Now available on Amazon is my new short story collection, The Present And Other Short Stories.
Month: December 2021
Editing 2
As I continue editing the short stories that I wrote months ago, I realize that the time that has past has allowed me to see them in a new light. Details and insights that I wasn’t aware of before suddenly come to the forefront of my mind. Word choices that sounded sufficient when I wrote them are replaced with better word choices today.
This process has made me realize that any work or story we revisit can be improved and modified ad infinitum. If we give ourselves enough distance from something, the experiences that we’ve gathered upon our next edit will give us a new perspective on our work. In theory, we’re never really finished with something until we decide to say it is. And that usually happens when we’re ready to move on to the next project.
Editing
I was editing a short story I had written several months ago, and it was like returning to and completing a project I had left unfinished. The story was familiar, and I knew what it was about, but it didn’t have the impact and clarity I thought it had when I first wrote it.
So I began to edit it, fixing the glaring errors I hadn’t spotted before, deleting sentences and words, and adding details that I didn’t realize was missing. After I edited the story several times, I read through it again. The story was essentially the same, but it had a flow that it didn’t have before. It was kind of like pulling out the weeds from a garden, and seeing the garden for what it should be.
Limits to Knowledge
We can be confident of facts, or mathematical statements like 2 + 2 = 4, but there are limits to how far this can be applied in reality. For example, when we make inferences about the world, they’re based on what we already know or what sounds logical to us. But it doesn’t necessarily mean their correspondence to reality is consistent and perfect. No matter how well we try to plan things out, something can go awry–something can get lost, broken, or we can simply miscalculate a result.
Reality has a way of surprising us–of defying or even embarrassing our logic. No matter how confident someone is in their understanding of science, philosophy, economics, or life in general, their knowledge cannot keep up with a world that constantly evolves, and with all the variables that intersect and influence the course of events.
Rest
Taking a rest is one of those things where we can’t really assign a time frame to it. We can set an alarm to wake ourselves up, but if we’re still tired when it goes off, we might hit the snooze button or just sleep through the alarm.
One thing I’ve done to overcome tiredness is to wake up at a certain hour like clockwork. I’ll try to wake up before the alarm goes off, make it a habit to beat the alarm, so to speak. If the alarm goes off and I’m still tired, I’ll come up with a reason to get up. For example, I’ll think about how great the coffee will be if I just get up and make it, or I’ll think about something I need to do that day. It’s as if the best solution to overcoming tiredness when we wake up is to outsmart it, or at least, try to sleep it off.
Fallton Havenstonne 