10 minutes of writing each and every day.
Another late night with nothing to say. There has to be some kind of change in order to get to this moment of relax and reflection before I’m all burnt out. So far, nothing. Today’s challenge was learning and teaching the obscenely complicated Yu-gi-oh! card game.
Wow.
That was nearly ten minutes. An all-time low. lets all agree to forget this ever happened.
Ever.
I’m trying to slot a copy of Deadpool before I go see Civil War in a few days. I just can’t stomach how pure the Captain is without some serious Opiods. I mean the dude almost picked up Thor’s hammer (which, when did that become about purity? Thor’s an angry whore most of the time). That being said, I am looking forward to a little Marvel viewing. I remain surprised that there is no definable linkage (on the front end at least) between Agents of Shield and the movie. The Agents are busy busting down Hive and putting the last remnants of Hydra out of commission. They don’t appear to have anything to do with the Marvel movie universe at this point.
By the way, where is Nick Fury?
I’ll let that question rest because I know he isn’t in this new film. He isn’t scheduled to appear in any film during this phase. That disappoints me greatly. I felt there was a real connection between Fury and Cap and the tie back to the super serum. However, they seem to have done away with that entirely.
It is going to be very hard to escape the suppositions of metaphor. People are going to fight to compare this situation to our upcoming election, especially with Trump being one of two candidates (possibly the Iron Man). I can already see the connections, though I haven’t seen the script. I am assuming a lot comes from the groundbreaking comic book of the same name. In the comic a mutant named Speedball accidentally destroys the town of Stamford, Connecticut. This ramps up the already high talk of registering mutants (read: Muslims), and leads to Iron Man and Cap coming down on different sides of the issue.
You can see where people are going to take this. You’ll see where I take it saturday night.
li Apple? What did you just do word association and grab a position everyone needs more of? Not that I’m bitter, just confused. I recognize that Apple, a Buckeye star, is a legit player, but with the first round the idea is to address the most important team needs. We needed other stuff. Line stuff. LB stuff to be certain. These needs were addressed later in the draft but how well were they addressed?
I can’t really doubt the Giants in their draft acumen. You know exactly what you are going to get–60% success rate in the four year player range. Look at Amukara and most Giants WRs and you get a sense of what the team is going for lately in the draft.
Some Thoughts:
When I was a kid I watched a lot of the movies that people these days describe as classics. They had an impact on me. I’d even go so far as to say they heavily influenced my perceptions of social interaction and the idea of cool. I got a lot of ideas from old movies, and a surprisingly important idea from the old Karate Kid. No, I’m not talking about the ‘pro-america’ Will Smith effort, but the original wax on, wax off. That movie made me consider the idea of teaching without letting the students on to the fact they were being taught. I call this strategy the Miyagi hypothesis.
The hypothesis suggests that students are more inclined to learn information if they don’t know they are being taught. This is the deception parents use to slip in peas and carrots by calling it a pie. My specific use of this is in regards to learning. I want to be able to create an environment where learning happens without formal instruction–without students knowing they are being taught but learning nonetheless.
Several of my sociology students did their year-end presentation on the concept of role conflict and how it applies to their lives. The term is defined as “emotional conflict arising when competing demands are made on an individual in the fulfillment of his or her multiple social roles.” Watching them talk and the resulting discussions made me rethink my own role conflicts. I’m a writer, a boyfriend, a father, a teacher, and a coach. These things occupy the majority of my time and headspace, often overlapping and creating immense conflict.
For example, I always have conflicts between work and parenting, because I want to come home and spend time with loved ones but I still have work to do. I still have writing that needs to get handled. Then I need to leave home not even two hours after the key hits the door in order to go be a coach. I’m not even going to get into how this has made my boyfriend role suffer (only got 10 min, folks).
For me the conflict centers around time and mental energy. Each role places significant demands on me and I am having to decide on a daily basis which role is going to be the so-called primary role for that day and receive the most attention. I’m certain this is what everyone goes through and I am just applying fancy terms to the age-old process of juggling responsibilities. Still, the terms help me to rationalize and quantify exactly how much is expected of me on a daily basis.
It is a lot.
Sometimes things get neglected and I sacrifice being effective at one role to really just maintain others. Luckily, I’m a professor, which means that I can enjoy two months of reduced labor in one role, giving me the time and energy to focus on others.
Some Thoughts:
I must admit there are days where being a writer is the furthest thing from my mind and remembering to put words together is nearly impossible to do. When that happens writing can seem like an inconvenience. Who wants to to drop everything and spend ten minutes posting to a daily blog. It seems silly–meaningless even. I feel like that more than I want to admit. I don’t always want to string together words and continue this habit. And then when I do I think about the counter–2275 could easily be the last one and then I can finally exhale, skip one, and start over at one.
What would it matter?
I don’t think it would matter to anyone but me, and for me it would be a small yet powerful admittance of failure. It would reflect the moment I gave up and let the ideas of writing slide down the scale of importance to a place where it honestly could never come back from. Writing is something I love and take great pride in, but it is also the most difficult and often fruitless pursuit in my life. Like I wrote above, it wouldn’t matter to anyone to me that I quit and I could do so without anyone being the wiser.
But then I would know. I would remember every day that I laid down and gave up and then I wouldn’t have any credibility with myself. I wouldn’t feel like I had to keep going with anything I ever did when it came to writing. Clearly this wasn’t why I started the blog, but over time this is what it became. An outlet, a promise, and a daily rededication to the cause I hold most dear.
The best way to write is to read and read a lot of the material written in the vein you wish to write. To that end I have been relentlessly hammering shut the holes in my sci-fi reading history. I’m currently reading Ernest Cline’s Ready, Player One which strikes me as a YA effort to recreate some of the fantastic writing generated by the cyberpunk movement and marry that to ideas about the decay of the world brought about by social media. I think Cline delivers his argument well, though he does drift off into introspection and description ad naseum. This is something I’ve found less troubling over the years. Don’t get me wrong, if one of my writers starts to wax philosophical straight into an infodump we are going to have words, but here I find it somewhat more acceptable. Maybe it’s the nostalgia of the 80’s that encourages me to just kick back and enjoy it.
That being said, I must admit that there are a lot of untapped ideas out there when it comes to sci fi. I’m a common culprit of the ‘every story has been written’ saying, but that is only partially true. The specific combination of ideas, characters, and dramatic situations leads to uncommon and often completely original stories all the time. Sure, it has elements of X,Y, Z, but that isn’t a problem—heck, that is the very definition of trope. The trick—the good writing, in fact—is to turn trope into terribly good writing and to keep your audience engaged throughout.
I fear grad school made me worry about producing the next great American novel when all I really ought to be doing is telling good stories. The rest will come, or it won’t.
Some Thoughts:
I deeply considered dropping the ball on the blog tonight. It would have been so easy without the server. As it is, these late night posts are bunk. I’m drained and incapable of doing what I need to this day, but I am still here and hammering out the work that needs to get done.
My heart is set on developing a plan for the future—a plan to develop myself as a novelist and put out some more short stories outside of the Shadowrun realm. This of course, all adds up to me putting more focus into being a writer. This means finding a way to be more structured and responsible in all of those other areas of my life and consolidating some of the things I do. It also means cutting back to a certain extent.
Most of all it means taking advantage of my surroundings in terms of the people around me, home life, and the opportunities I’ve been presented as a writer to develop my name (which is a writer’s brand) and hone my skills to be better than I’ve been before and develop a production schedule that allows me to not only be good but to be regularly productive and proactive with due dates.
These are just words so far, and I’ve written a lot of them over the years. Time to move beyond the words and into action.
The talislegger blog died tonight on the heels of the NFL draft and the Maricopa Community College Adjunct Faculty Association Outstanding Faculty of the year awards. I mention those two occasions because they were the only things that mattered to me at the time. My bestie was awarded an Adjunct Faculty of the year award, and the Giants drafted some fool CB they didn’t need the same way the Cowboys drafted a third starting RB for their ‘empty’ backfield.
Once I realized what was going on, I decided that going to a save file and completing today’s blog was the best course of action. Still, I didn’t have anything to say. I don’t have anything to say. Perhaps the most damaging thing about writing at night is that by the time I sit down to do this at night I’m fresh out of ideas—another reason to reopen the archive.
So, I leave you with some thoughts and some more awareness of my limitations…
Some Thoughts:
1. No, they did not kill off Elizabeth Keane. She’s in hiding to escape Reddington. I say this without watching the latest ‘funeral’ episode, but there are things that just make sense as a writer and there are things that don’t. Her coming back makes sense.
2. Cheat day: went over around 500 calories on the diet. Still, it was entirely worth it. I had my first legit burger and fries since this ride started.
I’ve been pretty happy lately, and I think a lot of that has to do with how I’ve been allowing myself to feel and think lately. It can be very easy to slip into despair based on the problems in your life and work and the habits you’ve developed. I let myself go there from time to time, falling upon this foolish feeling of woe and, on top of all that, anger at simple people. Scroll back about a thousand posts and you’ll see me write, “never let an asshole rent space in your head.” Well, I offered a condo with an eyeball view. It all comes back to having good people around you that remind you that you are capable of great things as opposed to people who drown you in drama, negativity, and the proclivity to remind you of how incredible they are, even when they aren’t.
So, bad people and energy gone, what is it I’m focused on these days? I’m excited to see my mid kid enter the football playoffs for the second straight season. He’s with a new team, same league, same results. I have seen so much more personal improvement and joy from him this year. I’m not quite certain if he is there as a leader yet, but he is clearly trying to be that as well, and I like it. Two more weeks of football and its on to summer break for me. I like that even more.
This summer is about reading and exploring new authors and making connections that I can use to vastly improve the quality of my classroom both F2F and online. Its funny, I was hoping for this to be the best semester in some time and it turned out to be the worst–perhaps ever. Nothing but drama, lack of engagement, and poor time management. I know I’m better than that, but this semester clearly hasn’t demonstrated it.
Some Thoughts: