Month: December 2018

I would argue that being a successful writer is the correlation of strong willpower and courage. In other words, Grit. The eponymous dictionary.com defines grit as, “courage and resolve; strength of character.” it is a word/term re-popularized as of late as an educational catchphrase (and oft excuse). I am not going to use grit right now but instead focus on the component of willpower.

I am writing this from the comfort of my own bed as I coast into the afternoon watching the Ny Giants struggling to come from behind to beat the Cowboys. That is to say that my willpower is questionable as of late. I have not been motivated to do much more than reflect. So, here we are, reflecting. 

The writers I know to be most prolific are the ones who have that inner push to get but in chair and produce fiction. This is regardless of their level of success from story to story. As a contract writer I tend to publish nearly everything, which while wonderful is no hope to the willpower. Will requires a significant test. You need failure to learn how to fight and you need failure to recognize the value of success. 

So, I’m going to be reflecting on willpower moving forward and trying to foster a deeper understanding of what it is, how I apply it, and what to do in order to make myself stronger moving forward.

Well, I saw Vice. While heavy handed at times the film was quite tongue in cheek in others and reminded us every step of the way that we are constantly being manipulated. The trick is being the one who tells you who is manipulating you. 

Hint: it’s not just one side. In fact the entire concept of ‘sides’ is a blatant manipulation and misrepresentation of what we are supposed to me as a nation.

Manipulations that I previously overlooked bubbled to the surface in the film. One strong example of that is the wording of the climate issue. Once chiefly referred to as Global Warming it is now primarily seen as Climate Change.  Which one scares you more? Yep, that’s the entire idea and thus the issue here. We have long been manipulated by the way language is used and by who we put our faith into and how. Fox News is perhaps the biggest culprit. Fox is nominally the largest news network in America and most watched in large swaths of America. By definition they are the mainstream. Still, they consider themselves exactly the opposite, the small outsider struggling to bring you the facts. At least they’ve mostly dropped the guise of ‘fair and balanced’

If you get your truth from the opinions of others who misrepresent those opinions and facts you will believe what they want you to believe. On a you do—once you choose a side—it’s hard to reverse course. 

The cruise directorship is apparently still active. The boys woke a little after 7:30 and played games for several hours before deciding they were bored enough to come to me for advice. I shouldn’t call it advice. It felt more like a demand for activity—a call to action in the passive aggressive form of , “what are we doing today?”

There are a million ways to respond to that question, but unless the answer includes an address, time, and dress code you are likely to get more questions. You are likely to get so many questions that taking down a kid starts to seem like a realistic option. So I said, ‘you guys decide’

After a considerably long resulting silence I offered, ‘we will go get haircuts at 11:30’ that was enough to chase them off for a while. They wandered back around 12:30 anxious to get on with it and that is how we ended up here watching my son’s Afro being shorn and shaped while he stares in a mix of amazement and uncertainty. After there will be lunch. 

The evening is a mystery to me. I’m not a very good cruise director, so I’ll probably argue for a video game and a movie. Maybe I’ll finally get to see Incredibles 2.

Some thoughts:

1. Finished another audio book. I’m getting to the point where I really need to start creating.

2. 

The last few blogs have come from my phone. I remember before I had one I used to write everything down in notebooks or use an audio recorder. I’d never go back to the majority of those notes and the audio remains untouched—even what remains on the phone. What I enjoy about writing from my phone is also what I dislike about the process: 

It lacks process.

Time and effort are different on the phone. It feels like I’m working less when typing on the phone, likely because there’s no ritual to it. I don’t sit down and go through the machinations of pulling out a laptop, finding a spot, and settling into the work. I pull out my phone wherever, handle my busines, and move on. It’s more carefree and perhaps more careless of a way of being. It feels very modern.

I believe there ought to be some manner of ritual to writing. I’ve played with many and haven’t gotten it down still, but the importance of one is. If lost on me. 

Part of the beauty of being off of work is being able to absorb a lot of fiction—audio and visual seems to be how I do things anymore. I listen to a lot of audiobooks and I watch a ton of tv. Really bad tv. My latest watch is called Travelers. It replaced Killing Eve when I fell asleep on an episode of that one. I decided to give it a try and then kept going. Here is where things get complicated.

The show has a lot of potential but is also limited because it has to work within strict and narrow parameters. It is about time travelers who connect back to a specific time to right the future. Within the scope of that argument we see that there are also five character stories based entirely on how these characters interact with each other and fall into their former lives. This is where the story is the most interesting at times but they keep the focus on the time travel mission, and there is where it all starts to fall apart.

The given future is basically a version of Hugh Howey’s Dust. The steps requires to prevent that from happening are vague and the missions the team or teams carry out are only loosely connected and difficult to make real sense of. 

In the end this show has potential but overall it is not a good show and lacks a great deal of creative power in terms of show to show action and plot. If it has more to offer it hasn’t yet.

I’ve been keeping myself up at night trying to figure out a way to stem plays off a slot I sweep base and incorporate it into a 10u no-huddle offense with hand signals. It isn’t the kind of thing people normally are consumed with, but I’m an obsessive compulsive with clear issues surrounding failure at sports, so it’s sort of a thing. The key is to not make it so big of a thing that it takes over, but I’m not entirely sure I’ve done a good enough job of that. After all, it’s nearing 11:30 and my brain has clearly honed in on the one problem I can neither quickly solve or matters at all.

There is something about immediacy that turns me off. Around 4 this morning I found myself trying to assemble a ping pong table for my boys and failing to do so before they rose for Christmas. I wasn’t a fan of the process. Given time and proper tools later in the day I enjoyed it and spent the time doing it right. The short of it is I don’t enjoy working under pressure as much as I do working at my own leisure. Of course a little pressure and deadline is needed but when things pile up and get close I tend to think about and do just about anything else.

Perhaps the best way to deal with my tendencies is to not get to that point in the first place. Call it a lesson learned on Christmas. Here’s a few more I learned today…

1. Don’t expect kids who have been up late the night before to last late into ththe present evening.

2. It being Christmas ought to change general assholery but it doesn’t.

3. Joy favors the observant mind.

4. 

Tradition is, well, tradition. So, here comes a ten-minute xmas eve poem…

Twas the night before xmas 
Twas a night of great cheer
Twas the night before presents
and excitement was near.

On this great evening
much fun to be had
Chores for the little ones
who long had been bad

For this was the day that
that long into night
All those naughty kids 
tried to make it right

They talked to their teachers, 
and parents, and friends
Like long time abusers, 
tried to make amends.

But this is the magic
when christmas is near
There is no better push 
then the christmas coal fear.

We do things for self 
we do things for love
we do things to feel good
nothing else above

For xmas is time
to fill up with glee
Some people even rhyme
Some people like me

Because in the end 
I prefer we find joy
I wish only happiness
for each girl and boy

So let them find christmas
their one chance to repent
They’ll do all your bidding
Till bad karma is spent.

So in this last post
before christmas day
I say merry christmas
In this poetic way.

Merry xmas, dear reader!

I’m just gonna say it like it is. Some things suck. Some things suck so bad and predictably that it makes you yearn for the stuff that is actually good. At times I wonder if the bad things lower my standards for the good things. To wit, I believe Spiderman: Into The Spiderverse is among the top 5 Marvel films of all time. The next day I watched Batman: Bad Blood and recognized how awful it was and how awful the DC stuff has presented itself in recent years (Marvel is not to be excepted from this generalization). 

The spidey movie was really good, but that is a blog for another day. The real here is that things are crappy across the board. I believe our president sucks and inexorably is tugging our country towards the normalization of behaviors that would otherwise be considered crazy, bullying, racist, lousy, etc (and will again should a democrat try anything like what this president has done). 

I don’t have a lot specific to rant about, but it isn’t quite christmas, so I thought I’d get it out now before I get to the point where I am reflective and grateful and joyous. Gotta get the rage out…

I don’t live in the world I grew up in. Not in any real way. It is a version of that world. It is a version that is draped in technologies that barely existed in my childhood. It is a world where the characters of my past–The Trump’s included–are caricatures of a past that seemed to make so much sense at the time. This is the central idea I wish I could find a way to capture in print. 

There are some serious problems with taking everything from my past and watching it turned into a movie vision by people from that time. It is the realization of everything we all wanted. But where do we go from there? What I loved about the Iron Man movies is that they represented a modernized version of what was essentially a B character done up to represent the angst and ego of a generation. What I didn’t love is that they unleashed a new era where there isn’t the gestation period of twenty years plus to realize that dream on the big screen and for the idea of characters and the zeitgeist they represent to be fully matured before being unleashed to a hungry, idea-starved, public. We get everything now. We get it in a hyper-shortened and summarized and even homogenized version. 

We get content without content, and I think that is where things are starting to go seriously wrong.

Fitting that I didn’t post the blog last night. I was overwhelmed by a great many things. To begin, break has begun and the kids are totally jazzed about xmas being around the corner. Me, not so much. I haven’t gotten all the gifts, I have no real plan on how to spend the time with them, I haven’t finished the work I need to do pre xmas, and did I mention gifts?

This is not supposed to be a stress-filled time but, here we are. So, it is no surprise I only hit publish one time and clapped the laptop shut before diving into an episode of God Friended Me with the boys (we do love our shows). The moment was indicative of two things: First, the double tap publish is not intuitive. You can always unpublish or delete, BTW. So, why do I have to hit it twice?! It makes me look unfocused, which I am. So, stop exposing me. Second, as I said, I’m unfocused. I wasn’t sitting down to the ritual of writing. I was trying to squeeze in ten minutes so I can feel accomplished and go kick it with my kids. 

So, that there is the real trouble. I’m not living that life I just talked about wanting to have. I’m still diving from cave to cave and watching the rest of the world turn to dust in the interim. In other words, I need to get back to balance. 

Funny… I’m not sure I know what that really looks like. I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen it.