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I’m learning to be proud of the small moments. I am learning to see myself as this stone cast out into the waters of creation, and notice the ripples I have. I used to be a person who was defined entirely by the group of people I associated with. Now that I have become incredibly insular in my old(er) age I suppose that lack of a community is a definition of sorts. However, I choose to look at it as the ripple. I define myself by who in the world I impact. Perhaps I should use another analogy:

When I think of the vastness of space, I think of the many many small particles and even larger bodies floating through the infinite void (don’t get me started on the concept of infinity and why/how it exists…) Deep in that cosmos imagine if you will a small rock. It isn’t large enough to shatter a star or impact a planet. However, it is large enough to touch another rock and impact the progress of that larger body. I am beginning to see myself as that initial rock. I am impacting the lives and have impacted the lives of many and that should continue to be my legacy. Who we impact and how–the nature of the way–we do so matters. When I started teaching my goal was to replace myself. I believe I’ve done that much by cultivating a style of teaching and the desire in a handful to teach in that style–at all levels of teaching. My work there is done. In writing I’ve long held the dual goal of reaching/inspiring other writers and telling a story that helps someone want to tell their own. I have not done that. This is the work that remains. This is the forward focus.

This morning I woke up in planning mode. It is a small moment, but a monumental accomplishment for someone who is self-described as ‘forcibly lazy.’ The thing with that description is it leaves desire out of the equation. When I want something; when I believe in what I am doing; when I have purpose I am a lion. This morning I rose with purpose and understanding.

That makes me a dangerous man.

I am looking at a 24/25 planner and the inside cover reads: Enjoy Every Moment. That’s a hard task these days, but it is certainly a message that bears reminding. I don’t, you know. I tend to find moments but they are sparse and often spread out between days of dealing with kids who’ll never leave (or help out) or chauffeuring other kids who act like this is in fact my singular purpose in life. What I am trying to do on the heels of yesterday’s decision to ramp up production is to lay out my writing goals and learn a little bit more about myself in terms of wha makes me happy (beyond hanging with the lady and playing video games).

Writing is a pleasure. It is also harder to do when I am unfocused. Part of the exercise of planning goals is to generate focus. It is a major thing to do and to consider. It also might be the key to all of this. I am at my best when in the flow. I am in the flow with deadlines and goals. So, onward to the planning part now.

Some Thoughts:

1. The bright side of blogging first thing in the morning is the sense of accomplishment I get knowing that the one thing I am required to do every single day is done. Of course, then it sinks in on me that there ought to be more things I am required to do on a daily basis. Then I allow myself a cup of coffee and a chance to forget what I just thought.
2. Getting married. There, I said it. It’s out in the world now!

Tough fiction day for me. I realized that what I treat often as a flood of writing is more like a slow drip… a trickle if you will. I had the opportunity to assess how much I’ve written over the last 6 years and the total came to 2 novels, 2 novellas, and 17 sourcebooks. That translates to roughly 3 source books a year, a novel and a novella every three. That is trash. I should be doing twice the volume I am doing now at least. I want to see 6 sourcebooks and 1 novel a year on average and perhaps more–maybe toss a novella in there as well. I need to be doing more as a writer, because volume is how I personally get good and stay in the flow of writing. The more I write, the better I write. I have gone on and on about the fits and starts, and this revelation really explains how these things get going.

So, my next step is to develop a writing plan–a schedule that seriously lays out each and every day moving forward and how that day/week/month/year tracks with my creation goals. I don’t know that a person can achieve goals without actually having some. I have proven aimless for a long time in that respect, and seeing where I am vs. where I expected to be helps me focus on where I want to be in the near future. It is entirely up to me to hammer out a realistic schedule that allows me to get there.

I am sick.

I don’t really respond well to the condition. It causes me to lay in bed and not be very productive and often comes as a result of me trying to be overly productive while not taking good care of myself in spite of the hard work of the Lady Talis to make sure I do take good care of myself. She ought to be mad, but love turns anger into sympathy. Unfortunately, it does little to solve the problem of illness and of me operating at less than 40% capacity. I am trying to get to a place where I can function. I need to. There are exactly 74 essays left to be graded along with more journals and novel excerpts and outlines and a host of other assignments I need to be getting to. This is not to mention the 8 classes I need to prepare for January, the novel needing editing, the Adventure book that comes due on the 15th of this month, and so on. I ain’t got time to be sick.

I suppose I ought to make time to heal. If I don’t this is going to spiral into something far worse and I certainly do not have time to deal with that nonsense. I need to allow myself this day to get right and get back in focus and on track.

Check the news and you’ll hear nothing but dispair. Check the sports news and—crap. Same thing. Unless you’re a Mets and Yankees fan that is. The Mets are through to the NLCS. The Yanks are up 2-1 on the Royals, moving us one step closer to a subway series. The last subway series was in 2000–the first of its kind since ’56 when the they met previously. So this occurrence is a rare one. I love that we are close to the possibility of it happening again.

In Football news the NCAA has done away with the National Letter of Intent. I am not completely sure what that means yet or how it impacts the last of my name who will be looking for a scholarship and a roster spot in two years time. It is making me think long and hard about getting him to a new school–one where he can be seen by scouts.

His big bro didn’t have a lot of chances to be sen by scouts and wound up at a D1 FCS school where he’s beginning to make a name for himself. He and another freshman are logging good minutes at the CB position. I cannot stress how difficult it is to reach that level and how proud I am of him as a result. Still he wants more. he wants to play and grow and I respect that. He needs to decide what that means for this season. A lot of changes are happening in the NCAA. Does he take a redshirt year–even if they intend to do away with the practice?

I have yet to talk about fantasy. It is not going well. Eventually I will tell that sad tale.

The Post is 1277. The year is… 2013. Concerned about finding time for the words in a busy schedule, I stated:

 Writing happens twice in that sandwich of events, but it doesn’t happen well. I’ve taken measures to maximize the time I have–namely making sure I can compact the work stuff into the work day–but I still have one last stage to go. I need to establish a solid writing hour during the time the kids and I are both home. This will ensure a healthy respect for the writing process as well as my personal space and time. It will also give me a time of day to write where I can assure myself the work product will be valuable.

I was struggling with being a parent and a husband. Funny how the things you struggle with are sometimes the things you miss after they are gone. I miss having the boys around. I don’t miss being married to that person at all. I miss the comfort of wearing a wedding ring, though that ought to change soon enough. I still haven’t found the writing hour in these past eleven years. I have found time to sell two novels and two novellas along with twenty or more other books of smaller length in that time. What I’m saying is I figure it out when I need to. What I am also saying is I should have written 10 novels and at least 10 novellas in that time frame but I didn’t because I didn’t need to figure it out. I don’t have to rely on writing as a primary source of income so I don’t give it all the time it deserves. I never have. I should and I could. I could do a lot more with my time than I do and it takes the memory of raising three boys at times alone to realize that I used to be a lot better at this.

Time to get my hours right. I’ve been slacking so long that I actually forget what it feels like to not to.

I’ve decided on a quote to share with the world: “Life is hard. Becoming better is hard. Dying is hard. Being dead is easy.” I’ll work on that one. It does reflect an evolution of thought in terms of the eventual end. I do still fear such things, but I see that it is going to have to come my way eventually. In the meanwhile there is a lot of lovely life to be lived. There are going to be wonderful moments of emotion and joy and passion and even anger. There is pride to be had along with disappointment and unease and relief and of course, triumph. I’m here for it–all of it. Some of it hopefully in more measures than others. That is after all how we shape our understanding of living good and living not so good.

I’m living pretty good right now. I spent several hours today constructing a lesson for my classes tomorrow. I’m not done. I have one more to go but it involves a healthy amount of printing and I don’t see the value in doing that from home. Life has been good to me so far. The week has been especially good. I got to spend time with the youngest and see him be happy. The Lady Talis and I are experiencing a ton of happy times working on projects and basically vibing.

What? Am I writing? Well, yeah… kind of. I am in that pre-due date space of having the half formed ideas marinating inside my skull, slowly forming into that irresistible urge to write for hours. It’s a process. I’m in the almost there part of the planning and drafting stage. I suspect by Wednesday I’ll be pouring out content. Fits and Starts. I need to come up with a better method, but until I do that is where it lies.

How do you know when I’ve started getting going? I’ll probably talk a lot less about sports and even start throwing together decent Friday fiction. It is a strange truth that sports and fiction war in my head. It feels like I could’ve been an incredible play caller with a deep knowledge of systems or a prolific author who churns out fiction like clockwork. I settled for neither thus far, and I am not happy with it. I intend to get these thoughts and ideas under control–hopefully sooner than later.

I think in maybe ten or twenty years people will look back on 2024 and the rampant carnage of the year and the crazy spiral of the American electoral system and say, “oh, so that is how we got here.” This is ever present in my mind. I’ll be nearly 70 and probably holed up somewhere with a bit of land and a lot of places to walk under trees. The kids will be scattered to the wind, but they’ll come see us from time to time. They’ll be thinking about our late stage lives in terms of what responsibilities they have to take care of us. It’s funny how small that no-care to care window can be sometimes.

Some Thoughts:

1. That opening line was built on a lot of scary news. Here’s one piece that blew my mind. Fear mongering is bad, okay?
2. Doing a careful analysis of the Pioneer league standings, I am starting to think that some of these records are smoke and mirrors. More on that Wednesday.

Last night my son’s HS football team was beaten 52-14. The game wasn’t even that close. They scored first and then proceeded to give up 52 points before scoring again in deep garbage time. They have become a deep garbage program over the past few years and I don’t see any way the thing turns itself around. The problems are notoriety and access to players. The talented ones who can afford to make the trip to Brophy, and play for a team that is constantly competing for a state championship. Then there is the lure of Mountain Pointe, who chose to bus kids in from a different town when Desert Vista refused to do so. It was that moment of refusal that triggered the fall. It was that moment of a school deciding they wanted to be insular and not attract the sort of kids who would make them successful that led to all sorts of kids leaving. In fact, almost every MP starter began at Desert Vista. Many of the Brophy starters live in the DV area. Academically the school is good (not Brophy good). The track team is consistently a state competitor. Yet football has become a black hole over the past decade, marred by 5 head coaches in 5 years. The first retired. The rest all quit. This new one has never coached as a HC before and the inexperience not only shows on the field, but from what I’ve been told in parent interactions and generally in the way the team is failing to attract new talent.

So, what do we do? The kid is a starter. He’s good enough to be a starter anywhere he goes. The issue is what it takes to get him out of there and then where he goes. If he stays he has a real chance at racking up a lot of city-level awards. That will help him get noticed, and the schedule will help him get noticed. He won’t win at the HS level, but is that the goal? Or is the goal to show that you can be a really good player no matter the situation. On the other hand, is he merely showing that he is a really good player on a bad team?

It is a lot for me to consider, but in the end it comes down to doing what is best for the kid and his future. If he does leave it needs to be to a place where the academics are good, the culture is solid, and the opportunities run long. It is not about being a starter. I expect him to earn that no matter where he winds up. It is about the opportunity to get better and give himself a chance to reach the next level: D1 college ball.

Some Thoughts:

1. Speaking of D1, the kid at Drake had a good game and a good win. The team looked solid defensively. They need to clean up the offense because they face an undefeated next week.
2. Alabama is no longer undefeated. Vanderbilt fixed that up.

No fiction. I think it might be too hot for fiction. In fact I think it might be too hot in general. It has been over 100 degrees for over 115 days straight thus far.

The National Weather Service says this is abnormal. The Lady Talis tells me it is always like this. I think the truth is somewhere in the middle. It is not always like this–not at all, but it is always hot. It happens to be quite a bit hotter now. 61 days of 110 or above. It is so hot, in fact, that I have lost all sense of what it means to not have 100 degree days. By now I should be cooling off and taking lovely morning walks. Instead I’m hiding from the sun like Riddick. Honestly, it is a clear scale up of global warming that people will continue to ignore.

But this isn’t a post entirely about the weather. It is more about life and the quality of life here vs. elsewhere. I keep thinking about the time I spend outside of the desert, and it is hard to rationalize why I continue to stay. The bugs are bad. The weather sucks. I don’t have a single friend I am staying for. We ought to up and leave. I am sure we will once the retirement hits. However, there is a part of me that wants to relinquish even that–cash it all out and find a new job and work in some capacity until I die. Retirement isn’t going to provide the easy street I want out of life. I’ll need to work anyway. So, maybe the plan should be to find another faculty position and put my heart into the next act.

It isn’t a bad plan. So long as it happens in a good place.

Some Thoughts:

1. Basketball is back. Sports are taking over the timeline. Did you know that there will be a college or pro football game televised live every single day for the next 54 days? It is like Lady Talis pointed out in the past, they cannot keep saying Sunday is the football day. They’ve literally made every day that.