Month: December 2022

The truth is, life is better away. Love is bonded stronger–perhaps by the virtue of fewer distractions, perhaps because we have better routines. I’m writing from my phone before the plane touches down in Phoenix because I want to remember this feeling. I want to remember how the trip was and learn how to translate that to daily life. This is where I struggle the most–I get caught up in stuff but not so much that I get stuff done –just so much that the surface of my life is covered by all that I need to do. I also want to remember that it isn’t all on me. I forget that sometimes too. I forget that I deserve to have the thoughts and feelings about things that I do as well. Both are necessary. I don’t seek to preserve myself but to not lose my self in everything.

Typing this while Gladiator plays in the background. I do not think you can go to the Colosseum and not have an immediate hankering for this film. Yes, it got many things wrong, but it got things right too. That is how fiction works. It is about the idea of who we are and who we want to become. I look forward to creating more fiction that honors that idea and honors what it means to be a writer. I have not fully done that in my writings as of yet, but I am not yet 50 and have so much more to give.

In the meanwhile I am seeing this wide world I often write of. I see it and love and appreciate it. Tonight I am in London and tomorrow I will be home, happy that I’ve spent so much time abroad and learned so much more from the experience than I ever expected.

Some Thoughts:

1. I slept through the Giants game, but I woke up to a win!
2. Watched Love Actually again. Quite wonderful. It reaffirms my thoughts of love and romance in the xmas holiday. Less than a week to go until Xmas is upon us!

I’ve had an amazing day. I wandered into a castle, ate fresh made pasta, and toured this ancient city on foot. Now I’m home in my hotel room and there ought to be a realistic opportunity to watch football as I chill, but it turns out all of my services will not work outside of the USA. I don’t want to be the guy who relies solely on illegal streams like ’98 me or any modern teen, but the truth is, they won’t let me get what I need on my system. So, do I just not watch or even try to tune into media like I’ve done the entire trip or do I step back and take advantage of available options in order to peek in on my Giants and even my Jets?

The world is corporate and still about the dollar. That is what I was thinking as I toured the Capuchin Crypts this afternoon. The sort of breathtaking and utterly shocking beauty that they provide could not exist anywhere else. I also thought, USA is simply a meme to the rest of the world. That appears to be a theme to the trip thus far. Others make fun of us by diving into their hand chosen pieces of our culture and simply ignoring the rest. Maybe make fun is too harsh though.

I’m happy and I’ve had an amazing trip and I do in fact want to see my Giants game I fully expected to miss. Is that wrong? Maybe. I don’t know. And knowing is half the battle.

One of the central parts of the world I am developing is a long history of gladiatorial arenas. In preparation I spent some time at the Colosseum, which I learned is actually not the name of the arena. It is actually called the Flavian Amphitheater, which begs the question: If a thing is known more by its nickname than its name, is the nickname thin simply the new name? Anyhow, I wanted to get a sense of the place and the horrors that occurred there. A simple truth of the Amphitheater, the gladiatorial sport, and all modern counterparts is that these things were used to sate the masses. The goal was to keep the people happy and keep them off the local or state leader’s back. I often argue that modern sports serve the same purpose, though they have embraced additional roles over time. Gladiatorial combat, in its purest form, gives the people something to watch while reinforcing the idea of what happens to you if you step out of line. The fighters, you see, were slaves. They were largely fighting for their freedom. The handful of elective gladiators were so down on their luck that they chose that life.

How can I put that into play in a story? From what I have so far, the combat is outlawed in some regions but welcomed in others, creating socio-political lines of distinction and giving rise to underground combat rings. It isn’t much, but it is the start of a larger slave trade network and a larger conversation about power and relations among nations.

Some Thoughts:

1. Reading an interesting article published a few years back that does a deeper analysis of the Madden platform. Specifically, it dives into the problems of quarter length. I’m definitely one for the realistic stats and gameplay shortcuts make it easy to break that–especially with longer quarters, but the number of plays you get to run in a game is so far less than NFL standard to be unfair and unrealistic to the stat need. Turns out I want to work on the Madden team.

For the past few years I’ve been toying with the idea of truly giving time to developing a fantasy world and campaign setting tied to a series of novels and short stories that establish the central conflict inherent in this world. That conflict, I believe, is in place. There is a lot of history that forms this core conflict, one piece of which involves a religion that has been militarized over the years. The religion, one of if not the primary religion of the world, is seen as law in only two regions. One of those regions is an ever-expanding militaristic empire run by factions friendly to the church but not entirely of the cloth who use the word of their God to promote their expansion and violence as the way to free the people. The other is a Pius region that acts as a counterbalance to the first and also houses the main and oldest churches of the faith. These churches are all constructed around a walled area. Outside of this area a city is growing filled with peasants and patrons and all of those who wish to curry favor with the leaders of the faith, but realize they have no power or opportunity to operate within the walls of the faith’s domain. It is in that sense a city in a city, and in that a tale of two cities–one of power and corruption and the other of a much older and officious style of power and corruption masked by faith.

I want to spend more time thinking and writing about this specific place, and about the very reason it was formed on these lands. That is why I’ve elected to focus this free write on the subject. I suspect I’ll be writing even more about the subject over the next few days.

I don’t do well with languages that are not English. I don’t do well when someone asks for help and I cannot help. Put those things together and you’ll quickly understand why I froze up when the old lady asked me a question in French on the way to the airport this morning. It was a collision of my worst nightmares. At one point on this journey (perhaps two or three) I literally froze up when someone started speaking to me in a foreign tongue and I could not understand or responded incorrectly. Here I am with an old woman asking for help and I’m left to guess if she is asking is this the last stop on the train. It was, so I said it was, but quickly realized she may have also been asking if this is the terminal for the airport. Fortunately both were true. Thus began my journey to Rome.

Rome is not like Paris. My partner is discovering that she loves the Italian food and style on a near genetic level, so this place is a better fit for her. It suits me as well thus far, with the nicer people and the general sense that everything is going to be okay. I like that feel and fall into it quite easily. I’m falling into Rome easily and quickly, with intentions to reach Vatican City in the morning.

Any fantasy author should make this pilgrimage. I believe this, and the wall @ Mecca are touchstones for all the stories fantasy strives to share. So I’m making my first pilgrimage. I am incredibly excited to see the City of God and take in more of the sights of Rome. It is a very old city and history seeps through its pores.

Some Thoughts:

1. Finally experienced turn down service.

NFL.com likes to make a lot of lists this time of the year: 6 most burdened defenses, 8 teams most likely to make the playoffs, 11 expectations for the end of the season… None of them are particularly creative or informative. In essence it feels like they put these out each week, looking at the prior week as an independent universe of variables and failing to make sense of what is going on from a seasonal standpoint. Moreover, all the glee about the overachieving Giants has pestered out entirely. While nobody is directly calling for Daboll’s job, his offensive competency is being openy questioned This today’s NFL, your problems are settled on Sunday TV. In order for the Giants to settle theirs, the need to look to outscoring the Niners–no matter what the list says.

I think they can do it. I also think they lock up a win in the final week against the Eagles. The team should be approaching healthy by then, and as with the Cowboys game, they’ll have a better answer to the pass rush. It all starts (or ends) with a win over the Commanders are home. My money is on the Giants.

Some Thoughts:

1. Date Night at the French Caberet

I turned all the way back to 6.676, which was a free write based on the line, “Something moved in the distance.” I think this was a moment of clarity for me–not the blog be the result of the action to notice this blog. The inciting sentence means different things to me now than it did in the moment of creation. That structure tells me something. It tells me that a writer should revisit prompts and compare those prompts to the past inceptions. I love the idea of seeing where you were and where you are in comparison. Heck, that is what Turnback Tuesday is truly about.

That blog came as part of a week or more of free writes in which I created new things as a way to jump start my writing brain. I always need these jumpstarts and I’m grateful to be able to still create from them. I found myself (and find myself) imagining stories in dreams and in the moments of emerging consciousness and that reminds me that there are stories lurking within–moreover, it encourages me that I may still be connected to the story verse, or what Stephen King once referred to as Boo’ya Moon. I’m excited to still be a writer. Here in Paris I found myself standing at the crypts of Alexander Dumas and Voltaire and thought about the incredible legacy and opportunity and connection being a writer brings. I thought about my life and the narrowness of it, in terms of action and human connection, and I thought about the need–the desperation–for expansion.

I travel to explore and to discover just as much as I travel to escape. However, when I return from the escape the land of the lost that is home descends upon me like darkness. I need to fix that in my own routines and in my own ability to create space in my space–one that has been entirely coopted by purposefully vapid children. They cannot ruin my me-ness any longer. I will not stand for it.

I’ve gone between the phone and the laptop in the blogging and trying to lock in on a rhythm with which to do this. Jet Lag plays a roll. So much so that I am struggling to get this blog out as I lay in bed in the lull before I go out again. Once I muster up the energy to hit the club on a Monday night, I will not have anything left to write with. So here we are.

I’m downing powerberries like their senso beans trying to fight through the strange hours. What bugs is that by the time we’ve gotten this right we will want to go to sleep at the odd time in order to sleep through a significant chunk of the flight home. Nobody wants to be up for 12hrs trapped in a plane.

But until then I need to find the juice to enjoy the stay the way I want to. 

Some Thoughts:

1. We have American neighbors at the hotel. They suck. The most engaging non-locals we met were Greek. The Americans have generally been stand offish and in their own reality. Now they’re listening to what between the walls sounds to be a Whitney Houston documentary. Ahh, Paris. 

Third straight unpublished blog to myself. The situation here in France is difficult on the tech. Even more odd, we blew a circuit breaker in our room and cannot charge devices. That’s rough to deal with. The tech situation here for me Is strange because I blogged on different devices. One blog is on text and another on a dead MacBook. I’m back on the phone which suggests I will need to leave a placeholder for the MacBook blog and work primarily from the phone moving forward–at least I have a portable charge for that. All of this is to say Paris is a new experience on many levels. It isn’t even close to warm so it is a frigid experience on top of everything else. Yet I remain happy. We are starting to deal with the jet lag and the time issue and that is taking a while. We slept till 1pm today and here just before 11pm we aren’t even near tired. When we head back home we will be flying back in time in a sense and will need to deal with that change back. This too will be a lot.