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I mentioned in an off-hand sort of way that I didn’t know the names of characters in my new book. This troubled me on a high level, because I could not explain what that meant. I know now that I was talking about the idea of presence in writing. To me, when you are writing a character you are writing about someone who is in the room with you. Tharsis Drennan, a character from an upcoming fantasy series, is always in the room with me. I know his name, I know his will and feeling, but I don’t know his story, so I haven’t fully written it. His presence is here though. With the characters in the sci-fi story, the Justice Engine they are not yet present. Once they are, I will have a much better time writing this novel. I’ll know them. I’ll realize how it feels to be there with them in the space and to recognize what they would do in the moment. Until then I am writing a biography of someone I never knew or researched.

The reason my mind is thinking of this presence now is because of the few thousand word piece I am writing right now in the voice of a character named Carol K. I know her. Like Tharsis, she’s always in the room with me, cigarette in hand, old cyberleg whirring haltingly as she slides past the bartop to greet another customer. I know every bit of her story, even in not consciously. She is a fully present character in my mind, so when I reach for her voice it is right there, along with her relationships, friendships, and the things that make her what she is. Until you have that, you cannot have character. You need character to tell stories. The more you know that character, the easier the story is to tell, which is why some writers can seemingly write a story so quickly while others struggle to get past the first few pages. That latter group is writing from an image–a glimpse that shot through their mind that they held on to.

The key is to write from character and marry that character to that glimpse. The Justice Engine appeared in glimpses often separated from character, and that is a problem, because it hasn’t quite been filled in by people. It needs to be. I need to marry those images to characters and marry those moments to wants and needs. I need to give myself the time and space to do that.

Not a cohesive kind of thought day, so I’ll just limit this post to…

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching the Eagles less for ‘Quon than for Hurts, because Hurts is on my fantasy team. Yes, I will be loosing both games again for the second straight week and the second straight season. Sigh.
2. The reason I don’t have a lot to say is because my thoughts are swirling about so much. I am thinking about writing more of the fantasy stuff (every day writing), and this idea of knowing or not knowing my characters based on knowing and in this case not knowing their names. Also thinking about how much I need to do over the course of this short week.
3. I call it a short week because I define the end of the week by the High School game, which is Thursday this week.
4. We can talk about what happened this past week another time, but the key is my college kid may be out with injury. Non-contact variety…
5. Not sure what I have planned for classes next week. My mind is on this project due Monday… that I am extremely behind on.
6. Still time on the clock so I’ll go into the character stuff a bit. I don’t remember the names of anyone in the new sci-fi novel. Does that mean they need new names or I don’t know who they are? I don’t, actually. I have these moments of imagining passages about them, but I cannot put a name to the characters. wild stuff.
7. Never drink and blog. It slows the mental fucntions.

I was watching the start of an Ed Sheeran video when suddenly I had a brief but powerful moment of clarity that tied me all the way back to string theory. The theory posits that the fundamental constituents of the universe are not in fact particles but one dimensional “strings” vibrating at specific frequencies. When I think about that and think about vibration in general it brings me to a moment in middle school when I was learning about the guitar and the idea of something so tightly wound on both ends and how any movement of that thing creates a vibration and, in the case of an instrument, that vibration creates a resonant sound.

That tight winding is suspension–it is creating a level of tension that forms upon it the framework for the existence of that tonal quality. Every string vibrates differently based on the points of suspension, thus creating a different sound. Now, I realize this a complicated theory that I am working towards and, in some ways, will sound totally unrelated, but hear me out: I was thinking about my kid. I was thinking about what he defines as his existence and the ‘tonal quality’ of that existence. In any phase of your life you are somewhere along the spectrum of happiness to unhappiness. Imagine, if you will, that this happiness itself is a vibration. When you experience certain things it allows your ‘self’ to vibrate or be suspended in this state of happiness. People can hack it and fall into the temporary drug state that triggers the chemicals that would be otherwise triggered by being in the right state. However, meeting the right person–your counterpoint–may cause you to vibrate at the same level as those drugs. You therefore live in this state of suspension where everything is good so long as you are connected to that other end of the string.

I think love is like that. I think finding someone who makes you vibrate like that is love. I think he is in love. I don’t think it necessarily works both ways all the time, and when two people vibrate in sync, that is where the real magic happens.

Friday was the first time in a long while that Ade saw stars in the sky. Not many, mind you. He’d lived in Arizona most of his life and before that was too young to know where he was or what those lights in the sky even meant. His father had seen stars, told him about them and how they stretched across the night like a twinkling blanket. His father had told him stories about how people once believed the stars were Gods looking down upon the planet and smiling. Not all of them were smiling, some were angry at the people they saw, others were merely disappointed. His father used to have stories like that all of the time.

When Ade looked up into the sky that early morning the first thing he saw was a messy sheet of clouds that rose up from the horizon like spilled ink. The rest of the sky was lighter behind them, and above them were three stars. It took him a while to find the others, but well told shapes were all there. He saw the big dipper, he saw one star off on its own as bright as could be. It was the North Star, he supposed. He’d never quite seen it before. He rarely looked up at night. Yet this very early morning while the sun was still just a rumor, he did this that as he listened to the distant sound of cars moving on the streets. He sat on his roof, and he looked up.

Some Thoughts:

1. Like taking the plastic wrap off stuff you stored away. I used to be good at this sort of thing. It wasn’t a thing I thought about as much as simply did. That is the nature of a freewrite. It is about accessing what is happening in your mind and letting it flow. That flow is a bit rust clogged right now, but I’m getting there…

Honestly, this post should have fallen on 187, as it is about the death of a political player. Yesterday Charlie Kirk was assassinated. I want to start by saying that I see no place in public discourse for physical violence. That being said, the way this is being spun and ultimately the threats being made by our President are not helping matters. In fact, what is being done as a result of this or what is being suggested in the very least by those with power is nothing short of a gag rule on political discourse from the so-called left.

Trump argued that he would go-after groups that shout down right-wing speakers and compare them to Nazis. He argued that doing so is promoting violence against the right. In short he’s trying to stop what people say about the right because the comments are divisive and derisive. So… what about what is said about the left? What about the violence that is foisted on those groups. Pelosi’s husband gets beaten near death by someone who doesn’t like her politics and they sweep it under the rug with a giggle. A right-wing activist gets got and he gets the medal of freedom posthumously?

This is America.

We aren’t a serious country anymore. What we are is a country that is becoming increasingly polarized through the aid of technology and the isolation that it brings. We weren’t one America before Obama and since then there has been a rise of people trying to take us backwards to a moment where they lived in the comfort of faces that looked like theirs and the ‘other’ was still the ‘other’ and not part of a larger melting pot that, honestly, nobody ever seems to have wanted.

We cannot ignore the fact that we live in a country founded on these divisions and that we’ve relied on some version of the other and some version of the haves and have-nots to keep a relatively small group of people in power. We’ve long relied on these tricks and, again honestly, on the stupidity and the financial weakness of the masses to keep this whole thing going.

Now we are working to change the rules and reinforce keeping this shrinking group in power and doing so by tagging on those on the fringes of these rising minority groups who are looking to be seen and be accepted by a majority that is growing ever smaller and weaker. I wish I had time to say more….

First Waiver of the fantasy season! I’m already 0-1 in both leagues with draft scores that indicate 2 wins is the best I can hope for. That’s okay. I like being the underdog. I like it right up to the point that I win the ‘ship. I expect to be in contention for that honor in each of the leagues. If not for a ferocious fourth by Josh Allen, I would’ve been 1-0 in one league. Of course, I can wish all I want. Just win, baby. That is the thing I must do. Can I turn it around this week? I don’t know. I have the players in one of the leagues (which I failed to start and started the worst possible players).

This is a big week for both fantasy and real FB for me. On the fantasy front, I need to win, because losing would move me to 0-2 and in these leagues that is really tough to come back from. In the 8 person it should be easier as It looks like my team is considerably better. In the larger money league, I have almost no room to find better players. I’ve already hit the waiver wire to replace some scrubs (X. Leggette) but struck out. Hopefully there is a chance later in the season or the kid actually gets good.

In RL, the UNC Bears go to South Dakota against a very very strong running team. They need the win to show themselves they are legit. A win against a ranked team is a big step. Even a close loss will have them feeling like they can do this. I want the win. So does the High School team after losing to a team they are better than. A loss this week would crush their spirit moving forward. They don’t just need a win, but a blowout. They need to show who they are.

I’m going back to 2090, which happened October 26th, 2015. That was about ten years ago.

I haven’t done a freewrite that interesting and engaging in a while. I think I need to get back to it the way I need to get back to telling stories to the Lady Talis. These are my goals. I expect I’ll follow through sooner than later, once I get my mind in a place where I am again freed up for a brief time. I have a project due 9/15, and haven’t done nearly enough to finish it on time.

I need to get back to freewriting because I need to get back to storytelling for the sake of storytelling. It is a lifestyle and a Way. It is supposed to be my Way, but I have done little to honor that since I left the beach. It is always this way after a project ends. I stall out and then have to get the thing going again. It takes me too long. It takes longer each time.

Some Thoughts:

1. The boys are watching a youtube video. Funny how easily they fall back into their habits and how those habits constitute a life. Strange how that life turns on the same wheel as my own, but seems entirely foreign in terms of how time is spent and what goals exist on a daily and longer basis.
2. It all boils down to dopamine and how these things we do make us feel. We definitely feel better when we are in routines and when those routines create opportunities to get a success feel. That is what is happening there.

This past weekend, watching our son play football, the Lady Talis and I got to talking about Marching Band. She suggested that parents may attend college games simply to see their kids perform in band. Cheerleader parents too. This concept never occurred to me. As strange as it seems it felt like the high school years were the only time that these other aspects of the game required parental support. Yet they aren’t. For the parents (and kids) what they are out there doing is every bit as important and worthy of parental love as those 22 kids on the field at a time playing football (or any sport). Not getting that is indicative of a mindset that prioritizes the athlete and the FB athlete in particular. This is likely thanks to my own kids being so sunk into the sport. I only think about why I’m there, which is very selfish.

I bring this up now as a way of understanding my own myopia; how I tend to see the world solely through my own lens. It is a very small lens and in some ways that makes me a very small person who is only now, 50 yrs in, starting to recognize that. It isn’t that I don’t care about other people and perspectives, it is just that I am so focused on. my own and caught up in the drama of it and of all the inputs related to it that I fail to see much significance in what anyone else is doing in that shared space we call a universe. This understanding calls out to me, helping me realize and recognize that this is exactly how isolated and self-facing we’ve become as a society. Each of us exists in our own filter bubble and we constantly reinforce the barriers of that space by refusing to acknowledge anything outside of it. Some bubbles are bigger than others, but they are bubbles nonetheless.

Ten minutes before I need to go get my Pei wei order. Enough time to get this out on the table…

I’m happy. I’m happy in my love and happy in my life with my wife. I am not so much right on the writing front or perhaps in the planning the future front, but I have love and I am happy with where my kids are in their lives and that makes me feel good. It also makes me feel incredibly greedy that I need more. I do. I don’t have all that I need to move into this next phase of life. The money is all wrong. Odd how so much of life feels like it can be solved by adding zeros to a paycheck. It would do that for me to be sure. Being able to be secure financially would change my ability to focus on writing and on this not so distant future. I could, finally, do all the things that I want to be able to do in life, and my wife could live her dreams.

She told me today that she thinks that love, for a woman, means getting the partner you want and giving up everything else in return. I’m paraphrasing here, but it isn’t a wrong statement. How many stories end with the man getting the girl and his life and the girl getting the man? Love shouldn’t come with such a lopsided price tag, but it feels as though it does.

All of this is to say I want to be able to afford to live the life that allows me to create. I just need to figure out how to make it happen…

I had trouble sleeping last night. It is a continuation of what I was saying yesterday about anticipation and anxiety and that feeling of the kids being in control of their lives but not being able to get there. Last night’s High School game was evidence of that. I went to bed thinking the kid got benched or hurt, because he disappeared from the field for the brief moment I was able to peak in on that game. I sped through a replay in order to get in position to write this blog. He didn’t get benched so much as found himself as part of a rotation. That is not a wonderful sign. It isn’t a sign I appreciate in the least, because it is a direct reflection of the energy I see on the field in drips and spurts. He isn’t always go go go, and that is what is going to hold him back from getting a college scholarship.

You cannot teach effort, heart, or desire.

These are intrinsic motivations. These are the things you must push yourself to accomplish. Without these things–without that hunger or endless capacity to bring it to the other guy, you are wasting your time. I see that in the College kid. I see that hunger for the competition. That individual–I am going to beat you–sense of stepping up to the challenge. I don’t see that ‘I am going to inflict my will upon you’ sense on this HS kid. I don’t know if it isn’t there or if I and all of his coaches have yet to find the right instrument to bring it out of him. So, that is my job this season. I need to figure out if he has that dog in him and how to bring it out.

Some Thoughts:

1. The college kid goes to war in a few hours. I’m excited to see him do his thing in front of 30K. Go Bears!