Day: August 21, 2019

As I start today’s post by finally posting yesterday’s I am left to wonder if adding a fantasy league commissioner role to my task list is wise. It is not, but here we go anyway. I am a week away from embarking on my first ever operation as a fantasy league commish. I will be designing a league using the NFL network interface (because the league I play in is there and one stop shop is key) and running a fantasy draft from the beach.

okay, that part is cool.

The rest is a terrifying swirl of complications that I’ll use this space to get off my chest. Fantasy football requires an email and fairly constant logins, so for the kids to be able to play they will need to remember which email they use and have the wherewithal to login in at least once a week to get their team right–more if they want to deal with trades and such. I don’t mean to stay on top of them for this stuff. I want them to figure it out on their own.

I also have no sense of prizes or anything in regards to how fun this might be for any of them. I do know that i want to do it and I am excited to see what shakes out of it in the end. I also want that first pick.

Some Thoughts:

1. Just had a random thought while I was blogging my 10… what if I applied this strategy to novel writing? What if I forced myself into 10 minute bursts per chapter of a story. Write on this chapter for ten, short break, go to the next. It is, in a sense, bringing the discipline of HIIT training to the writing space. This might be a thing!

**Note: This is getting posted late as I ***again*** failed to double click. I fear that as my life becomes complicated with responsibilities, I fail to manifest the patience to sweat the small stuff… like making that extra click. Post is below:

Going back to a regular teaching schedule has reminded me of the interesting cast of characters I freely associate with college. My college experience was such a beast. My best college friend (not to be confused with my brother who is not of my mother for we long transcended friendship and simply… are) looked quite a bit like Hootie (Darius Rucker) and often enjoyed the benefits afforded by such an appearance. Odd for an Indian man. So, yeah, a character. Such things have often inspired characters in my own writing. As I begin to move towards a mindset of having two worlds in my daily life, I am constantly looking for characters to populate those worlds.

I should explain. I write for a shared world. I do not believe I will be moving towards writing for other shared worlds in the next year or so, but I do intend/expect to begin populating my own fictional world again. I have in mind a series of short stories that will form a collection and those stories share a world or perhaps look at suburbs at different points in the near to distant future. In that I mean to populate these worlds and tell a sort of history of man through them. I hope to have a thread of characters who move in and out of the area. I hope to be able to conjure a moment where a family who left 100 years ago has a descendent come back and experience a form of the town that is very socially similar to what was going on when her family left. This came to me when I met a student this very morning who mentioned moving because of feeling like her family was outcast in some way and coming to a new place where they were once again cast out. I might change things slightly, but the general idea is to be telling two types of stories within the boundaries of these shorts. I want to tell a story of people and I want to tell a story of an ever shifting world.

What I am most afraid of doing (and have done many times before) is not telling the story at all; of getting all of this in my head and being satisfied by just that and, as a result, not ever making the hard work happen on paper. That would be a tragedy as it has been in the past.