JT

A picture is worth 140 characters

/ sarahelund / Leave a comment

JT got a smartphone last week. His first. For the last seven years he’s been using one of those old brick phones (it slides!) — specifically the Samsung Messager (SCH-r450), seen below.   samsung messager “The Brick,” as we affectionately called it, was a source of pride and conversation for JT and a source of amusement for me. I loved to watch people’s faces when they noticed it — especially in the last two to three years.  It was a good phone, and my husband – so practical, so… economical – found it hard to justify replacing it. I actually agreed with him. The Brick was hardy. You could chuck it full-force against a wall and it would still be pristine. It had a battery life of at least a week on a full charge (even in year seven). It had a full keyboard for texting. It received and made calls. He has an iPod for music, and who needs the internet, anyway? Data is expensive and besides, as he pointed out, everyone around him has a smartphone if he has a webmergency (read: if he needs to check his fantasy football).

But last week he took the plunge and got an iPhone 5S, and something unexpected happened. I learned that we communicate very differently.

I’m going to be real with you, folks. I’m in communications so I have an obligatory Instagram account, but anyone who follows me will know that it’s not my favourite medium. My nine photos will back that up. Pictures are powerful and impactful (let’s exclude selfies here), but I like words. Twitter is my platform of choice.

Apparently JT is an entirely different beast. Now that he has a camera better than 1mp on his phone, an extraordinary number of his texts have been photos.  I don’t think he’d ever commit to Twitter, but Instagram is probably right up his alley. Hell, he even makes me understand why Snapchat is appealing to people.

I suppose my point is, technology allows us to tell the stories of our daily lives in new, innovative ways that not even we could have predicted would be appealing to us. Massive creative freedom.

Just finish it

/ sarahelund / Leave a comment

I had a lovely walk with JT a week or two ago — a six kilometer round trip to get an apple fritter. I confessed to him that I’d stalled on my Nereid project. “Project” sounds pretty corporate, but I hate to use the word “novel” when I don’t think it’s deserved. Anyway.

I don’t talk about writing with JT much. While he is super supportive, he’s not a writer or a reader (I’ve mentioned his bookshelf before), and he generally chooses not to offer advice on subjects in which he is unfamiliar or inexpert. By the way, this is an admirable rule that more people, including me, should adopt.

In an effort to keep myself accountable, I shared with him my woes.

SE: I haven’t written anything on the Neried project in a month.

JT: Oh? Why not?

SE: (woe #1) I was very disappointed with how the trip to Whistler went. I had a plan to finish the first draft by writing like a possessed thing while you were in class every day, but because I ended up having to work, I probably got less done than if we weren’t away from home. I feel discouraged that I didn’t come close to meeting my ambitious goal.

JT: Yeah, that’s shitty.

SE: (woe #2) It sure is. I’ve also reached one of those stretches where everything seems stupid. I have no idea why I would have chosen to write in this point-of-view, and it’s a mess anyways; my main character is super boring; and I had the bright idea of writing all the “exciting” scenes first to keep me enthused… except it means that now I only have the vaguely plotted in-between stuff to write.

JT: I know you want it to be great, but it seems like you’re being pretty hard on yourself. How many words have you written?

SE: I don’t know. I had to trash at least half of the NaNoWriMo draft just so things make sense. Right now I have like 55,000 words that will be in the complete first draft.

JT: That sounds like a lot.

SE: (woe #3) Yeah maybe, but some parts are just painful to read. So bad. It takes all of my willpower to keep myself from revising, because I don’t want to get stuck in a editing spiral and never actually write anything new.

JT: You just have to finish it. Even if it’s really bad.

SE: I guess but…

JT: I don’t know anything about writing, but if I was doing this, I think I’d want to get the story done, so I could at least look at it and be like “It’s done enough that someone could pick it up and read a whole book – even if it’s shitty and they hate it.” And then I’d maybe put it away for a like a month or something and then try to make it good after. But maybe that’s stupid.

SE: No, that’s not stupid. It’s… very astute. It’s what probably most writers do.

JT: Oh good. So I helped?

Sometimes it’s nice to have JT around to make me face the obvious.