Month: December 2021

Well, I won that 1st playoff round game. Wow. I honestly did not see that coming. To make matters even more interesting, my partner won her match as well, making it two losing teams beating two winning teams to advance in the playoffs. As the kids say, ‘they sold the bag’. I just said ‘as the kids say’ which, as it turns out, I say a lot. Almost as much as I say… a lot. Language is a very interesting morphing construct in the hands of cool generators and meme machines like kids. But I digress…

This season was a promising mix of fun and excitement. I participated in three leagues and this beachborn home league is the only one that offers me a viable shot at the playoffs or at victory really. If I can win out then I secure that bag and that trophy. At least I won’t need to wear the sad toilet bowl. Turns out the automated bot that rounds out the league wears that this year, prompting a revision of the rules of how the draft is ordered. Now we are going to stage a lottery for the first (maybe even first 3?) picks or maybe even the draft order itself. This is worthy of a conversation and a little bit of math to determine equitable numbers in the situation.

Some Thoughts:

1. I saw Spiderman. I want to geek out on it, but that is going to need to wait until tomorrow.

First of all, I really need to get back to some order in this blog. I feel the blog often goes as the life goes and the life has gone full leisure. This is not to say there is not work to be done. However, there is work not getting done. I think I need a touchstone. I’m better with a daily touchstone that involves productive work vs. games. Holiday touchstones are great but temporary and provide a strange sense of timelessness. I don’t need timelessness. I need time management and goals. That is how I get things done. Of course, holidays aren’t about that life. They are about sleeping in and enjoying the family and that has its own joys.

Some Thoughts:

1. I really hate the idea of Lacrosse being so bourgeoisie given its roots in the NAN community. It feels like football was structured in the early days. Perhaps The NAN will take their game back. In my lifetime I mean.
2. Still a chance my sad little 4-9 fantasy team advances in the playoffs. Such is fantasy… Just don’t sell the bag.

Blogging from the main office for the first time in a while. It is now a week before Xmas and I am still thin on the presents. Of course, the idea was to be light on gifts as we gave each other the gift of travel, but I still grabbed a handful of fun and interesting things that kept the price of gifts below… a few hundred. I am happy in my life right now and it feels like I haven’t been able to say that for a long time. It took a ton to get here. I’ve struggled and struggled with a great deal both personally and from interpersonal issues. Yet I am still standing… sitting, actually, as I construct this blog.

Toughest takeaway from the trip: I lost my charger for my mac. Those things cost a bundle not to mention it had the special adapter my partner gave me a year ago. Sucks.

Best takeaway from the trip: All we need is each other. We find entertainment in that and in the world around us without trying too hard and in spite of what else may be going on.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been rebuilding the home network. Switching out the switches to models that are less than 5 years old. That ought to edge the speed up a tad when traffic is heavy. We added a mesh network designed to improve range and signal strength. So far so good. Now… what to do with the old gear?
2. Probably need to wait until monday to get back to the fantasy novel world. Time is not there right now.
3. I am very bad at Madden. It disturbs me how much I fail at that game compared to all 5 of my boys. I just don’t get it. Definitely need to put more time on task in order to get better. There’s a few sites I like, but Madden School is probably the best.

The blogging continues to be tough. In the beauty of the holiday it is hard to find time to do what needs doing. By needs to be doing I am speaking of the words. I haven’t been diligent at all as a writer and this blog has suffered as much as the momentum for building the world. I need to get back into the flow, but I don’t know that it happens pre-xmas. In terms of the holiday itself I am doing well with getting gifts right and getting glee going but I am losing coherence in a sense. Everything is happening at once and that makes it hard to focus and hard to be successful at any one thing. Tomorrow ought to be better.

One thing at a time.

Actually, this one is about football, regardless of where it comes from. I’m in the playoffs now and the first game of the week treated me fairly badly. My qb was outscored by his reciever. His Wr was Tyreek. My QB is Mahomes. This is not a good start, Still, hope rings eternal. It was only a 3 point loss. I have many more players to play and the prediction still has me on top. Life is good this holiday and I am working towards developing a healthy amount of glee.

I also don’t have a great deal to say this fair evening. I suppose the problem is being drained to nothing late at night yet again.

Some Thoughts:

1. Seriously though, I gotta get better at blogging at a reasonable time. I’m bad at the game.

My partner reminded me recently that I spend a fair amount of time thinking and talking about death. This is not, of course, a good thing. I am working to rationalize the inevitable but I am also wasting the possible by rationalizing that which cannot be changed. How long one lives does not shift the fact of the end and acceptance of that fact is entirely irrelevant. Perhaps it is easier and more useful to continue to rage against the dying of the light. So, I will do that instead.

While I am still here I have a great many things I wish to accomplish and see accomplished. There is a chance my mid kid gets some D1 level offers this next sports year. He’s a brilliant mind and a solid athlete who is coming into his own physically. He’s ready to build and emerge into something greater athletically, but I really want to make sure he nurtures that beautiful mind as well. That has to be encouraged on my part. I’ve been told I’m not so good at that side of things, and I want to get much much better.

I have been thinking about this book a lot this vacation—the fantasy one I mean. I don’t know that it is just a book. It is a story world worth sharing, and a part of the conversation my partner and I have been having is about that sharing and how to do that. There are options. There is money to be made selling through Amazon and making the world a thing. I’ve also thought about the idea of a Kickstarter to build up the world, but in order for that to work right I have to build up the knowledge and appreciation of who I am as a writer. I haven’t done that much. I have a plan for that too.

I am going to Gencon. It is long past time, but this time is about both business and pleasure. The novel should be dropping at this Gencon, which is the perfect timing for selling my services to other gaming houses. I need to be out in the space meeting people and making the connections that could get me working more and pursuing this career. I also want to play some RPGs with great GMs. This is the venue for both things to happen.

I am anxious to expand more as a writer and share the ideas I have with the world and hopefully discover an interested audience. There are stories that need telling.

Let’s talk football. Normally I wait till Wednesdays and I think I will talk more then but I want to reflect on a failed season–seasons. I’m in three leagues. I failed to make the playoffs for two of them and only barely scraped my way into the 3rd with a losing record. I am the New York Giants of Fantasy Football. So, that means I have a chance to win this entire thing if I really dig deep and come up with some smart picks moving forward. I don’t know if I have the best team, but I can hang with the rest. Covid is helping me a little, with certain clubs playing down key players and the bye week helps because my prized D is coming off a rest week. If I can knock out this first round there is a solid chance of me moving on to face one of the two folks on bye weeks and then we will see what happens then. This is a league with a two-week final, so I have to string together four solid weeks. I haven’t done that all season in any league, so I am asking a lot of myself.

The good news: I’m on vacation, so I can focus on figuring out what to do with these players. I can see who to pick up and who to drop. The future is looking… possible

In my earphones the last book of the Expanse is streaming. In a distant window the Cardinals just delivered a massive sack to Rams star QB Matt Stafford. Maybe I should call him Matthew. Maybe I should do less multitasking. I’m sitting by the apartment window thirty floors up and taking in the fullness of the Seattle night. I’m thinking about the things I’ve written in the past and how I feel about that material. I am thinking about the things to come and how I feel about that material. I haven’t been an entirely forward thinking writer for a long time, and I truly want to get to that moment and get to that ideal. I am ready to be the writer I am meant to be and tell stories that are clever, entertaining, and force you to think. This is how I intend to be remembered.

Be remembered. Odd to have to consider such things, but I am well past forty and for all intents and purposes the oldest person in my family. The broken relationships with my parents argues that I won’t do much to remember them and I have to wonder who will remember me and why. It is worth considering at this point.

So, I write. If not to be remembered then to tell my story and because I don’t know how to not write. I just need to figure out how to write well. The novel is done and set to be published, so that is out of my hands. Anything beyond that is still in my hands. I still have stories well worth telling and the world has even more stories yet to be revealed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Looks like the Cards are legit. All the same, the Rams are dang good too. The NFC is going to have a tough playoffs. AFC? Nah, Patriots are legit even with a rookie under center.

Regular fiction is different than fantasy. Regular fiction is built off a backbone of common understanding. We write about the world we live in and focus on a small subset of that world and the human condition. We create meaning through that shared understanding and dive deeper into what this part of our world means to us and why. If I talk about growing up in Harlem I am, on the one hand, fighting against perceptions of Harlem shaped by years of media coverage, the people who lived there then and live there now, and the reality of how my age and station shaped my understanding of the space. If I am writing about the fantasy nation of Paye I am writing based on the reality of how the characters age and station shapes their understanding of the space. I am also writing from the ground up. I am building a city that has relationships and treaties with other cities. I am speaking out on the various cultures that moved through that space and lingered or perhaps were replaced.

This project is daunting but exciting. I’m assembling this world bit by bit and the culture part is the hardest. I don’t want it to be stand-ins for existing cultures but the ideas of those cultures. It’s complex and fun and.. it takes time to get right

In creating this world for my novel I quickly discovered that I do not have a novel for this world. I have myths and legends and conflicts and Oathkeepers and Oathbreakers. I have cultures slowly forming and spreading across the world. I have a Theocracy and an empire separate from the Theocracy but beholden to it in the eyes of her people. I have magic and it is held by the church in a vice so tight that it might well as not exist. I have characters spread across this world with no solid way to bring them together that does not seemed forced or contrived. I have a beginning which now seems to have no place in story or perhaps it is not the beginning at all but instead a part of the story in the middle or later still. I have racial and cultural parallels that are unintended and should be unwritten. I have a world that needs a story that tells a great deal of the world itself.

So, I have nothing. Except perhaps for opportunity.

I don’t know why I expected this process to be fast. Like everything in life I want it now. I say to myself, “I’ve waited 30 years. This is long enough.” But I was waiting idly. I was not slowly building world and story. If anything I was forgetting story and character. Earlier in the day I was at an outdoor mall looking at leather wrapped notebooks and I remembered that I have one like that and it is filled with information about this world I am creating–information that isn’t being ported into the story of the world or the map of the world because I entirely forgot the book existed. As I write I realize that there are in fact two books of this sort in need of my eyes and integration. Opportunity.

I am going to put focus on this novel world and make it a priority. I feel the story is there and as the world reveals itself to me bit by bit, so shall its story.