Author: admin

as the school year winds down I find myself locked in on. Lot of projects in the home and a bunch of responsibilities at work. It can be all consuming and it also reminds me that I need to take time for myself. I’m a person that ultimately lives for the people I love. I thrive on seeing everyone happy and focusing on their goodwill to the point where I can forget about myself and my needs to the point of truly losing touch with what I want and who I want to be for myself.

I don’t take very much me time. I don’t spend a ton of money or energy on myself. Heck even these ten minutes are forward facing reflections designed with a trader in mind. Now that things are getting busy I have to remind myself to find time for me and to take care of myself and ultimately to think about what it is that makes me happy independent of anyone else in my life, which is a difficult thing to do.

Xavier Restrepo is a lie.

I thought the guy might cook, being the close friend of his QB. However, he wasn’t even a blip on the points radar. Luckily I only wasted a roster spot–not a starter spot on him. Even with that bit of luck, I still got demolished. I went from 4th to 9th in one week of play. It isn’t looking up. I play the #3 team this week and with a win I could move back closer to 4, but 4 through 9 are within one game of each other and the point spread is what is weighing me down. I need to get ahead of these guys in wins to be in a safer space and, perhaps a 4/5 playoff game. Unfortunately, the 109 predicted points is nowhere close to the 121 my opponent is supposed to reach. This is a bad look where a loss could put me out of contention. I need to make a move to get right, but what?

I need WR help. I’m neck deep in TEs but that is useless to me right now–especially now with my main two getting prime targets. I need a new face in the WR room. I am taking a flyer on DeVaughn Vele of the Saints. I know little about him other than the big performance last week. Here is hoping it is a glow up and not a fluke…

I found ten in the early part of my day between prepping for classes and voting for the future Chair of my division. Spoiler Alert: Old Chair is my pick for the new Chair. I’m good with change when change is good. But enough about my sordid work life. This is supposedly a blog about writing and the writing life. One of the more tortured aspects of that life is getting paid. I don’t get paid often or well, which is why I’m teaching so much. That old saying, “If you can’t do it, teach it” does apply to a significant extent in the creative arts. I haven’t had the break I needed to continue my lifestyle and write full time. I’m also not in a place in my life where I can pare back too much. As I said, I’m good with change when change is good.

What would be good is actually getting paid relatively on time. I presently deal with a 8-18 month lag on payments. The 8 is being generous. The 18 might be as well. For example, the Voltron RPG was released in January. I have not been paid. Now when I say released I’m not talking about when I finished the writing or when the book was finished… Yeah. It’s like that in the RPG world.

I need to get back to novels.

Some days the Demons get you. This turned out to be one of them days. I woke up just past midnight and didn’t get back to sleep till after 4, which only afforded me another hour of sleep. I thought that, on that empty brain, I could get work done. I have tried all day, but the mind is not where it should be. I’m drained and distracted and completely unaware of how to put myself back on track.

The real key is sleep and let this day go. I don’t really know that there is too much I need to complete today that cannot be handled in the morning. I will try to get a little more handled before I’m through, but actual writing is out of the question. I just don’t have it in me, as you can see here.

The lesson to learn from this is to always have low hanging fruit available. Do the hard stuff when you’re at peak, because it requires your peak. This way when you are feeling less than, you can easily pivot to the lighter work that doesn’t require full attention. I’m doing that with light grading and some paperwork. It is all I have in me.

I got to 451 yesterday. It is funny how the word speed fluctuates and the variables that impact that. Spelling for one is an issue for me. I’ve already fixed four errors in these two lines of writing. That slowed me down. There is also how fast my mind is moving. There are the distractions I face–for example I am battling the noise of one of my kids loudly watching yet another youtube video on the NBA. He is low key trying to turn himself into a basketball encyclopedia and generally only shares that vast wealth of data with one of his brothers unless choosing to weaponize said data in a moment when someone (anyone) else doesn’t know a specific fact in at a specific moment. You know, encyclopedia stuff.

There is the speed of typing. I don’t really know my max (which is again hampered by errors–four–no five again in this sentence alone). I know I’ve gotten slower over the past few years, which at my age is a telling sign of decline. Most of it is error and the rest is creeping arthritis. I can say this about the writing speed: I go faster when I am looking at the keyboard and faster still when I am doing that and not actually thinking about the fact that I am typing. If we ever reach the point in my lifetime of being able to directly translate thought into words on screen, I will be writing a lot more per blog. A lot more in general I’d argue.

That last barrier to speed is my mind itself–namely how fast these ideas fly to and through my conscious. I have no idea what the speed limit on that action is. This too is effected by background impacts (yet another basketball video is revving up and I am annoyed). I would like to reach a pace where I am writing at the speed of thought. I feel like that would produce both the best blogs and some of the best writing I’ve ever done. Getting it out and on paper is always the hardest part. Revision is a fun dance through what I said vs what I actually want the reader to read.

All in all, I write faster when I am looking at the keyboard, locked in, and thinking about the writing and not the mechanical aspect of what is occurring. When I can do that and not make so many errors, I can get out a decent amount of words in ten minutes.

430 this time.

I am writing this in the midst of a blackout. It happened during Stranger Things. It started with the light flickering. It is the one on a dimmer—the only one of its kind in the house. Nothing else seemed odd. Then it went out. Then everything else did. Seemed like a perfect time to settle into the Ten Minute Rule.

I have a theory about fear. The more you are willing to open your mind to the possibility of things, the more the fear you generate from horror and the like becomes a present thing inside of you. I feel like people block out fear. They watch these movies and steel themselves for the horror of it and as such do not let it get to them. The jump scares are what gets them, because they don’t always see it coming. It is more surprise than fear. True fear settles into you on the breath of ‘what if’. Once you allow yourself to believe, as though accepting the possibility of it could and removing the challenge of is it? Then you’re going to be able to be scared. Maybe really really scared.

Lately, I’ve allowed myself to be open. When the power went out I was overcome by this momentary feeling of what if? It isn’t the first time this has happened lately. A few weeks back I was in the classroom and mid-conversation the powerpoint shut off and we ended up watching my desk computer reboot. Then every other computer that was part of that classroom network rebooted. They all loaded to the same strange ghost account. I don’t know if it was a hack or if it was a system update triggered by admin or what it possibly could be. What I do know is that we were talking about AI as a God—as a trickster God. That’s when it happened.

So when the power went out while we were watching them track a Demogorgon and the flickering lights on the show matched the one in our home…. You see where I am going with this.

I believe fear is healthy and powerful—just like joy and love and many other primal emotions. We steel ourselves off from so much of that. We numb the natural chemical reactions that follow to the point where when we do experience real terror, we won’t have a clue what to do. I think we need to let these feelings in. I think we need to be in touch with the possibility of what is out there that we don’t know about. We know there is more out there we don’t understand.

And we have no clue how to be ready.

Not sure what to put down today. Long day–especially given the nature of the day itself, which is to get up ridiculously early in order to shop for things you don’t need or perhaps even know what they are. We went around town for hours and I am completely wiped out and have no sense of what I can or even want to accomplish today. I need a reset.

I didn’t even get anything of value.

There were some sweats. I suppose I needed sweats. Need is such a strong word and should not be pushed out there so lightly. I wanted sweats to complete a specific look as well as some more options to wear comfortably around the home. I’ve been spending far more money than I should. I need to reel that in and maintain focus on preparing for summer travel. I don’t want to be here for, well, any of the summer months. I’d love to go to multiple places, but I don’t carry that sort of wealth. I need to lock in with the Lady Talis on a single place to be as a base of operations and then do smaller explorations from there as we have done in the past. That works.

My mind doesn’t… not as of late.

Some Thoughts:

1. Bjork is so far ahead of her time.

I grew up on Marvel Comics. I read some DC. I was a Batman guy for sure, but the major reads were always Marvel. As such I had a specific age-based understanding of that universe. Unlike a Universe like Star Wars or even Stranger Things (as there will one day be a spin off), the Marvel Universe has undergone many many iterations and those are all very different and, unlike DC, rarely represented by a cohesive reset. Instead, Marvel plays with the idea of the Multiverse. This can be its ally, but I think now it has become the problem. They’re ruining the storyline by trying to make it cohesive–They want it too much to be one thing and culminate in some massive blockbuster. It worked the one time, but I think it is already played out.

One thing they should be pursuing is smaller collective meetups. They tried this with The Defenders, but made the stakes too high. I mean they brought up dragons for crying out loud. I believe instead the key to making this work is to find smaller opportunities and smaller conflicts to create team up shows and films and such. Build the Universe out not up. Don’t make it so everyone has to be saving the world every movie. They may all be ‘heroes’ but they are about different things.

Also, make the movies different enough to hold value. The last Captain America movie was not so significantly different from the series to have value. It should have never happened and it did not need to step the universe forward significantly the way these things seem to always do–Except for Fantastic Four. That was just trash. It is always Trash.

I’m a bit more excited about the arcs being connected together in the DC Universe under Gunn. The Gods & Monsters chapter is already building towards revealing some cool hero moments. I think the next arc will be far more grounded and human. Marvel could learn a thing or two from the new DC.

There is a part of me that wants to ‘pen’ a day before Thanksgiving blog, but I don’t have it in me right now. I have to burn through these next ten minutes in a more scattered fashion, because my mind is everywhere. It is about time I refocused and locked in on the next project (which is due pretty quickly it turns out), but until then I need to clear out my mind by getting rid of…

Some Thoughts:

1. Set aside the foundational idea of Thanksgiving and you get a moment in time dedicated to family and understanding what we are grateful for. I would love this to be a monthly routine. Giving thanks once a year is pretty weak. The Lady Talis gives thankfuls every morning. Me, not so much. I should be doing it more often than yearly, because I have a ton to be thankful for.
2. I want to take a minute to talk about writing. There is still this strange expectation, at least where I tend to publish, that we are going to be politically correct. I write in a genre born from cyberpunk. What correctness is expected? Moreover, if everyone is maintaining correctness, then nobody is real. I want the writing to be real and have people who say and think things that are not always perfect. I don’t care if they are likable or what they say is likable. I want it to feel genuine. That is what bugged me about this last editing process. None of it felt like I was being allowed to speak with real voice.
3. I need to write more and better stuff.
4. I need to go to a doctor and get myself checked out. Too old to not do this regularly.
5. Speaking of which, I always assume everyone is older than me. I see myself as a far younger person than I am. I find myself treating these 30 year olds with the respect reserved for my elders when I could be their parents. Wild. Someone recently wrote that Gen X are the 45-60 year olds who look like they are 30 – 40 but act like teenagers. That tracks.

I am done with revisions to Lethal Knowledge! Super grateful to have made it to the end of the process (finally) and ready for the next challenge! It feels good to finish. It is like being at the end of a race and knowing you conquered the challenge of yourself. I’ve yet to reach the point where I’ve finished more novels than I’ve abandoned. I’ll get there soon enough. In the meanwhile, I have a few short projects to carry me through the Christmas break and then it is on to the next novel. I am not sure which one is going to take my interest but I really need it to be the Justice Engine.

Some Thoughts:

1. Is the novel good? I think so. It could’ve been better and longer and slower, but then it wouldn’t be Shadowrun. The thriller mold is what works best for the genre and I teetered on the edge of something else entirely.
2. Portal opens on the 2nd of January and the kid is indeed jumping in…
3. I’m pretty sure I said that yesterday. The days (and information) started running together once I stuck my head deep in the word mines.