Author Archives: Brian B Baker

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About Brian B Baker

I write horror stories, review books, and talk about depression, and how I get through all of it.

Finding the Life-blood of Writing Through Failure.

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Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald

Stumbling through the world we find our place. It can be at a table, desk or it could be standing all day waiting tables; either way, we’re finding.

Through our stumbling and our constant search, we may come to an impasse, a place where everything has fallen down around us and we discover that we’re stronger than we believed, or that we may be lost in a cycle of failure.

Failure is normal, and regardless of what your parents say, failure is good, we can learn from failure.

In failure we can find the things we’ve done wrong previously. We can discover far off discontent that we never knew existed. But only through the times we fail can this come to fruition.

Falling on our faces, dirt in our ears, sand caked in our hair, that is the failure which brings about the change we need for ourselves.

We’ve entered the time when our life or writing are the lifeblood of our souls.

Life-blood, that’s a hell of a thing. It’s the thing which drives us, pushes us and makes us commit to the life of a writer, the long nights, dreary weekends stuck in the house and the celebratory days when we get published.

Our life-blood pours through us, it connects us to each other and makes us strive to write better through the failures, through the droughts of lost words and at the end of it, we discover.

In this discovery, we find ourselves, not the failures we thought we were, and certainly not the people our parents believe us to be.

It’s not our failures which are added up, but our successes.

 

Stemming the Tide of Depression with Transcendental Meditation

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In September my grandfather passed away and there were a few things about that which set me into a severe depression which no one noticed, not even my wife.

The depression lasted until late February, but it’s been a recurring thing for me since. I’ll get all melancholy, and now that my wife knows what I was going through, she knows what to look for.

Since breaking through the depression, I’d found myself going in and out of depression. Thoughts of suicide ran rampant through my mind on a daily basis during the depression, and lets just say it’s a good thing I don’t own a firearm.

My reasons for trying Transcendental Meditation (TM) stem a lot from the depression I fell into, caused by events following my grandfather’s passing.

In early November I got shingles, I knew this was from the stress of my grandfather’s passing. I also understood that I was beginning to spiral, though I hid it well from my wife, family and co-workers.

The catalyst to get me into TM was a breakdown I had at work, caused by an interaction with a co-worker, who said, “I don’t care what’s wrong with you.” His statement sent me over the cliff.

After work that day I cried in my car for twenty minutes. It was hard sobbing, uncontrollable crying. The type of crying you’d do as a kid. I called my wife on my way home and told her I needed to do something, and soon.

After that day, I knew I had two choices, be done with living, or truly start living. TM is my way to live.

When I attended the first introduction meeting I knew I would do it before I walked in. The next week I took my first lesson. That was one week ago. I feel more awake, and for the first time in a very long time, I feel alive.

TM is a lot like other meditations, except for the mantra. When you learn TM, your teacher gives you a mantra, it’s a word, phrase or combined words which create a tone, that centers you in a way that makes your body drop all its defenses and sends you spiraling into a deep pool of bliss.

I can’t tell you my mantra, because each one is special to each individual. I keep it as a sacred thing.

I can only speak of my experience, but TM was my last stop before jumping. I’ve backed away from the cliff in the last week and I’m now more comfortable in my skin than I’ve been since before my parents were divorced, when I was 8.

If you have any question or comments, please ask them.

 

Diving to the Source, my First Experience with Transcendental Meditation

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Have you ever felt like the world wasn’t what you were told? Have you ever felt that there was someone hiding behind a curtain and eventually they’d jump out and say, “Gotcha”?

I’ve been following a path that many of my generation have. I moved away from faith-based religions and into Eastern Philosophy and have considered myself Buddhist for at least ten years, maybe longer.

In the last few years that hasn’t been enough for me. My meditation practice had fallen off, or been non-existent.

A lot of this was because of a hectic life of a day-job, wife, kids, writing schedules and in not practicing my Mindfulness Meditation, I’ve become more angry and lost faith in who I am, was and where my life was headed.

I wanted something more than Mindfulness Meditation was offering.

My search began to narrow in the last six months.

I watched a speech by David Lynch about Transcendental Meditation, and from there I listened to his audio book of “Catching the Big Fish”, after that I listened to Transcendence by Norman E. Rosenthal on audio.

After listening to those as well as reading Science of Being and Art of Living: Transcendental Meditation I found myself in a place I hadn’t been in a long time; I was without direction.

On Monday I had my first TM session and though I was a bit apprehensive and thought that maybe, just maybe there would be a man with a small alien which he would attach to my spinal column, nothing close to that happened.

The truth is, I’ve never felt something as profound, spiritually like TM. The session was easy and transcending was easier that I thought it would be.

It was as though I were on an elevator and the cable snapped, but I could still control the descent.

The closest feeling I can compare it to is the sound of my kids the first time I heard their cries, it was that life altering.

This post is different from my usual writing posts, because honestly, after my first TM session I feel different.

Going forward I believe my sessions with TM will help me along my path, as well as lead me to new ones, but going forward my perspective is forever altered.

If you have any questions, please ask them below. If I can answer them, I will.

Writing and the Flicker of the Candle

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In the corner it flickers, stretching shadows, emphasizing the darkness and collapsing things around it into small dark little balls.

The candle, though small, creates its own world and as it dances in the night air we see all that it creates.

For every candle we light, another shows up in our dreams. The wick can be worn, tired, burnt, but it stands there reminding us that it was once lit.

For every story we write, the wick burns farther down, but that is a deception for the wick may look worn, tired and burnt but it’s still there.

The reality is that we look at the wick, never the candle. The wick is where our stories come from, the candle is only holding them, just as the wick holds the light.

The darkness, though eclipsed by the light, may be its own deception. Is the darkness hiding from the light, or is the light hiding from the darkness.

We see the light stretch across the room, but the darkness, it hides in the corners, in the folds of the candle wax. It comes out when the light fades, drifting up through the wax, around the top and spreading out across the room.

The darkness, willing itself through the spaces, the nooks and crannies finding its way to the places in the room where the light once stood.

But in its search for more places to hide, the darkness seeks something greater, it wants to be inside our mind.

In the darkness of our mind we create the darkness which stood in the wax. We create monsters, killers and anti-heroes.

But in this darkness we pull the darkness in our reality and put it on the page every day.

Whether our reality is disturbed by the things we pull from our darkness is another thing, but putting that darkness on the page is our release, much the way our night-time dreaming is a release from our daily activity.

In our release we set free the darkness to share with others.

 

Writing and Ignoring the Grand Bargain

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What reality is this? What fantasy have we created that makes us feel more important than those around us?

The dawn comes and with it the light, the brightness and the foundations of who we are. Throughout our writing there are two things that come together as a means to halt our writing.

  1. Our lack of faith in our writing.
  2. Those who wish to distract us or deride us from the task of writing.

Each of these are part of the Grand Bargain of Writing.

The bargain is that we knowingly accept what we’re getting into, even if we don’t understand what we’re getting into.

We knowingly accept that we may become famous as other writers have done. But, we also take into account that we’re alone in our task of writing.

The solitude of writing is one the things a lot of people either can’t handle or they’re worried about other things going wrong.

For myself, the things I worry about are the ability to multitask all of the things I have going on. From day-job, blog, wife, kids and my fiction writing.

My biggest worry is that something will get lost in balancing act.

My reason for this has a lot to do with childhood and the things I’ve dealt with my entire life concerning abandonment issues, which plays into the worry of losing my wife or kids through the solitary life of a writer.

I risk losing things I care about because I’m a writer and have known that for over twenty years, it just took me a while to take a chance on it, and that my wife supports me and tells me she just wants me to write makes the risk less, but it’s still in the back of my mind every time I sit down.

My day-job isn’t much of worry and honestly if it weren’t for the healthcare I’d quit.

But a lot of day-jobs are like that.

Reality and the life we choose as writers, the solitary life of doing something we love, something that we feel in our soul, is enough for us to say to hell with the Grand Bargain and do it anyway.