The Grasshopper On Life, Sunday Edition: Zombies vs. Serial Killers
Wanna hear my B-movie pitch?
So, here goes: LA is being invaded by zombies after some kind of natural disaster. The humans aren’t doing too well so, in desperation they decide to let all the serial killers out of jail so they can kill all the zombies they want.
But there’s a twist. Some of the serial killers become zombies and turn into super killer zombies who take over the world.
The end.
Lately, for a politics writer like me it can feel like the zombies are really out there. I let the news get to me this week and I had to deal with that and keep writing while working on positive thinking.
Writing successfully requires us to push forward, even when we think our stuff is crap, and why bother? I’ve developed a simple habit that keeps me going even when I don’t feel like it.
Daily word count. I know, it is cliche advice to tell writers to just get that word count down everyday whether you think it sucks or not, but it works. And we can work through those days when we are just not feeling it.
Or we can go on vacation. That works too.
I’m Working on This Positive Thinking Thing
One rough morning is not a reason to give up
I may have to set this article aside for a day while I shake off an illogical sense of ‘why bother?’.
Somehow I’ve assigned myself the task of writing about what I see as injustice. But I have always had a distrust of righteousness, of those who are convinced they are holier than thou.
When you write about the news, like I do, you risk falling into the negativity trap, especially when that news is relentlessly bad. This year has been pretty rough, newswise. But it has been pretty great too.
The problem is that the positive stuff is not as newsworthy as the bad stuff, and if you consume a lot of news, that can start to get to you. It got to me this morning and I’m actively working to shake it off. Unfortunately I do not have a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking handy to refer to.
I live in a northeastern city that, when seen from above, looks like a forest interrupted by church spires and a few tall buildings, a sea of deep green foliage. It’s high summer and though I live in the center of that city, I am surrounded by towering trees, and right now they are filled with the hypnotic singing of cicadas, one of my favorite soundtracks.
Yesterday it was the rumble of distant thunder that went on for hours, though it never reached us as a storm. We need the rain so I would have welcomed a downpour. But all these things make for a great background to writing.
Zen tells us that it is far more important to listen to those cicadas and that thunder than to listen to our thoughts, which often mislead us. You can’t force yourself to be positive but you can just listen.
That’s going to be my therapy this morning. Cicadas and afternoon thunder. What more could you ask for?
This piece also appears on Medium.com (paywall).
587 words
A short Sunday edition today. It was a heavy news week and I did a lot of writing about politics on Medium, so I’m just going to enjoy the rest of my weekend!