This one is all about me.
My trip to Seattle/Olympia was hugely successful. Not only was it a great opportunity to escape the daily grind, but I also learned many valuable lessons that I can employ in my classroom next semester. Sadly, next semester is a few weeks away and I still have an ebook and a novel series proposal to write. I did layout the general plot and order of all 11 books, so there’s that. However, I didn’t get down to HBS studios to touch base with the good folks of Shadowrun: Returns. That warrants another trip to Seattle itself.
Another wonderful side effect of the trip is the ability to really understand Seattle geographically, to take note of how hilly the city is and to now incorporate that verticalness into some of the work I am doing with Shadowrun right now. Fluff and Smoke is finished, but the weekly release schedule gives me a chance to clean it up just a speck. As for the other projects, I cannot speak to what I am doing (NDA) other than to say that I am working on my first ebook and it is going to be a good one, and one based on a great amount of research and library hours. I hope folks enjoy it as much as I am enjoying putting it together.
I am looking forward to going home and putting together a few hours with my family. Maybe we’ll build things. Maybe we sing, or laugh, or just play. I have missed them, despite the overwhelming need to clear out of there before I stroked out. Going back is like having a fresh start. It reminds me what I have been missing and I’m missing the hell out of my wife. The funny thing about love is that it suffers from daily attention. Absence does indeed make the heart grow fonder, and if it does not then you are no longer in love.
In love I am, with my lovely lady, with my family, with my writing. That last part took quite some time and even some separation, but my love of the written language and belief that I still can write ‘competitively’ returned over the past year. I feel like I am on the way up once again, and I know that confidence is going to shine through in the words I create. I also know that it is communicable. Like small pox, I want that love, passion, and dedication to writing to run through crowds of students empowering these emerging learners to be arbiters of their own futures as opposed to sheep, herded by talking heads and highly paid marketing execs. Once upon a time I was in the same spot they were and people rose from the darkness to show me the way forward. I’ve started to remember that I have a duty to pay that forward.
Some Thoughts:
1. The couple in front of me is sitting next to a young attractive man and the wife is clearly into this guy. Hubby doesn’t seem to care that she has been chatting dude up since he asked to sit beside them. I get the sense that she loves a conversation and her husband does not. Be careful, bub. Conversations are great, but the way she keeps leaning into that dude is not so great, for you at least.
2. The horizon is a straight line bordered by blue sky and white clouds.
3. Seattle’s downtown mimics the architecture of lower manhattan with a flare for the dramatic in places. The people are different, like New Yorkers from a planet that moves much slower than or own and dips itself in tattoo ink every 7 years. Nevertheless that production bump I get from NYC lives strong in SEA.
4. I get to coach two basketball games tomorrow morning. I am missing some of my top players from each team, and I have not even seen my team in a week. @whee!
5. Michelle Casillas of Ursa Minor is kinda my hero right now. She had a dream and went out and did it. Not just that. She did it well and found recognition in people who know her craft. That is pretty bad ass. Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. Most of us don’t have the talent or work ethic to be successful and that is why Walmart has as many employees as it does. I don’t want to be Walmart man. I want to be a lot like Michelle C.