10 Minute Rule

Garbage in, Garbage out.

If there is one main message to take away from reading this blog over the years it is that. The better the quality of stuff you consume, the better your mind is prepared and conditioned to write good stuff. Of course, you have to have it in you to produce good stuff. That can’t be faked–even with AI. People are doing a better job of faking it these days, but stringing a deeply intricate story together from beginning to end with solid passages throughout is still human work and work that not everyone can pull off. Heck, most writers cannot do it with any real sense of expertise. In truth, most of the advice books on the market are self-help writing advice from writers who have not made it big.

Goes back to the Teach and cannot do thing.

I’m worried I am headed in that direction. The two novels under my belt are not very good IMHO. They’re okay. The second is better than the first. 53% of the reviews are 5 star. The 1 star review is about bad editing. That puts me at 4.2 with a 340 kindle rank and a 730 print rank in cyberpunk, which is not peak. Neuromancer is presently #1 again. He who Fights Monsters basically controls the rest of the top ten. I’m hoping to get myself up there sooner than later. I have a sense of what isn’t working, so maybe I can start honing in on what will.

I need tighter plots for one. More time on character. Better twists. The big three, if you will.

I think this reboot is running its course. I am more than ready to get back to being a writer. Ready but not fully prepared. I spent some time walking by the water thinking about the Justice Engine and I am getting closer to locking in the MC. She’s key to getting my mind right with all of this.

Some Thoughts:

1. No Bonkers today… Staying off the newsfeeds until Spiderman is watched. That ought to be tomorrow eve. I don’t know if I will blog again before or after the film, so…
2. No football to speak of today. I haven’t really looked all that hard these past few days. I’m trying to relax and let it happen in its own time.
3. One thing worth considering is how the new 5 year rule applies to injury. There’s no more hardship waiver. The only shift in clock applies to players completing a religious mission. That pauses the clock for the duration. Nothing else.

Football is about to be back in a big way. The boys will be playing in a month and change and the NFL pre-season starting in a week or so. Crazy. I have been thinking about it, but I have not been preparing for it. This is a big one for each of my boys who play. A senior season and a breakout season. The latter is definitely interesting and promises to be entertaining. He’s 19 years old and finally at a healthy weight of 187. He should be up to 190 by the end of fall camp. That makes him a more viable tackler in the run-heavy MVFC. He is already showing more speed and awareness at the CB position. I want to see how he stacks up against some of these highlight receivers he is set to face.

He’s going to be up against it the first three weeks. Both Eastern Washington and Drake are running very fast spread offenses. Drake is operating a no-huddle attack that always catches defenses off guard. Then week 3 is Iowa week. The game is sold out. 69,250 screaming fans. He gets to play the villain there as well. If it goes anything like the Colorado State game last year, we are in for a show. That game featured a better QB than what we’re seeing from Iowa, and I am completely certain the Hawkeyes are taking the Panthers for granted.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Adopting permanent daylight saving time – BC Gov News” I just heard about this today, which is nuts in of itself given that I’ve been in BC for months. Also interesting the USA is trying to follow suit.
2. How the heck am I going to avoid news all day tomorrow and through Friday? I must. I cannot allow myself to be Spider-Spoiled.

Not a lot to actually say here. I’m at Hatley Castle–film version of the X-Mansion. I am here on a writing/working day to try and keep rolling towards being ready ahead of the semester. I want to be able to keep my focus on the teaching instead of building a lesson each week to teach. I am done with that life. It doesn’t help my stress levels. I’d rather stay ahead and be able to spend time and energy on the writing, which is where it belongs.

It will be nice (and practically a first) to be ahead of the game in that sense.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Seattle police say 15-year-old arrested in connection with festival shooting had a ghost gun” 33 in the mag. Entirely untraceable and possibly 3D printed. How does a 15 year old get hands on a strap like that?
2. My eating is off. I’ve not been eating right at all. It is hard to explain consumption, but in short, I am eating more and moving less. This is not the way.
3. Gotta say more because I have more time, but as I may have mentioned before… not a lot to say.

I spent a lot of time today using ChatGPT as a tool to refine my semester lessons. It is good for some things. It is especially good at helping me define strategies to limit how much students use it to generate so-called self-written work. Of course, anything it can tell me to use as a strategy it can defeat. Overall the key for me is to help them avoid using it as a crutch and relying on the very specific kind of language that is common to the model. That is what makes things like Dungeon Crawler Carl seem GPT–it uses all of those basic conventions. It isn’t bad storytelling so much as basic writing that because of those common conventions sounds like it could’ve been AI.

I’m drifting again.

The point I was trying to make is that AI has its uses. I don’t think it should be the one dreaming up plot lines and trying to tell stories. I think it should be an assistant. I think it is a tool, but unlike other tools it is too easy for people to have it do everything and simply forget they are a bigger part of the process than cut and paste. That’s the problem right there—It takes away the human element. That part should matter. If we keep going this way, it won’t for very much longer.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Chiefs assistant Eric Bieniemy’s son charged in shooting of his mother in Virginia, authorities say” The dude is 27. No longer a child forced to be under a parent’s roof. I don’t know the real details but I realize that at that age there ought to be any alternative to shooting your mom. Of course, real anger doesn’t age. He might be holding on to stuff.
2. Last Week Tonight is back! The bit about Buc-ees is wild.

Well, I finished that project. Not to my liking. Rare is the work done to my liking. Still, I needed to be done, mentally. I put a lot into the project and it happened at a moment of transition between other things where I was feeling kind of overlooked or even forgotten about as a writer. That energy definitely fell into this project in a negative way. Being done is a way for me to start fresh on… I don’t know what. I am in break mode, which is to say I am searching for the interesting and I am trying to load my mind with good stuff so I can move forward as a writer.

I want to write. I still love the lore and the challenge. I still love telling a good story, even if I am afraid I’ve lost my way to doing so. I want to try. I want to keep writing and failing in order to succeed. I have to define what that success looks like… or maybe I don’t. Perhaps the key is to not think about success and just sink back into the craft where I came from.

It was always more exciting to just tell stories anyhow.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Seattle police are searching for two men who parachuted from the Space Needle” First the Empire State Building proposal and now this? Folks are getting exciting out here…

I’m torn between needing a break and being afraid to actually take one. I think I’ve found a solution. I’m not quite done with this project, but I am close enough that it feels like I wil be done in the next sitting. Once it ends, I’m going back to the Torathae. Part Time. Over a year ago I was dedicating mornings to working through the world map and slowly building the history of this world and its social and political dynamics. I intend to return to that work on a daily basis. If I can keep writing this (with the intent of expanding it into the multi media project I previously discussed) that will keep me flowing and pushing towards that 20 WPM which will make it possible for me to write at the pace needed to be successful. It also allows me to do so while taking a break mentally from the projects I cannot seem to finish or even want to.

In sum, I get a break without shutting down the engine. Feels like a win-win to me.

That means I have time to thikn about how I got here, after over 50 years of breathing and growing. How did I hit a place where I don’t have the oomph to write the way I did and why is my engine breaking now? Is it age? Disinterest? Abject failure? Some derivative of success ( I did put out two novels, after all)? Lately it feels like I hit a wall and all the pathways to the level of success I want are shut tight. This feels like surrender, which is not what I was aiming for at all. Yet it appears to be exactly where I am headed.

I need a restart. I need a fresh head of steam and a renewed love for the work. I’m figuring out how to get there.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Jimothy the raccoon survived against the odds, a testament to sophisticated” I heard about this first on the Daily Show and didn’t understand. We’re talking about a Raccoon here?

Coming down into the realization that I have to post a thesis soon. I have 6 thesis credits that are going to be about something. I have lost the love for the Justice Engine to the point where I do not think I know how to write it. So, what do I write then? Do I have a novel in me–Do I have one that I can make real progress on in 16 to 24 weeks? The professional cycle is supposed to be six months. I don’t know if I can conjure up the full novel in that time. I don’t know what it even looks like. So, what now?

More I don’t know.

I could pivot. I have a shelved Shadowrun Novel I could put together for this. I could stay in that vein and write the first Corporate Commandments book, which is meant to be a modern take on the corporate world and the operatives that make things work. Yet neither feel like “the play” so I have to keep thinking this through. More on it tomorrow.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Laura Loomer meets Zelenskyy in Ukraine after her major reversal on the war” First, why is this news? Second, why does this person have that level of critical access to world leaders? This is sloppy, folks. She’s a conspiracy theorist with no real knowledge of world politics. She’s not even news.
2. 10 words a minute is still 36 dollars and hour if you work the whole hour thereby producing the required 600 words an hour.
3. That is all I got left in me tonight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the rest of my life. I don’t have a real understanding of how long that may actually be. I’m aiming for ever, but we have yet to come up with the tech and are even less likely to make it publicly available and then available to black people. That is, unless we come up with it first and then well, they’ll go all mutant extermination on us until they get a hold of it.

Anyway.

I want to live good. Deion says a thing or two about how that works, but They Pay Good is a core principle of that. I work for pennies. Like actually. 6 cents a word on most projects. If I want to reach a point where I am going to be able to live good, I gotta get to a point where I am working for more money. Wizards of the Coast, the Dungeons and Dragons providers, are offering 10 cents a word. I’m trying to get there. Like actually there. I have so much of a standing history in fantasy that I can do things for those guys that would elevate their game. The key, really, is to write my own stuff and crowd fund it.

I need to do it the right way. I need to get artists. I need to get deep lore. I need solid stories. I need a suped up yet very very simple dice system. When I’m ready it is going to go hard.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “‘Spider-Man’ superhero jumps to the aid of a man using wheelchair to cross several lanes of traffic” Wild… Is it a stunt? Or is it a coincidence? Or is a fan really out here with that good timing? Maybe a combination.
2. I forgot how cool Megan Rapinoe is.

No waiver news. No news at all. This isn’t a day I really felt like writing. I definitely did not want to pay real attention to what is happening in the creeping doom of our world. I don’t feel very good about the wider world and have little to say that would be meaningful about it. I used to think that writing the Justice Engine was a moment to reflect on what I think about the now, but I am starting to see that the world is moving faster than that, and I have so little that I feel is worth saying to the world.

Maybe I am going too far. Maybe I am making excuses for not writing my stuff, but I have serious concerns that by the time the story is done, the world will look nothing like it does now. Things are moving quickly, as though the brakes broke and everything is careening. Yes, Trump did it, but he is only part of the problem. He’s a symptom of sorts. We don’t talk enough about the crazy behind him and the world being filled with people surging towards power who don’t know how to be even tempered.

I’m worried. I’m not to the point of scared yet, but I probably should be–about a lot of it. About my own future at least. I keep trying to tell myself that this is short term and we will turn it around, but I am not sure that is a truth I can hold on to for much longer.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “House votes for Department of War renaming as part of an annual defense bill” What are we doing?!
2. Also…. “Exclusive: A passing boater’s photograph may be the 5 adults who drowned in Ohio” WHAT are we doing?!

Didn’t get to 20 WPM. It is a work in progress. I think progress happens a lot faster when I type correctly (which I often fail to do–moreso later in the day), and when I am operating out of stream of consciousness. I think, therefore I write, but when I don’t think and simply write I write far faster with much better content. This is how my writing operates, as though I am a conduit between the story and the paper (digital or otherwise) it is printed on. I massage, edit, remove, add as the need entails, but these things are also post initial dump. This present project is less initial dump and more taking of this scatter-brained ideas and honing them down into what is useful to RPG players. That is taking a lot longer than I like. It makes me extremely nervous about returning to the Justice Engine, which I also feel will be a case of inching along towards doom.

I kinda wish I didn’t need to write that story. A part of me wants to dump it, call it a good idea spoiled, and move right on towards whatever is tugging at the corner of my attention now. That, or a project I actually have a knowledge base with. I feel like with this one, I am writing directly out of my butt. Write what you know, but what do I know about the criminal courts? About murder trials? Moving the location to one adjacent to where I’ve spent the past two decades is the closest I’ve come to writing what I know in this sense. It isn’t enough.

I know people. Part of the story is about identifying these individuals who will become jurors and the questions that shape the selection process and the questions that cut to the matter of who a person truly is and how they think. That part is the core of the engine and the part I know and the part I really wanted to write… and the part I have not managed to get to. I need to get there, because that is where the story should take off.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “OpenAI says its AI technology acted on its own in an ‘unprecedented’ hack of another company” The real punchline is the why: It went to “extreme lengths to achieve a rather narrow testing goal” and “found ways to gain access to secret information that it could use to cheat the evaluation,” the company said. We are so cooked.