Down-time and stress

It’s funny what relaxes you.

There was a conversation on /r/AskScience about different body shapes – why some people only gain weight around the mid-section, while for others the weight is evenly distributed around the body.

I’m one of those people who only gain weight on my torso – a personal trainer at my gym once told me that it was the worst kind of body-type to have, because the closer your fat is to the heart, the higher your odds of a heart attack. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it’s handy in inspiring me to attend the gym more often.

(also handy is Gym-Pact, a website that my friend Mike put me onto. Pledge how often you’re going to go to the gym and your credit card details, and it’ll charge you a pre-decided amount every time you fail to go. If you hit your target, you get money from people who didn’t. It’s a clever little site, and I’m planning on signing up later this week.)

My Dad has the same body-shape, and so I had always assumed it was genetic. The comments of the reddit thread I was reading, however, suggested that where you put on weight was determined by hormones, specifically those produced when one was stressed. The more stressed you are, the more the weight focuses around the middle.

Now I haven’t independently verified this, but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, for the first time in my life, I stopped and went “Hang on, am I stressed?”

Turns out that I am! It’s not something that normally bothers me, but having attention drawn to it like that was a bit of a downer. Since then I’ve been thinking about it, and realised that I don’t really remember the last time I wasn’t stressed.

Things seem to feed into one another – this week was meant to be a chilled week for me, but yesterday I spent alternating between a rush editing job that I picked up and a Melbourne International Comedy Festival application for We Should Know Better; today has been a bit better, but I’ve had morning appointments almost every day this week and don’t really have any breathing time until Sunday.

Since learning that I’ve stressed, I’ve been feeling it (which sucks) but I’ve also become more aware of what I do to deal with stress.

I’m not good at time off. I can’t imagine not being run off my feet – as soon as I have time off, I fill it with more things to do. So my method of relaxing is to do something productive.

Sometimes it’s sorting files on my hard-drive: I find this to be very soothing. Often it’s working on All-That-Is, which is a nice form of “creativity without deadlines” that I quite enjoy. Very occasionally it’s playing a computer game, but I rarely find a game that doesn’t make me feel like I’m wasting my time. (puzzle games, that’s the trick. It’s so satisfying, finishing a puzzle.)

Recently, and this brings me back to the start of this post, it’s been organising my Kindle library. I’ve downloaded (one could say “pirated”) a bunch of books that I own in physical form (eBook piracy is surprisingly challenging) and I’ve been adding covers, correcting meta-tag fields…you know, all the stuff that one does on their downtime.

It’s funny what relaxes you.

Why I don’t secret.

There’s a big discussion in the erotica forum that I frequent (to follow trends, get opinions on covers, and be inspired by how well other people are doing) about keeping your choice of career a secret.

I’ve never been much for secrets. I had to keep a secret from SJ for about 3 months (more on that later) and it was horrible. I almost spilled the beans a number of times, and any time she was talking to someone who knew, I was on edge.

Never again, says I. It’s not fun, and I’m not good at it.

Pretty much as soon as I started making money from erotica, I started telling people. I didn’t broadcast it, or introduce myself to people by saying “me Peter, me write smut”, but if someone I knew asked what I was doing for money, I’d tell them.

A few people in my line of work just tell everyone in that they write romance; I do that on occasion, but mostly people I won’t interact with regularly – other extras on set, bored wait-staff, or my dentist.

Since I’ve told my family (who were all cool with it; all of them but my Dad asked if they could read a story or two) I’ve “come out” about smut-writing everywhere but Facebook. I didn’t want the wider world to know before my family did, simply because that would be a pretty crap way for (say) my sister to learn about it.

(Facebook is an interesting bag – I feel like I’m forcing it into people’s faces if I post about it on there. My extended family read my Facebook closely, and as most of them are religious, I suspect that they don’t really want to know about it.)

(If I ever start making serious dollars, I’ll post about it there, but until then I’m happy to keep it under wraps.)

I’m a big fan of Kevin Smith – I think he’s a great writer and an even better speaker. I’m actually a bigger fan of Kevin Smith the man than I am of his films – I’ve seen all his stuff except for Red State, and while I love Clerks, Clerks II and Dogma, the rest I can pretty much take or leave.

One thing that he heavily promotes is “owning your shit” (I can’t remember if that’s his exact words or not.) – the logic is that if you own your weaknesses (being fat or having a small dick or whatever) then no one can “dig it up” and try to use it against you.

I write porn. For years, it was just for fun – in the last few months, I’ve started making money from it. (about a year ago, I started writing for commission, but that was only ever spare change, and I’ve only recently begun trying to make a living from it.)

My best-sellers are what’s called “PI”, or Pseudo-Incest: step-fathers, step-siblings, adopted cousins etc. Consensual, fully-grown adult incest, I should specify. They sell well and I’m good at writing them – I have absolutely no attraction toward my own family, but I’ve always enjoyed the fiction of it – so that’s where most of my writing energy goes. They make up something like 70% of my income, with two books alone being about 25% of that.

I also have no shame about my body (except perhaps that I’m a little chubbier than I’d like) and so I’ve done a little bit of online porn. Nothing hardcore (though I don’t honestly have any objections to doing that either) – there are a few alternative erotica sites that pay you to do stuff like masturbate on-camera. I’ve done two videos so far, and they’ll be released in the next month or two.

But as well as all that, I’m also a kids’ puppeteer. For a while, I wondered if I should keep all the above under wraps (or even decide not to do it at all) – if I were to create the next Sesame Street, would it all come tumbling down when a video of me jerking off surfaced, or if people found the story “Backseat Fisting” amongst my catalogue?

If it does, so be it. Morally, I have no issue with the people behind “Play School” also being porn stars. I realise that I’m particularly liberal when it comes to these things, but as far as I know, there’s no connection between being filmed having sex and being dangerous to kids. If others disagree, that’s their problem, and if it means that they won’t buy my products (or the network refuses to air my shows, etc) then so be it. I’m not the kind of person who lives their life by the standards of others, and I don’t want to be.

You only get one chance at life, and it doesn’t make sense to me to make decisions based on what other people might think. If this attitude of mine results in bad things happening to me, then I’ll learn that lesson at the time.

Until then, I’m going to live my life as well as I know how to. And right now, that means writing chapter four of my latest commission (in which the adopted daughter seduces her mother to get her step-father’s attention) and then go home and redraft the story of the wizard who helps his owl work out how to best be an owl.

If it all goes up in flames, I’ll have this to hold on to: while it was happening, I had fun.

Have an interesting life.

 

I Want To Be A Producer

In the words of Mel Brooks' disappointingly not-as-good-as-I-thought-it-was-when-I-was-a-teenager musical, “I want to be a producer.”

As a kid, I always wanted to be an actor. (except for a few months when, as anyone with a decent teacher does, I wanted to be a teacher.) My friend Brent, in the last year of high school, said something that has always really stuck with me – “I always thought if you were going to make it, you'd make it as a writer.”

Maybe I'd just never even considered it as an option before then, but as soon as Brent suggested it, my brain started ticking, and I realised that I really enjoyed – loved, even – writing.

And, more importantly, that I was good at it.

(like all writers, I look back on my old stuff and cringe, but there's definite potential in most of it, and I was spending my time the two things you need to do to improve – writing and living a lot of life)

Now, seven years on, I've shifted my thinking again. I love writing, and I love being in front of the camera, but I think my real skill (and passion) lies in producing. I enjoy almost nothing more than helping to shape things, whether it's working with a collaborator on my own ideas, or being brought in to help knead someone else's brain-child into being.

I can think of nothing I'd enjoy more than spending the rest of my life as a producer, working on half a dozen projects at once, helping other people rewrite scripts, or pick actors, or tweak games for quiz shows, or just plain ole doing whatever needs to be done to get a project happening, get it working, and make it great.

“Unfortunately” isn't the word for it, because it's a necessary fact that I agree with, but…unfortunately, you need to have some success of your own before anyone will bring you in to produce their work. No one's going to listen to someone with a string of failures behind them, and I think I'm not sure I'd want to work with them if they did. So right now, I'm working on getting something working, trying to get make something that will get a name for myself out there.

I'm working on a dozen projects at once because I love it, and because there's nothing else I'd rather be doing. I'm trying to make them great because that's how you learn what works and what doesn't. And I focus on trying making them successful because I want to position myself as someone with a history of making successful works.

It's always seemed strange to me, that the only path to no longer being the person who prints the posters and buys the props is to first be the person who prints the posters and buys the props, but that's how the world works. We do the little things so that we can stop being the person who has to do the little things.

Me? I write because I don't necessarily want to be the person writing. I start projects that I think will work because I don't necessarily want to be the person starting the projects.

I want to be the person who helps other people get their projects off the ground. To do that, I have to first work on getting my projects off the ground. It's the only way to accomplish my dream of helping other people accomplish their dreams.

Assorted thoughts about sleep

When I was little, I used to hate sleep. It was such a waste of precious time, and I hated the fact that if we didn’t have to spend eight-plus hours laying down with our eyes closed each night, we’d be able to get so much more done!

In grade 11 (the second-final year of high school in Australia) I tried very hard in all my subjects (something that stopped as soon as grade 12 came long) and as a result got very little sleep. Since then, I’ve had a much stronger appreciation for no longer being awake – when I’m tired, it’s rare for me to choose anything over sleep. Absence makes the heart grow sleepier and all that.

Another new-found joy: naps. I truly love to nap.

I actually see this as a good thing – if we’re going to spend a third of our lives sleeping, I’d rather enjoy it, and since I embraced sleep and started doing more of it, I’ve been much more productive during my waking hours.

One of the purposes of dreams is your subconscious sorting out information that your conscious mind hasn’t had a chance to deal with yet, according to some site I read once. That’s why you’ll dream about whatever’s happening in your life at the moment, and it’s the reason I try not to go to sleep when I’m angry or stressed; I don’t want to spend all night dreaming about whatever it is that’s making me feel that way.

That fact might be true, or (more likely) my brain might just be extremely suggestible, but ever since I heard it my dreams have contained little tidbits of information that I’ve picked up over the previous few days. I learned that New Zealanders emigrate to Australia at a startling rate, and that featured in a dream the next night.

Reddit.com/r/todayilearned is pretty much a dream-generator for me.

About two weeks before we film each episode of We Should Know Better, I dream that it’s show-night, all the guests are there, the audience are filing in…and we’ve forgotten to write the questions. If you’ve ever seen an episode, it may or may not be obvious how much time we spend on the questions, but it ranges from “hours” to “days”. I don’t know why my subconscious insists on routinely freaking me out like that, but it does serve as an incentive to get the questions finished as early as possible.

Last time, I also dreamt that I forgot half of the guests’ names, and that the audience refused to sit where they could see the stage (which was in a giant football field, of course) because it didn’t have sufficient wheelchair access. I think Friday Night Lights is partially to blame for that one.

My brain adores many things, with “story structure” right near the top of the list. All my life, my brain has taken the random collection of images that come to you when you’re sleeping, and turned them into a structured story, with beginning, middle and end. Sometimes it has to fudge it a little, but the beauty of dreams is that you can retroactively add information in. Getting to the end of the dream and need a twist to have been set up from the beginning? Done. Dream-style.

The best description for it that I can think of is “a Peter-specific movie, each and every night.” I’ve written more than a few of them down, and the last TV pilot I filmed actually came directly from one of these well-structured dreams. (though it turned from a sitcom starring me as the sidekick into a drama featuring Laura Jane Turner in the role my brain wrote for me. I’ll forgive her some day.)

Sleep, if you can’t tell, is a delight for me, and even if it wasn’t mandatory, I’d still probably indulge from time to time. Waking up, not so much.

My absolute favourite way to wake up is to someone I love bringing me a cup of tea. My girlfriend is now the one who sleeps in, but when I used to work nights, she’d wake up and want to hang out with me. The deal we struck was that she could wake me up any time after 10, as long as she was holding a cup of tea.

Since I started working from home and getting up at a more reasonable hour, I’ve set four alarms on my phone, for 8:00am, 8:05am, 8:10am and 9:00am. On mornings when I’m springing out of bed at the sound of the first alarm, the rest are superfluous, and mainly serve to remind me to actually start working when it hits 9. On mornings when I desperately need more sleep (ie: Monday mornings), I wake up at 8, turn the next two alarms off, and allow myself an hour of extra sleep.

(the 8:05 and 8:10 are because I’ve been known to wake up, turn the alarm off, and then go straight back to sleep. The threat of two more alarms generally makes me tense enough to avoid drifting off again, though there have been times in my life when I’ve woken up, turned all three alarms off, and then slept through whatever important event I’d set them for. Most recently: the surgery I’d been waiting more than three months for.)

(they took me even though I was three hours late. I was overwhelmingly grateful, and before important appointments I now set even more alarms, and put my phone somewhere that I can’t reach from the bed.)

As of today, I’m setting one more daily alarm – 8:30pm. Before I started living the 9-5 lifestyle, my bed-time would range from midnight to 2am. If I do that while trying to get up early and do a full day’s work, the following morning ends up consisting mainly of me staring into the screen and making endless cups of tea. The 8:30 alarm is to tell me to start wrapping up what I’m doing, and get ready for bed. Not go to bed, but to at least stop staring at screens until the next morning.

We had people around for dinner last night, and afterwards chatted for several hours, and then watched TV for a few hours more. It was a great night, and I still dragged myself out of bed at 9am this morning, but it’s just hit 11:15 and I’m only just now finishing my first-thing-in-the-morning blog post.

I make sure to structure my Mondays so I don’t have to do anything wildly creative. Today, for example, I am going to watch over some speeches, find some snappy stand-alone quotes, and assemble a rough cut of a trailer for a client. I may also do some photoshopping. My brain is too fuzzy to do anything that requires any more skill than that.

Writing? That’s Tuesday work.

What are your unusual sleep-based habits? Do you use alarms, or wake up organically? What are your dreams like? Tell me your weird sleep stories, because I actually find these things interesting.