Day: July 3, 2026

Back to it.

There’s writing to be done. There is speed to be achieved. Then, I need to start looking for a new job–as a writer I mean. I keep coming back to RPG work, and I know I ought not to. I want to finish this novel, take a break, and then think about the next step. Yet in these posts and conversations I continuously skip over the part where I finish the novel first. Am I so anxious to get to the next act that I refuse to fully be where my feet are at in this one? What, after all, is the rush? Or is it a more honest reality–I don’t know how to write this novel.

Yeah, that one.

I’ve spent more time thinking about the book than I have writing it or even sketching it out, and I continue to fear that it will not happen. I think about more and more other stories I could be writing instead of the one I should be. Story of my life, I suspect. What I need to be doing is locking down and locking in. That means getting away from all of the other stuff distracting me from a narrative and then sinking into that one story until I reach a point of churn that gets me to get it done and then edited and then sent off to someone with an eye for wonderful things. I’m not expecting it to be the next best seller so much as I want to finally tell this story with all of its layers and then move on with a sense of accomplishment.

That feels more like the story of my life.

Instead my life has been thus far a messy series of failures from football to college itself to marriage to parenting (which is always some degree of success and failure no matter who you are, I suspect). Each one of these things has been a fail followed by a hard-fought success. So, I’m in that arc with the writing now, and I need to see it through.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Permit obtained by AP shows schedule for the wedding” What’s bonkers is the level of attention we see being given to this sort of thing. Yes, I know they are both famous and this feels somewhat like a Royal Event, but that makes it even more insane. Are we so starved for aristocracy as a society that we clamor for the moment that two knowns become one? Even more, the amount of money being spent is so wild. A fraction of what is being spent could be life changing for so many people. Of course, the couple also is aware of such things and is donating 26 million to charity as part of the event… which argues they may have spent 26 million on the event itself.

The amount of unusable energy in a closed system. Or, me on a rainy day when I don’t feel like doing a thing. I didn’t, you know, do a thing. I ate more food than necessary and walked far less than I have since May, and in the end I simply did not feel like dealing with the world. It is a bad one too, because in feeling this way I find myself wondering how to get back to usable energy. I hit this ‘suck’ low and decided that I was done being useful to a functioning society. I played a bit of NCAA 27, I watched TV. I played a bit of Starfield. I graded student projects that were almost entirely generated by AI. Slowly, I lost faith in humanity and began taking it upon myself to withdraw further from the world and into this small apartment where it felt like I didn’t have to do much else but be this dude who does nothing.

Then, I realized that I don’t live alone in this space and part of the reason I can never fully detach from reality is that I have a wife–My Lady Talis who keeps me tethered to this planet though there be days I prefer to fall far far away. So, what is to be done tomorrow? Anything else but this. A rainy day is a great opportunity to lay low and be a stick in the mud, but I am learning to pull out of the spiral before it becomes a long process. I need to get up, get out, and do something straight away. I fear if I don’t I will regret it for days to come.

Some Thoughts:

1. Absolutely Bonkers Headline of the Day: “Maine couple spots a bear chasing a moose calf and helps it escape“