On Turning 30, The Inexorable March of Time, Promises, and Seeing the Success in Failure

Today is my thirtieth birthday.

Our culture puts a lot of emphasis on certain milestones, and some of them do make sense. At eighteen, you are almost completely legally an adult. You can participate in our Democracy by casting your vote. You can purchase pornography and tobacco products. You can have sex with anybody you want (who is also over the age of eighteen) and nobody can tell you otherwise (except, of course, for the other person involved, and if they say "no thank you" it's best to listen). It's the age that most Americans graduate from high school, the age at which many of them set off on their own for the first time ever. Now, sure, you can't drink yet, so, you're not fully an adult. But still.

At twenty, nothing really happens except that you're now in your 20's, which is supposed to involve some amount of maturity? Maybe? I don't know. There's really nothing special about twenty when you get right down to it. It's just a number with a zero in it. A year later, you can finally have a drink.

At twenty-five, you're a quarter of a century old, which was alarming to me at the time. Something about being able to easily quantify my age in terms of a century, albeit in terms that were fractions thereof. Also, your car insurance rates drop because apparently that maturity you're supposed to start acquiring in your twenties has kicked in notably in your driving skills. Or something.

Then what? Sure, thirty. Three-oh. Now you're really and truly a grown-up. I fell victim to this same fallacy. Now that I'm thirty, I'm a grown-up. A grown-up who is wearing a T-shirt with the name of a band I have liked since I was fifteen. Half a lifetime ago.

Thirty year olds can wear flies, right?

And I'm listening to records. Grown-ups, in all their practicality, should not own records. They take up so much space. And they're expensive. And they require archaic equipment to enjoy. Equipment that has pretty specific space requirements. I'm looking across the room at my record player, and I can see a guitar I have had since I was thirteen. It's covered in stickers. I still play this thing. Grown-ups who have guitars keep them in their cases. Grown-ups with guitars do not have stickers on their guitars. They're embarrassed by this sort of thing being leftover from their youth.

So many things about this picture scream "I'm an adult!"

But I also see pictures of my family; my wife, our daughter. A daughter who is growing up so fast. These pictures are over  a year old, and she barely looks the same now. She's a little girl, not a baby. She's currently napping. I am awake mostly through sheer force of will. In a little while, she'll wake up and come downstairs and she'll want to dance to the records I'm playing. Because I'm cultivating in her an appreciation for real music, not just music specifically marketed towards children. Side bar: why is this a thing? Music exists in the world, yes? I understand the idea that some music is not appropriate for kids. I get it. I can make that decision, I think, right? Like, if she came down here right now, I'd keep this Arcade Fire record on. Next, I'd play Broken Bells, or Simon & Garfunkel, or Fleet Foxes. I would not play AC/DC or Childish Gambino or 10cc. Not that there's anything wrong with the 10cc record I have, it just seems a little crazy for a two year old, no? I mean, I'm not sure I'd play any of the Dixieland or Hot Jazz I've got, just because she might dance too fast for me to keep up.

But Alice Cooper is perfectly fine for Jules. Right?

I guess what I'm saying is that, thirty is just an arbitrary number. Twenty-eight years separate myself from my daughter, and then thirty-one years exist in the space between me and my father. The three of us could groove to the same record at once. And we have. And we will again. Why should it matter, these designations? Now, talk to me on my 42nd birthday. That will be a whole other story. But for now, hey. So I'm thirty. Yesterday I was twenty-nine. I don't feel all that different. Okay, so at twenty I was able to spend hours at the City Museum in St. Louis, crawling around and running, and feel fine the next day. And now, having spent two hours there this past Saturday, my right shoulder could fall off at any moment. But that's fine. It happens. So I'm thirty. And a year from now, I'll be thirty-one. I'll still be long-winded, I'll still be listening to records, I'll still be writing.

Oh yeah, writing. I made a silly promise about writing and turning thirty. That silly promise was a hard deadline on completing my novel. Silly because I'm afraid of completing anything for fear of it being a failure. Silly because I would rather sleep in than get up early and work on it. Silly because I have a family whose company I enjoy far more than the self-inflicted torture of writing for hours on end. Silly because a good novel takes a good long while to complete. Silly because numbers are arbitrary (see above).

So it's been a while since I started writing it, I guess. The full history reaches back to the spring of 2008. I wrote a short story called "North for Salvation." The following autumn, I took the same characters and general situation, and changed the name to "Before Rock Attained Perfection." Then I stretched that concept out over the next two  and a half years, changing the name to What Place to Rest the Search, a nod to a Led Zeppelin lyric from the song "Achilles' Last Stand," which figured prominently in the narrative. Then, about a year ago, I threw out what I had written in first person and changed it to third person because, as I discovered, I had one main character and a whole lot of action taking place in the past. I wanted to tell a more present story and get into the heads of the other characters (who, in the first-person narrative, were flat and boring). First person worked for the short story versions. Not, it seems, for the novel, for which I have yet to find a good title.

Then I set an arbitrary goal, to have the whole thing completed by the time I turned thirty. Today.

Woops. I guess I failed.

Or...maybe not?

I could have easily finished...the original first person version. But then it wouldn't have been as good, in my opinion. You know what I mean?

So, I'm inclined to call this "failure" a "success." But, how? Well, that's a very good question, disembodied authorial stand-in for the audience! And I'll tell you how!

Writing is a process of discovery. Discovery of the author's limitations. Discovery of the author's strengths. Discovery of those in the life of the author who are supportive, and the subsequent partial or complete fare-thee-well to those discovered to be unsupportive. It is also about the discovery of the story. Sure, I sat down with an outline and a basic idea of where this story was going to go. And for the most part, I've followed it. But it's grown, and changed, and I've had to make adjustments along the way. And though in some ways I am farther from finishing a novel than I was when I threw out the first-person version, I am also much farther along in developing a real story that might have some teeth, legs, arms, and a torso as opposed to just some very misguided feet. That's a very strange metaphor, I'm sorry, but it makes sense to me, and I had that metaphor rattling around in my head and, trust me, it did not need to ever find its way into the book. Ever.

Sure, I missed my goal. But as the goal approached and I started to panic, I felt I should take a step back and look at what I had accomplished. The fact is, pushing myself toward the goal was more important than reaching the goal. Pushing and pushing got me off my lazy ass. I don't care if it's not perfect, now. I will finish it, and if it fails to sell or whatever, that's fine. I'll just write another one. Or a play. Something else. One failure doesn't mean an end to an endeavor, or exclude success from the future (see also my first attempt at college).

I even think I could have finished the third-person version of the book by today if I had been slightly less meticulous. Though, had I been more meticulous, I'd be about half-way through the second chapter. The point is, if I had rushed to get it done, I'd have a complete novel that I was only thirty-fifty percent happy with. Right now, I've got about forty percent of a novel that I am almost completely satisfied with. That's a fantastic feeling, believe it or not. A feeling that far outweighs any frustration I may have felt at not completing it.

As Wayne Gretzky once said, "You miss one hundred percent of the shots you don't take." And we all know how awesome Wayne Gretzky was.

Wayne Gretzky was one of the 19th Century Russian Romanticists, right?

The Long Awaited (and delayed) Post

Well, my teacher called class a little early, because all he had left on the agenda was to screen a film he wrote that went to sundance called Dopamine, and there wasn't enough time to do so.

I am going to just do a brief little "New Years Resolutions" deal here, not recap the ones I didn't keep from last year. I have more important things to blog about tonight.

So, this year I resolve to graduate. I resolve to get on my bike at least once. I resolve to write as much over Spring Break as I will have been doing all semester (with playwriting and scriptwriting [two totally different classes; playwriting is plays and scriptwriting is actually screenwriting] it should be quite a large amount). I resolve to love more, dislike less, try new things, spend more quality time with my wife and our family (both at home with the cats and the extended groups), cook more often (because I love to cook and haven't done enough of it in the last two and a half years), publish, make contacts, sell myself as a writer. I resolve to be Elliot M. Rauscher, writer.

I want to talk about the writing process, and two pieces I wrote in the last year and a half that I think truly are me, one hundred percent, through and through. These pieces that grew from the mind but evolved from the heart, while growing from the heart and evolving from the mind. What I mean by that is that, well, I have written a great deal from my heart in the past, but my heart has always been on my sleeve whilst doing so. I have also written a great deal from my mind, which has proven ill-fated and hard to read later when I can't figure out where my sentences were going and why they took so long to get to nowhere (kinda like this sentence which I have extended even longer with the parenthetical). What I learned while writing these two pieces is that you shouldn't write from just the heart or just the mind, but both. Let the heart kick the mind up, let the mind ground the heart in reality.

These pieces-and I have excerpts of both of them on here and I'll link to them at the bottom of this post-are similar in subject matter, but approach them differently. It's sad to say that they both deal with death, which is odd, because I have the good fortune of not having dealt with much death in my life. Three of my four grandparents are dead, one of them before I was even born. It was difficult when Granny Rauscher died suddenly, but it was even more difficult six years later to watch Grandpa Rauscher die slowly. I've had three pets that I held very dear to my heart die in the last eight years; one unexpectedly, one slowly and in great comfort (I like to think that the morning she died, the last thing she did when my father picked her up was purr), and one in the cold, clinical fashion most of our pets leave the world. But this is all normal; pets do not live forever; they get old or their adventurous attitude catches up with them. Grandparents die. Parents die, too, and so do children, and brothers and sisters and friends and enemies. People die. This is nothing new. What could I possibly have to say of any value, of any profound consequence, on the subject of death? It's a theme writers and philosophers have dealt with for centuries.

But I tackled it, as I said, from the heart and from the mind. My first drafts were, however, not done correctly. The first of these two pieces, a play, I began writing upon hearing of the death of a friend I hadn't seen in four years. It was too much to tackle at that point, and it poured out of my heart and came out on the page splotchy, bloody, raw, but not emotionally raw; melodramatically raw. Not the good kind of raw. It started with the protagonist (loosely based on your heroic writer) receiving a hand-addressed letter (how romantic, no?) informing him of his friend's death. Only, the audience does not know the nature of the news. It sent the character into a spiral of self-pity and then, lo and behold the (as-of-yet unrevealed to the audience) dead friend arrives. Clearly, it is all in the protagonist's head.

So I put it down for four months and worked on another play, Spice (and more on that in a moment). I thought a lot about what my friendship with this person had been, had meant. I read up a lot on what projects he was working on before he died, as he had been a terrific actor. Lots of people had a lot to say about him online in tribute groups on facebook. And in a way, reading all of that and thinking hard about him made me remember more of our friendship, insignificant as it truly was. And it got me to thinking about how lives cross paths at all kinds of angles, acute and obtuse and right and sometimes they run parallel and bend together for a short while. About how no life is really a straight line, lived from start to finish. It bends, it circles, it splits in two at times. And I wrote The Last Thing.

The second piece is sort of the opposite; I had this idea for writing about a band, traveling to their last gig because they've had it with life as an unsuccessful local band. It was partially inspired by the second ever free-write Friday about Joe Dubinsky. But I had all this stuff in my head about music, and about a band, and it all came out on the page. Actually, nothing about death in the traditional sense, merely the death of a certain musical act, which can seem like a death (believe me).

But as I said, I wrote this one from the mind, not releasing my passion for music, just some technical jargon. Which is not to say it didn't have any heart in it; the friendships were written with heart, because I had learned that with The Last Thing. But in a sixteen page story, three pages with heart do not equal anything good. This story was called "North for Salvation" and, while parts of it were good, it fizzled for me with every read.

So I got to thinking about death again as I was redrafting, thinking about it because I felt mortality creeping up on everybody I know; not morbidly, not immediately, but I feel the steady drumbeat of time, and it dawned on me that each second passed is a second less to live than a second ago. Now, this could cause some heavy breathing and angst amongst some people, so instead of dwelling on this, I just let it happen to one of my characters. Not the angst, but the final passing second. My main character's father passed away. It got me to thinking of what I would do if I were that person; how does one cope with that? It's not the same as a cat. It can be the same as a grandparent, but for me it would be more immediate. There's a generational buffer between us and our grandparents. There is no such buffer between ourselves and our own parents.

Suddenly, I found the heart of the story. Not to keep saying heart, but I found it when I started writing from the heart. The result is something more profound than four guys riding in a van trying to live out their last rock 'n' roll glory. The result is called "Before Rock Attained Perfection."

Anyway, these are the two pieces I am currently going to push forth as the heavy artillery in my arsenal. The Last Thing is very nearly polished to perfection; "Rock" still needs work but it is getting there. These are the works that are going to go out to contests, magazines, etc.

You can find the excerpt from The Last Thing here. Currently, no excerpt of "Before Rock Attained Perfection" can be found on this blog. However, you can find an excerpt from the original draft of "North for Salvation" here.

And now, to other business. Remember the debacle that was Surfacing Emerging Playwrights Festival 2008? Well, it's back, but this time in better hands. In fact, it's in the hands of the same person who rescued it from oblivion last year. And this year, rather than being commissioned to write a piece and guaranteed a spot regardless of the crap I turn out, I opted to submit work and hope for the best. I actually submitted three pieces: the aforementioned The Last Thing, a dramedy set in a restaurant called The Office Bar and Grill, and a romantic comedy entitled Spice (no excerpt posted [and none forthcoming, read on]). I had hope for The Last Thing, knew that The Office Bar and Grill was a long shot, and I submitted Spice because I knew it would play well onstage and fit in very well because there are moments of absurd comedy played against the reality of a young couple falling for each other over Thai food. I was originally going to suicide submit just The Last Thing, but Surfacing is known for selecting plays with parts for both men and women, hence the other two.

Anyway, I received confirmation last week that Spice has been selected this year! And the best part is that I won't have to direct it! Which is a big relief, because that was very time consuming and stressful. I had offered to direct a play if none of my written work was selected, and you can bet your last dollar I was doing my best to will fate to select a play so I wouldn't have to direct. I would have taken the director's chair for a play, if needed; you can't renege on a promise once you've made it, unless of course it's a promise to be more of a consistent blogger...

Well, there you have it. My long silence is broken.

I would like to take a second to ask for a moment of blog silence, to mourn the dismantlement and removal of Gerald's blog turbochubs. He assures us he will come back some day, showcasing his amazing skills of an artist. Yes, I said skills of an artist. Ten points to anyone who can recognize that reference.

The Times, They Are a-Changin!

Why did I change my mind about going into journalism?

As my wife pointed out when I told her I was minoring in Journalism, I at one point swore off it forever because of a bad experience at the U of M.

But then again, almost the whole academic experience at the U of M was a bad experience, mostly for the people keeping track of my grades as they slipped and hit rock bottom.

Okay, so, that's the first time I've truly admitted on the blog, I think, that I once flunked out of college. And now, I have been on the Dean's List three times at Meramec. This last semester, I took five classes. I got three A's, a Pass (because it was a P/F class, but it was playwriting and I know it would have been an A) and a B. Okay, so I got the B in Contemporary Moral Issues, which makes me wonder just what kind of morals I have...good enough, but not as good as they could be. Which probably makes me a pretty good candidate for being a journalist.

The thing is, I had no experience with media when I went to the U of M. Not the kind I needed, anyway. Media was something I consumed, not something I participated in. It wasn't something I had any inkling of learning about. But that's changed quite a bit, really, because media are important to almost every job out there now. It's something I want to understand better.

But, the reporting? Well, again, I had very little understanding back then. I thought you could pretty much write whatever the hell you wanted as long as it reported the facts. Bo-ring! Having been listening to NPR religiously for almost two and a half years now, I know enough to know that I don't know enough. You know? Basically, what listening to NPR has taught me is that news is news, and entertainment is entertainment, but sometimes entertainment can be news and news can be entertainment. Imagine that I learned that from a public institution that has such a dry reputation in the outside world. Aside from those of us who listen (and the numbers are growing, I believe), people see NPR as a droning 24 hour news radio program somewhere between their favorite rap station and the oldies. This could not be further from the truth.

Okay, but that doesn't mean I want to get into radio. But they have news researchers, writers, you know, people who are behind the scenes. There's also print journalism, which I think is more my style. I could write for a paper. Ideally, I would love to graduate, get a job at a paper like The RFT in St. Louis or City Pages in the Twin Cities for a few years, write on the side, get my MFA in writing from either UMSL or (gasp!) U of M, get a teaching job at a Community College teaching creative writing and/or mass communication and just sit back and enjoy life. But I'm sure that there are some crucial steps I am leaving out in my grandiose plans.

The real reason I changed my mind on going into journalism is that minds change. Journalism isn't just about reporting the news, it's about finding the news, finding the people that make it, or that it happens to, or discovering what hasn't been news and then making it news. It's about people, and ultimately, that's what any kind of writing is about (with the exception of technical manuals and miscellaneous other types of writing, so don't try and do the "Dude, you WRONG!" crap on me). And I am interested in people, in finding their stories, in writing new stories...basically, I discovered that the only difference between a story in a newspaper and a story in a collection of short fiction is that one probably happened in the real world close to the way it was told, and the other happened in the mind of the writer exactly as it's written down.

As I said yesterday, I will not be calling for suggestions today. But fear not! The moment I get home tomorrow, I will post again and solicit your help. Well, certainly, the moment I ascertain the availability of internet access...today SBC is doing rolling maintenance and I finally gave up at home and headed over to the 'rents so I could say hello and use their internet. Hello, 'rents! Hello, 'rents' cats!

An Update on Some Things and a Preview of a Couple New Features!

Well, Friday I e-mailed the president of Master File St. Louis, which as far as I can tell is a legal document service based in Clayton. They need a person to do a bit of research and deliver court documents, and yesterday he e-mailed me back and today I sent him my resume. Check it out! I said I would look for a new job and I'm on it! Go me! Granted, I still have not gotten a new job, nor have I rode my bicycle once since that last [20] time[s] I said I would, but it's only been a [few dozen] week[s] so I don't feel too bad.

I feel just a little uneasy about having sent him an e-mail telling him how detail oriented I can be, then thirty seconds later having to send him another one because I forgot to attach my resume like I said I was going to. Oops. And yes, I am aware of how ironic that was, please stop pointing it out.

Alright, so, from now on I will announce on my blog when I start reading a new book I haven't read before, and the first weekend after I finish it, I will post a review. This is just a way of keeping myself reading as well as flexing my undeveloped and rusty journalism skills. Or, Skeelz, as some people call them. I still call them skills, though.

Another feature I would like to add, though I am not sure how this will work, is something I would like to call Free Write Fridays. I think what I'll do is at some time during the week, I will call for suggestions, and readers can post suggestions as comments on that post. Then, on Friday, I will select one of those suggestions and do a half hour to hour long freewrite right into the blog. We'll see how that works out. So, I'll go ahead and call for the first suggestions for Free Write Fridays!

Some guidelines:

Your suggestions should consist of three parts; type of writing, one character, and a situation. For instance:

Short story, Bob Jones, Lost his wedding ring.
...or...
Play, a UPS delivery man, a suburban hostage situation
...or...
Film script, BBQ master Bobby Slay, getting his ass handed to him by Iron Chef Japanese Masaharu Morimoto

Something along those lines. Okay. suggestion box is opened. And...GO!

Umm...Thursday Blog?

Alrighty, so, it being Thursday, and less than a week into my conviction to blog every day (once on weekends), here it is with two and a half hours to go and still no blog.

Well...

I would like to refer you to Monday's blog about my car.

Remember all of the little things adding up? Well, Tuesday came the straw that broke the camel's back. Or rather, the bundle of straws that broke the Toyota's back. Or, to be precisely accurate, the repair assessment that caused the Toyota's fate to be decided. Amongst the culprits:

Old battery.
Tires looking a tid bit worn.
Very dirty air filter.
Oh, and, the little problem of the exhaust leaking right into the air intake, causing exhaust to come out of the ventillation system, meaning every time I drive my car, any passengers I am carrying in addition to I myself are breathing in noxious fumes.

Problem. It would have cost around $600 to repair. And the last big repair (not the last one...the next to last one, the oil leak) cost me a lot and then it started leaking oil again, so we know what a repair to a car this old is really all about. So, Tuesday I embarked on a new mini rigid search (in addition to the rigid search to find a job-more on that tomorrow-and the overall very rigid search to find myself) to find a new vehicle. You see, this time, the issue is forced because, let's face it, a fifteen year old car with 162,xxx miles needing a $600 repair does not equal good math. So, today, after work, I officially embarked on the physical searching part of the rigid search (having done the preliminary online research Tuesday and yesterday). I was going to save a couple cars for next Tuesday, as they were 20+ miles away, but I thought I'd start with a few in-the-area curiosities. Just looking, mind you. Just looking. I started at Ackerman Toyota and from there, I was going to Lou Fusz Toyota. At Ackerman, they had a 2000 VW Golf with 115,xxx miles, sunroof, stick, and only $6000. But, upon arrival, I find that the mileage was a bit off, the car didn't sound great when I started (like, it whined at me), and it's not a stick. That in itself shouldn't be a deal breaker, but coupled with the bad start, and also the glove compartment door was falling off. Next.

I pointed my wounded Camry in the direction of Lou Fusz, hoping that they still had their 2005 Civic for $14,500. It had only 74,xxx miles. It too was listed as a stick, but I knew to be wary, and it was only a two door. But, on the way, I decided I would swing into the Dean Team in Kirkwood and see if they had any used VW's at good prices in amongst all the shiny new ones. Brian, the guy I worked with, told me he had a few in the year range I was looking for. He said he had a 2002 Jetta, but he wasn't sure if I would be interested because they were asking $16,000 for it and it was a stick.

A stick? Really? Awesome...well, okay, I figured we could take it for a test drive. That was my first mistake. It was beyond what I imagined it would be. It was...better than the Golf, for sure. He also had a 2001 GTI for $12,000, but I am not sure a tin can with a rocket launcher is the right car for me. So, whatever, we sit down to see if we can't hammer out a deal. I had low hopes.

I said, "I figure about $1000 for my trade in, no money down, what can we do? I want my payments around $200 a month. And, my wife is the boss of the money. So I may have to come back with her."

Well, they weren't about to hear that, so they said, "We'll give you $3000 for your trade-in," my eyes popped out of my head momentarily, thinking did they look at my car? really?, "And we knocked $2000 off the price, we've got you around $220 a month." Call the wife. No deal. "$210?" No deal. "$200 and we give you thirty days to get $1000 down payment?" Thank you so much for everything, really, but...it's just not a good enough deal. Then, this is the best part. The sales manager asks me if I will call my wife back so he can talk to her. And I do. And he does. And I get an extra $1200 for my trade somehow, and my payments are at $199.98 a month.

And I came home with a 2002 Jetta.

Fun fact of the day: We got $4200 trade-in for a car that I paid $3000 for four years ago. We rule.