This week: The Importance of Rest Edited by: Storm Machine  
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“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
-Henry David Thoreau
“Every man can transform the world from one of monotony and drabness to one of excitement and adventure.”
-Irving Wallace |
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As I write this, there are only a couple days left in August and we're heading into September pretty quickly. Many are looking to that back-to-school time and planning how the fall and winter might look.
I wrote every day I could in August, and it broke my long-time streak . We lost power for six days due to the derecho that hit the Midwest. Did you hear about that? It also delayed school for two weeks as we're trying to put together our plan for hybrid and online learning.
Have you ever noticed we don't talk about how important it is to take a break? To give yourself a break. We are not machines, and we're not created to do all the work all the time until we break and get downtime. Organic creatures have downtime requirements- like sleep, and also rest. Those are often two different requirements for each of us to fulfill.
The United States has created a society that always tries to push harder, work longer, never quit. I found it hard to give myself permission to not write while I didn't have power. I could have done it from my phone, maybe. I could have gone somewhere else to do it. Instead, I focused on my kids and getting them through while understanding how life is different but possible without electricity.
What is the cost of such a life? It's very hard to say. But as we dream up adventures and robots and flying among the stars, we could imagine a life better than what we have. And yet so many times we get stuck in the rut of where we're living, of writing what we know.
Dare to dream. Dream big- dream of all the things that might be and might not be. Some of them are good, some of them are not, but if we do not find our possibilities in dreams we'll never change our daily lives. That's one point of writing- to expand on the world we do live in without the constraints of everyday life.
One thing I don't see on Star Trek- what happens when they get a day off? It doesn't happen often in that five-year mission to explore everything else. Occasionally we see what happens in the off-duty hours of the main crew, where the night people are set up, but it's often a junior officer in charge that we find in other times. But really, if a navy ship runs several different crews with only one captain - they're not out on the seas for five years, are they? And a pirate ship that's running on its own wouldn't have extra crew that way, but they would have to take breaks and find port of call in order to rest.
Resting isn't that moment of thrill and chill where we're falling off the precipice of a waterfall or we're finally breaking free of the black hole. But there can be great things here for characters, and I'm curious what happens when you see them doing their great things and also in their time to take a deep breath and stop just reacting to the problems around them.
My dreams have always been weird that way. I dream of different worlds, and they're not always like what I have in my daily life. That's one draw to my stories. And while it does need to be true to the human condition - even if you're not writing humans - we do need to dare to step outside our ordinary lives for something different to come out.
After that six days out of power, I did have to rest. I couldn't just start everything back up again. We caught up on laundry and dishes and started to have actual food in the house again, and by evening I just had to sit and veg for a day or two. Then I could pick up the regular activities again. Still thankful for having the electricity back! |
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Christopher Roy Denton 
Thank you for plugging my short story Madam President in your informative newsletter.
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Action/Adventure: September 02, 2020 Issue [#10344]
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