Month: July 2022

Football is an exceedingly violent sport.

As someone who played and now years later is feeling the latent pain of that past experience, I know it goes hard. I also know that the risk of injury is high. My eldest blew out his ACL and then re-injured the ACL the following season. He done. My mid kid (though based on the 6 he is 5 of six…) is playing at a high level and doing well, as described in the previous post. Still, I worry about injury. He’s had his first concussion already. The ‘baby’ may have sustained a concussion at the youth level in the past season (which is why 12 yr olds generally don’t play 14u). Injuries are part of the story the NFL tells. We make a point to label them as part of doing business with language like, “Oh, he has an ankle” or “he’s out for six with a knee”. This shorthand does wonders for reducing the visceral nature of these injuries. Yet, in contrast, the truly gruesome injuries are treated as rare moments in time and the beginning of an oft incredible comeback story.

The NFL runs on stories.

There is the comeback story. There is the kid from the hood story. There is the country boy turned pro story. There is the hometown hero story. There is the underrated and grew to be that guy story (see Tom Brady). There is the ‘Rudy’ tale of toughness and grit. All of these stories define a sport and are often what makes that sport fun to watch beyond cheering for the people in one colored uniform vs. another. The teams attempt to make these players endearing. They turn them into heroes.

But what is our idea of a hero?

This is the kind of thinking I am seeking to disrupt and analyze. I have a theory that cultures needs heroes and those heroes need to be warriors. I’m seeking to apply that construct to a fantasy setting and then brutally deconstruct the dichotomy between what the idea of a hero is and what it takes to be that hero. I’m going to look into warrior poets, samurai, and the like for inspiration. All of this to construct a world of fantasy that helps me come to understand and question my own reality.

That is all.

I was going to wait till tomorrow, but this video clip got me started. The conversation about Nnamdi had me rolling. It hit on a number of levels. I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of a dad and former coach who is watching his son go through the same stuff. My son hardly gets thrown at in game. It isn’t because his coverage is the best in the world. It is simply the best on the team. He covers long enough that, if the play isn’t designed for that side the QB looks away. So, what story can we build around that?

The story of the Cb turned Actor Nnamdi Asmugha is similar–he didn’t get challenged because he was a good player on a very bad team. Why take the risk when there are other options? So my job is to play that up and make sure he feels solid and make sure he stays better than everyone else, because by not getting challenged and locking up the opposition when he does get challenged.

I don’t truly understand how we still find ourselves divided along racial lines. I know it has a lot to do with class structure and the idea of ‘being better’ than another group, but can one race truly look at another and say ‘we are better’? Not if we are all nearly identical genetically. We are all humans. We are all different, That difference ought to strengthen the collective, but it seems to create lines instead. Read a few pages into any fantasy novel and you will find that division writ large. It ought not to be so heavy handed, but the truth of the matter is that Elves, Orcs, Trolls, etc. often act as stand ins for racial divides in our own cultures.

Tolkien was indeed an ass. Maybe a racist too, but I’m not going to go there right now.

The fact is that we are definitely responsible in many ways for applying our own sense of race to the racial divides created in these narratives–both as readers and as writers. These conflicts serve as a way for us to see ourselves and to see the other. It is heavy handed–perhaps even moreso than the other divide of zombies. No person looks at a Troll or an Orc and says, “well there goes a stand in for a white person.”

I want to move towards creating fantasy that does better. I don’t want to play out these racial divides as stands for our own. I want something different. It may take a while before I can get there.

I’ve been working on a project for several weeks now. In all that time I have not churned out too many words. I’ve done a crapload of research and firmly situated myself in the world in which I am writing. Now that I am immersed, I can take off at full speed. It is a lot like it is for me getting in the pool. 30 minutes to get in and then I’m in for the rest of the afternoon or at least until someone says, “you gotta get out.”

I think I need to think about that process, because it happens with every story I tell. As I am writing the Justice Engine I see that I haven’t gotten immersed and thus haven’t really gotten that story going. That is worth considering–how you get the engine of your story going. For me it is about the world in which the story takes place and doing enough research to understand that world and be able to sink in deep enough to feel the grass between my toes and know all I need to know to walk freely among my characters.

Some Thoughts:

1. Went to the big Northwest Pow Wow today and it was epic.
2. Here is something I discovered there that I’d never heard of before. I really want to be a part of this story being told. Put me on.

Thought I quit, did you?

Nope.

I was actively avoiding being connected to the network for fear of distraction. I really needed to get some of my sections of writing done. I finished one section of the work I am doing and it feels very lovely. Now I have a few more days before the next deadline. I’m stoked and scared at the same time. Stoked because I can do this. The section is in many ways easier than others. Scared, because I cannot afford to miss more self-imposed deadlines. I am really putting myself against a wall here. Should I get more work (and given the impending academic semester) I don’t want to be in a position to be crunched and ineffective. Balancing your hours is perhaps the clearest definition between successful writers and those who don’t make it. I want to stay on the side of successful and keep getting better at that side of it.

I also want to play a lot of video games. And surf the web. And watch TV.

The balancing act is indeed precarious. How I operate is I allot time to academic work and time to writing. The rest of my time is on hold for my partner and our family. I work hard not to cut into that precious time. In fact, since I stopped coaching, that time has only grown and that has been a very good thing for the health of the relationship. I try to set aside time for games OR work games into the time I already have allotted for work (school or otherwise) and I definitely carve out an hour at the beginning of the day to warm myself with games. It is a working model, until I start playing too many games and eat up all my time. Sadly, that happens too. That is why I turned off the internet. That is how I got stuff done.

Some Thoughts:

1. I still use the word ‘some’ too much. I still use compound sentences too much. Being aware of your phrasing is important, but don’t be murdered by it. Revision knocks out the kinks. Write the way you sound and then revise for impact. Took me years to figure that out…

So, I didn’t post the blog from what I wrote in the library. I thought about it, and then did absolutely nothing. That is entirely the difference between being home and connected to the internet and being out in the city and doing my thing. When I’m out on the go, I don’t get to or think terribly much about the posting. The upside is, I lose quite a few of the distractions that define my writing situation.

I’ve been trying to get my writing situation right while out here and simultaneously come to a mindset of how to write anywhere by preserving the time and space for writing regardless of location. It is a work in progress, but this is the important work that separates writers from people who write.

I know who I want to be in that conversation.

Some Thoughts:

1. Watching some fellas throw the ball around on the pier and thinking about the difference between guys who play for fun an guys who play. That difference is writ largest at the QB position where amateurs throw the ball up and the guys who know throw it at an angle that is lower and with more zip to get it to where it needs to be before the defense can close. 4 seconds of air time for a 15 yd throw is junk.

I’ve blogged a lot over the past few months about how hard it is for me personally to write with other stuff going on. This is not limited to things happening around me that I want to check in on (like video games and kids) but also emotional matters—trouble in relationship land, health issues, writing space itself. All of this finds me at the Seattle Public Library’s Downtown branch on a Thursday trying to piece together an extraordinarily tough writing assignment. The work is hard because I am close to it and want to do it ‘right’ vs. do it the required way. It is tough because I bury myself in minutiae, which gets me wanting to escape, which leads to me playing even more video games and working less.

Which leads me back to the library…

…and the steady hum of a yellow-sided escalator climbing endlessly to a part of the library I’ve never been before. I could go. I could also write. Writing is obviously best, but as this blog indicates, procrastination and stalling are what I am most inclined to do.

So, let us spend these last five minutes talking about why we stall when we should write. The answer is a spectrum that basically comes down to We are Bored – We are Scared. It is rarely entirely one. I personally float more towards the center, with an emphasis on focusing on the why instead of focusing on the how to step off the spectrum.

How do we get off the spectrum? Honestly, the work that bores you is about having to do the tough parts or having to do work you don’t like in order to do work you do. The work that scares you is about missing deadlines or digging into thoughts and feelings you are not comfortable with sharing or perhaps even accessing.

In all of these cases the answer is: Just Do It. Find a corner where you can be away from your distractions and get the work done. There really is no other way. Which leads me back to the library…

…and away from this blog.

I have nothing left to say about writing.

Nah, I’m just messing around. There is always more to say about writing. For instance: Tonight Tobias Buckell is speaking in Seattle. I’m sure it is a paid gig, and even if I am wrong he is building cache towards his job teaching MFAs at the University of Maine. He’s finding a way to generate income with his words. In fact, he’s finding multiple ways to generate income while still managing a life, a wife, a time to write.

I bet he doesn’t play Apex or Minecraft or (especially) Madden.

However, my woes are not the focus of tonight’s words. I want to riff briefly on the writer as a job. There are many ways you can generate enough income as a writer to keep writing. Most of them involve teaching and speaking gigs, but there are others. Writing copy (or any short bursts of text) can bring you a little bit of cash. Doing this a lot can bring you enough cash to call it a career, but you have to make sure to balance how much of the ‘scut’ work you do vs. how much you are chasing your dream of being a writer. My sister is a PR genius, but she will never be as good in PR as she is as an author. Unfortunately, she spends most of her life doing the one thing and the other doesn’t make it as far as it ought to.

We have to choose how to spend our time and energy. We have to be efficient in what we do, because time is never as long as we hope it will be. Do the work you need to do as a writer (or otherwise) to have the space to write the stories you wish to write as a human. Find that balance for yourself.

I grew up writing on busses and trains. I had a decent trek to school from k-12 and never once experienced a school bus where my friends were with me most of the way. Elementary school was the M1 to Harlem. High School was a choose your own adventure of train routes that eventually led to the 4 train dropping me off as close to Bronx Science as a train possibly can. My friends occasionally rode with me on part of these high school adventures, but the bulk of the routes were me alone and in my world of words.

It was wonderful.

I haven’t done that in a long time, but tomorrow I am going to try. I’m going to be in transit a bit throughout the day, so I felt it would be best to prepare to write during these trips. Generally I play Clash Royale or Solitaire for $$. Neither option helps me reach my deadline, so I am going to try to slip back into my world of words and see if I still know the way in. I hope I do.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been pushing my personal deadlines this week. Rough week overall, but it doesn’t help to push. Things tend to pile up on the back end that way.

My partner finished her graduate degree online from a desk in her kitchen while three kids all under the age of 12 ran around acting exactly the way young kids are supposed to act. It didn’t matter. It also didn’t matter that she was on a shoddy internet connection linked to a computer already a decade past its prime. She was locked in. Maybe some of those things even helped. Maybe the noise of children and limited ability to have multiple windows open on screen helped her focus on what was directly ahead of her. She wasn’t trying to do everything in the moment. She was focused on the one thing she needed to get done. She was doing what every writer struggles to do–stay focused and avoid distractions.

Presently I have to grade 23 assignments and write 7 sections of a project alongside two more adventures. Presently there are 17 internet windows open on my laptop to go along with the 9 docs, 2 excel spreadsheets, and 23 pdfs. The majority of these windows and files are divided between three distinct interests. This is to say that I am engaged in a ridiculous level of multi-tasking that means that if anything gets done it will be done eventually. This, of course, is not the way. The way is to be focused as she was. The way is to take one bite at a time, one step at a time, and one task at a time.

We have become so attached to multi-tasking and escapism as a human society that we forget to be where we are and enjoy being in that moment. In that forgetting we lose access to the deeper connections between ourselves and the world around us and, as writers, to the material we create. I write best when I do nothing else but write. I write best when I have the mindset to drown out everything else and let the words guide me for however long that I am able to be in that zone–be it ten minutes or an hour or 4 hours. As I grow older I find that I have less and less time to stay in that zone. That is strange, because as I grow older I have more and more time that does truly belong to me. It comes down to how I choose to assign that time and how much of that time I spend locked in on one thing. Am I trying to squeeze in a game between paragraphs? Am I checking the news as I look up the definition of a word I want to use?

I am learning to be focused on the moment and stay in that moment, because that is how we get back to understanding the meaning of what we are doing and having a real connection with what is happening right in front of us. Equally importantly, that is the way to get stuff done fast and right.