Month: August 2022

Starting next semester I’ll be teaching writing for comic books and writing for video games. These are narrative heavy forms that have huge differences. I’m going to be brushing up on the best way to teach these. I’m excited about the opportunity to teach forms. It is not a thing I thought I’d enjoy–particularly after being involved with poetry for all those years–but it is a way of doing forms I believe I will enjoy and I believe my fuel my heart in a new way. It could be a really good spring… If the classes fill up.

Some Thoughts:

1. I’m a bit on the drained side this week. Moving again. Trying to settle into the idea of this new shared household and what that looks like as well as figuring out how to make space for everyone and make the environment something we adults can be happy with and not a boy cave.
2. That being said, I am working hard to develop ideas for a space for these two teens that preserves their privacy and a space they want to stay in.

Beginning of week two of the semester and I think I am, slowly, developing a sense of how I want this to go. I have trouble starting semesters. In truth the summer is a very different way of life for me and I find that it is difficult to shift from one to the other. I am doing it though. It stalls the brain, creates long and terrible moments of stress and anger, and I lose track of what I need to be doing. This is not a sustainable way of transitioning and I need to get much better at it. FAST.

Seriously.

You never need to think about these things until you realize how much they impact the people around you.

I put forward my theory to my Mythology class and they basically finished for me. I started by saying, “Consider memes. How are they like Myths?” To which they responded with an explanation of myths as being a shorthanded form of communicating what people should know and understand but often being hijacked by other people who reshape them over time to suit their individual needs. So, I said, “Yes.” That was all I really had to offer them at that point. I have not developed the ideas beyond that, but I find a certain truth in the relationship between memes and myths. I want to explore it more in my writing, but I haven’t figured out a form in which to do that. I haven’t found the story.

I need to find a way back into the story I’m supposed to be writing for myself. I haven’t found that either, and the more and more I wait, the less relevant and interesting it becomes.

Some Thoughts:

1. Week two of school is rolling in, and I am not ready.
2. I’ll be ready by week 4…. I think.

Here is a sad realization: I don’t know when the 100 days started but I know I failed. I know this because I looked back as far as June and found holes is the process. I did not write about writing every day. Sorry about that. It was a powerful undertaking that didn’t come to fruition. Want to know something else? I vastly underestimated the number of books about writing. I should’ve realized that I alone own over 100. That being said, I own less than 0.0001% of the possible books out there. Much less. Go ahead, do the math. I’ll wait.

Some Thoughts:

1. Last pre-season game for the Giants is tomorrow and they face the Jets. This is a game where both teams are in the home locker room. Nice. More importantly, this is a game where the teams are ones I like and I am greatly interested in seeing who makes the final roster of 53… and who doesn’t.
2. High School football is about to get underway for my boy and I hope he has done enough to start this next weekend in California. They play a pretty good team called Madison. They’re playing as part of the Honor Bowl.
3. Here I am talking about football. It truly is a huge part of my existence.
4. You know what I am not talking about? Writing.

I tried to mow the lawn a few minutes ago. The grass is super high, and I used this weed whacker spinny tool to knock it down to size. Afterwards I ran the electric lawn mower over it a few times. Let me set the stage properly. My lawn is really a patch of grass about 5 feet wide by ten to twelve feet long. The fact that I call it a lawn ought to warn you that I am deeply uneducated about such things. Yet I try. I try and I make it extra hard on myself by doing things clearly wrong and not coming up with a finished product that looks good. I’m trying to reinvent a process that exists and is relatively easy to learn, but I refuse to be educated on.

Sounds a bit like creative writing to me.

I am rarely in the camp of: Don’t learn how to write. I also recognize I’m creating a bit of a false equivalence here. However, there are thousands if not hundreds of thousands or even more books in circulation about the art of writing. I’ve read close to three hundred myself and I learn more each time I read a different book. Yet I started without study and , to be honest, my writing felt less scripted when I did. But is scripted really that bad?

We are writing to an audience that has expectations. We are writing in a form practiced over a thousand years and honed to become what it is today. Sure, there are different forms, but the basics of story have not changed very much. Writing without understanding the form is possible for sure, but you end up like me in the yard–especially if you want to get published. What you wind up with is raw and possibly amazing, but likely needs some shaping to get it ready to sell.

Read a book about writing. Better even Go to school. You go there and you might stumble into a community of writers that want to get better just like you.

been sitting here thinking about how Covid is this thing we all experienced and, for many, are still experiencing. I’m in a Jimmy Johns where the tables in the back have never been made ready to use. They store things there now. It feels like the remnants of a very bad time. We will see more writing about this. It will impact how we do zombie, etc. I think it will blossom into another all too true genre of fiction to write about pandemic life from different angles.

first we need to psychologically recover from what we’ve been through. I don’t know if we are trying to do that. I know I haven’t found the words or even tried really. I need to tell that story one day myself.

some thoughts:

1. There is a cereal bar in Goodyear, Arizona
2. I saw a youth football practice today. I looked away as if I am addicted. Perhaps I am. No.. I am.

I acknowledge that writing about the story of sports as a way to still do waiver and keep going with my 100 days of writing about writing is a bit of a stretch. That . being said, there is solid value to it all. Journalists–especially sports journalists make their careers off this stuff, and people want to hear a good story. Better–people want a goos mystery to solve. Consider the Curious Case of Tom Brady. Two particular stories jump out at me.

The first story is that of a team not wanting Brady. He was apparently interested and the team decided to stay with the QB they had. This is back in 21, mind you. This arose from an episode of The Shop where athletes and celebrities sit around a mock-up of a barber shop and talk.

(I’m still figuring out the tech, so if this winds up messy I apologize)

Back in 21 Bleacher Report referenced this and, of course, speculated on who the MF in question was. They quickly ruled out Derek Carr, which is funny because a year later speculation points at it actually being him. The point is, we love a story. We love to count people out or in and polarize ourselves like the descendants of tribesmen we all are. This is the way of sports story.

I’m typing slower. That is an unhealthy side effect of fatigue. It has been a rough few days here trying to get things done. I am severely drained and overwhelmed and as I watch the world flow around me unbothered (save for my partner who is very bothered by all this) I am reminded of a fundamental truth: People who cannot identify with your struggles do not see your struggles as struggle. People who are absorbed with their own lives (no matter how big or small that life) don’t take the time to recognize what you are going through. They don’t have to. Everything in their orbit is just fine, so everything is fine.

When I went to grab the image I realized it was already uploaded, which means I have used this image before. That is never a good sign. It is, on the other hand, a sign that I deal with a lot a lot. Earlier this week I considered quitting my job just to have the bills handled for the next year and nothing more to do than take a run at writing full time–see what comes of it. I didn’t, and that will be the subject of a blog sooner than later.

Here and now I still am in the midst of a promise of 100 days of writing about writing. The message of the day should be clear by now: Nobody cares about your writing struggles. It is your job to get through it. However, I am aware that this is bad advice. The real advice is this: The world is going to burn all around you from time to time. What makes that unbearable is trying to deal with it entirely on your own. Writing, nay, living is not a solitary art. We need people to talk to and feel like we are being heard. Writers write to be heard, but not everything is ready for the page. Write it when you can, but don’t bottle the rest up waiting for it to age into a fine novel. You don’t have the mental space for that. None of us should.

It took a while for me to figure it out, but I get it now. Audiobooks are not a substitute for reading print material–not if you want to be a writer.

I found myself flipping through the pages of a Nyx Smith book I read years ago. I loved the book. It told a well crafted story that jumped off the page and into my imagination. More importantly, the way the words were shaped on the page–the size of the paragraphs and the length of the chapters; how it varied created a tension that is not possible in audio form. You cannot see it. You cannot recognize the chapter is about to end and know that a major moment is closing. When I wrote Imposter I had not read a physical book in over two years. That cannot stand.

Writing is a visual art. The pacing comes alive on the page. The way you lay things down from beginning to end is a reflection on your relationship with the reader. It shows in your writing how well you understand what good writing looks like on the page; the shape of such things.

I’d forgotten that.

Some Thoughts:

1. Rock Bottom is not a place. It is an idea. It can happen at any station and any time. It is the understanding that things are not going to go well for you moving forward. It is seeing that and deciding in that moment to either carry on or fall apart.
2. Perhaps there is a way to do both.
3. On a lighter note, I played more Madden. I enjoyed it. Franchise is not ‘fixed’. Trade mechanics remain utterly broken. You still can trade your way to a fantastic team, screwing the CPU the whole way. I’m in a season ten years in the future and the Giants remain a bad team. However, my trades have made us competitive. We don’t have CBs. Not ones that can run our defense. I will look for that next. Perhaps I’ll address the deficit in the draft. At any rate, the offense looks like it will eventually be able to cook under Daboll. Yeah, a ten year sim didn’t remove that man from his spot.

There is going to come a time where you miss a deadline. It will suck. It will haunt you. It will make you feel like a failure as a writer and planner both. It will poison your confidence and make you consider quitting the biz entirely. Let it settle in. Roll around in it for a few hours. Then get back to work.

Missing a deadline is not the end of the world. It is also not acceptable behavior. The key in these situations is to recognize how you got into this situation in the first place and learn from that so it doesn’t happen again. If it does happen again then you need to consider how much you are taking on as well as your willingness to put aside other things to get the work done. A writer’s life needs to be about writing. That needs to happen most if not every day. You need to find ways to be productive, even if that means writing outlines and adding a paragraph here and there to help you get what you are working on in better shape or clarify your ideas. You cannot decide that you’re going to blow off work and do other stuff primarily, because that is how you end up backed against a deadline in the first place.

Here’s another thing about deadlines they don’t tell you: When you are racing to write up to the deadline or especially past it, you aren’t writing your best, most relaxed, and thoughtful work. You’re writing the crap you forced onto the paper to make the wordcount. Don’t write crap to make wordcount.

You’re better than that.