Day: October 23, 2024

I’m leading off with the blog today; putting firmly in my mind so I can put it out of my mind for the day. I want the mental space clear and ready to write fiction, because I have a ton of fiction to write. Before I get there I need to talk here about sports. I’ll start at the High School level and see how far I get.

My son’s team is terrible. I found myself saying that out loud the other day when my mother called and asked how his team was doing. They are 1-5 and ranked 29th out of a possible 31 teams in the 6A. This is in spite of being the 5th largest school in the state. Sloppy. Just plain sloppy stuff right there. If you have over 3000 students you ought to be able to find 24 (kicker and punter) starters to make a competitive team. They didn’t. They haven’t even found a coach who’ll stay longer than a year. I’m hoping this one will, if only to provide some consistency.

There are two teams with worse records in 6A, and it is my deepest hope that we get them on the schedule for the next two years. I am openly lobbying to get 27, 28, 30, and 31 on the schedule. We already will have 25 (who is a fellow district team and who we play in a few weeks). That could offer the chance for a 5 win season. Throw in a 5A team and we could be looking at a 6 win affair. In fact, we have a 5A this week. The team, Ironwood, has gone 4-3 this season, beating terrible teams and losing to the ones with winning records in 5A. We are not a winning record by any means, but we are larger (for however much that counts) and we did whip these guys 42-0 last season. Of course, that was a different coach and a different Talis-boy leading the secondary. Ironwood too has changed. They have a shifty QB who drank the Lamar sauce. I’ve been studying film this week in order to help the kid get an in-game and prep advantage. I’m going to teach him how to read the linemen preplay. He has the cues on how to read the qb once the play starts, but now the WRs are the next read. A two-stage read is an important skill for a safety, so here is an opportunity to grow and to harness that.

I was part of a panel today during which the host read a remarkably old bio that neglected to mention half my kids and the Lady Talis. I need to clean that up. Your bio is the image you put out of yourself to the world, and if I am denying half my family and literally half the books I’ve written then that is a bad look. I need to add roughly 40 volumes, two novels, and three novellas. Work needs to be done there to be sure.

That moment was a good moment to reflect on how far I’ve come since I first took work at Arizona State. The bio is likely slightly newer than the one on this blog, meaning I have work to do everywhere. It is a longstanding problem, me not keeping up with things of this nature. In fact it is only through thinking about this content that I discovered that my work appeared in an anthology several years back. This is not sustainable, though I’ve sustained it for decades. Funny how once you get old the things that were easy to overlook become all that you think about.