Month: February 2023

I tell you, Monday is the longest day of the week in spite of only teaching one class. Monday is a matter of falling back into the rhythm of the working world after a weekend of doing not that. It is often made worse by allowing myself to fall behind on matters such as grading and generally caring about my work life. I do believe in weekends being about family and self and escape from the routine (though a weekend routine is still a routine). So that is why Monday strikes like a heavy staff against my back over and again. By 7 pm I’m drained of all that resembles energy and fully in the realizing that tomorrow is yet another day of work.

I believe this is why Date Night Wednesday is a double edged sword. On the one hand it is a great way to end the work week. On the other I pile up so much during those days that I don’t ever get a chance to think about the date night to come–I’m too buys getting through three days of classes and figuring out when to grade.

Quite busy as of late and not really having the time or capacity (I hate that word) to come up with a structured blog. So, instead I’ll share…

Some Thoughts:

1. Just saying Capacity reminds me of the truly awful experience I had at ASU’s Piper Center for Creative Writing. That was a sinking ship and a cesspool of relationships that ran contrary to the workings of an actual writing center or promoting a writer’s existence. I did a quick scan of the staff page and discovered there really isn’t any staff listed. I do wonder if they finally just fell apart. They continue to put up a meager assortment of events and opportunities, which I was starting to properly develop…. no more, alas. It counts as a fail in my life and moreover a fail on their part.
2. Writing is not a fail, presently. I’m hard at work developing this new novel.. in my head. Imma put it on paper this week though.
3. Seriously, I am.

The hardest thing to deal with as a parent is a kid who fails to listen and take responsibility for their own actions. I have at least one of those, and the one in question is generally a really good kid, but he’s selfish at times. He takes his parents for granted (all three of mine and one of hers entirely do). What screws me up is when I’m treated like my needs and wants are meaningless and, instead, I am the help. that stuff breaks me and makes me feel like I shouldn’t be putting in the time and effort I do in order to develop and continue these relationships and to make his life good. I’m frankly sick of it. The situation always spirals and winds up ruining everything else in my life. More often than not I spend the week I don’t have them making up for the week that I do.

Consequences ought to change things, but I’m not sure they will or even how to enforce such things on a week on/week off basis. I’m struggling and at times I feel completely helpless and alone in the struggle. It feels like a battle where there is no wall to back against because it is coming at me from all sides and nobody is going to step in to help me. Instead, anything I do is going to make everything worse. That’s when I get defensive and worried about all of it and, as a result, make everything worse. This is not sustainable.

Some Thoughts:

1. The general model of TV shows is broken. These shows are being structured and forced to function as forever shows–especially comedy shows and sit-coms. A show needs an expiration date, because then you can create moving story arcs. The one exception to that rule appears to be soap operas, and they just keep shifting and moving and creating new arcs as they go. There’s something to that worthy of exploration for those who want the never-ending TV series. The way they’re building them now just isn’t a lasting model.

Just a nice warm evening full of…

Some Thoughts:

1. Track Season. Which means I’ll be blogging about that experience. One thing to point out early on is the relationship between my two youngest boys. The older of the two missed out on setting school records due to Covid and now he’s coaching up his little bro to break all the records he could not. This is really sweet. In the first meet he managed 11.8 in the 75m Hurdles, which is good enough for 3rd all time in the middle school history. Best part of the number: He hit the first two hurdles and had a rather bad start overall. He’s due for a 10 this year.
2. The other one runs in the morning as a HS Jr coming off his team’s first state championship in several years. He’s coming off a broken leg, so this will be a huge test for him. He’s #2 hurdler on the team, and the first guy is in line to be state champ.
3. Writing season. Starting that novel. Or Should I say started. Once the contract was signed I was quickly to work. Grateful for the opportunity. There have been fewer than 70 novels published in the line in the last 38 years and I’m on my second.
4. Working out a family trip to the beach. That stuff is quite expensive, but if I can book early enough maybe there’s a chance for a good deal…
5. I really want to play Medival Total War. I downloaded it and everything! I just haven’t put in the time to put in the work. Thinking about making it my early morning fix. I need stuff like that to keep me thinking about the worlds of fantasy.
6. As for the dystopian worlds of sci-fi, all I need to do is read the news to reach for that content.

I’ve named so many blogs after this standard. I think I do so in my endless quest for the writer’s life. But what is that life? So few of us subsist purely on the work of our words–at least at the level to which we seek to be accustomed. I presently have a student who wrote professionally for a TV franchise, yet he is back in class, back at work, and trying to scrape out an existence by keyboard or pen. It is hard to sustain this life and it takes a person of great dedication and even greater fortune. Other characteristics (for good luck or good fortune, if you will, is a characteristic) may be equally helpful. Connections, lineage, the rawness of talent… All of these things shape success. I am blessed with outrageous fortune, but I admit to a level of laziness that would see me penniless in any other profession. I suspect charisma numbers among my attributes (or at least did) for I used that primary attribute to succeed throughout my academic life. The writing success came later (and largely lately) and after I saw my talent level and creativity dip considerably. So much has been written about seeking a return to that talent and creativity.

When I heard Chapelle lament on the concept of thinking as working for creatives I did think for a long time about whether or not what I’d lost was a result of noise. For years I’ve fled silence and the very concept of being alone with my thoughts. Life is difficult for me on so many levels that I seek escape from it’s constant troubles by hiding in every crevice of distraction that can be found. What cannot be found in most of these dark corners is creativity and imagination. However, I continue to seek it there. I play Madden and imagine the world in which I am pretending to exist. I imagine being the coach and what talk show hosts and announcers would say about me, how I would chat up my players, organize practices, the life I would have outside the game, the relationships I would have with my staff and fellow coaches. This is a retreat–this is hiding–yet I try to find in it some imagination and creativity. I still seek some access to what was lost.

The purer path is to sit in silence and think.. perhaps after to write. But I am afraid of that. I know not why.

I spent the last two days helping students world build for Video Game development and Comic Book development projects. That has my mind on world building overall. I’m constantly world building. Every time I listen to a book I’m listening for how these great authors unfurl their worlds. I gotta say, I am constantly awed by the creation. I am presently developing a fantasy world and have designs on a futuristic world that I may consider beginning next year–so long as I get some prime production on the fantasy world. I’ve developed a great deal of it with the visual help of Azagaar’s fantasy map generator and World Anvil, though the later serves as a repository I’ve yet to develop enough content to use.

The key, however, is understanding what it means to truly build a world. I believe you need to deep dive and consider the terrain, the history of that terrain itself (natural phenomena that shaped it), what it means for the cultures that dwell there and so on. My tip to all writers is to examine human history–like really look and don’t just dive directly for the Roman and British stuff. In truth that stuff is going to lead you terribly astray. I also think a key point is to write down every idea, because putting it on paper makes it real and frees your brain up to test those ideas against others and change and edit them–this happens far less when you are doing it in your head.

Low energy day. I am working through a lot of things and my brain is slowed by the effort. Mostly I am trying to figure out the physical stuff that is haunting me, but the work stuff is a serious drag on my mental energies right now. I need to engage in the way needed in order to simply write full time and make the sort of money that would allow teaching to be the secondary job situation. That would be quite nice. In the meanwhile, I gotta get this body back in some kind of shape so I can actually stay alive. It seems to not be functioning up to age-based standards. The weight is a big part of that.

Some Thoughts:

1. It occurs to me that in Academia, once you’ve hit the moment where you are teaching everything you love and doing all of the things you find to be the best for you, it is exactly the time when all of it falls apart. That is generally how Academia feels like it works. People see you get where you want to be and then they start asking questions about why you get to be there. Such is the way…

I wish to begin by stating that I have officially given up on the Fast Franchise. The Rock had me hanging on, but the brotha is surely done, and as such I too remain done. I mention this because that preview was utterly trash and so beyond unbelievable–even as a Vin Diesel Vehicle (no pun intended) that I simply cannot abide. Meanwhile, I abide the AntMan and the Wasp series purely because of Paul Rudd. That man carries. The problem with this specific film is that it is not actually about him or his (truly badly scripted and acted) relationship with the Wasp. This is about the Quantumverse and about introducing story and helping us to understand the ‘Idea’ of Kang. Sadly, Kathryn Newton (who plays a very standard version of every high school girl lead ever in this one) gets the lead treatment and we lose many other characters in search of the father-daughter bond. It doesn’t work for me. They do a good job of setting up the next Young Avenger (we’ve already seen Hulk’s kid, New Hawkeye, and IronHeart but we’ve seen no men–I guess Guardians III might get us the guy but I’m really hoping for Miles Morales).

Marvel burned this one in order to set up other stuff. I knew that going in, but without the chemistry of Rudd to carry, the movie simply fails. The introductions were not even on point, because we met Kang in Loki, and unless you watched Loki you will not get this film the way they intend for you to get it.

Some Thoughts:

1. The Rock and Jason Statham are 50 and 55 years respectively. They look younger and more virile than I, who is younger than they… Dang

Rule #2: Have a moral compass/believe in something.

Life is, well, a mystery. We don’t know what caused the universe to come into being or even if it does actually exist. At some point there was nothing…. Now there is something. Weird. Now what made that happen? I don’t know, but I believe that there are certain principles that have to govern reality and thusly certain principles should govern our individual being. This I refer to as a Moral Compass. No, I’m not a religious man and I’m not what all would even consider a good man, but I have the things I see as right and wrong and they are clear to me and not to be overlooked. This matters. It matters so much that it is engrained in my way. So, I believe it ought to be engrained in every way. I find beauty in such things. It is why in the Hogwarts game I choose to believe in being a particular house and following the way of that house as opposed to simply doing whatever.

A Moral Compass is a set of guidelines, and I believe we all should have that. Belief in something greater than yourself is a similar philosophy. One is about the guidelines and the other is about the creator of said guidelines. Both can be useful in developing your own way.

Some Thoughts:

1. I do not know why it is important to me to publish these thoughts, yet I persevere.
2. I think I must believe in doing something till you know why you are doing it. I think that is why I miss coaching, because I don’t think I ever entirely completed the ‘what I was supposed to do’ in that. There is an entire part of personal learning and execution that was missing.
3. I’m tired of being ill/heart issues. I want to be right.

I am still in stream of consciousness mode, and all of the words that fall here are a reflection of the ten minutes I’ve given myself over to the typing. Listening to the Midnight Miracle on the way home from Cali I heard Dave Chapelle reflecting on the idea that when he is writing he isn’t really doing the hard work, but when he is thinking–dreaming and puzzling through his ideas, that is when he is doing the work–when he mustn’t be disturbed. I found that really interesting as a point of comparison to where i’ve been as a writer as of late. I’ve been neglecting that thinking part. I write and I shape the words to sound good, but the deeper thinking and meaning has legitimately been less of late. That is likely why my novel is #6,793 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books). That’s trash. I know I can do better once I actually do better.

I’m not going to get into LitRPG in this post, but I will get back to that discussion at a later date. Honestly, the truth of my writing woes have more to do with the work I put in than anything else on the market. I have the stories. I know I can dive deep and make them worth the read. I’m going to be diving into one (that is not contracted) next and seeing what I will do with it after. It is about the writing now and turning that into what it was always meant to be, because I haven’t told my stories yet and I’m nearing 50 years of crawling around this hot blue planet.

It is high time I started saying stuff that matters.

Some Thoughts:

1. Shorter than the last one, and yet the words are coming out a drip drip drip. I believe that drip will eventually become a flood that becomes a wave that becomes a way.