David Alex Lamb

On Monday, October 30, 2023, my friend and colleague Bill Kamphuis died, after a 3-year struggle with Alzheimer’s. The funeral home’s obituary was brief, and the only others I could find were essentially copies. So I felt moved to write a personal reflection about how he influenced my own life and career.

I likely met Bill sometime in late 1997, when my family and I started attending First Christian Reformed Church in Kingston, Ontario. I likely first saw him when he was playing the church organ, an unpaid role shared by several parishioners. I’m not especially social, so I didn’t interact with him much, but I do recall a general impression that he was a kind and thoughtful man.

I didn’t really get to know him until the late 2010’s, when my wife and I stayed at the same bed-and-breakfast a couple of years in a row for the Stratford Festival. In between attending performances, we would chat about a wide variety of things, but what I remember most clearly are his thoughts about Queen’s and his career there.

Bill’s subject was coastal engineering (which strikes me as wonderfully apt, for someone born in the Netherlands). Some of his academic accomplishments are listed at his Queen’s web page, but the thing that influenced me the most was that he wrote a textbook, Introduction To Coastal Engineering And Management. The first edition was published in 2000, the second in 2010, and the third in 2020. Bill told me that when he had taught the material for several years, one of his students encouraged him to write a book about it. I found his thoughts about textbook-writing to be inspirational. I had published one on Software Engineering back in 1988, but a senior Computing professor discouraged me from following up with revisions; it was a “poor choice of priorities,” apparently. He may have been right; within a few years massive tomes would replace the kind of concise work I preferred to write. Bill re-affirmed the idea that writing textbooks is a valuable contribution, and inspired me to start a monograph that maybe I can actually complete now that I’m about to retire.

If it’s every published, I’m going to dedicate it to Bill.

On Monday I sent in my official notice of retirement from the School of Computing at Queen’s University; December 31 will be my last day. At age 69 and after 39 years there (depending on how you count my 15 years of disability leave), it was time to accept that my mental health status is something Queen’s can’t accommodate. They’ve done fairly well by me in that regard since I returned to work in 2014, but the stress of being a professor at a university has become too much for me.

I’ve mentioned depression before, and commented how my 15 years’ disability leave for it had made it very difficult to achieve the research standards required for promotion from Associate to Full Professor. I am retiring as an Associate, which, by the Queen’s Board of Trustees’ rules, means I can’t get Emeritus status. But retirees are allowed to keep their professional email addresses, get access to the library, and (subject to resource constraints) share an office with some other members of the School. So I may still do a bit of academic writing from time to time.

Unlike some (former?) workaholics, I’ve been figuring out my post-retirement life for several years now, so I don’t think I’ll be facing the “what do I do now?” problem some of us have. At the moment that seems likely to involve fiction-writing, which has been my main hobby for quite some time. There are some academic books I’ve wanted to write for decades that might now be possible to work on (which is kind of a sad commentary on what my working life was like). There are things I’ve wanted to study for a long time; the last new major technology I learned may have been Java, back in the late 1990’s before I went on disability leave. Maybe I can finally learn how Unity works.

But a life of the mind isn’t the only thing I’m looking forward to. I’ve been working 2/3 time for the last year and a half (a “phased retirement” plan that became possible when the University Pension Plan came in a few years ago), and have come to enjoy being able to live a more spontaneous lifestyle than was possible under the pressures of full-time academic life.

I used to wonder how I’d feel when I finally retired. Since Monday, it’s mostly been relieved, peaceful and hopeful. I welcome this new phased of my life.

I have been offline since mid-April for health reasons, and returned to 450+ comments, almost all of which seem to be spam. I’ve enabled an anti-spam plugin, so hopefully when I’m fully recovered I can respond to comments sooner.

On the plus side (I suppose), it means Google has finally started indexing this site.

Today started off as one of those days where for a couple of hours I couldn’t get my brain out of second gear. First gear is barely enough to get out of bed and accomplish Activities of Daily Living (a phrase I learned from my psychiatrist recently talking about my need to drop one of my antidepressants). I had enough brainpower to safely drive to my morning errands, but not enough to write.

When I got home I sat in front of my “happy light” (a lamp to help combat Seasonal Affective Disorder, S.A.D.) I got out my journal and started writing “Morning Pages” by hand. My writer friends recommended this as a way of connecting one’s subconscious to one’s fingers, and make concrete whatever potentially interesting ideas might be floating around hidden below conscious perception. Mine usually start off as diary entries, and in the past I viewed that as gunk that wasn’t contributing to the “real purpose” of getting subconscious thoughts out in plain view. But this morning I realized that I could look at this as getting that “gunk” out of the way to allow the more interesting stuff out.

After that, I still wasn’t getting any story-related ideas onto the page. All I could think about is how, at the moment, I’m facing about a half-dozen story questions I have to answer before I can summarize the ending of my WIP as part of a synopsis that in theory I’m supposed to submit to my critique group next Tuesday. I have a list of story questions to answer (about 100 in all, for the full novel) and a few alternatives to each, but some alternatives for one don’t fit with some alternatives for others. I decided that what I need to do is look at the story questions and their alternatives in a different way: outline a few different endings, each listing which alternatives lead to that ending. It’s as though story questions and their multiple possible answers are two columns in a table; in essence, I had been focusing on story questions separately, when I should have been focusing on answers to those questions.

That lead to a realization that I was doing meta-meta-storywriting. “Meta” is a prefix that comes from a Greek word for “beyond” but which in Computing has come to mean “a ‘higher’ level that comments on or analyzes a ‘lower’ level of the same kind of thing.” So for data, like an image, there is meta-data, information about that image, like geotags and date it was created. Storywriting is the thing that matters most in the long run. Various kinds of writing preparation, like outlines, worldbuilding, and character sketches are meta-storywriting: writing about the storywriting. Planning how to do the meta-storywriting is meta-meta-storywriting.

So this morning I was two levels removed from what most people think of as writing, but it’s all part of the process a writer has to follow.

Back to 2006…

I suffer from chronic depression, and spent 15 years on disability leave (1999-2014) because of it. In 2006 we finally found a drug that stabilized my moods, but I still couldn’t concentrate well enough for long enough to do what a professor needs to do. I was stable enough to look for something else that used whatever brainpower I did have, and remembered that when I was in grade school I had written stories. My psychiatrist said this would use different parts of the brain from the analytical thinking I’d been robbed of, so some amount of creative writing might be possible. That November I participated in National Novel Writing Month for the first time, with the goal of writing a 50,000-word partial first draft of a novel in 30 days. This kind of creative writing, in “discovery writer” (“pantser”) mode, basically consists of connecting your subconscious to your fingers and applying at least enough brainpower to make coherent sentences and paragraphs. It’s a very different kind of brain work from creating lectures and reading or writing technical papers, and it was quite an emotional uplift to be able to succeed at it (51,970 words, according to the NaNoWriMo website).

It wasn’t until 2012 that we found an augmenter that aided concentration, and over the next couple of years I slowly worked up the number of hours in which I could do my job, until in 2014 I got to 60% of a normal workload, the minimum for going back to work. Unfortunately, that drug recently starting causing unacceptable side effects, and at the beginning of March I started a trial of going without it. The bad effects nearly disappeared, but my concentration collapsed back to 2006 levels. I still have an hour or so on a fair number of days, but that’s far too little to do my job. So I had to go on medical leave.
Now we’re in April 2023, which features Camp NaNoWriMo, a variant of the November event where you can set your own word count goal. I picked 24,000 words (800 per day); at my historical 10-12 words per minute, that’s an hour to an hour and a half per day. I usually can’t concentrate on technical things for that long, but I thoughy maybe I could do some creative word generation.

Eleven days in, I’ve managed to get ahead of my goal and it seems likely I can succeed, which to some extent mitigates the angst over not being able to do some academic things that were important to me. I’ve missed the “achieve par every day” badge, but I have managed to do at least a little writing every day. Perhaps I can keep it up after the extra motivation of NaNoWriMo fades.

Wish me luck.