Day: July 22, 2020

I just had the conversation with my partner about holding the 2020-21 fantasy football season. It feels like the NFL season will be happening. It will be janky as heck, but it will happen. As such we will carry on in a fantasy way. I haven’t given a ton of thought to what that looks like in terms of players and draft and concepts, but I will have something ready for you all next week. This week is back to youth football. Specifically, I want to talk about the national championships, the AYF, and the insistence to play in spite of covid.

The Empire Sun Devils (out of Cali) posted this recently:

This is a clear indication that these folks expect to play throughout the year and at least one league outside of AZ (NYFL in Nevada) is going hard. Our own team is first up on the Sun Devils schedule. We also play another one of their opponents, the OC Buckeyes, earlier in September. In other words, we are also good to go for the season.

I am still on the fence. I feel like this is a great opportunity for exposure and excitement for the little guy. However is it also a great opportunity for exposure to Covid-19? While we are working on ways to limit exposure (face and eye shields, personalized water, no snacks, coaches are masked, limited fans, etc.) there is no sure way outside of isolation. Likewise I am also sending my boys back to f2f school where the biological security is also suspect.

I have a lot of thinking to do on these issues in the coming weeks. I know there is exciting football available, but is it worth it?

I’m deep into this novella and trying to get the end sequence handled. I need to figure out how the protagonist finally overcomes the antagonist in a way that makes sense. I do not have an answer to that problem and thus do not have an ending. There are other loose strings left to tie up in the story, but overall I do not think I will tie them all up. I want to leave the readers guessing. I want them to feel like they’ve gotten a sense of who the character is and found some interest in his life and now he’s going on with his life and they ought to feel curious and hopeful about what happens next.

At the same time, there really are not enough words in a novella to dive as deeply as I would like to. I want to be able to dig into the character, so in rewrites I think I will consider ways to deepen our understanding of his lasting conflict–the one he comes into the story holding and that which is a step closer to resolution after the interruption that is this story.

I’ve needed to fall into writing something like this for a while, and revisions over the next week will be a happy happy time. Also painful. Always painful and excruciating. Detail work always is.

Some Thoughts:

1. My partner thinks I only say not so good stuff about her on the interwebs.
2. I think she is amazing.
3. So there.
4. In other news, I’m slowly coming around to the understanding that nobody actually cares if Trump is crazy or narcissistic or greatly resembles an African dictator in nature. His people dislike the idea of democratic rule so much that the majority — the great majority — of them will not allow anything beyond republican rule and that is a sad sad situation.