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One of those nights where my mind wanders and I fall directly into…

Some Thoughts:

1. Brock Purdy is basic. Serviceable. Not in the Lamar/Mahomes/Allen conversation. Not in the Stroud conversation. Just basic. Good in the system. Won’t win the game all alone. That being said, the Brock Purdy love is out of control. I saw Lets Go Brock signs all over the highway today… I’m in his home state, which is NOT the state of the team he plays for.
2. I am waiting for the first car accident to be caused by an Apple Vision User. The breakthrough device moves beyond the shielded vision of the Meta Systems to a system you can likely use while walking around. Spatial computing, AR, the ability to use hand gestures… yeah this thing is cooking.
3. Been watching a TON of creepy videos online. I am not really sure why. It feels like I am either preparing for something or putting my mind in a state for… lord knows why? One thing I found sad and curious is how many people post videos of situations where they witness something possibly terrible happening to a person (usually female) and do nothing. What is wrong with people anymore?
4. Speaking of which, Vince McMahon finally got nabbed for his shady behaviors. I feel for the women who suffered at his hands, and I hope they get the justice they very much deserve.
5. Meanwhile, the Rock is now running the WWE. This man is killing it.
6. Well, we are nearing the ten mark, so all I can say is happy Saturday. Be good to yourselves. Be good to the people you love.

Yes, I said I was going back to fiction… No, I don’t have it in me today.

What has me going on empty is the increasing amount of work I find I have to do in order to retcon things after not doing the work in the beginning of the process to make sure these things are set in stone and make sense the way I want them to make sense to the reader. In other words, my lore is jacked and I need to fix that. What I’ve decided to do is spend a little more time each day developing the lore for the stories I am working on. I feel like this patient development is the best approach. Meanwhile I am already far enough down the road on my novel series that retcon is the way to go here. Well, more specifically I am going to make it all make sense and dig deeper into the lore of these characters, so in the 3rd (and final???) book in the series they are reaching the point where their backstories are fully revealed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Took a writing reset day yesterday. Blog was all I was able to deal with.

Let me start with the number: 238. Given that it is January 25th, my expected weight is 232, following a two pounds per week plan and following a 234 reading last week. Now I am moving in the wrong direction. I get it. I’ve had some emotional relapses. I’ve eaten more meat than I should be eating in a month in a week, I haven’t worked out at all. If you put it all together, I absolutely deserve the reading I earned.

So, the work begins anew.

My life is series of attempts, fails, restarts, and successes. I don’t win much, and that makes the wins feel all the better. I am one of those people who wishes he could go back in time and clean up a bunch of things personally. I cannot do that. All I can do is try to be the best me tomorrow, and be the best version of myself for myself and for the people I care about around me. I have not done that this past week. For the past week and a half I have engaged in epic failure. I need to acknowledge that, own it, and analyze it in order to move forward and be better.

So, I failed. What happens next?

I gotta come up with a more rigid plan. I need to realize what works and figure the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations required to follow through with the plan. Above all else, I need to feel like I am moving forward and being successful at this. It felt good to move forward. Moving backwards sucks.

Let’s start off with a brief nod to Lamar Jackson. The much-maligned quarterback is fighting through a who lot of stereotyping (and borderline institutional racism) to become the guy who not only gets to the show, but wins the MVP. We exist in a world of comparisons, and unfortunately those comps tend to fall squarely along racial lines in the world of the NFL. The handful of articles I’ve read espousing these comps exist behind paywalls, so no links here. However, it is clear that the new crop of QBs for the 2024 draft are being given floors and ceilings compared to other QBs “like them” which basically means race. Take Jayden Daniels for example. His ceiling is the aforementioned Lamar Jackson. His floor is Tyrod Taylor, according to more than one article. However, if you really watch these players, Tyrod Taylor and Lamar don’t have similar games. Taylor has the ability to extend a play but he doesn’t have the same type of game as Jackson or Daniels. Feels like race plays a larger role than game here.

Back to Lamar and the Ravens. Dang, man. This team gives me vibes. I’ve been a Giants fan my entire life and I’m getting 2001 vibes when my G-Men caught a beating from a dominant Ravens team. Also feeling the 2013 rematch of the HarBowl minus one Har-Bro. Interesting if dude wins again the same year his bro is contemplating an NFL return.

The Chiefs? Oh they are very good. They have a great D and a QB who has that dog in him.. and no Wrs. So… Yeah.

I want to share two quotes from a past blog. I’m going back to 1426, which was published April 1st, 2014. Not your typical April Fool’s stuff, but it had a few things in there I think resonate for me even now.

This story is about understanding something I’ve only recently realized: Opportunities arrive throughout life. There is nothing that says we are hopeless and ruined if things don’t happen for us right away.

Talislegger 1426

This first quote (note: I figured out how to use quotes in this thing!) hits me now in a way that reminds me that I still possess patience. 2014 was a tough year on a number of levels. I won’t go into those details, but I was struggling with relationships and being a dad and trying to be a good teacher and a good coach and really shifting my focus to the things I felt I could control. Every once in a while a light would turn on and remind me that I still have people who respect and even appreciate my work. I still work for those people a decade later, producing solid fiction.

The job of a teacher cannot merely be to deliver content. A book can do that. The job of a teacher is to help the student interpret and apply content to their specific situation first and to a global perspective secondarily.

Talislegger 1426

I teach three days a week in person this semester and each class is severely different than the one that came before it. I stopped using textbooks. I don’t see the value in them just reading content and not being guided to understanding by me. I teach creative writing and english and game studies and mythology. I don’t teach memorization fields like science or the social sciences where the textbook is extremely needed. I try to turn my space into an enjoyable and memorable experience where the content is learned because they are engaged and want to learn en route to being successful.

Well, we know Sunday sucked.

Monday wasn’t a ton better, but I approached it with a ‘I got this’ attitude and it helped me power through a pair of very long classes that I am not sure I was 100% for. The second was better than the first. The first suffered from technical issues and an extremely flat crowd. I do have some stars in that group, so that is a bonus. The second saw me short on content and generally not as up and ready as I intend to be on a regular basis. Tomorrow is a new day… one that finds me less prepared for interaction than hoped… again. So, I will brighten my new morning with the work of preparing classes and power points and delving a bit deeper into this concept of gamification.

I ought to gamify that Monday/Wednesday class. There is certainly time enough to create some bright moments of fun with that. I’ll give it more thought over the course of the week as my mind moves back into resolution. Presently I feel anything but resolute or ready for the world. I am ready to fall into several hours of video games and bad tv. I am ready to tuck myself away from the world and veg out. I am not ready to be a better me like I’ve promised. I am ready in most ways for the task, but I am still so very tired and run down and not wanting to engage.

Maybe I’ll give myself the night.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been playing more pokemon TCG online and learning that there are ways to be really good… you gotta have a deck that gets built out fast.
2. Lots to say about sports, politics, and more. But not more today….

This was not one of the good days. I’d like to argue I have more good days than bad, but even the best days don’t take away from how bad it gets when it is bad. Today was a rough one from a familial standpoint. I took hit after hit and really had to recognize the place I have in the lives of the people around me, what I am doing to make their lives better or worse, and the impact my actions have overall. I say this as a person who, in essence, is juggling two lives that truly ought to feel like one but don’t. I have my kids half the time, so half my life is lived in a fashion quite different from the other half of my life. While my older step-kids live with us, they don’t shift the landscape of how I live my life. School age children do that in a way that older kids cannot.

So, I struggle with the constant shift and struggle with the expectations during and between those shifts. Today was part of that struggle in ways I really don’t know how to explain. Needless to say I created a large amount of pain and drama based on parental choices that were mine alone and done without the consent of my partner, who is their stepmom and my best friend. Except I haven’t been acting like much of a friend. I haven’t been acting like much beyond a selfish person who doesn’t seem to know who is on his side or why there needs to be sides at all. Instead I behave that there are sides, and I am the only one on mine all the time. This isn’t how it actually is, but it is how I feel more days than I should. I don’t know how to fix that fundamental problem. I don’t know how to feel like I am on a team where I am supported. I spent my entire first marriage being on a team where I wasn’t supported and was raised in a household where I was constantly treated as less-than and the problem, so while that is no excuse, it is an explanation of why such an old habit continues to rear it’s ugly head.

I don’t know how to make things right, and I keep making things worse. For as much as I call myself a good writer, I am a bad communicator. That, is why today is a bad day.

I’ve been sitting in my Batman chair for nearly two-hours. I have, in that time, worked on two major projects. I love the work. I love being creative. I hate that sometimes it feels like no matter how much time passes, I am not getting anywhere on a project.

One of the first I teach my students about is the dopamine response. In short, when you get a reward, it feels good. However, we are becoming increasingly wired to get rewarded for doing less and less. As a result, we don’t want to do more. Instead we want to “work smarter” and we expect the reward to come quickly. This means that if I am writing a novel, I am waiting a long time for that ‘hit’ of it being done. If I am working any project and I don’t see progress, I don’t get that hit. Not getting that hit can make it feel like I am wasting my time and effort. I know I am not, but that doesn’t give my brain and body the “ahhh yeah” it needs.

No, I don’t have a solution. I don’t think there is one that is realistic and doesn’t eventually lead to segmenting work into a series of rewards. Instead I try to teach myself to lock in and enjoy the work for the work and treat the process as the thing I love vs. the result being the thing I am looking for. To me, that makes far more sense because as a writer, I am always going to be moving on the the next project. In fact, when I stop for any significant period of time, it takes me forever to get the momentum built back up to be productive. This too is an aspect of the crazy dopamine engine that is the human brain.

Some Thoughts:

1. Really enjoying the process this time around. It makes me happy when I am happy with the work as opposed to always questing for the ending. In fact, as I am writing, I’ve already got future projects in mind and I am making notes on everything. Exciting times and good energy… dopamine be damned.

I am trying to figure out where I fit in the writing landscape. I am, by trade, a RPG writer. I write games and I write tie in material for games. This is what I enjoy but it is not the end goal. However, in that RPG landscape there is a great deal of space for a writer to find a name. I don’t do this full time. If I did I would have more novels out on the street, but as I am writing this novel and reading a friend’s novel in the same universe, I am starkly aware of how different our writing and storytelling styles and types of adventures are. Heck, I am not sure where my band of merry runners fits into the landscape of things. I think the sequel will answer a few of those questions, but I am not sold on that. Perhaps the 3rd book will solidify their place (and mine) in the universe.

In the meanwhile, I am learning more about what stories I like to write, which come easy, and what is the really hard work that needs to be done in order to generate an entirely new narrative. I am working on yet another book outside of the ones mentioned, and I hope that one will give me space to grow as a writer and start to build me a new sci-fi fanbase–one that will help me transition to full time writer.

234! Exactly two pounds less than last week.

I feel really solid about hitting the goal I set for myself, which shows me that I have the ability to hit these goals, and if I really step up and do the work–do the exercise like I should–I can achieve the weight goals I set for myself and, more importantly, move closer to being a healthy individual. I’m proud of moving the needle down this far . I was nearly 240 a few weeks ago and I have worked for this ever since. I am doing much better with my diet, but I need to work harder and harder as a lose more weight. The first few pounds are easy. The last few are damn near impossible.

Change is hard. Patience is hard. Deliberate Practice is extremely hard, because the results are slow in the coming for the kind of work that I do and need to do in my life. My brother said to me “your calling isn’t necessarily fun all the time.” It was a statement I needed to hear, especially since I was starting to question if I wanted to continue on with my calling as a writer. I’m in on this. I am in on self growth and change. You will know I am no longer in, or I am dead when the blog stops.

Some Thoughts:

1. Reading Russell Zimmerman’s Neat on audio. First Shadowrun book I’ve ever listened to. The narrator is supposed to be my narrator, so I am excited for that. I also think Russell is him. He’s the best SR writer on the block right now, and my competitive ass needs to dethrone him. My Imposter sequel will begin the to just that…