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How to Transplant Hops

December 30, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

I took the unseasonably warm weather this Saturday as a sign that I needed to get outside and do something. I need that vitamin D.

I toyed with making an impromptu brew day out of the faux-spring revival, but a lack of prior planning and fresh ingredients kept my kettle dry. I thought about washing the cars, but figured I wouldn’t tempt the weather gods with some pristine paintwork to defile. I even considered going for an extended run, but the overindulgence of the holidays still rolled in my belly like an errant skateboard on a halfpipe.

So, instead, I decided to transplant two of my hop plants.

When I’d first planted them, I broke ground in a dizzy revelry, overwhelmed with the idea that I would soon be growing my own delicious nuggets of lupulin. I’d painstakingly prepared an area for the gangly rhizomes; tilled, pH tested, de-rocked and de-rooted. I built for them a nest where they could sprout and grow and be happy. The one sort of definitely major thing I didn’t consider as I buried them a few inches down, was how much light they’d be getting in the rather secluded plot tucked next to my deck beneath two oaks.

Turns out it wasn’t nearly enough. While the bines did grow in the flat, sun-starved dapple, they didn’t exactly flourish. The fatal parallel was finally drawn when some first year hops I planted in a much sunnier spot grew to twice the size and produced dozens more cones. I knew they had to be moved. The problem was, I didn’t know how to move them.

I don’t have a lot of luck moving plants. Two bushes I tried to move last year did very impressive impressions of dead versions of themselves by the end of the summer. I’m also psychologically averse to pulling an established plant out of the ground. It feels like I’m ripping an organ from the earth with crude tools, in some barbaric verdant ritual.

But it had to happen. For the good of the hops! Lack of knowledge be damned. Armed only with a shovel, my hands, and some guidance via Stan Hieronymus, I set to giving my harrowed hops a happy new home.

How to Transplant Hops

Things you’ll need:

Hops to be transplanted (sort of a no brainer)
A shovel (given the size of the root networks, you’ll need something big)
Your hands (they’re gonna get dirty, so plan ahead)
A new place for the hops (see the first item of the list)
Some extra topsoil (I had some left over from summer planting)
A beer (I chose Troegs HopBack Amber because hop back. Get it!? I need help.)

Step 1: Find the Nubs

If, like me, you decided to transplant your hops in the late-fall/winter, you’re going to have to find exactly where you cut the bine down from the previous year. If, also like me, you were dumb enough to winterize your garden by dumping shredded leaves all over the soil before you moved the hops, you’re going to have to do what I like to call, “exploratory dirt surgery.”

Just dig around with your hands for a while until you find the nub where you cut down the bine. Don’t bust out the shovel quite yet; you don’t want to cut through any major roots. And yes, “nub” is the technical term. You can trust me, I’m a scientist.

A hop “nub.” It has been so temperate here in Maryland that the hops are sprouting like it’s April or something.

Once you’ve found the nub(s), you can start to excavate the area around said nub to see where the major roots are. After a little bit more hand-digging, you should reveal what looks like a miniature stump with hundreds of differently sized roots shooting off in every direction.

A hop “stump.” Looks kind of Lovecraftian style terrifying, actually.

Step 2: Dig around the Stump

Now comes the somewhat tricky part: you need to dig around the stump far enough to not accidentally sever any major hop-arteries, but close enough to actually be able to pull the tentacled beast from the ground. It’s a fine art. I started pretty far away and worked in closer until the whole ground heaved when I levered the shovel upwards.

Protip: The roots spread out very wide, but don’t go very deep. Sort of like bamboo, but way less intrusive and annoying.

At one point, I cut a pretty major root off of the rhizome and felt really super bad about everything. Before I was too overtaken with grief however, I remember that when I planted these things, they were barely the size of pencils. Hops are resilient little dudes. Don’t intentionally hack off a bunch of roots, but if you do hit some while you’re digging, it’s OK. Chances are the plant will be fine. Probably. Hopefully.

Step 3: Pull it out of the Ground

I’m not being metaphorical or anything, literally grab a hold of it and pull it out of the ground.

A second year hop plant’s root system, no longer in the ground. Believe it or not, this is all connected and about 60% of it is not in frame.

Step 4: Drink beer and Admire your Green-ish Thumb

And your high school guidance counselor said you’d never amount to anything. Just look at what you grew! You nurtured and loved a living thing! And then summarily ripped it from its comfortable home for selfish reasons. Maybe that counselor had a point.

Anyway, drink some beer and maybe pour some out for your hop-homies.

Step 5: Dig up the new spot

Given that your plant is much, much bigger now, you’ll need to dig deeper and wider than you would for new baby rhizomes (I dug down about 5 inches and out about 10, but this will vary depending on the size of your plant). You’ll also want to position the stump so that the nub is facing up, and planted roughly where you want the bines to grow. Both of my plants seemed to sprout bines from the same part of the plant each year, so there’s a good chance where you place the stump will be where your new growth will pop its little head out, come spring.

Once you’ve placed it where you want it, dump the dirt back on top. Remember that the nub was technically above ground before, so try not to bury it completely in the new spot, either. For good measure, I added a new layer of topsoil and patted it down to create a uniform bed for the hops to sleep in through winter. I then tossed some mulched leaves on top to keep the soil from getting too hard (you obviously wouldn’t want/need to do this if you’re transplanting in the spring).

A patch of ground,
And not a sound,
But worms and roots turning.

Step 6: You’re done!

Pray to Gaia that your plants like their new home, and that you’ll be seeing little reddish-green spears shooting up come the long-thaw. Drink the rest of your beer. Rejoice. Then go clean all that mud off your shoes before you track it into the house and your significant other yells at you.

How to Make Hop Tea

August 7, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

In a former life, many years before this one, I was prominent Egyptologist. During an expedition into the Medjai, my team and I discovered the tomb of a powerful sorcerer, one who was known to dance with demons, and conjure the servants of Anubis to fulfill his pharaonic duties. The massive earthen sepulcher, dotted with hieroglyphs and other drawings, warned us not to draw near, lest we face the magic man’s wrath. Despite all the desperate urging and wails from our terrified local guides, I forced crowbar into and cracked seal of that ancient resting place, unleashing a fetid wind that blew by and whispered a curse that lives on to this day:

“For disrupting my eternal sleep, I doom you and your entire bloodline. From this day forward, you will never be able to travel via airplane without getting a very annoying flu-like virus”

Ignoring how the ancient Egyptians could have preordained modern commercial air-travel and classification of specific orthomyxoviridaes, the curse has plagued me my entire life. No matter what I try – vitamins, rest, exercise, diet – nothing seems to be able to keep my normally strong immune system safe from being confined with 100+ strangers in a box full of recycled air.

I just got back from a trip to England, and they haven’t finished that trans-Atlantic bridge they’ve been talking about, so here I sit, sick. I’ve sweated like I just finished a marathon, taken more medicine than recommended by the label on the bottle, slept for so long that the beginning of one SyFy movie blended into the end of another. My biggest issue with being sick isn’t the actual symptoms; sure, they’re annoying as hell, but they can be dealt with, assuaged. The real punch-in-the-stomach of being sick is the down time. The inability to write or edit because of brain fog, the muscles aches that keep you from covering distances any longer than bathroom to bed, the full-fledged loss of hours or days that could have been productive and full of life, all because your immune system refused to show up for work.

I’m always willing to try home remedies, especially those that are tangentially related to beer. Andrew of Das Ale House mentioned throwing some hops into my tea as a beery panacea, and since I was going to make some anyway, I figured I’d give it a go. Hops act as a preservative for beer, and some medical research suggests they are also anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and anti-insomnia. Plus, they smell and taste great, which is a much needed psychological boon when you can only breathe out of one nostril.

How to Make Hop Tea

Things you’ll need:

Hops (I picked a few fresh cones off my bines, but pellets would do)
Tea (I used green, as I didn’t want to overwhelm the hops)
A cup (to put the tea in)
Hot water (because cold steeping takes way too long)

I know this isn’t the most sophisticated recipe I’ve ever come up with, but whatever, I’m sick.

Step 1: Heat up the water

I used the microwave, but the kettle works too if you’re going to be all English and prescriptivist about it. You have to get the water pretty hot, as you’re going to want to pull all the good oils out of the hops (mimicking a brewing boil, I suppose).

Step 2: Add your tea

I used a plain-unflavored green tea because I thought black tea would overwhelm the subtlety of the hop aroma, and add too much acidity when mixed with the alpha acids of the hops. I think white tea would work too, but I didn’t have any to experiment with. Orange pekoe might be a good partner in this bath-time ballet, too. I’m no tea expert.

Step 3: Add your hops

I didn’t let the hops dry (because I’m impatient), so they needed to steep a bit longer. I used six, largish cones from my first year Willamette bines. Any less and I don’t think you’d notice the aroma much, any more and the tea would probably be too bitter to drink.

Step 4: Let steep

Let the tea bag steep for ~45-60 seconds. Remove the hops when they sink to the bottom, or leave them in while you drink the tea. Warning: if you leave them in the whole time, the last few sips are intense (read: acrid and bitter).

Step 5: Drink

It may be because I’m a little partial to the smell and taste of hops, or it may because I can barely smell anything given the amount of mucous that has taken residence in my sinuses, but I thought this was some excellent tea. Time will tell if it makes me feel any better, but either way, it’s the closest I can get to an IPA without actually drinking an IPA.

No NaNo

November 8, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Despite a strong idea, a somewhat realized outline, and an opening chapter, I decided not to do NaNoWriMo this year.

I “won” NaNoWriMo in 2011 and 2012, but swore that after the chaos of last year’s 50,000 word, several short-story sprint, I wouldn’t start another big project until I had graduated. At one point I even said I’d do NaBloPoMo (these acroportmanteaunyms are getting a bit ridiculous) to change things up a little bit. Now, staring down the barrel of my final grad school semester, with lots of big plans for this blog and my other writing, dedicating an entire month to a project that will likely rot, untouched on my hard drive doesn’t seem like the best use of my time.

But I want to feel like I’m participating, sort of. So for all you other people NaNoing your little fingers off, here are links to some of my favorite writing and grammar related posts from the series “Craft and Draft.” I hope they can help you capture those coveted 1667 words each day and maybe nudge you the 50k word mark with some lilting grace.

Plotting, Structure, and Pre-writing:
Go Small or Go Home
Literary Smiterary
Plotting Progression
Sheet Music
The Write to Read
Idea-logical

Imagery and Metaphor
Metaphor Galore
Imagine All the Imagery

Grammar, Syntax, and Word Choice
Branching Out
The Diction Affliction
Frag. Ments.
Resumptives and Summatives and Appositives, oh my!
Parallelogrammar
I’ll take words that start with “Ad” for $2000, Alex
Grammar (with an “a”, not an “e”)

Characters and Dialogue
Character Counts
Dialognostics

Editing and Proofreading
The Editor is Dead, Long Live the Editor!
Fixing What ain’t Not Broke
The Proof is in the Reading

I’m also happy to answer any other questions about NaNo, NaNoing, having NaNo’d, or why I’m so obsessed with English grammar.

Ask away!

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” -Robert Louis Stevenson

How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

August 26, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

When looking for a new recipe, the adventurous homebrewer is faced with a breadth of choices so vast that it can be debilitating.

You can, without too much exaggeration, brew almost anything you can think of. Want something spicy? Try a Jalapeño/Haberno recipe. Feeling a bit light, perhaps craving some fruit in your malt? Try a watermelon wheat, or a strawberry blonde, or blueberry lager. You can even start messing with the types of sugars or yeasts you base the beer on and journey deep into the weird world of sweet potato, pizza, creme brulee, or even beard (yes face-hair) beer.

With so many options, so much potential just waiting to be mashed and fermented, it seems wrong to brew a clone of an existing beer, to recreate what has already been created, to add nothing new and plagiarize the work of another brewer so brazenly.

But, despite being the safe and boring choice, cloning is one of the best things you can do to improve your homebrewing skills. We know why we like certain commercial beer, be it the flavor or smell or presentation (or a little from columns A, B, and C), so by attempting to brew a clone, we can see how exactly the brewers used their alchemical skills to bring about such a well done beer. It gives us a standard to measure our own brew, and ultimately brewing skill, against.

How to Brew a Boddingtons Clone

I won’t try to hide why I picked Boddingtons of all the beers out there; it was, and will always be, my dad’s favorite beer. As my Untappd profile says, I’m pretty sure I drank Boddingtons before milk. I understand it may not be everyone’s cup of Earl Grey, especially since it was purchased and retooled by Whitbred and then ABInBev, but this is the brew that my dad used to teach me about beer, his rambunctious youth in British pubs, and how to tell a good story over a pint of ale.

“The Cream of Manchester” is a standard English bitter, fiercely golden with a thick white head, that, outside of pubs dotting the northern English countryside, comes in tall yellow and black cans, each of which contains a floating beer widget. Hopefully my all-grain homebrew will be less like the stuff available in the US today, and more like the stuff my dad drank on tap back in Manchester during the late 70s and early 80s. He always said there was nothing quite like a cask-condition, freshly pulled pint of pub ale.

Stuff You’ll Need

For a five gallon batch:

6.2 lbs of 2-row malt (British preferred, American accepted)
4 oz of Crystal 40 (for that golden color)
1/2 oz Patent Black Malt (for roasted goodness, and a little more color)
1/3 lb of invert sugar (which requires brown cane sugar and citric acid, explained below)
1.25 oz Fuggles (for bitterness and aroma)
.75 oz Kent Goldings (for aroma and flavor)
British Ale Yeast (I used WhiteLabs WLP013 but WYeast 1098 should work well, too)

You’ll also need all of the standard all-grain brewing stuff, like a mash-tun, brew kettle, bucket, carboy, fire, spoon, etc.

Step 1: Mash it up

The first thing you’ll notice is that this isn’t very much grain for a 5 gallon batch. Most American Ale recipes call for at least 10 lbs of malt, and we’re nearly 4 lbs short of that here. That’s because Boddingtons is a pretty low ABV brew, bubbling in at thoroughly sessionable 3.9%.

Because it’s so little grain, it’s best to mash for a bit longer than normal, say 90 minutes instead of 60. Mash the 2-row and specialty malts at ~151 degrees, stirring once or twice to make sure there are no malty dough balls floating around. Sparge once to loose the sugars, settle the grain-bed by draining off a liter or so, then send the rest right into your kettle.

You might be surprised at how brown the wort is, but that’s OK. From my experience, the color of the beer in a carboy or other container is much, much darker than it is in a glass.

Step 2: Make some invert sugar

While the grain is mashing, you’ll want to start your invert sugar. For the record, you can buy something like Lyle’s Golden Syrup, but if you’re putting in the work for all-grain brewing, you might as well create all of the ingredients from scratch. Consider it a lesson in self-sufficiency. Or survival preparation. Your call.

Invert sugar is naturally found in a lot of fruits and honeys, but you can make it yourself by adding citric acid to normal cane sugar, and heating it in water. The citric acid breaks the bonds of the sucrose in the cane sugar, resulting in free fructose and glucose (which are both sweeter than regular old sucrose). For those curious, this is the same chemical structure as the dreaded high fructose corn syrup, but our version is made from completely different ingredients (namely: not corn).

You want to heat 1/2 a lb of cane sugar (not table sugar) in 3/4 a cup of water. As it’s heating, add 1/8 a teaspoon of citric acid. Let it simmer, stirring frequently, for at least 20 minutes. The longer it simmers the darker and thicker it will be. You don’t want it too dark or thick for this beer, so try not to simmer it for more than 30-40 minutes.

Step 3: Boil her up (or down, not sure how it works)

Now that your grain is mashed and your sugar is inverted, you can start your boil. As soon as it’s roiling enthusiastically, you’ll want to add 1 oz of your Fuggles and .5 oz of your Kent Goldings. Boil for another 45, stirring as your impatience dictates. Next, add your invert sugar, a teaspoon of Irish moss (or a whirlfloc, if that’s how you roll) and the rest of your hops. There are no hop additions at burnout for this recipe, so you just need to wait another 15 minutes. Now is a good time to drop your (cleaned and rinsed) wort-chiller into the beer so that the boil can do most of the sanitation work for you.

Step 4: Drink a beer and chill out (while the beer chills out)

I always try to drink something in the same style as what I’m brewing. Three guesses as to what I was drinking this time around.

This is a good time to use the excess water from your wort chiller to water your poor, droopy hydrangeas. You can also use some to hose the bird-poop off your car. Get creative with it.

This is also a good time to get an original gravity reading.

Step 5: Pitch your yeast

Around ~75-80 degrees you are ready to stir the hell out of your wort and pitch your yeast. Remember that the more oxygen the yeast has, the better it will get established, and the better it will attenuate. I sometimes seal my bucket and shake the hell out of it once the yeast is already in there, just to make sure it’s well distributed and has enough oxygen to breathe comfortably.

Step 6: Prime and bottle

Let the golden-brown joy ferment a week, then rack to secondary. Bottle by priming with 2/3 a cup of cane sugar. Let the beer very slightly carbonate (to mimic the traditional style) for another ~14-21 days.

That’s it! Enjoy one for me and my old man.

How to Peer Edit

May 9, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

It’s easy, as a writer, to think of your craft as a one-way street. You write words, send them bleeping and whirring through the wiry innards of the internet to a reader, who then reads them. It’s all very binary. Writers are 0, readers are 1.

But when you start getting up and out, into the writing world, into the community of like-minded crazy people and neurotics and geniuses, you’ll start to notice that the writer-reader relationship is just the final product of a massive word factory, an interconnected automaton that clunks and steams as writers feed it raw materials through their laptops and tablets and notepads.

This factory is where all the drafts between 0 and 1 happen, where those oft-spoken-about but rarely seen editors do their editing things. While there are some wonderful and talented professional editors holding senior positions in the factory, the majority of the day-to-day editing is handled by the writers pulling bad words off of never-ending conveyor belts and turning big red valves on proofreading machines. This factory is the thumping mechanical heart of planet writing, the place where little baby mewling essays turn into triumphant opinionated masterpieces and sad, confused stories grow up to play in the literary NFL.

Good news: they’re hiring.

Editing another writer’s work will improve your writing. It gives you a chance to read all kinds of stuff you might not see otherwise, but also gives you a chance to see what mistakes other writers are making. Editing gives you the chance to learn from other people’s lessons, dissect how a writer created an image or a theme or a tone. It’s also one of the few ways you can truly give back to the writing community short of becoming Rowling-famous and giving away money because you’re feeling particularly philanthropic.

Seems easy, right? Go join a workshop group, grab some stuff, and edit! I like that attitude, that energy. You’ll need that. But not all edits are created equal. Prior proper preparation leads to efficient, effective editing.

How to Peer Edit

Things You’ll Need:

Something to edit (preferably something that needs to be edited)
A word processor with a “track changes” feature (MS Word, although I don’t like to admit it, works great. GoogleDocs ain’t bad in a pinch either)
A printer and a red pen (in case your computer explodes or the hamster-wheels powering the internet suddenly fail)
Your brain (that thing you routinely confound with whiskey and words)

Step 1: Take it for what it is

Before you take your crimson, inken scalpel to the page, bent on excising the grammatical tumors of the piece, take some time to just read it. Enjoy the story. Let the language court your brain and take it out to a fancy dinner, listen to the nuance of the word choices as they dance their elaborate syntactical ballet. Make friends with the characters, take a mental vacation to the setting, and really just let the narrative wash over your brain like a beautiful word wave.

Don’t try to fix mistakes, even if they’re obvious. Don’t try to analyze the voice or theme.

Just read.

And when you’re done, put it away for a little bit.

It’s important to appreciate the art of the piece you’re revising before actually offering any feedback. You need to understand what the author was going for, what message they hid deep in the emotional soul of the writing. If you don’t “get” the story, or haven’t taken time to just read it as a non-writer would, your final feedback won’t be as helpful, and might even, at times, be hurtful.

Step 2: Fix the easy stuff

Once you and the story are BFFs, you can start your actual review.

I find typos, misspellings, grammatical mistakes, and punctuation faux pas the most distracting things on the page. Before I can look at theme or metaphor or fancy things like sentence structure and variation, I have to go through and (try to) clean up as many eye-luring boo-boos as possible. It’s OK though; I’ve got a big supply of backspace band-aids.

There are many ways to do this, some really effective, some not so effective.

My favorite technique is to read the story backwards, starting with the last sentence working towards the start. This lets you view the sentence as a whole and fish out any little inconsistencies without your brain automatically filling in the gaps of what it already knows and expects to come next. By going backwards, you can focus on the sentence in a vacuum of itself, all without damaging its relationship to the rest of the paragraph.

Some people might argue that this isn’t a good use of editing time, but I disagree. The writing will have to be proofread eventually, and training your eyes to spot inconsistencies will make your own drafting stronger.

Step 3: Look for writing tics

As you read, try to notice if the writer repeats certain ideas or constructs or words. It’s possible that something (an idea, a memory, an ancient evil) has wormed its way into their processes, influencing every single sentence they type without their knowledge or express written consent.

This can be as simple as a person using the same kind of transition (say a terminal simile) or as complicated as a person creating the exact same kind of metaphors with very little variation. For example, I know I have a problem with creating too many magic/wizard/fantasy/medieval metaphors, like a hardened warrior whose sword and steel soul is tainted by blood and battle.

It is your responsibility as an editor to point this stuff out for the writer. This kind of feedback is the most revered and praised, as it often brings into focus topics and issues that would have been near impossible for the writer to discover on her own. Read carefully and note anywhere things seem to sound or feel the same. Highlight similarities in the same color (say bright orange), so the writer has a stark visual of just how often a tic is sneaking into her writing.

Step 4: Ponder the mysteries of theme

Theme in a piece of writing (especially a short piece of writing) can be an elusive gremlin that pops his head out of a hole for a second and then disappears, only to pop up again in some impossibly distant place a few seconds later. Sometimes it’s blatant, like dozens of thick slices of chopped jalapeno on the top of a pizza when you specifically wrote “no jalapenos” in the “additional notes” field on the pizza ordering website. Sometimes it’s so subtle that you can barely pick it out, like the addition of a tablespoon of dry Amontillado sherry to a traditional enchilada sauce.

But it’s gotta be there if the piece is going to succeed. Try to find examples of a writer carrying the theme that you like and specifically call them out with colors or comments. In a recent story (it’s short, I promise) I used a lot of Christian allusions and references to support the theme of a lapsed Catholic being unsure of her place at a funeral. Some were intentional, others weren’t. I had an editor friend point out some that I, caught in the energy of the writing itself, didn’t even know I’d written. It was pretty cool and taught me a lot about the piece.

When you’re editing, point out every example you can find, even if they seem loose or under-formed. These help the writer see if his theme is strong, or if it needs to be bolstered in certain places. It also helps you develop closer reading skills, which will benefit you when you’re self editing early drafts of your own work.

Step 5: Write pointed, specific feedback

There is nothing worse than getting all pants-peeing excited to digest someone’s comments on your work, only to find things like, “this is good,” “I don’t like this,” or “I don’t get this at all.” Comments like that are worse than not reviewing the piece at all.

Fight your baser instincts to immediately point out what you like and don’t like. In the grand scheme, your subjective tastes don’t matter. Just because you didn’t like it doesn’t mean it’s bad. Just because you did like it doesn’t mean it’s good.

A writer needs objective feedback about how it is written.

If you can’t, you just don’t possess the fortitude to not voice your opinions, then make sure you accompany any vague comments with a clear and specific why. Did you like it because it was beautiful to read or because it established the tone? Did you not like it because it was confusing or distracted you from something more important?

The more specific your feedback, the more the writer learns about his own craft from your edits, and the more you learn about the writing process as a whole. This is one of those, “you’re only cheating yourself” situations, like lying about how hard you worked out to impress your coworkers who really don’t care either way. If you take short cuts in your editing, you’ll be missing great examples to learn about bigger issues at work in all writing, and you’re just being a dick to the person whose work you’re reviewing.

Step 6: Do it again, and again, ad infinitum

Yea, nothing fancy to say here. Do 10 sets of 30 edits three times a week for maximum results. Apply ice to any finger injuries. Apply beer to any brain ones.

Craft and Draft: Frag. Ments.

March 14, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Not all sentences are privileged enough to grow up in a warm, loving home with supportive clauses and structured guidance. Some are forced to grow up on the syntax-streets, forced to figure out this crazy grammatical world with nothing but their guile and wit.

Sometimes these sentences don’t learn the rules, never understand why they should fit some mold invented by a system that abandoned them. They grow up functional, sometimes even beautiful, but ultimately incomplete, lacking in something baser, something important.

These sentences are the lost souls of the written world. They are the broken. They are the fragments.

A fragment, grammatically, is a subordinate clause turned into a full sentence. Think of it like a sandwich. A normal sentence is bread, meat, tomato, lettuce, mayo. A fragment is two slices of bread that someone is trying to pass off as a sandwich. It can contains nouns and verbs and prepositions and clauses, but is always missing a main subject (lunchmeat and veggies).

They should sound/read weird to an trained ear/eye, because they are not complete thoughts.

A fragment, practically, is something like this: “He stabbed blindly at the shadows in the alleyway, fear guiding his hand. A slash of luck, a jab of hope. He prayed to be the one who got out of this alive.”

There are no rules for fragments. No real, official, decided upon rules, at least. Some people say to use them as you see fit, wherever you see fit. Some people say to avoid them entirely. Many agree that they’re fine as interjections. Others say they shouldn’t be relied upon to convey important information. Other others say that should only be used to convey important information.

There should really be some rules.

Oliver’s Fragmentation Rules:

1. A fragment should have a direct relation to the sentence before it

A fragment is an innately odd structure to read, so it needs to have a strong relationship to whatever it is modifying for the reader to make sense of it. Trying to tie a fragment to a sentence earlier in the paragraph may confuse your reader and cause them to stop their forward progress to go back and figure out what you’re talking about. Trying to reference a sentence that comes after the fragment is equally confusing, as you’re trying to connect to an idea that hasn’t happened yet.

Like a resumptive modifier, a fragment should “resume” the thought, verb action, or direction of the sentence directly before it. Unlike a resumptive modifier, it doesn’t need to mirror the noun or adjective that ends said previous sentence.

“Oliver wrote into the night, his fingers flailing wildly over careworn keys. Wrote and wove those stories that refused to stay trapped in the prison of his mind.”

I’m referencing the main verb of the previous complete sentence, so my fragment makes sense and adds context/new information that the reader can quickly assimilate and understand.

2. A fragment should be used intentionally

A fragment is nothing but a normal old subordinate (dependent) clause, which means that it could easily be attached to and made part of a traditional sentence. Most of the time, you want your subordinate clause to be part of the main sentence, for simplicity’s sake.

But sometimes, for effect, you want that clause to stand alone. Carry its own weight. March on defiantly.

Fragment time!

Syntactically, they are quick and shattered, making them great for conveying panic, stream of consciousness, or frenetic movement. If you’ve got a character who is freaking out because he just witnessed a giant squid-crab eat a nuclear submarine whole, using fragments can syntactically support the action of the narrative. If you’re writing an essay where you are recalling some distant, fading memories of your childhood, using fragments can recreate the jarring phenomenon of trying to rebuild a scene from memory.

Fragments are great, but make sure you are using them intentionally for effect, and not just because you’re not sure how to include the information in the sentence. There is nothing worse than an unintentional fragment in the middle of an otherwise perfectly fluent sentence.

3. A fragment should not be an aside

If you haven’t noticed, I love asides. They are a great way to express an opinion (or interject something new!) without going on a rant. They tend to break the fourth wall which can be good or bad, depending on your format and genre.

Fragments however, do not make good asides. An aside tends to be non sequitur (which translates to “it does not follow”). If you turn a fragment into an aside, you run the risk of changing the focus or message of a certain section of writing.

A fragment reads as if it is part of the main-line narrative, unlike a phrase set off in parentheses or in between em dashes. This will cause your reader to view it as part of the whole (not just added on information) which might stop them dead in their mental tracts if it takes them out of or away from whatever scene they were reading.

Leave the asides to their little parenthetical prisons. Fragments should be free.

“We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That’s what connects us–that we’re all broken, all beautifully imperfect.” -Emilio Estevez (yes, really)

Craft and Draft: Resumptives and Summatives and Appositives, oh my!

March 4, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Bust out those style guides, argue over those serial commas, and question the legitimacy of those split infinitives, because it’s National Grammar Day!

After Halloween, my birthday, National Hat Day, National Homebrewing Day, National Wizard Day, and National Drink Beer and Play Video Games All Day Day, National Grammar Day is my favorite. To celebrate the wonders of this syntactically accurate 24-hours, I’ve decided to talk about three of my favorite grammatical tools:

Appositives and resumptive and summative modifiers.

I normally don’t go for such low-hanging Oz-born fruit in my post titles, but for once, comparing these three constructs to lions, tigers, and bears is actually appropriate. I mean, not directly appropriate, as they’re not technically dangerous apex megafauna, but pretty indirectly appropriate as they are powerful and should be treated with respect.

These three are some of the best spells in the grammar-wizard’s tome of arcane writing knowledge. They are also three of the most challenging to master and use correctly. They help embroider and embolden your prose with more eloquent definition of your subjects, and can add lyricism and emphasis to your writing that phrasing and branching may not.

Much like parallelism, modifiers can transform stumbling, unnatural writing into flowing, organic writing with a few flicks of the predicate and shakes of the subordinate clause.

In Apposition to

Outside of our little grammar bubble, the word “appose” (similar in definition to, but not to be confused with “oppose”) means “to place in juxtaposition or proximity.” When inside said grammar bubble, apposition is the idea of placing one noun next to another to “rename” the first noun.

In practice an appositive is like a fancy adjective, with which you describe specific qualities of your noun, using another noun. For example:

“Oliver, a guy obsessed with wizards, wrote a book about ancient magicks.”

The appositive in the sentence above provides additional, specific knowledge about the main subject and has another noun (or nominative clause) that could theoretically replace the original noun.

An appositive cannot rename a noun that is somewhere else in the sentence:

“Oliver wrote a book, a guy obsessed with wizards, about ancient magicks.”

In this case, my appositive follows the noun in the direct object position (“a book”) which makes it sound like it is renaming the book. This sentence doesn’t really make any sense (unless the book is alive and sentient and really into wizards and wizard culture and HOLY CRAP awesome short story idea).

An appositive always renames the noun that precedes it and is always another noun or noun clause.

In addition to basic renaming or specification, appositives can put on some fancy-ass pants, and rename a subject more than once to create a very rhythmic effect:

“Oliver wrote a book, a treatise on men of mystery, a tome that would bridge a gap between science and spirit, a collection of words woven with the sinew of sorcery.“

Appositives are like grammar-guitar solos in the middle of your sentence-songs. They’re in the same key, but give the main melody a little variation and a lot of vivification.

Resuming Resumptives

I think, in all the untamed wilds of the grammatical jungle, that resumptive modifiers are my favorite tool. Don’t tell the adjectival clauses though, it’d break their little nonrestrictive hearts.

The resumptive modifier is exactly what it sounds like; it “resumes” a sentence where it left off, creating an echo-like effect for the end of your original sentence. It shifts the emphasis of a sentence from the main verb of the subject, usually to whatever information is found in the object position:

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul forever doomed to read about, talk about, and be in the company of wizards.”

Where the original sentence would have been focused on her weeping, the resumptive modifier makes the sentence more about his soul. This is a great tool for opening, transitioning, or closing a section where you really want to leave the reader with a clearly defined point of focus.

You can also chain resumptive modifiers together, or repeat an idea to branch into another, tangentially similar idea:

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul turned malignant by years of abuse, abuse of dark magic that should have been left interred.” (Chained resumptive modifiers can make a sentence pretty dense, but pack an amazing syntactic wallop and carry a ton of information in not a lot of words.)

“And so she wept for his soul, a soul entwined in distant lore, a soul that wandered a shadow world of near-forgotten ideas, a soul that had little hope of ever finding the light of tangible reality ever again.” (the resumptive is repeated to add to the idea of this weird guy’s soul)

While resumptives are awesome, they still have rules. To create a resumptive modifier, your original sentence must end with a noun or an adjective, and the section that follows must include (or be) a subordinate clause. The modifier would be incomplete or not make sense otherwise:

“And so she wept quietly, quietly as to not disturb her brother.” (Resumptives with an adverb are redundant as you could just take one out and have the exact same sentence)

“And so she wept for his soul, a tired soul.” (No subordinate clause is also redundant, as you could just include the adjectival information in the original sentence)

For effect, it is still possible to use these forms, but know that if you do you are breaking a grammatical rule and some readers may find this wording garish or silly or just plain pointless.

Summarizing Summatives

If resumptives resume, then summatives…?

Summarize. You win one million SAT/GRE vocabulary points.

Unlike a resumptive, which only modifies the previous noun, a summative modifier sums up the entire independent clause of a sentence with a single noun (or nominative clause). A summative modifier is a perfect tool to nudge your reader into believing something about your sentence without beating them over the head with, “HI THERE READER PERSON, THIS IS WHAT THIS SENTENCE MEANS AND WHAT YOU SHOULD TAKE AWAY FROM THE STORY.” It’s more subtle and sneaky, and when pens are down, better writing.

For example:

“The wizard lost the battle, a defeat that would mark the beginning of his end.”

You’re very slyly giving your reader supplemental information without having to break it into a separate sentence. This improves the flow and let’s the reader draw the conclusion you want by providing literary breadcrumbs. This has the added effect of naturally “rounding out” an idea, making it a perfect way to end a chapter or section.

Just for fun…

…let’s use all three tools in one sentence:

“Hadrax, a red robed silhouette on the horizon, began to wave his hands, a signal to those below that meant incoming fury, fury that came from a wizard pushed too far for too long.

I’ll include my usual grammatical tools disclaimer: these are great, amazing, wonderful, lovely, super effective constructions, but be judicious. They are very fun to write, and very easy to get carried away with. An entire paragraph of resumptive modifiers is going to be dense and confusing. An entire section of summative modifiers may make your reader feel like you’re spoon-feeding them too much information. Too many appositives and your reader won’t know which descriptor is most important.

Use sparingly, parental guidance recommended, caveat emptor, et cetera, et cetera.

I wasn’t kidding. The first step is admitting you have a problem and then writing about it.

How to Live like a Writer

February 22, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Do you know what a lot of historically famous writers have in common? Aside from depression, alcoholism, psychosis, failed relationships, monomania, poverty, destitution, and narcissism, I mean.

Give up?

They all lived fascinating lives. Hemingway survived back-to-back plane crashes while he was bumming around Africa playing chicken with lions and rhinos. Christopher Marlowe was an alleged spy for the British Crown and was stabbed to death in a pub, probably for discovering some super secret Illuminati plot. Mark Twain was a gold prospector and steamboat pilot who spent a ton of time drinking with Nikola Tesla, who was his BFF. He also accurately prophesied his own death.

These men definitely had innate talents for writing, but their art was set ablaze by the events of their lives. Their work was a reflection of what they had experienced, a living mirror of who they were, where they’d been, and what they’d seen. Without the wanderlust and random chance of life, they may not have written anything of note.

Whether catalysts for personal artistic transformation or just examples of the good and evil woven into the quilt of our reality, the life of a writer is just as important as their mastery of language or the vividness of their imagination.

If you want to write things that readers will connect to, you have to get out there and live. How can you understand universal human emotions and appeals if you haven’t felt them yourself?

But you’re busy, and don’t have time to go camp in Africa/spy for Britain/chill with a revolutionary scientist. I’m right there with you. Our commitment-centric lives don’t leave much time for such wild and irresponsible adventures.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn from the way you are already living. You still have to get off your duff and see some things from time to time, but there are several things you can do to capitalize on whatever situation you just happen to stumble into during your nine to five. There are lots of ways to improve your writing on a daily basis, but they all involve a proactive attitude towards improvement.

1. See the details

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was hiding all of the best stuff in the details. I think that’s how the saying goes.

It is your responsibility as a writer to watch closely and carefully. Instead of mindlessly walking through the park, scan your surroundings and process what is happening. Did an English Mastiff break from its leash to chase a squirrel? Did the squirrel run through a bunch of picnic-goers to get up the nearest tree? Did a robot, programmed to protect humans, see the squirrel as a threat and try to climb the tree? Did the dog then collide with the robot causing a hilarious pile-up of fur and tungsten alloy?

Probably not, but these are the kinds of details you need to notice when you’re out in the world. These are the London broil and garlic mashed potatoes of your narrative-entree. These are the things that make up the microcosmic stories of our daily lives.

It’s not always easy. Sometimes you’re tired or distracted or so lost in your cloudy head that a wizard could conjure some fire imps right next to you and you’d barely notice. You still need to make a conscious effort. You can attune your brain to watch for these details (like Shawn Spencer from Psych) and over time get pretty good at spotting what most people miss.

The more you pay attention, the more you’ll realize that a lot of what we experience can almost be directly translated into storytelling. What is a day in a life other than a self contained event with a beginning, middle, end, arc, and lesson? When you know what makes up the basis of a good story and can spot real life examples without much effort, it becomes a lot easier to recreate them on the page.

2. Note how many notes you take

Our brains are more like long-term storage databases than USB flash drives. If you expose yourself to a content for a while, chances are you’ll remember. If you get a tiny fleeting glance of it, chances are you’ll forget.

Even if you thought that one idea was totally perfect. Especially if you thought that one idea was totally perfect.

Easy solution: carry a notebook. Use a note taking App. Takes notes on napkins or receipts or in the margins of whatever book you’re carrying.

You don’t have to tattoo yourself with every single idea that spontaneously forms in your brain like Guy Pearce in Memento, but taking down some notes about the key points or details of an idea can help jolt your memory into action when you have some time to actually sit down and write.

The more you take notes, the more you’ll remember, the more you’ll write, the more you’ll be happy.

3. Correspond like a writer

I bet you a beer that you write thousands of words a day without thinking about it.

These are the “forgotten words.” They sneak by in the form of text messages, emails, chat sessions, and meeting notes.

Our daily writing is like the running part of soccer; you don’t necessarily play soccer to run, but you might as well get the workout while you’re playing.

Why not use all of those forgotten words (that you’re obligated to write, anyway) as a chance to practice your craft?

Start writing emails with some artistic flourish. Intentionally vary your sentence patterns. Try new vocabulary. Force yourself to use correct grammar, punctuation, and syntax. Don’t be lazy, don’t take shortcuts.

Use every chance you have to improve your writing, even if it’s in an email to your mother reminding her for the 50th time that you’re lactose intolerant and that she shouldn’t make linguine Alfredo for dinner when you come to visit.

Eventually, writing clearly, accurately, and fancifully will become habitual. When it becomes habitual, you can focus on other aspects of your craft, like what to name the Android in your short story about a machine and a dog who became best friends after running into each other at the park.

4. Get up, stand up

Life doesn’t happen in your cubicle or on your couch or at your local dive-bar. A form of life happens in these places, but it’s the boring, generic, perfunctory kind that is tainted by the usual and the predictable.

Life does happen when you take a pin of variation to your bubble of comfort. When you break routine and rout boredom. It happens when you appreciate the pattern that makes up your life (mine is tartan) but recognize that in those well worn grooves you’ll never grow.

Even if you’re not physically, financially, or temperamentally capable of grand excursions to exotic destinations, you can still deviate from your patterns and engorge your brain with new information.

Drive a new route to work; see new buildings and neighborhoods and street-corner life. Have conversations with people you’ve barely met; ask them about their jobs and dreams and families.

And when you feel like you know these routes and these people, change it up again. And again. And again. Every new pattern builds upon the last, layering experiences and life lessons into a thicker and thicker cross-section of life. Eventually, you’ll have experienced so much, that you can’t help but have it permeate your writing.

“A work of art is above all an adventure of the mind.” -Eugene Ionesco

How to Brew All Grain Noble Hopped Pilsner

February 20, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

I stepped into Maryland Homebrew a few weeks ago with a focused mind. I had a recipe. I had a goal. A singular idea dominated my mind, and my will was committed to pursing it even if it meant my ruin.

I wanted to move from extract brewing to all grain brewing.

To anyone not familiar with homebrewing, this doesn’t sound like such a big deal. It sounds sort of like going from Shake N’ Bake to homemade seasoned breadcrumbs. A little extra preparation work, but similar end product: breaded chicken.

But to a beersmith it’s so much more than that. It’s a right of passage that we must face armed only with a couple of buckets and our wort stirring spoon. It marks the transition from brewboy to brewman. It’s a bubbling, boiling, fermenting, Bar Mitzvah.

When I told the staff at MD:HB I wanted to do my first batch of all grain beer, they all jumped to attention, quick to help me load up heavy bags of grain and answer any questions I had knocking around in my beer-addled brain. One staff member showed me how to best use the mill to crack my grain. Another talked to me about temperatures for strike water and mashing. Yet another guy called to another, across the warehouse area in the back, “hey, this guy is doing his first all grain!”

As I was checking out, I felt like I had joined an exclusive club. Like Skulls and Bones. Or the Masons. Or the Mouseketeers.

I was part of a club of people who did things by scratch, with purpose, with art and flourish and drunken enthusiasm. I was now on the all-grain inside. And it felt good.

I went home all blissfully happy, grinning like a little kid who had just eaten the slice of his birthday cake that had his name written on it in icing. I set to mashing and brewing, a new man in a new world.

Of course, I couldn’t be simple (or practical). I decided not only to do my first all-grain brew, but my first lager as well.

Sometimes a man has to buy 9.5 lbs of pilsner malt. We all have our vices. Don’t judge me.

Things You’ll Need

9.50 lbs of pilsner malt (this is the good stuff, it smells like sweet bread)
.5 lb Cara-Pils (as a supplement to your main malt to add some color)
1 oz Tettnang hops (Noble hop 1 of 5)
.75 oz of Spalt hops (Noble hop 2 of 5)
1 oz Hersbrucker hops (Noble hop 3 of 5)
1 oz Hallertau hops (Noble hop 4 of 5)
2 oz Saaz hops (Noble hop 5 of 5)
Czech Budejovice Lager Yeast (I used Whitelabs liquid WLP802, for anyone wanting the specifics)

You’ll also need the full brewer’s regalia and accoutrement (I like to say, “ackoo-tray-mon” all fancy and French-like):

A mash tun (good job I already showed you guys how to make one, right? guys?)
A brew kettle (that will hold all of your final volume – 5 gallons for me)
A big spoon (Yup.)
Some oven mitts (if you use the nice matching ones your wife has in the kitchen, try not to spill sticky wort all over them)
Ice bath or wort chiller (I still don’t have a wort chiller, because I’m cheap and cooper is expensive)
Thermometer (if you don’t have a laser gun thermometer by now, I can’t help you)
A hydrometer (for measuring the beeryness of your beer)
Bucket or carboy (unless you want to ferment it in something weird, like 8 two-liter soda bottles)

Step 1: Monster Mash

Malt extract is basically just pre-made (and condensed) grain extract. You’re going backwards one step in the process by doing all grain. It’s up to you and your cleverness to extract all that delicious sugar from that massive pile of grain.

Heat up five gallons of water plus a little bit extra to make up for the volume lost during boiling. Since it takes approximately one epoch to heat up five gallons in one container on an electric stove, I recommend splitting it out into several different containers. If you have a gas oven or a patio stove, feel free to use that, but don’t bring the water to boil.

You want to get your water hot, but not so hot that it scorches the grain. The temperature of the strike water (or the first water you add to the mash tun before the grain takes a nice bath) will vary based on your recipe. For this one, I kept the temperature around 160 degrees. Despite being an efficient holder-o-heat, your mash tun will likely lose a few degrees over the hour you let the grain settle, so heat it up just past your target heat to compensate.

I made some tea afterwards, so this isn’t weird.

Once you’ve added your water to the mash tun, you want to quickly add your grain. This is sort of like adding hot chocolate mix to a mug of hot water: a bunch of grain will sit on top and not get wet. Like a viking manning a long ship, use your big spoon to stir the grain until it has all been thoroughly wetified.

I underestimated my water here. I ended up adding more, but only drained 5 gallons off of the final. I'm not good at math.

I underestimated my water here. I’m probably the worst estimator in the Great DC Metro area.

Step 2: Wait an hour

You’ll need to wait while the hot water sucks all of the sugar out of the grain like a diabetic vampire. To prevent excessive heat loss, wrap your mash tun in some blankets. No, not that one. Or that one. Go get the ones on the guest room that no one ever uses. Deny knowledge if your wife asks why they smell like a brewery.

This is a good time to chill out and drink a beer that is like the beer you’re making. Notice the flavors, appreciate the craft. Sam Adams Noble Pils or Victory Prima Pils were my models. Now is also a good time to stir the grain, but don’t leave the top of the mash tun open for too long while you’re stirring.

One episode of Law and Order SVU later (dun-dun) your wort should be ready for the primary boil.

Step 3: Drain the mash tun into your mash pot

Hopefully you put your mash tun on a kitchen counter or something at hip-height, otherwise, have fun lifting 40 lbs of really hot water plus ten pounds of soaking mash up onto something high. Remind me to go back in time to remind you to put it on the counter, not the floor. You’ll need gravity’s help to drain all of the wort out o the tun.

Position your mash pot on a chair below the spigot coming out of your mash tun. Before you start filling the pot with the precious brown liquid, you’ll want to collect about a liter of wort in another container. This prevents any loose grain husks from getting into the wort.

I used the same pitcher I use to fill the cat’s water bowls. I hope they don’t notice.

When the pitcher is full, start filling the pot. Pour the contents of the pitcher back into the mash tun as to not lose all of that sugary goodness. If you used exactly 5 gallons, you’ll need to tilt your mash tun slightly to get all of the liquid out.

Ok, so I lied. I didn't use a chair. I balanced the brew pot on a brew bucket. Terrible idea. Don't try this at home.

Ok, so I lied. I didn’t use a chair. I balanced the brew pot on a brew bucket. Terrible idea. Ignore this picture.

(Note: Up until this point, sanitizing your equipment isn’t super important. Everything should be clean and free of anything loose or gross, but since you’re about to boil the stuff for ~60-90 minutes, not everything has to be perfectly sterilized before coming in contact with your wort. After the boil though, make sure everything is clean as bleach. But don’t actually use bleach.)

Step 4: Boil ’em cabbage down

Now you’re back to where you would be with an extract beer. Get the wort to a rolling boil and add your hops as called for by your recipe (for this pilsner, I did Spalter and Tettnang at 60 mins, Hersbrucker and Hallertau at 15 mins, then Saaz at knockout). You don’t have to worry about steeping any grain or anything like you normally would with an extract, as you’ve already done that hard work in the mash tun!

Wasn’t quite boiling yet. Oops. Impatient.

Now you just need to cool and pitch your yeast. If you need help with that part, see my Homebrew 101 post.

Step 5: Make a pizza

There is one slight drawback to moving to all grain brewing. When you’re finished, you still have ~10 lbs of wet, sugarless grain sitting in your mash tun. There are a few options of what you can do with all this perfectly edible grain. Some people like to donate it to local farms (apparently horses and cows quite literally eat this shit up). Others like to make dog treats with it (apparently dogs have similar palettes to horses and cows).

I decided to make a pizza.

These grains are very similar to bread grains, so the crust I formed tasted sort of like multi-grain bread (chunks of grain and hard bits and all). I didn’t really know what I was doing, so I just combined flour, water, baking yeast, some olive oil, and the left over beer grain until I had something that was pretty dough-like.

I thought it tasted pretty good. Not sure my wife was a huge fan.

Beer and pizza go so well together that literally mixing the two was a no brainer.

How to Choose

February 11, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Life is a huge, open-ended Choose Your Own Adventure book.

At any moment, no matter the circumstance, you have some level of choice. You can choose which pair of pants to wear (if any), what to believe and what to deny (and what to tell others to believe and deny), or which flavor of Doritos would go best with your Lean Cuisine (Cool Ranch, by the way).

You can choose what to do with just as much ease as you choose what not to do.

You have more options than your brain can possibly process.

You can choose anything or nothing or something or everything.

What do you choose?

You choose to stop reading this blog post. Close your browser window.
You choose to keep reading this blog post. Continue to the next sentence.

You are progressing through your very own tailor-made, hyper-personalized adventure, one choice at a time.

You might associate choice with “big” or “important” concepts: whether to buy a manual or automatic, a Colonial or a Tudor, paperback or the Kindle version. It’s easy to forget you’re even making choices when the robotic perfunctitude of your daily life turns most little choices into exercises in the process of elimination. You may choose to eat cereal for breakfast, but since you only have half a box of stale Cinnamon Toast Crunch left your choice of cereal is predetermined by your available resources.

You may also automatically assume that your choices are limited by the choices you have already made: you can’t choose a new career because you already chose one years ago, or you can’t choose to be healthy and fit because of all the other choices that made you not so healthy and fit. This seems true because you’ve formed habits. Habits are just big collections of choices that have turned into semi-permanent mental constructs like carefully stacked Lego blocks made of pure destiny. Even though they seem like cumulative life-definers, these habits are sickly and squishy, only as strong as the weakest choice in the theoretical chain.

You can, at any moment, make a decision that undoes all of your previous decisions, to your advantage or to your doom.

That is the great secret of free-thinking; you can and should and will make your own choices. Sure, some will be harder than others, and some might be unfairly influenced by external mind-goblins. But each choice is perfectly yours. Even though the outcome may be grim, you always have a choice to go against the forces pushing you in one direction.

You have to be active in the decision making process. Each thing you decide should be intentional and deliberate. Don’t get sucked into the undertow of choices that make themselves. If choices define your life, and you’re not actively making said choices, who is defining your life?

The great news is that our reality, even limited by our relatively small ability to perceive the electromagnetic spectrum, is exploding with choice. Sit and think about everything you can do right this second. You could jump up from your computer, go buy 25 kittens and a huge package of catnip and just roll around in kittens and catnip for hours. And that’s just one thing! No one is stopping you. Only you, questioning my sanity (and possibly your own, if you’re considering it), are stopping you from hopping in your Prius and going to PetSmart.

Very rarely are you in a position where your choices are truly limited. Sometimes, a choice that works best for you just requires some less-orthodox and deeply critical thinking. The concept of coming up with choices in seemingly no-choice situations has been around for a long time. A lot of people call it “problem solving.”

Following our passions comes down to making choices that feed, not starve. Being active instead of passive. Do you sit and watch another hour of TV, or do you use that hour to write a short story? Do you eat four donuts and sit around in your unwashed boxer-briefs, or do you eat a tasty spinach avocado sandwich and go for a jog? Do you diligently work on improving your skills, or just hope that one day someone will notice you and hand you a delicious burrito of success wrapped in a tortilla made of thousand dollars bills?

Do you put what makes you happy first, or do you put what makes other people happy first?

The world is at the doorstep of your brain. You just have to make some choices.

What do you choose?

You choose to keep putting your passions second or ignore them completely. Go to Kristen Lamb’s Blog: “The Land of Good Enough“
You choose to spend your time and energy on your passions. Go create something and be blissfully happy because you’re awesome.

I used to "play" these books all the time as a kind. And by "play" I mean "cheat my way through to see all the possible outcomes."

I used to “play” these books all the time as a kid. And by “play” I mean “cheat my way through to see all the possible outcomes.”

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