Just read an excerpt from a productivity/goal setting book that concerned Tolkien.
His publisher mentioned that people wanted more about the hobbits after Tolkien published The Hobbit.
So Tolkien started another novel.
And apparently bounced between the depths of despair and the height of confidence for the entire process (he said that: “his ‘labour of delight’ had been ‘transformed into a nightmare.’”)
He gave up multiple times.
That book? Fellowship of the Ring.
You know what kept him going? C.S. Lewis’ support.
First lesson: if you’re stressing over your book, remember that Tolkien did too.
Second lesson: Writers have to support each other. Seriously. It might be the difference between a book that becomes beloved by hundreds of thousands (maybe even millions) even existing or not.
This is fair! This is so nice! I love this!
You know what else kept him going while he wrote Lord of the Rings? Well,
having an income while he wrote, that he didn’t really have to work for. In fact, he held his dream job (Professor of Literature) with a full-time income,
that came with a pleasant private office. He sat at work, for which he was being paid to do something else, and actively avoided doing his actual job while he pursued his own unrelated novel.
having a stay-at-home wife to run his entire home and family for him.
having servants…. that helps….
having a large, pretty house within a pleasant 25-minute walk of work.
never having to do:
household maintenance
laundry
cooking
cleaning
Life Admin
the not-fun gardening
the not-fun childcare
The work day
of Men of His Time ended when they came home. Women of His Time, and
Staff, existed to run the rest of his life. And that’s what they did. Jonald Ronald Rolkien Tolkien was the center of his household universe, which existed to support him in every possible way.
Let’s be real: he was not the person who was up in the night with a teething baby. That was what the nanny was for, followed by the wife. It would have been unthinkable for a man of his time/class to do his own childcare.
Actually, it’s worth noting that he had in particular a Very Intelligent Icelandic nanny, who lived in his
house and looked after his four children all day, and was never given a holiday, and told the children lovely bedtime
stories about trolls and the Icelandic Edda, and who provided a useful
resource for the language and myth he used in LoTR, until his wife became too jealous.
I mean, what could YOU do if you had that much support? Write an epic! probably!!
Because nobody was forcing him to do anything, ever, he slept late and woke up late. sounds nice
Tolkien did not do laundry. He did not cook meals. He did not
clean the house. He did not wrestle rice pudding down the necks of
his screaming babies, while calmly and lovingly answering his schoolchild’s questions. He wasn’t
making a cake while talking to his boss on the phone and wiping up the
dog’s sick. He did not spend hours every day in the process of keeping
his home together, or sorting the affairs of his four children, or sorting out the wifi. The Care and Keeping of Tolkien was outsourced to
wife, servants, scouts, assistants, waitstaff.
He would have received free meals at work, although he usually walked home for lunch, where he was served food and alcohol that he took into his private study. but if he didn’t
want to do that, Oxford profs of His Time could just get free lunch. He could ring a bell to be brought tea and snacks at work. And then he would go home and be served dinner.
Going to the pub with his friends, who supported and admired him! Sure!
not
having to go home in the evening to his four toddlers and children, because he was a Man of His Times! and he could totally
just spend evenings holed up in a pub with his admirers, because he was not required at home to help, or parent, or do anything in the home, except be served a glass of beer and go into his study.
god, imagine spending hours in the pub on a work night with a bunch of highly qualified literature professors telling you how smart and lovely and amazing you are. heck YES you’d be encouraged.
The Hobbit was already popular so it was probably quite helpful to know that while writing the next work.
Working and writing in a place that is generally considered to be an
inspiring setting for academia and literature. Want to write Elrond’s
Council? Sit down at a beautiful old stone table and start writing about the table. Want to write about a tree? Go write under
your favorite ancient tree in the Botanical Gardens. Want a snack? Ring a
bell and a scout will bring you toast and a cup of tea.
I mean, he wasn’t exactly spending his 40 hours a week under a manager’s baleful eye while he manned the self-checkouts at the Tesco in Coventry, or pumped gas for minimum wage in Montauk, scribbling notes into his phone. He floated around The City of Dreaming Spires, dreamily making art, while several people labored very hard so that he would be untroubled by Real Life while he floated.
Let’s be real. Tolkien’s literary accomplishments are very impressive, but he L I T E R A L L Y
was doing them on his work clock with the full support of a pit crew.
To be fair, I love the man. And I love the huffy apologism in the Tolkien Gateway: “Writing [The Fellowship of the Ring] was slow due to Tolkien’s perfectionism, and was frequently
interrupted by his obligations as an examiner, and other academic
duties.”
I’m ??? sorry that writing a novel on the company dime was frequently interrupted by occasionally having to do his job???? oh my god I love and hate this so much,
Dianna Wynne Jones, of Tolkien’s students at Oxford, commenting “of Tolkien, they said he was wasting his time on hobbits when he should have been writing learned articles…”
maybe because that’s what academics are SUPPOSED TO DO, it is their job,,,
He would also deliberately mumble incomprehensibly, ignoring his students, deliberately delivering terrible lectures, so that they would all go away; but Dianna actually wanted to receive some of the education she’d been promised:
“I imagine I caused Tolkien much grief by turning up to hear him lecture week after week, while he was trying to wrap his lectures up after a fortnight and get on with The Lord of the Rings (you could do that in those days, if you lacked an audience, and still get paid).”
God love the man! Deliberately teaching so badly because he planned to alienate his students and collect a paycheck! He would be flayed on social media for less, today. There would be news articles about the Lazy Professor. He would be fired, and buried, and dug up, and fired again.
In conclusion: yeah, CS Lewis was very encouraging and that helped immensely! But probably so did a secure income, freedom from chores and labor, and a crew of support staff. Who knows what we might do, if we all had that kind of encouragement. We’d probably be very productive.
it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.
This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.
No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.
Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
The Land of Entrapment
here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink
pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water
pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there
dammit jesse now I want to read about the things that live down there
meanwhile in maryland the summer is killing-hot, the air made of wet flannel, white heat-haze glazing the horizon, and the endless cicadas shrilling in every single tree sound like a vast engine revving and falling off, revving and falling off, slow and repeated, and everything is so green, lush poison-green, and you could swear you can hear the things growing, hear the fibrous creak and swell of tendrils flexing
and sometimes in the old places, the oldest places, where the salt-odor of woodsmoke and tobacco never quite go away, there is unexplained music in the night, and you should not try to find out where it’s coming from.
The intense and permanent haunting of a land upon which countess horrors have been visited, and that is too large and wild for us to really comprehend is probably the most intense and universal American feeling.
it’s all you americans talk about… liminal space this… cryptid that
america is big, we got.,.,.,. its a lot happening here
It’s at least 3,000 miles just from the East Coast to the West, depending on where you start.
If I try to drive from here in Maine to New Mexico, it’s 2,400 miles.
From here to Oregon, 800 miles from my current residence to my relatives in NJ, then another 3,000 miles after that.
A brisk 8 day drive that meanders through mountains, forests, corn fields, dry, flat, empty plains, more mountains, and then a temperate rain forest in Oregon.
The land has some seriously creepy stuff, even just right outside our doors.
There is often barking sounds on the other side of our back door.
At 3 am.
When no one would let their dog out.
It’s a consensus not to even look out the fucking windows at night.
Especially during the winter months.
Nothing chills your heart faster than sitting in front of a window and hearing footsteps breaking through the snow behind you, only to look and not see anything.
I live in a tiny town whose distance from larger cities ranges from 30 miles, to 70 miles. What is in between?
Giant stretches of forests, swamps, pockets of civilization, more trees, farms, wildlife, and winding roads. All of which gives the feeling of nature merely tolerating humans, and that we are one frost heave away from our houses being destroyed, one stretch of undergrowth away from our roads being pulled back into the earth.
And almost every night, we have to convince ourselves that the popping, echoing gunshot sounds are really fireworks, because we have no idea what they might be shooting at.
There’s a reason Stephen King sets almost all his stories in Maine.
New Mexico, stuck under Colorado, next to Texas, and uncomfortably close to Arizona. I grew up there. The air is so dry your skin splits and doesn’t bleed. Coyotes sing at night. It starts off in the distance, but the response comes from all around. The sky, my gods, the sky. In the day it is vast and unfeeling. At night the stars show how little you truly are.
This is the gentle stuff. I’m not going to talk about the whispered tales from those that live on, or close, to the reservations. I’m not going to go on about the years of drought, or how the ground gives way once the rain falls. The frost in the winter stays in the shadows, you can see the line where the sun stops. It will stay there until spring. People don’t tell you about the elevation, or how thin the air truly is. The stretches of empty road with only husks of houses to dot the side of the horizon. There’s no one around for miles except those three houses. How do they live out here? The closest town is half an hour away and it’s just a gas station with a laundry attached.
No one wants to be there. They’re just stuck. It has a talent for pulling people back to it. I’ve been across the country for years, but part of me is still there. The few that do get out don’t return. A visit to family turns into an extended stay. Car troubles, a missed flight, and then suddenly there’s a health scare. Can’t leave Aunt/Uncle/Grandparent alone in their time of need. It’s got you.
Roswell is a joke. A failed National Inquirer article slapped with bumperstickers and half-assed tourist junk. The places that really run that chill down the spine are in the spaces between the sprawling mesas and hidden arroyos. Stand at the top of the Carlsbad Caverns trail. Look a mile down into the darkness. Don’t step off the path. just don’t.
The Land of Entrapment
here in minnesota we’re making jokes about how bad is the limescale in your sink
pretending we don’t know we’re sitting on top of limestone caverns filled with icy water
pretending we don’t suspect something lives down there
dude i swear based on the demands overwatch players keep making to blizzard
it’s like almost none of them have ever played an online shooter before and just suck at them
mercy, back when i played the damn game was a fragile healer class with a shitty little pistol as a last resort defense
and they made her even shittier with every single nerf they’ve done to her
“she heals too much!!!”
she’s a healer class
that’s her primary thing
her healing is supposed to be huge and overhwhelming cause she’s supposed to stick to her teammates like glue and keep alternating healing between them
how fucking bad are you at shooters if you can’t even shoot the medic that’s literally glowing almost all the time and has the lowest possible health value you can get in overwatch
Old but still pertinent:
“2007″
my fucking god
Her problem is her ressurection ability, which should not be a thing in a competitive fps game. It is anti-skill. Also, she isnt the lowest possible health target because Tracer is AND she also has health regen after 1 second of no damage. It’s really not that simple and I hate when people just boil it down to “just kill her” like this isn’t a game where supports are probably behind at least one shield and at least one tank and is highly mobile. Not even comparable to the medic from tf2.
just
kill her
she’s a giant fuckin glowing SHOOT ME sign
it’s really that easy
especially since the medic has an ability THAT MAKES HIM AND THE TARGET INVINCIBLE and mercy ain’t in the time i played it
(but yeah i was wrong about her being the lowest health because she’s merely 2nd lowest along with unsuited d.va and s76)
Being behind a shield and a tank was also what happened with TF2. “Pocket Medics” where the Medic constantly tagged along behind the hard-to-kill Heavy were incredibly common. You know how people dealt with that?
They stealthed around behind them, or sniped them from above, or just lobbed grenades over the meatshields to hit the medic. Things that you can do in Overwatch with Sombra, Widowmaker/Ana, and Junkrat respectively.
You have the tools, so stop whining and use them. She can’t resurrect people if you kill her first.
You can nade/rocket jump over the medic/heavy pair. Scout is all about maneuvering around and taking out high value targets. Spy can close in with stealth. Now Overwatch has similar heroes. Pharah/Junkrat can fly over and blow up the Mercy. “BUT MERCY CAN FLY.” Fucking learn how to shoot with projectile weapons then. A good soldier/demoman can launch an enemy into the air and hit them mid-air since they can’t dodge as well in the air. Heroes like Tracer and Genji were made for taking out Mercy. Even if Mercy flies away, both have movement abilities made for closing distances. Sombra can just hack her so that she can’t even fly away. Reaper can flank if the enemy doesn’t notice him. You have so many options.
And my god, this isn’t Tribes. Every map in Overwatch is just chokepoint, chokepoint, chokepoint. Fuck, Overwatch doesn’t even have movement that’s as fast or fluid as TF2. Shooting at some slowing flying glowing chick is nothing compared to trying to headshot some demoman flying at you 200mph because he has the sticky jumper that lets him nade jump without damage and omg he has a sword. Or you’re playing on a server where b-hopping is allowed and my god there’s a medic solo-ubering and he’s this fast hopping invincible freak just stabbing the entire team.
I’m glad you mentioned shooting flying/aerial targets because now it gives me an excuse to post this finely aged clip:
I came to learn that women have never had a history or culture of leisure. (Unless you were a nun, one researcher later told me.) That from the dawn of humanity, high status men, removed from the drudge work of life, have enjoyed long, uninterrupted hours of leisure. And in that time, they created art, philosophy, literature, they made scientific discoveries and sank into what psychologists call the peak human experience of flow. Women aren’t expected to flow. I read feminist leisure research (who knew such a thing existed?) and international studies that found women around the globe felt that they didn’t deserve leisure time. It felt too selfish. Instead, they felt they had to earn time to themselves by getting to the end of a very long To Do list. Which, let’s face it, never ends. I began to realise that time is power. That time is a feminist issue.
My father, an activist and artist, told me I wouldn’t be able to be an artist when I had kids, because I would have to give all my time and energy to them.
This was said in 2005 when I was pregnant with my first child.
And I have also been told on this very site that I had no right to have opinion, outside interests, or write because I should be taking care of my children. This was said, most recently, in November 2016, by a woman who claims to be interested in the rights of women.
As I slowly work my way through catching up with news of the world for the past few weeks, I can’t help but think the greatest tragedy of our time is our own resilience.
The state of the world is frankly intolerable and unacceptable in many ways, but it is in our nature to stand tall and survive it.
The US government shut down, but the key word here is again. This has happened before. It was terrible before. But we survived it. We dealt with it. We moved on.
I’m not telling you not to take pride on all you have survived, all you have conquered, all that seemed deadly and that you still stood up against and remained.
But please remember that just because it didn’t kill you, it doesn’t mean it’s okay that it happened. Personally. Professionally. Politically. You are human and humans are notoriously hard to destroy. We’re by nature creatures that endure. We lick our wounds and learn from our mistakes and come out if not stronger, better prepared to brace ourselves and face adversity again.
But just because it doesn’t kill you, it doesn’t mean it’s okay or right or just the way things are.
Take pride in your resilience, but do not let the world take it for granted. Do not let the world make it a standard or a benchmark you’re expected to reach.
The goal is not survival, the goal is actually living, fully and healthy and comfortable, with all the dignity you are owed, purely because you’re a human being. That’s what we’re fighting for, in the long run. Survival is important, immediate, but do not trust anyone who wants to convince you it should be the end goal. Who says it’s “not that bad”, because it left you bleeding but still breathing.
I have decided on a new constellation. I call it The Bees. If you look up at the night sky and see all those sparkly dots, congratulations. You see The Bees. I have just made astrology 10000x easier, you’re welcome.
just moving along like everyone else 