writing

Resisting Reading.

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

I haven’t always been an avid reader. I have always had great reading skills but reading books for leisure was something I resisted up until I went to college.

I was often bullied, made fun of and nicknamed from elementary school until the end of junior high school. Nerd & Geek culture wasn’t like it is now. If you were different, you were bullied and you couldn’t be more different if you did anything that fell into that kind of nerdy category like reading for fun. That was something losers did, losers who tried to be smart and being smart meant you were an outsider. It wasn’t cool and it wasn’t what being a man meant. This is, of course, the opinion of the 6 to 12-year-olds who bullied me and even amongst some of my peers. I honestly don’t remember people who were good at math getting the same chagin and those who read books for fun. It was either sports, video games, professional wrestling or cool action movies. Never books.

It’s not as if my parents didn’t try. They read to me as a smaller child and every time they went to the library they would ask me if I wanted anything. “No,” I would say and play through Super Mario World for the 50th time. When a Border opened up for the first time near our house, I believe around when I was 12ish, is when my parents got me to read some books. It wasn’t many though. In fact, it was a series by Bruce Coville that started with Aliens Ate My Homework. 

I can think of so many times I was bored in the library, walking up and down the aisles. I wonder how many times I passed J.R.R. Tolkien, Stephen King, or Douglas Adams walking those aisles. Instead of reading it I would wait for the library to get the latest copy of Nintendo Power. That’s how I discovered the Nintendo 64, through the library’s copies of that magazine.

The dilemma I faced though was that I wanted to be a writer. It’s hard to be a writer if you’re so resistant to liking books. If you look at my 6th grade yearbook, when they ask what you wanted to do when you grow up I wrote movie script writer instead of writer or novelist because writing wasn’t cool but movies were.

Then when I met who would become my best friend from 8th grade to 12th and he introduced me to hip-hop I suddenly had a new world to explore that I never had before. In my mind, writing other genres of music was about playing instruments first and lyrics second. With hip-hop, it was mostly about the words and the rhythm of words. When he would ask me to join his rap group, I suddenly had an outlet for my writing. I wasn’t very good at the performing part but I love writing lyrics. So many marble notebooks just filled with lyrics and song ideas.

I was always good at reading though. When Shakespeare was taught in class I had no struggle with the language. Spelling and vocabulary tests were what I lived for. When my 10th grade English teacher showed us Finding Forrester I immediately connected with it.

Then we had a major falling out and I was left without my main group of friends. Suddenly I hated writing, very resistant of it. I associated writing with that friendship and I had no desire to do it anymore. Without music or writing I had to think of what I was like before I met my highschool group of friends. Besides video games I would read comic books. My dad would bring home bundles of Spider-Man, Green Lantern and The Simpsons comic books for me to read. I remember this shop my mom used to hate bringing me to because the parking lot was so bad and immediately looked it up. There, I saw Green Lantern Rebirth #3 and asked the clerk about it. He found me copies of the first and second issue and that’s where my comic book habit started and my love for reading began to grow strong again.

It was when I went to a Barnes & Noble for the first time that I started transitioning from comic books to books. It all began with this beautiful leather bound copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy then at Christmas I got an equally beautiful copy of The Lord of the Rings. It’s been all about books since then.

I Just Want To Keep Typing with My Mechanical Keyboard.

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

Thanks to the encouragement from a programer/writer friend I bought a mechanical keyboard. Specifically a Das Keyboard Model S Professional Click Pressure Point Mechanical Keyboard which I would recommend to anyone. It’s expensive, and you might be thinking that a keyboard isn’t worth that much. I thought the same thing, it is an extravagant purchase but one I didn’t buy lightly.

Most of the time I write on my laptop, that’s the productivity machine while my desktop, which I’m writing this blogpost on I call my distraction machine. It has all my Steam games, my images, my photos, my music, my videos, and everything that isn’t writing. With my laptop I don’t have anything but writing and maybe some wallpaper on it. The only other files on it are for research for my writing, Nothing to distract me.

This keyboard though, it makes me want to write more on my desktop. I mean, it makes sense. A full keyboard, a large monitor, it seems like it would be perfect for writing. So I figured I would try to write on here and learn to ignore the distractions. I may not always be able to keep it separate so I might as well train myself to not be distracted.

It has proven difficult thanks to the Summer Steam Sale that happened about two weeks ago. I bought Borderlands 2 which I avoided buying on Xbox 360 thanks to both Skyrim occupying my attention for three years and reapplying for college around the time that it came out.

So what is a mechanical keyboard? Well, I don’t know about everyone else who reads this or how new the modern non-mechanical keyboards are but most of them don’t have that clickity clack noise you get from old keyboards during the 1980s and 1990s. From what I gathered, in the 90s keyboard manufacturers started using rubber dome switches. That is what connect the key you press to the circuitry that produces the letter you are pressing. This was cheaper than mechanical keys due to easier production. Cheaper products mean more sales and more profit.

Oh man though, it just does not feel the same. Instead that rubber membrane to connect the key to the circuitry that sends what you’ve pressed to your computer mechanical keyboards use physical switches. in order to produce the key you want you have to fully press the key. This leads to that audible sound you remember from old movies or from when you were younger depending on your age. I’ve read that it also makes your typing more accurate but I am not sure about that yet. It’s only been about a week.

I will say I can type much faster with this. I don’t know if it’s just because I like the feel of a mechanical keyboard, a memory sense from the computers I had when I was younger or if it’s just something that comes along with using a mechanical keyboard.

All I know is that typing on it is much more satisfying than any other keyboard I’ve used or the one on my laptop. I actively want to write more because of this keyboard. Hell, I only wrote this blog post so I could use the keyboard more. I fully support your decision to treat yourself to a mechanical keyboard, though I am not responsible for your financial mismanagement.

I Actually Miss Thesis.

/ Joshua S. MacDougall / Leave a comment

     Hear me out. I know this is some kind of St. Joseph’s College blasphemy but I actually miss writing thesis. It sounds strange but it was probably the most fulfilling writing I’ve done yet and will be until the novel I am writing is actually done. Everything about it was stressful but the healthy kind of stress. I woke up every day with a purpose, a goal, a deadline and work in a subject I actually enjoyed. If that is what having a deadline on a novel feels like then I am ready to have a deadline.

     I am not just talking about the writing part either. I mean all of it. I miss cataloging all research on index cards, then dividing them into piles of cited and not cited. I think fondly back at pouring over old books in the library, photocopying their pages and underlining in pencil all the parts I need. I still remember the joy I felt when I discovered Evernote’s document camera, where I could photograph whole documents instead of spending all my change photocopying them. Once that happened it was only one update in the app. store later that all the highlighting tools of Evernote’s other app, Stitch, was now implemented into Evernote just when I was running out of documents to cite.

     I don’t know if I’ll ever dive as deep into any piece of literature as I did with Macbeth but thinking about it now I sure would like to. I am not a fool, I know this feeling is part nostalgia and part feeling completely and utterly unfulfilled at my lousy part time job. Still, when I saw the thesis topics for 2014 included one for The Lord of the Rings I felt a void in my chest that I wanted to fill.with hours of research, writing and editing. Each day and each week I knew I had a set amount work on it that I need to accomplish. Today I was thinking of thesis and almost said out loud “What if I just start writing one for the hell of it?” I mean, that’s not crazy right? People do that, I know they do. I’ve heard people like Corey Olsen, the Tolkien Professor talk about it.

     I am not a fool. We were given seven months to work on thesis. Novel writing may be like that but editorial work definitely does not have that long of a deadline except maybe feature articles which are meant to be much longer. I don’t know if I would feel the same way with shorter deadlines but it has to be better what I am doing now. What I mean by that is compared to Senior Thesis, which basically was my job for me at the time even, what I am currently doing to make money feels meaningless and ultimately makes me unhappy. I’ll take short and stressful deadlines over that anyday.