nations and empires.

And yet…I can still connect with him.  Why is that?

Maybe it’s because he’s far from perfect.  He vanquishes hundreds of soldiers, assassins, monsters, and demons, but he doesn’t escape uninjured.  In Realm of the Wolf, his less-than-perfect swordsmanship is a key element of the plot.

It’s the internal conflict, however, that really makes me connect with him.  Don’t get me wrong–I’m not a cold, unfeeling killer, nor have I lost my whole family to roving bandits–but I can understand his struggle to find happiness in the face of so much evil, both within him and without.

Or maybe it’s not so much that I understand him as that I’m fascinated by him, and I don’t know why.  It certainly helps that he has a soft side–that he’s not a complete monster.  In all the books, his quest is always to save lives, not just to take them, and every once and a while he does something to keep my sympathy.  The way he spared the Sathuli scout in Realm of the Wolf, for example.

Overall, though, I think it’s the characters and their conflicts that made this book come alive.  Waylander is basically an adventure tale with some interesting characters; In the Realm of the Wolf is also an adventure tale, but the personal stakes are much higher, and the focus is more on the characters than on the rise and fall of empires.

Anyways.  I still feel like there’s something elusive that I’m not quite getting, but those are my thoughts after finishing this book.  If you didn’t find it helpful, I hope you at least found it interesting.  And if you have the chance, read the trilogy!  It’s goood!

Travel writing + Gemmell + Sanderson signing = awesome

Today was an awesome day, which is weird considering everything that happened.  Woke up at 4:45 am to catch an early morning flight back to Utah, took public transport back to Provo, and ran around on errands until attending the midnight Way of Kings signing at the BYU Bookstore.

Yet it was awesome.  Why?

First, I got a lot of writing done on the plane.  Normally I can’t write much while traveling, yet today it was really flowing.  Maybe it’s because I love revising, maybe it’s because the chapter I was working on was already pretty decent to begin with.  Whatever the reason, writing was fun and productive.

Second, I started an AWESOME book by David Gemmell.  Holy crap, I love David Gemmell!  It is my life’s ambition to acquire a signed first edition hardback copy of his debut novel, Legend.  I just started In the Realm of the Wolf, and it’s even better than the first Waylander book.  It’s got all the standard awesomeness you’d expect from a Gemmell book, plus some very interesting plot turns at the beginning that widened the scope beyond what I was expecting.  Very awesome.

As a side note, I think these Gemmell books are influencing my writing style for the rewrite of Mercenary Savior.  I’m not sure if that’s a good thing, but I tend to think it is.  Gemmell’s style is very terse, very blunt, and cuts right to the action without much description.  I’ll probably have to watch that I don’t skimp out on descriptions too much, but the other elements seem to be helping.  I hope.

Third, I had lunch with my grandparents.  That was great.  I don’t see them all that often, even though they live up in Salt Lake City–maybe once every other month or so.  I need to visit them more.  Anyway, it was good to see them.

Fourth, even though it took about two and half hours to take the public transit to Provo, those two and a half hours were quite productive.  Read more Gemmell and made some satisfying edits to a pivotal scene.  I also discovered that I only need to charge my netbook for one hour to recover 50% of its battery capacity.  Sweetness.

Fifth, while running errands after I got back, I talked with my sister over the phone and solidified our vacation plans.  Looks like we’re going on a road trip!  Yay!  Also, while chatting with my new roommate, whom I barely know, I found out that he’s written a fantasy novel.  How awesome is that?

Sixth, the Way of Kings signing at the BYU Bookstore.  I’m currently too poor to buy it in hardcover (still need to find a steady job), but it was still a ton of fun to hang out and see friends.  Brandon did a Q&A before the signing, and there was this stunningly attractive and generally awesome fangirl…whom I chatted with…briefly…didn’t get her name or contact info…hope I see her again.

Besides heckling Brandon, which is always good fun, I chatted with another local writer going to World Fantasy 2010, and found out he’s got room in his hotel room if I want to split it. That’s great–I need to figure out my travel and accommodation plans for that convention, since it’s coming up quick.

So yeah, it was an all around awesome day. Now I need to take a shower and crash before the lack of sleep catches up to mmzzzzZZzzzZZZzz…

Why am I so #$%! unproductive?

I don’t know why, but it’s a lot harder for me to write the first draft of something than it is to revise it.  Finishing my last novel was much, much harder than any of the projects before it, and my productivity is still suffering because of it.

The root problem, I suppose, is procrastination.  While I was writing my last novel, things got really tough towards the end, and I found myself procrastinating much more than I should have.  That led me to develop a dangerous habit.  Right now, as I move into the fourth revision of Mercenary Savior, I find that I’m still procrastinating even when the work is much easier (and more enjoyable).

Or is that really it?  Maybe I wasn’t procrastinating when I was writing my last novel–maybe I was taking frequent breaks to “fill the well.” Except now, those breaks have turned into full-scale procrastination, and I’m finding it very hard to get back on a regular schedule.

I’ve been doing about 1k to 3k words per day this past week, but I feel like I should be doing around 4k or 5k.  A lot of the time, I put off even starting until around 5pm, and stay up until late hours of the night when I should be sleeping.  It’s not a sustainable schedule, and I know it.

Part of it might have to do with the fact that I’m back at my parents’ house right now, taking a short break before returning to Utah.  I guess I should just stop worrying and enjoy my time here–I’m still doing well, overall, and there’s more to life than writing all the time.  Still, it’s maddening to feel unproductive.  Blarg.

Other than that, things are going great.  I’ve been spending a lot of quality time with my dad, as well as relaxing and taking time off from other pursuits.  Saw Inception and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, and loved them both.  Read a couple of good books, too.  Life is good.

In unrelated news, my sister is about to have a baby.  Everyone in the family is WAY excited.  We love you, Kate and Danny!

Waylander by David Gemmell

The Drenai lands have been overrun, and the Vagrian conquerors, led by Kaem and the Dark Brotherhood, are laying waste to all that lies before them.  Only the stronghold at Purdol withstands them, but unless the Drenai can rally a counterattack, all will be lost.

In these trying times, a strange old man visits the assassin Waylander and urges him to go to the sacred Nadir mountain of Raboas and retrieve the legendary Armor of Bronze.  With this armor, the Drenai commander Egel can rally the army that will save the kingdom.

But Waylander is a hunted man–a man of dark secrets and many enemies.  Kaem wants him dead for killing his son.  The Nadir want him dead for violating their lands.  And the Drenai want him dead for assassinating their king.

I love David Gemmell.  When you pick up one of his novels, you know exactly what you’re going to get: gritty, complex characters, bloody battles, ruthless villains, and difficult moral decisions that transform even the most depraved individuals into true heroes, if only for a few moments before they die.  Waylander is no exception.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the book is the story behind the founding of the Thirty.  When the young Source priest named Dardalion forsakes the pacifism in order to save the lives of his fellow countrymen, twenty nine fellow priests join him to form the band of legendary warrior monks.  This religious order goes on to play a pivotal role in some of Gemmell’s best works.

Waylander himself is also an interesting, memorable character.  During the events of Waylander, he’s basically hit rock bottom, but as he learns again what it means to love and fight for what he loves, he climbs out of that dark place.

I really enjoyed this book.  My only complaint is that the ending felt a little rushed.  All the plots and subplots get tied up, but some of them so abruptly that there’s little room to savor the emotional impact.  Still, the novel was quite satisfying overall.  I look forward to reading the next book in the Waylander saga.