Month: February 2022

This Prompt comes from 642 Tiny Things to Write About. Finish this sentence: The smell of an orange reminds me of….

The smell of an orange reminds me of the southern shores of Erros where the groves sit close enough to the ocean that you can smell the saltwater. I haven’t been since I was a boy of nine. In those years I hardly wore clothes at all, so quick was I too dirty them either in the muck lining the groves or the waters down the hill to the south. My father picked oranges his entire life. When they were not in season he worked at plucking cabbage until his fingers were stiff with the repeated actions. He told me, “Boy, you should never do as I do. You should learn the ways of books since we were both spared the gifts of magic.”

I didn’t see magic as much of a gift then. I only knew of the priests that roamed the lands conjuring healing spells for the faithful. The other children would talk of magisters who came from the west–from the place we came to know as the Reach. They were dirty men with poor morals and hearts that thought only of gold. It was a curse to be touched by magic and not touched by the one true God. If I had only known then how wrong the stories were–how much they witheld–my life would have been different. My life would have been safe.

Over the course of the next 31 days I will be freewriting exclusively. This is being done in order to test and create prompts for my creative writing class. I will try out each of the prompts in an attempt to figure out which are the best prompts to use. To that end, I will consider several prompts each day and do one of them a day. At the end of this period I hope that I’ve gotten myself back up to ‘writing speed’ and maybe even discovered a little bit about what it is I want to say as a writer–which is largely the point of prompts.

The way it works is you look at all of your responses to the prompts and you try to find the common thread. It may be a type of character or a condition or some other such thing. The award winning author Matt Haig almost always has a character dealing with suicidal ideations, as my partner explains. This is part of the story he is telling. So what is yours? What is mine? These prompts force us to draw a bit of that poison out of ourselves and see clearly what it is that infects us with this need to tell stories.

I want to begin to tell my best stories. I am at an age where I am done waiting for that right time or fall more luck to fall into my lap. I need to be telling stories now and getting everything off my chest while this remains a possibility and there is the possibility of enjoying knowing that the stories are being told and shared and perhaps appreciated by some.

So, I finished the Sex in the City “Spinoff” And Just like That. At least I think I did. Not to give it away, it ends with the idea that there could be a next chapter–for everyone. This doesn’t mean there is any real sense of closure save for this present chapter in their lives is over in a sense and they are all going to move forward into the next adventure. I suppose that is the way it is supposed to work in a series. Leave the fans to wonder what happens next. I still wonder what happens next for the Gilmore Girls. That last bit was beautiful and sad and fulfilling… or I was buzzed and emotional when I watched it… or both.

But I buried the point back there. Or didn’t say it at all. There are a ton of shows trying to tell the next chapter. The idea of ‘limited series’ is a rarity. People are trying to develop franchises because a franchise can demand higher (and long lasting) add revenue. This, to me, argues that they are trying to do the soap opera method and not telling a close-ended story. Can you do both? Apparently only with a reboot, spinoff, or prequel in play. See ‘Grownish’ for example of the spinoff. The upcoming reboot of Babylon 5 argues that reboots can bring solid revenue should one build that cult base during the first go round.

All of this is to say that a lot of stuff is being made right now that isn’t new or some new take on the old but a way to build revenue and make money and I am not sure that is a good thing.

Next week will be the return of freewrite friday. I’m kicking in off with 7 straight days of freewrites starting Monday. I’ll do one a day until I run out of steam (or something else catches my interest). This is the beginning of building back my connection to the creative. I feel I’ve lost a bit of that and lost a bit of intelligence and drive as a side effect of all that. I need to read better stuff. I need to seek out new knowledge as opposed to leaning in to the stuff I already know. I need to be productive and interesting in a way I used to be.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of the problem is I fell too deeply into this football world. It became a passion of knowledge and I spent so much time learning how to become an offense designer that I entirely forgot that I wasn’t and, moreover, I was done coaching.
2. I wonder who I’ll be in 20 years.
3. I wonder if i will be.

Honestly when I loaded up to write the blog I was convinced I missed a day. I could not get around to thinking it was actually Thursday. I say Waiver Wednesday and thought, crap. Then I thought about it for a while and recognized that it was not friday and could not be friday. This is how it feels in the new world when I go into the office once a week and spend the rest of my time working from home and struggling to devise a schedule that I will stick to. It doesn’t help that two of my kids are in college and one is taking his entire semester online, so there is not that sense of having to take kids to school every day. There are few touchstones in the week to remind me of what day it is, so I get lost as a result. I need to be developing my own touchstones–not just day to day but within a day to create a sense of what a day ought to feel like. Right now it is just a matter of ‘when is my partner getting home?’

Life is good, in general. I have long stretches of the day where everything is wonderful. Then, inexcusably, I do something to damage my relationship and spend a large part of the remains of the day trying to set it right. I’ve reached the conclusion that I am a thoughtless partner, and it is getting worse each day. I need to figure out a way to get better–be a better person and version of myself. I would not be surprised if I wind up alone in a year’s time. People can only deal with living below expectations for so long before they decide to find a way to reach their expectations.

Some Thoughts:

1. Turns out I have none tonight…

A lot of football to talk about. Let’s get started at the High School Level:

High School

Desert Vista named Dave Bills its new Freshman coach to work alongside Nate Gill, 2021 AZ High School Football coach of the year. That shows me they have every intention of continuing the rebuild set in motion by coach Wisdom (now coaching in Nebraska). My sophomore started at CB throughout the year and, after making that jump from freshman B-team, has his eyes on being noticed nationally. He has a chance, because the Thunder will be playing out of state this season as part of the Honor Bowl. Each team gets to award an MVP and a Character award. I think if he keeps up the good work he can figure for the character this season. It is tough sledding for a CB to win MVP, though he hopes to play all three phases of the game this year.

His little brother will be training with the incoming freshmen this spring as a way to prepare himself to be a leader once he is in that incoming freshman role. Finishing the season as a 14u starter, the 12yr old has shown a lot of growth. He toughed it out playing multiple downs as a RB and started the entire season as a CB and never gave up a single TD or big catch. Big time work ethic on the field and some real desire off the field means he has a solid future indeed.

The Pro Game

The Giants. It is all about the Giants. I hope they get it together and get clear of this recent Flores scandal. The fact is they only interviewed Flores because they had to via the Rooney rule. Schoen knew who he wanted. The texts indicate as much. Once the smoke clears and the staff gets back to work there will be some solid questions to answer and about more than the line. What about Barkley? How to rebuild the WR corps? How to clear enough cap space to be a destination? None of these answers are near focus, so we just have to wait until they are.

Not a lot of cohesive things to say but I do have…

Some Thoughts:

1. Given the influx of African American fandom to anime will there be more black characters in Anime? No. Here is why: There are less than 25,000 black folk in Japan. There are more Ainu than blacks. In truth the anime culture focuses heavily on Japanese and German culture specifically. There are 83 million Germans still which is not reflective of the percentage of the world pop the nation had during the height of the cultural alliance between Japan and Germany. In short, we don’t have the market size to make an impact. There are quite a large number of black people in the world, but the African American population is sub 50 million. So, there’s that.
2. Interesting developments in the Brian Flores situation. Man gone went and sued the NFL (and the Giants) claiming he never got a fair shot at a job. He isn’t wrong. Giants knew it was Daboll and the two non-white candidates were merely Rooney show horses. They interviewed Graham to keep him there. Flores was just the big name. NFL racist? No surprise. Given the increased number of highly talented black assistants over the last decade it is hard to fathom that there is only one black coach in the NFL. One Hispanic coach too… And that is all.
3. It is Black History Month! Not sure what to do with that in the age of CRT…
4. Somehow this rolled into a rant. Imagine that. I gotta stop peeking at Fox news and getting mad.

I am back in the Bat chair. No, seriously. I literally have a Bat chair (made by Titan). I have a bad ass partner who gets me such wonderful toys. So I am here and trying to lock in on what I need to be doing as a writer. It is very difficult to say the least. I’ve done all I can to avoid distraction and that act itself was, well, distracting. The truth of the matter is that I don’t know how to move forward in either of the big works I am toiling over, so I move forward with neither. I even considered writing for a new Shadowrun game book, but I didn’t have anything relevant to say. I refuse to say I am out of ideas, because that is absolutely not it. Instead, I’m just stuck. The only way to get unstuck is to force my way out through writing. I wound up doing more mapping instead. Even that is a part of the process. The more I map, the more I am forced to think about characters and places and peoples. The more I do that, the more I draw near to telling an actual story. I just need to pick one story out of these two to tell first and in that begin to do the hard work of writing it the way it ought to be written.

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of the reason the negativity hits me so hard is that I know I am not living my best life or being my best self and it is easy to fall upon blaming my surroundings for such things. Surroundings matter, but people are successful under far more difficult conditions than these. My main culprit is myself.
2. Began listening to Eaters of the Dead, because I saw it on Audible and I like Chrichton. I suspect we are kindred in some small way. He passed in 2008, though I intend for a measure of his spirit of research to live on through my own work moving forward.
3. Always forward.