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I am having that internal conversation about space and intersectionality again. When do we begin to move outside of our normal orbit and move into a new orbit that encourages fresh thinking and energy? Today I am blogging from the spheres. Yesterday I was in someone’s home that doubles as a private use art space and I was watching musical artists perform. In a few days I plan to make my way to Screwdriver Bar, which doubles as a shrine to the Seattle music scene. I view intersectionality as the connected nature of things as they apply to a single point (be that point a person, group, or otherwise). I view these past experiences as a deepening of my understanding that in order to be a creative you have to live a life that takes you outside of your regularly scheduled course and series of events, less you become locked into the doldrums of daily life and unable to step far enough away to see it.

I’ve stepped far enough away from Arizona to recognize that how I live there is not The Way. I haven’t stepped so far away that I know what to do about it. Here are the facts of my daily existence: I go to campus and teach a few days a week. I go to my office every day in an attempt to escape from the singular reality that is the home environment that my kids have created and thus dominate in and through the reality that they have nothing but free time on their hands and in such live and lean more into the environment than I, a daily visitor does. My other kids are also visitors but they carry with them their own reality, which is centered mainly on my car. I spend no less than 2 hrs a day driving them around (drop off, pick up–sometimes multiple times in one day). This leads to a fragmented daily reality in which the times I feel most whole is when I am escaping either to the office or to the bedroom with my partner.

This is not at all sustainable. A writer needs access to the public and needs to be alongside the public. A writer needs a measured and organized existence to the extent that they can reliably have the opportunity to nourish creativity in the moments they are not writing, as opposed to constantly fleeing one version of reality or another.

I realize this. According to G.I. Joe, that is half the battle.

I was fortunate enough to attend a Sofar show in Seattle tonight. The organization puts on shows in venues throughout the city. The catch is you don’t know where it is until 36 hrs before and you don’t know who is playing until they walk on stage. Sofar doesn’t get the top names, but it does get up and coming young artists. It felt good to be in a space with people listening to music. It was a good vibe. It will be a totally different vibe tomorrow night at the Circle Jerks show, because different music attracts different crowds.

Different music impacts you in different ways, but the common theme is that it does impact. It does make us feel something and encourage us to feel what the artist is going through in that moment. I felt that especially strongly with one of the artists in the show today. She ended her set with an acapella rendition of lift every voice and sing and she killed it. The moment carried through the break between sets and needed to be acknowledged by the next performer, because what she felt touched us all, and what she felt is what a lot of people are feeling right now: despair.

I’m not going to be political tonight. I’m just going to end with this: Use your words. Use them for what you believe.

When I have a project with a deadline I tend to rewrite the deadline to break it down into multiple sections and also to shorten the length of time I have to finish the project in (sad) anticipation of missing the date. What can I say? Writers miss deadlines. So, if I don’t want to be that writer then I use a false deadline in order to ratchet down the pressure. Generally I forget the real deadline entirely and focus on the false one as the legit deadline. Sometimes I miss the false one. That is largely due to how I break down the work and what happens between setting a schedule and life happening.

Life happens. Hard.

On the other hand, having many shorter and more manageable mile-marker deadlines helps. For example, I am working on a 35,000 word project that is due in 30 days. That sounds legitimately rough. However, I have a subsection of just 12oo words due this weekend and several other smaller deadlines numbering close to a total of 8 k due over the course of the next week. Each small section seems doable. If I put in the work I ought to be just fine. If I miss one there will be a chain reaction that pushes everything back. That being said, I’d rather have that smaller mishap then try to tackle 35K all at once. It feels like too much. I’m not the first writer to say it this way.

Take small bites. You’ll get done and it won’t hurt doing it.

Truthfully, I just thought the title sounded good. Pontification is a word I tend to enjoy. It refers to pompous or dogmatic speech (of which I am occasionally accused). It works double because I am going start by saying gaming helps me get my writing day started. Seriously. There is nothing better than gaming for that. I either play something active like Madden or Apex Legends (all hail EA, apparently) or I listen to a book while Minecrafting. The process works for me. At the root is the moment to clear my head and not think about the natural world, because the natural world and all of its largely unnatural responsibilities detract from the process. Writing is about disconnecting (and reconnecting in a oft fictional way) and getting some distance and focusing on the telling of the thing, so for me it takes a bridge to get that moving. Honestly, I make the bridge too long.

Yeah, I game too much. I game when I should be writing. I was going to game instead of blogging right now, but I didn’t and that sure feels like progress to me. The key, as my partner explains, is balance. You have to know when you’re doing too much. It is misleading to think you aren’t doing enough, because the nature of the game is to give you that jolt of dopamine like any other good drug does. Also like any other good drug, you get hooked and don’t let go. I have kids who can go 8 hrs gaming and never even notice the day passed them right by. This is the oddness of the gamer-verse. Like Tik Tok, once you are sucked in, time ceases to have meaning.

So, balance in all things: especially games.

Some Thoughts:

1. Submit work here. Now: https://www.craftliterary.com/submit/

Ever think that there is simply too much going on for you to sit and write? That is real. It is a feeling triggered by the understanding that you (A) Have a Life. (B) Have a Job (C) Have to really sit down and think to crunch out the specifics of your writing, and (D) Are writing more than one thing. I rarely meet a writer who is working on just one project. Even my students have other classes, jobs, crap going on. Everyone who commits to this lifestyle has things to do and everyone has a engrained responsibility to themselves to write. But how to focus on just one thing is a conundrum. No, I don’t have the answer.

Okay, I sort of have the answer but it is not terribly workable. See, you could lock yourself in a room with no internet access and a deck (computer) rigged up with only stuff pertaining to the one thing you are supposed to be doing that moment. This is how it was for writers who used typewriters back in the day. The amount of focus needed to type on an old Corona is different than our modern world. Writing back then was different–focused even. So, this supposed solution is, in fact, non-workable.

Okay, I have another: Become a better scheduler of mental time and energy. This includes not taking so much on. I was watching Where did you go, Bernadette? again yesterday and I was taken by the beauty of the story and the titular character. Genius demands activity and she was straight dying in the lack of a focal project. Therefore, genius also demands focus. So, really dig in. Get a planner. Write in that bad boy every single day and develop them habit of mind of getting the menial stuff down and done every day early, so you can have a moment (maybe even schedule that moment) to write what matters to you the most.

It is somewhat ironic that the day after I post about burnout I deliver what is the shortest blog in the history of the 10 minute rule. I was burned last night and could not put together much in spite of staring at the screen and poking despairingly at the keys. This too is a part of the process. I never stop wishing people could be more like computers in that you can shut down and debug a computer, clearing out the bad. Upon restart the computer runs like new. We don’t have a restart. We have a sleep cycle, but that is truly hit or miss for most of us. All of this brings me to my point on writing for the day. The good way to reengage yourself in good writing is mindful thought.

No, I’m not talking about meditation. That has value in the process, but specifically I am talking about listening to the natural world and thinking about what you hear. The term natural is used loosely here. I mean turning off the TV and the phone and any other digital distraction and listening to the wind, the cars moving by, the birds chirping, people in the streets, the scuff of shoes on hot pavement, the hum of an idling bus. All of this serves to trigger our minds to reflect and to catch up with the fleeting thoughts banging around inside our minds that we never take the time to settle in on. I don’t know if your story lives in those thoughts, but I do know some forgotten moment of your day/life is waiting there to be realized.

Generally speaking our society is geared towards time moving forward and consuming as much as we possibly can. Little is geared towards reflecting on what is consumed. We take it in, we enjoy it, we share it, we move on. In a society of consumption little is thought about the mental waste consumption inevitably creates. That is what I want you to consider in your pause. That waste–that mental debris is what is killing our creativity and our focus. So, as with all waste, we need to take a minute to face it. Perhaps ten minutes.

People say life is not a game. I say life is entirely a game. It is an open world RPG in which the win conditions are largely up to the player but based around the concept of ‘player success’ which can be defined by the player.

Yesterday I wrote about the inevitability of politics/ideology in writing. I didn’t explain how people wind up living there. At some point for may writers, the theme or ideology becomes the overriding factor of story creation. As I explained, I have a general idea of what I’m trying to tackle in my writing–the concept of how people confront their own truths being challenged and confront realizing their truths may be false. All of that is well and good and good breeding ground for story, but it isn’t an idea. This is fundamental to story–you have to have an interesting bit of whatever to write about. When I wrote my last novel I started on absolute empty. I did not have an idea or a character or anything, and I was lucky enough to collaborate with people to at least get a where to work with. Once I had that, the rest unraveled itself.

For me idea formation can be the toughest part. I used to come up with ideas out of nowhere, and while now it does happen more and more, it happens at the most inopportune times—while I am driving. On a bus. in the shower. mid sentence of a conversation, etc…. My new strategy is carrying a notebook to write these things down–a portable version of my old-fashioned idea archive. The trick, of course, is going back to the notebook enough that the seed of an idea can be fertilized into a thing worth writing.

If you are stuck on ideas then the key to restoration is threefold:

1. Walk around your land. Observe people and situations and write down what is happening and what you imagine to be happening.
2. Read and listen to one piece of fiction from your past you really enjoyed. I go back to the Dark Tower every decade or so.
3. Stare at a blank page for three minutes exactly. Them write like mad for three minutes. Turn page. Repeat.

Some Thoughts:

1. When I went into the woods I was writing without the internet, which led to me forgetting to post those blogs. They’ve since been posted and all relevant renumbering handled.
2. If I can remember to do this, I am going to talk about unraveling plot and character for the reader tomorrow.

Here in the woods I have discovered more than a little of that inspiration I wrote on yesterday. It is easy to be inspired in a place of such beauty and calm and in this sacred space I discovered a truth about myself and my writing. What I write is often about the idea of truth—more specifically it is about the subjective nature of truth and how people react to their truth being questioned and how far they are willing to go in order to defend it.

Generally speaking, I have written about this throughout my career/life. However, I’ve done so without recognizing the core of what I was attempting to argue. My latest independent work challenges two fundamental truths: one about racial perception and one about the power/uniqueness of the human construct. Both are questions I carried with me since I was a boy growing up In Harlem and going to a wealthy midtown public school where the few other black kids were all dynamically special in some sort of way, while I was just an out of place kid. I should have recognized it then in my earliest works; in Horace Treefellow and Liefer Shadowseek, elves who were apart from their people largely because of perception and position. I didn’t.

In higher level literature classes the focus is often on what is the author trying to say with this work vs. what does the work itself say as a reflection of time and place (often regardless of intentionality). As a writer, knowing what you are saying helps to quietly carve the borders around the action of what will be in a story. Inside those lines your characters will paint your story for you. Inside those lines the individual motivations and interconnections can grow into relationships that shape and direct a tale. I am now aware of what it is I say overall. I am also aware of how dramatically large and wide that umbrella of meaning truly is.

As a takeaway, try to consider what it is you are saying and thinking about when you are shaping your stories. Try to envision in your palette of characters and scenarios just what it is you feel about the world you are creating and or writing about. That theme should form the canvas upon which those stories find their form.

*note* this and the following blog were written in the Olympic National Forest and significantly out of internet range.

I am sitting near the shores of Crescent Lake in Washington and realizing that a number of writers have come this way, seen the beauty, and rooted their stories in this space. Perhaps I am going to be the next to do so. The beauty of the space is undeniable. The calm of the space is so encouraging that I was excited to be able to come back to the page and write about it. I love being here. I love that I can be at the shore staring into crystal waters and moments later be so deep in forest that I cannot see anything but trees and undergrowth. It is a powerful location; one that the first people viewed as sacred and one that I must as well.

All of this is to say that inspiration is my topic for these ten minutes. A writer without inspiration is a writer winding down the clock of their literary existence. We cannot write without having that fuel that fires us. We must find inspiration in our own ways. It may be place or situation—even desperation. Many athletes rely on their physical craft to get them out of their dead-end living situations. Many artists are the same. I believe writers are no different. If you are hungry—if you are desperate—you are encouraged to pour your soul down the tip of that pen or out the end of your fingers on to a waiting keyboard and let the world feel your want and your message.

Like a double-edged sword, inspiration has a second side—it is also a promise. If you are inspired you are then required to use that inspiration and turn it into something of value; even if only to yourself and even if only a stepping stone to a greater project or realization. In short, do not waste what inspires you, because inspiration is temporary and fleeting.

I am inspired. I do not mean to waste that. I expect to write hard over these next few days and weeks and produce work that is worth reading.