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Want to stay out of poverty? Delete Grubhub. I spend more money on that app in a month than I do at the grocery. It’s just another shortcut and low hanging fruit that distracts me from what is good for me.

there is a writing lesson in this: don’t dwell on what is easy lest you forgot how to do what is hard. Not writing is easy. Starting and not finishing is easy. Reaching for stories that are simple is easy.

keep it up and before long you lose the ability to do anything else.

This is one of those days where I am just worn thin.

We’ve been all over the Islands today, which normally is fun but today felt like there was a lot more riding on it and less fun. I wrote on a boat during transit and that was fun, but I am also in that headspace where none of my ideas make a lot of sense to me and do not sound very smart or good on paper. This is what drain looks like on paper. I’m here. I’m writing. I just don’t have so much left in me to put down on the keys.

Some Thoughts:

1. Marvel is releasing a Midnight Suns game… I’m curious. I have no idea what it is about.
2. Saw Nope. It was really interesting and different and not at all what I expected. It lacked the strength of ending generally associated with Peele’s work, but it was still well done.

I’m headed out to the Harry Potter Library at University of Washington today. I’ve written there before, but today is merely a tour. I’m taking the two older boys through the campus with my partner. Maybe it inspires them a little. Inspiration is a curious thing. I need new and different forms of inspiration in order to write new and different things. I try very hard to separate myself from the sameness of my daily life, because that is woefully uninspiring. This summer living has helped quite a bit, and if you ask my partner, I am better here. But what is going to carry me when we get back to the 113+ desert?

Some Thoughts:

1. I must be missing football, because I am talking about it day in and day out…
2. Still sad the youngest isn’t playing ball in the fall–largely because it has become such a part of our fall routine.
3. While I am on the subject, I find it interesting that Madden suddenly figured out how to update franchise mode to something fun and playable just as they are prepping the NCAA game. The changes and features seem to be tailor made to slide into that game as well, which makes me think that they straight up stole.
4. Which makes me think that maybe there are quite a few people in industries that are burned out and just waiting for someone to come along with an idea they can copy and tweak just a bit to make it their own.
5. Which makes me think that a lot of the fiction out there is likely that as well…

Football is an exceedingly violent sport.

As someone who played and now years later is feeling the latent pain of that past experience, I know it goes hard. I also know that the risk of injury is high. My eldest blew out his ACL and then re-injured the ACL the following season. He done. My mid kid (though based on the 6 he is 5 of six…) is playing at a high level and doing well, as described in the previous post. Still, I worry about injury. He’s had his first concussion already. The ‘baby’ may have sustained a concussion at the youth level in the past season (which is why 12 yr olds generally don’t play 14u). Injuries are part of the story the NFL tells. We make a point to label them as part of doing business with language like, “Oh, he has an ankle” or “he’s out for six with a knee”. This shorthand does wonders for reducing the visceral nature of these injuries. Yet, in contrast, the truly gruesome injuries are treated as rare moments in time and the beginning of an oft incredible comeback story.

The NFL runs on stories.

There is the comeback story. There is the kid from the hood story. There is the country boy turned pro story. There is the hometown hero story. There is the underrated and grew to be that guy story (see Tom Brady). There is the ‘Rudy’ tale of toughness and grit. All of these stories define a sport and are often what makes that sport fun to watch beyond cheering for the people in one colored uniform vs. another. The teams attempt to make these players endearing. They turn them into heroes.

But what is our idea of a hero?

This is the kind of thinking I am seeking to disrupt and analyze. I have a theory that cultures needs heroes and those heroes need to be warriors. I’m seeking to apply that construct to a fantasy setting and then brutally deconstruct the dichotomy between what the idea of a hero is and what it takes to be that hero. I’m going to look into warrior poets, samurai, and the like for inspiration. All of this to construct a world of fantasy that helps me come to understand and question my own reality.

That is all.

I was going to wait till tomorrow, but this video clip got me started. The conversation about Nnamdi had me rolling. It hit on a number of levels. I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of a dad and former coach who is watching his son go through the same stuff. My son hardly gets thrown at in game. It isn’t because his coverage is the best in the world. It is simply the best on the team. He covers long enough that, if the play isn’t designed for that side the QB looks away. So, what story can we build around that?

The story of the Cb turned Actor Nnamdi Asmugha is similar–he didn’t get challenged because he was a good player on a very bad team. Why take the risk when there are other options? So my job is to play that up and make sure he feels solid and make sure he stays better than everyone else, because by not getting challenged and locking up the opposition when he does get challenged.

I don’t truly understand how we still find ourselves divided along racial lines. I know it has a lot to do with class structure and the idea of ‘being better’ than another group, but can one race truly look at another and say ‘we are better’? Not if we are all nearly identical genetically. We are all humans. We are all different, That difference ought to strengthen the collective, but it seems to create lines instead. Read a few pages into any fantasy novel and you will find that division writ large. It ought not to be so heavy handed, but the truth of the matter is that Elves, Orcs, Trolls, etc. often act as stand ins for racial divides in our own cultures.

Tolkien was indeed an ass. Maybe a racist too, but I’m not going to go there right now.

The fact is that we are definitely responsible in many ways for applying our own sense of race to the racial divides created in these narratives–both as readers and as writers. These conflicts serve as a way for us to see ourselves and to see the other. It is heavy handed–perhaps even moreso than the other divide of zombies. No person looks at a Troll or an Orc and says, “well there goes a stand in for a white person.”

I want to move towards creating fantasy that does better. I don’t want to play out these racial divides as stands for our own. I want something different. It may take a while before I can get there.

I’ve been working on a project for several weeks now. In all that time I have not churned out too many words. I’ve done a crapload of research and firmly situated myself in the world in which I am writing. Now that I am immersed, I can take off at full speed. It is a lot like it is for me getting in the pool. 30 minutes to get in and then I’m in for the rest of the afternoon or at least until someone says, “you gotta get out.”

I think I need to think about that process, because it happens with every story I tell. As I am writing the Justice Engine I see that I haven’t gotten immersed and thus haven’t really gotten that story going. That is worth considering–how you get the engine of your story going. For me it is about the world in which the story takes place and doing enough research to understand that world and be able to sink in deep enough to feel the grass between my toes and know all I need to know to walk freely among my characters.

Some Thoughts:

1. Went to the big Northwest Pow Wow today and it was epic.
2. Here is something I discovered there that I’d never heard of before. I really want to be a part of this story being told. Put me on.

Thought I quit, did you?

Nope.

I was actively avoiding being connected to the network for fear of distraction. I really needed to get some of my sections of writing done. I finished one section of the work I am doing and it feels very lovely. Now I have a few more days before the next deadline. I’m stoked and scared at the same time. Stoked because I can do this. The section is in many ways easier than others. Scared, because I cannot afford to miss more self-imposed deadlines. I am really putting myself against a wall here. Should I get more work (and given the impending academic semester) I don’t want to be in a position to be crunched and ineffective. Balancing your hours is perhaps the clearest definition between successful writers and those who don’t make it. I want to stay on the side of successful and keep getting better at that side of it.

I also want to play a lot of video games. And surf the web. And watch TV.

The balancing act is indeed precarious. How I operate is I allot time to academic work and time to writing. The rest of my time is on hold for my partner and our family. I work hard not to cut into that precious time. In fact, since I stopped coaching, that time has only grown and that has been a very good thing for the health of the relationship. I try to set aside time for games OR work games into the time I already have allotted for work (school or otherwise) and I definitely carve out an hour at the beginning of the day to warm myself with games. It is a working model, until I start playing too many games and eat up all my time. Sadly, that happens too. That is why I turned off the internet. That is how I got stuff done.

Some Thoughts:

1. I still use the word ‘some’ too much. I still use compound sentences too much. Being aware of your phrasing is important, but don’t be murdered by it. Revision knocks out the kinks. Write the way you sound and then revise for impact. Took me years to figure that out…

So, I didn’t post the blog from what I wrote in the library. I thought about it, and then did absolutely nothing. That is entirely the difference between being home and connected to the internet and being out in the city and doing my thing. When I’m out on the go, I don’t get to or think terribly much about the posting. The upside is, I lose quite a few of the distractions that define my writing situation.

I’ve been trying to get my writing situation right while out here and simultaneously come to a mindset of how to write anywhere by preserving the time and space for writing regardless of location. It is a work in progress, but this is the important work that separates writers from people who write.

I know who I want to be in that conversation.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching some fellas throw the ball around on the pier and thinking about the difference between guys who play for fun an guys who play. That difference is writ largest at the QB position where amateurs throw the ball up and the guys who know throw it at an angle that is lower and with more zip to get it to where it needs to be before the defense can close. 4 seconds of air time for a 15 yd throw is junk.

I’ve blogged a lot over the past few months about how hard it is for me personally to write with other stuff going on. This is not limited to things happening around me that I want to check in on (like video games and kids) but also emotional matters—trouble in relationship land, health issues, writing space itself. All of this finds me at the Seattle Public Library’s Downtown branch on a Thursday trying to piece together an extraordinarily tough writing assignment. The work is hard because I am close to it and want to do it ‘right’ vs. do it the required way. It is tough because I bury myself in minutiae, which gets me wanting to escape, which leads to me playing even more video games and working less.

Which leads me back to the library…

…and the steady hum of a yellow-sided escalator climbing endlessly to a part of the library I’ve never been before. I could go. I could also write. Writing is obviously best, but as this blog indicates, procrastination and stalling are what I am most inclined to do.

So, let us spend these last five minutes talking about why we stall when we should write. The answer is a spectrum that basically comes down to We are Bored – We are Scared. It is rarely entirely one. I personally float more towards the center, with an emphasis on focusing on the why instead of focusing on the how to step off the spectrum.

How do we get off the spectrum? Honestly, the work that bores you is about having to do the tough parts or having to do work you don’t like in order to do work you do. The work that scares you is about missing deadlines or digging into thoughts and feelings you are not comfortable with sharing or perhaps even accessing.

In all of these cases the answer is: Just Do It. Find a corner where you can be away from your distractions and get the work done. There really is no other way. Which leads me back to the library…

…and away from this blog.