Month: December 2025

I am grateful to have a partner that recognizes when I am in need of detox.

I am definitely in need presently.I am mentally worn down following the long semester and I do not have the energy nor desire to work. I just want to lay aorund and play minecraft and chill. I don’t want to do projects or anything. I think if I can give myself a day of that, I’ll be better. Everyone needs a day off. I don’t know that I will get a full day but a few hours is in the offing.

I’m not a fan of feeling this way nor am I fan of just laying around all the time. However, it is a solid chance to reset.

I need that reset.

Some Thoughts:

1. I also need a few days without any kids. We don’t get a lot of time to ourselves and man it feels good to have control of your space and to be yourself without worrying about kids walking through and shifting the vibe to whatever in on their mind…

I have never written an ending I truly liked.

It turns out I am quite trash at finishing stories, as though I’m building a teaser trailer throughout the story and actually have no realistic way for the tale to ever end. This works out occasionally in short stories. Once I told a story about a man who found himself inadvertently involved in a major heist where the police were looking for him and he was deconstructing how he wound up in the situation. It ended much like it started, with the protagonist, who’d been thinking about running away, running away. I don’t explain what happens or if he gets very far. I don’t really know what happens. I never do. In my mind, the story is a glimpse at a moment of time from another reality, but I shut my eyes before the end, which is problematic for anyone wanting to know how it ends. Endings are extremely messy for me, in spite of the fact that in fiction they are supposed to be neat and tied up in a pretty bow. I can’t even wrap up Christmas gifts, let alone novels. It is a flaw.

Instead I find myself wandering back to the beginning of a story looking for what it was the protagonist was after in the first place and trying to discern if they found it. Every story I write is some variation of that hero/heroine’s journey. More often than not it turns out they haven’t completed their journey by the end, and instead have just taken a step (in some direction) in their lives.

This is to say that, for me, stories are not neat. Lives are not neat. Therefore, endings cannot be neat. I have long been forced to create endings that appear to be neat, which is why I never like them.

Some Thoughts:

1. The Dungeon Crawler Carl series is an excellent example of how AI can be infused to make a fun, easy reading story. Of course this works best if you have a good audio reader, because reading these stories isn’t nearly as fun as listening to them. Some other similar examples include the Expeditionary Force series and anything allegedly recently outlined by the estate of Tom Clancy.
2. That leads me to my second revelation. It took me until now to realize that most of what I read in commercial fiction is from the perspective of a middle aged white man with a very specific type of personality. They are usually present or ex-military with a penchant for clever ideas and making their own rules…
3. The number one rule from Stephen King that has never left me is to write every single day. I wish I could sit down and focus for the number of hours the man puts into his craft. If I did, I’d likely be a much more developed and prolific writer than I am today. There is no substitute for butt in chair.

I’m about done here.

That is one of the best feelings a teacher can have short of seeing their students be successful beyond the classroom. I’m about done and it feels like I am going into the break with a much more positive sense of where I am headed with next semester’s work. I want to be ready next semester from day one. I want to have it all improved and scripted out so that I don’t feel behind and can focus my energy on the students and interacting better with them both in person and online. It is going to take work, but that schedule of off season work is already in process. I plan to put some real time into getting right both as a teacher and husband. Mostly as a husband.

Life has been good to me. I don’t have the problems a lot of people contend with and I have the partner of my dreams. We don’t have a perfect life–we have debts and a limited amount of privacy, but we have enough to be proud of and happy about. More than anything, we have each other. I think about that every day. I don’t know what kind of person I would be if I were alone in this world. So, with that I begin my thankfuls of the season. I am, above all things, thankful for the Lady Talis.

I’ve been off, Like big off. Like gained 8 lbs off. Perhaps more. I am easing towards 240 when I should be 200 at best and the extra weigh is wearing me down in ways I did not predict. Weight can be a mood modifier. I am more sullen and slower and often lethargic over the course of the day. I don’t want to work or work out or do much of anything concrete. Mental work is overwhelming. Physical work is much the same. I want to say ‘yet I endure’ but I actually don’t. The Lady Talis had to remind me of our anniversary tommorrow.

It’s like that.

I want it to be any other way. Yet here we are and I need to figure out a way to climb back out of this hole quickly. I am not the person who I’ve been over the past few weeks and, while everyone has bad moments, it is not right to linger in the space. I need to get right and get back to right being the way I always am.

Write the following:

1. A noun
2. A proper noun
3. An adjective
4. A verb
5. A brief line of dialogue

Then write a one-page story that incorporates your list of words/phrases into a coherent narrative (I would like to see both the list and the story if you pick this option).

1. A Noun: Shoes
2. Proper Noun: Coca Cola
3. Adjective: Zeroadic 
4. Verb: Uglify
5. A Brief line of dialogue: “Six is luckier than seven.”

Latiff only wore the glasses for a week before folding them up neatly and setting them back in the box to be returned to the store. 

“They make you look dignified,” his mother said. 

“They make you look like a punk ass,” His girlfriend said.

In the end neither was entirely right. They didn’t uglify him the way she said, but they did have another effect that made him want to keep wearing them. When he realized how much he enjoyed it, he knew immediately he’d need to return them.

The first time it happened he was walking down Farmer Street, south of Clinton past the place where Mabel used to work before the accident. It was called Tommies back then, but now it had one of those vaguely British sounding names, Pomp & Spice. He could smell the latter from the sidewalk. The glasses, black-rimmed and elegant, felt heavy on his nose. He didn’t know if it was the added weight of the dot-sized cameras embedded in the endpieces, the twin slim batteries, or the odd speakers lining the temples, so small he could hardly see them. Latiff could hear them. 

It was the first time the glasses ever made a sound. It emerged, completely zeroadic, as though it would have happened even if he weren’t wearing them. 

“Six is luckier than seven,” The glasses crooned lowly into his ears.

He stopped dead in his tracks. He looked around, forgetting for a moment that he was even wearing glasses. He looked for who could have made the odd statement and found himself alone on the street save for a woman far ahead of him, her head tilted back as she greedily gulped a Coca Cola. 

Latiff said, “Who said that?”

When nobody answered he scratched his head looking about the empty street. A moment later the glasses spoke again, “You’re going to need new shoes in under a month. The pair you have on possesses a defect.”

He blinked twice. “What the–”

A man stepped out of the store that had been Tommies. He was looking down at his purchase and not paying attention. He was holding a bag full of small glass spice containers in one hand and examining a single container in his other. The man slammed into him, dropping the spice he’d been holding. It fell all over his blue shoes, leaving a spray of brown like dirt mixing with the slim shards of glass.

The man growled angrily, “You made me drop my spice!”

Latiff opened his mouth to respond, the words that came out felt more predicted than rehearsed. He said, “six is much luckier than seven.”

I don’t want to do anything today. I definitely don’t have it in me to write on this novel or these two smaller pieces I’m supposed to be working on. The strange part is that I have been thinking about my novel a lot. It swirls around my subconscious lately with scenes and organization coming together. I don’t want to look too closely into the process because I am not mentally fit to get it all down. It feels like I’m tuning into the station from which the story is coming from but don’t yet have that clear frequency.

So, I blog.

I’ll need to crash through some grad work as well today, though the burn out there is peak. I think that started to break bad when I realized that they weren’t taking all my transfer credits as A’s and it tanked my perfect GPA. But that’s fine. Everything is fine…

I hate that I feel like that every morning and have this need to crawl back under a rock and avoid any contact with with present reality. Yet, here we are at the end of the semester. Honestly, the only solution is to slog through the crap. So, I’ll probably post a ton of grades today and get through all the crap that is non-creative so that when the creative does eventually arise, it is handled appropriately and with the patience and mental gusto it deserves.

Some Thoughts:

1. Been experimenting with recordings of singing bowls, brought about by a recent post reminding me of what I was missing. It is not the same. You can feel the bowls when you’re in their presence. Hearing them is similar but not the same.
2. Also been thinking about the weirdness of how we interpret reality through ourselves. The mirror trick is a wonderful indicator of that. A mirror doesn’t see… it refracts light back at us and we program what is seen in it. In this fashion, you can see what is directly hidden from the mirror. In otherwords, it isn’t about the mirror. We are the interpreters. Now I wonder how that applies to those who see Ghosts…

Two for the price of one this morning.

One of those (increasingly) rare days where I didn’t publish a previous post. Ironically it probably had a lot to do with the fact that the day turned out to be about everyone else. From birthdays, to couple projects, to pick up and drop off, I found precious little time to focus on me. Still working on that carve out. Need to work much harder, obviously.

I feel like I spend a great deal of time listening to the thoughts racing through my head. I tend to use distractions to silence them–be it ASMR or silly shows or what have you. Unfortunately, those things seed my mind with other thoughts. I wind up going deeper down the rabbit hole with the shows or trying to find better beta waves and so on. I used to know how to still my mind on my own or within my personal reach. The Lady Talis sent me to a sound therapist several times and that really cleared me out. I left those sessions spiritually and mentally healed. It has been way too long since I’ve had one of those. I do still have my own set of singing bowls that have barely left the case in which they live. That is something else for me to work on in future ‘me time’

I don’t have a ton of that today. I need to figure out how to get back in that writing mind. I hit my checkpoint for a short project and realized I haven’t really done any work on it. I have thoughts and notes, but nothing concrete is laid down. I was too busy fixing up that novel. With that out of the picture, it is time to turn my eyes forward to the newest of projects.

But I don’t want to. I want to keep trying to figure out how Dungeon Crawler Carl is so damn addictive. It already has a live action treatment and an upcoming webtoon. So… it hits. It also reminded me that most popular protagonists are middle aged white guys… That’s a post for another day.

as the school year winds down I find myself locked in on. Lot of projects in the home and a bunch of responsibilities at work. It can be all consuming and it also reminds me that I need to take time for myself. I’m a person that ultimately lives for the people I love. I thrive on seeing everyone happy and focusing on their goodwill to the point where I can forget about myself and my needs to the point of truly losing touch with what I want and who I want to be for myself.

I don’t take very much me time. I don’t spend a ton of money or energy on myself. Heck even these ten minutes are forward facing reflections designed with a trader in mind. Now that things are getting busy I have to remind myself to find time for me and to take care of myself and ultimately to think about what it is that makes me happy independent of anyone else in my life, which is a difficult thing to do.

Xavier Restrepo is a lie.

I thought the guy might cook, being the close friend of his QB. However, he wasn’t even a blip on the points radar. Luckily I only wasted a roster spot–not a starter spot on him. Even with that bit of luck, I still got demolished. I went from 4th to 9th in one week of play. It isn’t looking up. I play the #3 team this week and with a win I could move back closer to 4, but 4 through 9 are within one game of each other and the point spread is what is weighing me down. I need to get ahead of these guys in wins to be in a safer space and, perhaps a 4/5 playoff game. Unfortunately, the 109 predicted points is nowhere close to the 121 my opponent is supposed to reach. This is a bad look where a loss could put me out of contention. I need to make a move to get right, but what?

I need WR help. I’m neck deep in TEs but that is useless to me right now–especially now with my main two getting prime targets. I need a new face in the WR room. I am taking a flyer on DeVaughn Vele of the Saints. I know little about him other than the big performance last week. Here is hoping it is a glow up and not a fluke…

I found ten in the early part of my day between prepping for classes and voting for the future Chair of my division. Spoiler Alert: Old Chair is my pick for the new Chair. I’m good with change when change is good. But enough about my sordid work life. This is supposedly a blog about writing and the writing life. One of the more tortured aspects of that life is getting paid. I don’t get paid often or well, which is why I’m teaching so much. That old saying, “If you can’t do it, teach it” does apply to a significant extent in the creative arts. I haven’t had the break I needed to continue my lifestyle and write full time. I’m also not in a place in my life where I can pare back too much. As I said, I’m good with change when change is good.

What would be good is actually getting paid relatively on time. I presently deal with a 8-18 month lag on payments. The 8 is being generous. The 18 might be as well. For example, the Voltron RPG was released in January. I have not been paid. Now when I say released I’m not talking about when I finished the writing or when the book was finished… Yeah. It’s like that in the RPG world.

I need to get back to novels.