Goals for 2015.

ASUS M11Ad computer, Logitech speakers and mouse, HP printer.

Louis Shalako

Goals for 2015 would include something like the following:

Learn how to use, and optimize, my new Microsoft Office 2013 for Family and Student.

Replace image files that got pooched when the old machine crashed.

Reinstall a few doodads and doohickeys, for example Kindle for PC, Nook or Kobo for PC, etc.

So far I can’t get the Blackburn radio app to work. I don’t know much about troubleshooting that, but it is only day two with my new machine. I can listen to albums on Youtube for a while.

Write more short stories and begin a new submissions/rejections list, which we’ll start at ah…#1,023.

Because I knew the old machine was dying, I have published virtually everything on the old list except for one more story awaiting rejection or acceptance.

Essentially, my new submissions list will be all new stories—hopefully I’ll be able to write something, after all, and then there’s no worry of resubmitting something to someone who’s seen it before. That’s why we keep records in the first place. The trouble is, when the list is gone, it’s gone.

That’s not to say that watching old Betsy snap, crackle and spark there on my desk wasn’t a bit traumatic because it was…we go back a long ways, and she helped me write a half-dozen books or so, maybe more than that.

I plan to complete and publish The Conqueror, and I definitely need another book in the Inspector Gilles Maintenon mystery series. If I could publish three 60,000 + word books in 2015 that would be some kind of achievement for one such as I.

I wrote at least 400,000 words in 2014, and I would like to focus that to a finer point if I could. There is something to be said for blogging as well. But marketable stories would take priority.

Other than that, my old computer blew up, taking hundreds, possibly thousands of stories, poems, blog posts, personal photos and of course book covers. The most worrying thing is the POD files, but by downloading .doc files from Smashwords, it only takes an hour and half or so to make another. 

(The author has just downloaded a 4x7” POD file from Lulu, so that’s one less worry.)

On the plus side, I had sort of planned ahead, and had a new machine sitting right beside old Betsy. 

All it took was a pair of 7w Logitech speakers, and what the heck. I had already purchased a 23” flat-screen monitor, and a new wireless mouse. We are all set to get on with our whole new life.

My goal is to keep moving forwards, to keep writing, to keep submitting stories, to keep creating books and stories, and to continue seeking a new kind of success, an independent kind of success as a writer.

In more personal terms, I wouldn’t mind finding an incredibly quiet place to live. I’ve been using a little pocket camera, and a really good one would be nice…we all have our little wish list, don’t we?

A new car, a vacation on a desert island with a beautiful wench, a cat, a dog, and a new jean jacket, some good whiskey…it’s the stuff dreams are made of.

Other than that, we’ll be taking it one day at a time, ladies and gentlemen.

End

Pump Up Your Brain.

"We are going to pump up your brain, maggot."

by the Evil Dr. Emile Schmitt-Rottluff


« Before you can win; first you must live. »

« Avant que vous pouvez gagner, tout d'abord, vous devez résider. » -- old French proverb which I just made up ‘cause I’m sneaky.

***

Yeah, ladies and gentlemen. I’ve been working on my boy Louis’s brain. He’s right out of it, ah, presently, and I’ve blocked his ability to see this post and one or two others, so bear that in mind. You must never mention this to him, by the way, or it will break the block.

***

Overcoming every obstacle does some interesting things to the physical structure of your brain.

A person accustomed to failure or even futility might begin to see things in a whole new light.

A few small victories definitely helps.

The Greeks used to heat up the tip of a sword to red hot temperatures and burn out the eyes of Cynics, a recognized belief system in its own right back then. I was just a very small boy at the time, but I did read the papers. (I gave that up when they went to the new paper format. I’ve always preferred wax tablets incised with a nice clean papyrus reed cut sharp on the proper angle.)

But anyway, this was supposed to help them see things a little more clearly, and in fact it worked very well. As you might imagine.

Rather than go off on too many historical digressions, the fact is that my brain, or your brain, can be re-wired. There are plenty of folks these days, all signing up for ‘memory-enhancement games’ online, and there were ‘speed-reading’ courses in the past, advertised on TV so you know it had to be real.

People learn new tasks all the time, but what about new attitudes, and how does that help the problem-solving process?

We all have certain expectations, and those expectations are also being re-written constantly with each new experience, for surely they rest at some cellular level. It's an electro-chemical process, inside each and every one of us carbon-based units. Our negative expectations from the past can be over-written with more useful and positive expectation-patterns from the present or the more recent past. It’s simply a matter of doing the work, and adapting some effective techniques, although this author’s approach is intuitive…even unplanned.

What’s happening is that the brain is being redesigned. It is adapting to the newer, more complex tasks set before it. With experience comes a data-base for further problem-solving. But also with experience comes a record inside the brain of new methods and procedures of experimentation. There is now an extensive history of past successes to review, which can be very motivational. And prior history is the best indicator of future behaviour, and as often as not, future outcomes. In other words, my brain or your brain now decides that it can in fact win one once in a while. In fact, it wants to win just as all such carbon-based units do in Darwinian terms as well as Freudian. It is the survival instinct. It is us, ladies and gentlemen, at some deep and fundamental psychological level.

We want to win, (for we must win or at least break even over time in order to survive) and if we are going to win, then we need to approach each task with that winning, problem-solving attitude. We know we have learned new things in the past, plus new things only recently, and so we approach the new problem with a can-do, or even a must-do self-image.

I don’t care what happens, I’m going to do this. I don’t care how long it takes, I’m going to do this. No one can stop me from doing this. I don’t give a dang if no one likes it—I’m going to learn how to do this and then fucking learn it some more. That’s what your subconscious mind (hence my reference to Freud) is thinking.

That little voice inside your head is there all the time, isn’t it? That’s the id or the ego or something according to Freud, and he should know, as he wrote the book on it.

So why not put the little bastard to work for you, and make him earn his keep. Right?

Depression.

Depression is an ailment that is often triggered by some external event, or so it seems.

I went into some big long depression back in April or May and the bloody thing lasted all summer. One day last week I realized it was over—the contrast is pretty stark, what with me driving down the road singing along with Tom Petty.

I was sublime, by the way.

But even so, I knew it was over.

How did that happen? How did I make that happen, bearing in mind it seemed like I had no control for months on end, and also, it would be nice to have some tools, right? Some way of dealing with it.

Looking back, one day I went to the beach, and I was pretty sure I could do a hundred metres along the shoreline. I got it all paced and measured and everything—it’s a hundred metres.

Like the crazy knucklehead that I am, I ended up swimming three hundred metres. Without touching bottom. I swam on my front, my back, my side…I drifted on my back, while controlling my breathing. I was totally comfortable in that water. This was a first for me.

A first. You know what that means?

I done real good there. I mean that.

I’ve never even swam a hundred metres before, not in my whole life, not as I recall. Yet I had also been practicing a little bit, going maybe seventy or eighty metres, two or three times each session at the beach.

And I did three hundred metres. Sure it was hard. Sure it took effort, sure it was painful and sure I had to focus and concentrate and want it really bad…for no real good reason anyone can explain.

Maybe that’s the sort of thing that kills depression. Setting some goals, working on some new things, and accomplishing a few oddball accomplishments…it all adds up, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the whole process seems to be working.

I’ll report on it from time to time, er, when I get a minute. I’m busy trying to figure out what my next little stunt will be.



END

Louis Shalako has books and stories available from Amazon. Check him out.

Thank you for reading.