Month: January 2024

I’ve been sitting in my Batman chair for nearly two-hours. I have, in that time, worked on two major projects. I love the work. I love being creative. I hate that sometimes it feels like no matter how much time passes, I am not getting anywhere on a project.

One of the first I teach my students about is the dopamine response. In short, when you get a reward, it feels good. However, we are becoming increasingly wired to get rewarded for doing less and less. As a result, we don’t want to do more. Instead we want to “work smarter” and we expect the reward to come quickly. This means that if I am writing a novel, I am waiting a long time for that ‘hit’ of it being done. If I am working any project and I don’t see progress, I don’t get that hit. Not getting that hit can make it feel like I am wasting my time and effort. I know I am not, but that doesn’t give my brain and body the “ahhh yeah” it needs.

No, I don’t have a solution. I don’t think there is one that is realistic and doesn’t eventually lead to segmenting work into a series of rewards. Instead I try to teach myself to lock in and enjoy the work for the work and treat the process as the thing I love vs. the result being the thing I am looking for. To me, that makes far more sense because as a writer, I am always going to be moving on the the next project. In fact, when I stop for any significant period of time, it takes me forever to get the momentum built back up to be productive. This too is an aspect of the crazy dopamine engine that is the human brain.

Some Thoughts:

1. Really enjoying the process this time around. It makes me happy when I am happy with the work as opposed to always questing for the ending. In fact, as I am writing, I’ve already got future projects in mind and I am making notes on everything. Exciting times and good energy… dopamine be damned.

I am trying to figure out where I fit in the writing landscape. I am, by trade, a RPG writer. I write games and I write tie in material for games. This is what I enjoy but it is not the end goal. However, in that RPG landscape there is a great deal of space for a writer to find a name. I don’t do this full time. If I did I would have more novels out on the street, but as I am writing this novel and reading a friend’s novel in the same universe, I am starkly aware of how different our writing and storytelling styles and types of adventures are. Heck, I am not sure where my band of merry runners fits into the landscape of things. I think the sequel will answer a few of those questions, but I am not sold on that. Perhaps the 3rd book will solidify their place (and mine) in the universe.

In the meanwhile, I am learning more about what stories I like to write, which come easy, and what is the really hard work that needs to be done in order to generate an entirely new narrative. I am working on yet another book outside of the ones mentioned, and I hope that one will give me space to grow as a writer and start to build me a new sci-fi fanbase–one that will help me transition to full time writer.

234! Exactly two pounds less than last week.

I feel really solid about hitting the goal I set for myself, which shows me that I have the ability to hit these goals, and if I really step up and do the work–do the exercise like I should–I can achieve the weight goals I set for myself and, more importantly, move closer to being a healthy individual. I’m proud of moving the needle down this far . I was nearly 240 a few weeks ago and I have worked for this ever since. I am doing much better with my diet, but I need to work harder and harder as a lose more weight. The first few pounds are easy. The last few are damn near impossible.

Change is hard. Patience is hard. Deliberate Practice is extremely hard, because the results are slow in the coming for the kind of work that I do and need to do in my life. My brother said to me “your calling isn’t necessarily fun all the time.” It was a statement I needed to hear, especially since I was starting to question if I wanted to continue on with my calling as a writer. I’m in on this. I am in on self growth and change. You will know I am no longer in, or I am dead when the blog stops.

Some Thoughts:

1. Reading Russell Zimmerman’s Neat on audio. First Shadowrun book I’ve ever listened to. The narrator is supposed to be my narrator, so I am excited for that. I also think Russell is him. He’s the best SR writer on the block right now, and my competitive ass needs to dethrone him. My Imposter sequel will begin the to just that…

So, here we are nearing the end of another NFL season. You know what that means? 7s season!

I do not like 7 on 7. I like it even less given the rampant change in and disregard for standard rules. It is an opportunity for kids to put on their best swag and play fundamentally bad football led by coaches who, more often than not, are trying to get in the spotlight or earn money as trainers on the side. The internet is loaded with free 7s playbooks, and all of them teach you one thing: there are core concepts that are going to work time and again so long as your team is markedly better than who you are playing. Fortunately, the talent divide in this sort of league is wide.

My youngest plays for a number of teams right now. He plays for his school, his friends’ school, and one of those hype teams that only exists as a 7s team. Not one team has the same coaches, but two have the same players. What is he learning? Not a lot really. I agreed to the madness because his coach reached out and thought it would be good to help the next gen of players and leaders gel. Then none of the Juniors played, so I now am left wondering what the real point was. At least his 2 QBs are on the roster, so he can establish a lasting bond with them as he is now a two-way guy.

Overall, he is in it for the swag and videos and to have fun. There is nothing wrong with that. The only problem is that it is a money making thing that is filled with opportunities for me to spend money in order to spend hours waiting for him to play a 20 minute game. I’m not spending the money. Someone will record the game for me. At the very least, I can catch the highlights on instagram.

Some Thoughts:

1. There is a chance the next paycheck may put me in a position to upgrade from a 2012 to a 2018, but the arguments being offered by many in the computing world say that any mac before 2020 is a bad look. I am not sure where I fall on it all, but this 2020 article is a helpful step in the research process for anyone having a similar debate. The price difference right now is around $30. The Air is actually cheaper.

I’m not going very far back or to any specific blog post. I learned something about analytics the other day that stuck with me: People are not truly aware of their habits and tendencies. This applies to daily life as well. If I could do analytics on how and when I reach for the web or particular gaming apps, I would be interested in seeing how that measured up with where I was and even state of mind trends. I don’t know that my iPhone goes that deep in how it tracks my usage, but I may look. However, I have looked at daily work and personal trends by creating an activities checklist that includes writing projects (individually), time for creative thinking, meditation, cleaning of the house/space, finances, exercise, etc. I looked at these things over the course of a week and discovered what I do daily and what I don’t do. I have a list of 12 daily actions I tracked over the course of 7 days. The only one I did every day was blog. That therefore is my only successful habit.

Others are on the up. I worked on the novel for 6 of 7 days. I worked on school stuff for 6 of 7 days. I updated my to-do lists and built a daily schedule 5 out of 7 days. The rest didn’t go nearly as well. I only exercised 3 times, which means the Thursday weigh in is going to suck. My meditation and 30 minutes of creative thinking activities were worse than that. All of this tells me what I am doing and what I am not doing so I can decide whether to X out these things as important or to work on getting better and doing this stuff daily. For this week I will try to get better. Let’s see how that plays out in the Thursday breakdown.

It is 9:50 on a Monday morning and I haven’t even climbed out of bed except to pee. I feel like one of my teenage sons on a day off. I feel like a man whose life has put him in a position to hide from the mounting list of responsibilities he has, because putting my head down and ambling through hasn’t gotten me any further than laying here in bed has.

I don’t want to act like my life is bad–it isn’t. I will say that from a very young age I wanted to be everywhere and be everything and live in every different social grouping and situation I could. I actively worked to be someone who had it all. I later discovered that having it all means, generally speaking, having the best aspects of one thing–not everything. Having everything is both impossible and overwhelming. I discover and rediscover this every times I move through strata of my life. For example: I was at a 7 on 7 tournament yesterday to watch my son play a 20 minute game. From the time I left the house until the time I returned, the clock rang off 2.5 hours. In that time I was in a world that is totally different than my home life, my work life, watching from the sidelines of track and field, heck, even watching from the sidelines of a High School game. It was more in line with the past of youth football than anything else, and more foreign to my present self than I could have possibly imagined. Moreover, the time it took from my day and the possibilities of that day was astounding. I only was there for one game. The kid himself had already been there three hours before I even showed up. He’d played two or three other games in that stretch–not counting the all day affair of the day before. In short, that activity encompasses a life. You can’t have it all if you want to have that one thing.

This is what I am dwelling on as I lay here almost ten minutes into a blog and three hours into being awake and immobile on the last holiday before the real work begins. I ask myself. What is it I want? I am still waiting for an answer.

Tomorrow is a holiday, which means my classes don’t really start until the day after. I need to find a way to make this last day feel good–not just for me but for my partner as well. Class takes me away from the family life in a way little else does. This is a hard thing when we are both teaching and both distracted by that as well as other things such as the novel, etc. So I want to make sure she understands how much she matters and how everything still starts and ends with her. It feels good to feel that way about another person. I was married and really worked to keep that feeling foremost in my heart when I was, but the truth is I felt like I was the only one working like that and it made me feel not only taken advantage of, but as a secondary character in her main story. That is why it ended. The last (gosh it feels like a decade but it isn’t) has been the exact opposite. I never want to feel that bad way again and I never want my partner to feel that way. It is an ugly and useless feeling to say the least.

As I work hard to get myself right, I am constantly remembering that I am getting right for us. We deserve a better me. My love suffered through the worst versions, so she deserves the best. After all, they do put better in there beside worse…

Some Thoughts:

1. Football was really good this weekend–at least on the pro level. I’ll rant about 7s on wednesday
2. My computer feels like she’s on her last legs. It is 2024 and she’s a 2012 model. Time for an upgrade, but what can I actually afford? Budget is sitting below $500, but I can see how much more cash I can scrape together to upgrade from what is going on now.

The absolute worst place to find yourself as a writer is in bed at ten pm suddenly realizing you didn’t turn in that thing you absolutely had to get in that evening. Here we are in that exact moment. This is being written but shall not be published till the morning because I am not anywhere that I have password access to the site. I’m just trying to get through ten minutes on the basic tech I have available to me. Sometimes it is just that way.

I want to talk about American Fiction without really digging into the acting or anything like that too deeply. It is definitely worth the watch. I do want to discuss the premise in which a black author is pre categorized as someone who must write the black experience and his work is decried because it is not seen as such.

I took that personally. I don’t write that stereotype but for the first time I feel like in these works that are bubbling up inside of me I am writing some version of the oppressed character. It might not always be a black man with a white boot on his throat, but that dichotomy that has and still exists in some form in my life is present. I suppose I am getting around to telling my story on the page.

I don’t know how these next few tales will perform but I don’t entirely care. I’ve been given the chance to be honest and tell narratives I think are necessary and help me grow and undergo catharsis, so I’m putting this stuff out there. I think moving forward every story I make will be some version of the truth, because an authentic author is the best author I can be.

In the interest of creativity I need to get back to the freewrite. I don’t really have words for the creative cascade that happened to me, but I felt it deep in my soul. I started loosing the connectedness to all things creative and fell into a hole of rote-ness. In other words, everything I wrote felt basic or worse, derivative of something else. I lost track of new ideas. I couldn’t generate anything that felt original and my writing suffered for it. There are a few reasons why this happened…

1. I realized that I needed to monetize my ideas: Once I decided that I needed to get paid for the good stuff, I let the bad stuff take precedence as free public writing. I kept all the good ideas bottled up and, often, didn’t even write them down. As you can imagine, they ended up going away.
2. I got stuck in ‘mode’: As a person who primarily gets paid to write cyberpunk, I thought in cyberpunk. However, I am a great deal more than that. I have an imagination that is well rounded and is open to exploring all aspects of things… well, I cannot imagine romance very clearly. However, I locked in on cyberpunk and tried to focus too much energy in that direction. The truth is, cyberpunk is fairly one dimensional in nature and while there are plenty of stories to tell there, it does not satisfy my creative mind.
3. I stopped being competitive: Fully blaming lady Talis for this. I used to be uber competitve, and it wasn’t something that really bonded me and my partner. I made an active attempt to mellow out and not be that hard ass New Yorker I once was. Mellow Talislegger is a weak sauce Talislegger. I need to find that competitive fire to be a solid writer. I need to find me a good nemesis who, while I love and respect as a writer, I want to out do. He exists. I know his name. I will not name him here… Voldemort style.
4. Success made me comfortable: I’ve published a crap ton of work. I’ve published in so many books that there are times when I read something and realize after the fact that I actually wrote it. Heck, I read a short story about a cyberpunk rigger the other day and thought: I like this. Then I realized… I wrote this. That level of success makes you lazy.
5. I got distracted by other challenges: Always in the back of my mind is the desire to be a truly bad ass offensive coordinator (at least at the high school level). I feel like I would be wonderful. I was decent at the youth level, but never had the chance to commit myself fully to the endeavor. There is this old saying about dropping out of society and working for XX years to do nothing but achieve your goal and how bad ass you would be with that kind of focus. What they don’t say is how difficult that would be if you kept holding on to other foci.

So those are the big reasons I’ve sucked lately. All this is to say I believe each one is correctible and I am truly tired of sucking and not being the best version of myself as a writer. So, Freewrite Friday needs to come back. I need to get back to being a bad ass.

I came to the page with a swirl of thoughts, but when I saw the blank page they scattered. Ahh, such is the life of a writer. The trick, you see, is getting these thoughts down before you begin the ritual of writing, so that you may have notes to work from. At least, that is the trick for me. I have dozens of scrolling pages of text messages to myself covering sections of stories and ideas for new stories or anything creative really. Sometimes I send myself links to things that I want to remember to consider or incorporate into something at a later date. Short of the lady Talis, I text myself the most.

Yesterday I saw Poor Things and it forced me to consider sexuality and how that plays in so-called visual literature. It is the second such movie I’ve seen in a week. The former being Saltburn, and both dealing with nudity and sexuality in different but disarming ways. I don’t approach sex in my writing. I don’t think I even know how I would begin to do such. That simply is not the type of writing that I do. However, I deal with death and killing quite often–as it is the backbone of a lot of action driven fantasy and sci-fi. So, perhaps I ought to consider the gravity with which I approach those things–at least on a character by character basis.

Some Thoughts:

1. Weight dipped below 236. It is a slow work in progress that demands I actually work. My exercises have been low tier and designed for a man in his seventies. I’m not quite that old, inspite of the way I feel. I need to push myself if I plan to break through to the 220s.
2. Perhaps it is time to mark the expected weight on a calendar so I can realistically track where I want to be vs. where I am. Under those conditions, May 9th should put me at 200 lbs. That is just in time for the summer! Of course, those pounds may be a lot more stubborn, so I need to work a crap ton harder week to week to keep the 2lbs per week action going.