10 Minute Rule

I don’t know if anyone will see this post. There is strangeness happening on the site. I used a backdoor to get in and post, because typing in the web address didn’t work initially. Tech and I don’t always have a healthy or mutually beneficial relationship. I can say with certainty that I’ve had gremlins my entire life.

That life turned 50 today.

I am old and, at times, worn out. Today was yet another example of that. The Lady Talis went to extraordinary measures to make the day special and it was still disrupted by the lives of the other people closest to me remaining focused wholly on themselves and their lives in this moment in which I hoped it would be about me. One kid came through with a great gift. Another texted and it was totally unexpected. The daughter was awesome and we got to spend some real quality time. I’m taking these things as wins. I’m taking the entirety of the day as a win overall, because I spend too much of my life chasing down imperfections. Heck, I even started doing it in this very paragraph.

So, 50.

It means I need to think hard and long about how I want to spend my time. I talked recently about the change and evolution of the daily habits as a result of increased responsibility. Today showed I can handle that and still find time for self and family. I am happy to have turned over this new leaf. I am preparing to move into my second act. This life is worth living. I didn’t fully embrace that even five years ago.

I’m back in school. Crazy.

Over the next eight weeks I will be trying to finish up my course load, do a handful of high school visits as part of my regularly scheduled work, revise a crapshow of a novel (I have a solid path forward now), and take MFA courses. This is a lot for me to do and to deal with right now, and the Lady Talis fears it wil be overwhelming. Valid. However, I feel it will lock me in. I feel it will drive me forward as a writer and as an organized person. There are things in my life that I have to get right. Love, health, parenting, writing, finance. These things need to get right in that order. I’d add that I need to be much better at being part of a family (love/parenting) and reaching out to those I care about. I’ve been a taker and a lazy person my entire life. That life is at least half over. It is long past the time I started giving back and being the person that my wife and kids can look to as a positive example.

I’m going to take on these next eight weeks as a personal challenge to see what I am made of and see what I am capable of accomplishing. I am going to work my butt off to be better in every phase of my life. The first step to that is eliminating senseless wastes of time. I can be more efficient. I can definitely play less Pokemon and refocus that and other wasted time on completing the tasks I care about. How do I decompress then? I’ll still take time to play a game (that I care about) and watch shows I enjoy. I’ll do less of that on my own and enjoy it more as a moment I do with family to be sure.

There are simple moments I can take advantage of–swapping out Pokemon for responding to discussion boards at the grad level and grading low hanging assignments at the instructor level is one avenue. Spending less of my mental energy giving a damn about the treatment and behaviors of my kids that I cannot directly control is another. No need whatsoever for those ruminations.

Growth is hard and slow. I am making progress as a person every day. I want to see who I am at 51. I’m trying to make him an absolute bad ass.

Being away from home forces you to live an existence defined by what you don’t have as you are away from home. For me that means the shedding of layers of responsibility, the removal of a few different toys and games, and a separation from the routines that define the home life. So, what I learned from all of this is that the life I live away from home is indicative of the experience I want to have in my daily life. Yet somehow that doesn’t work out for me day to day.

Why?

I don’t really know or get it. The Lady Talis is not a fan of the home existence and thusly (yeah, I like the word though), wishes to experience a more refined existence reflective of how we operate when we are on the road. I get that. I can’t get how to make that happen, because I can’t define the essence of that experience outside of what I illustrated above. I love being on the beach. I am about to take this laptop to the beach and write and listen to the waves and feel absolutely wonderful. If I were putting in these hours at home I would be locked into the office–maybe with the door to the backyard open–and writing. I would be doing the same thing. However, the before and after–the routines surrounding the key moments change.

What she wants, and by extension what I want but fail to understand how to accomplish, is to make it more like it is here. After the words there will be more adventure, more chilling, more happiness and exploration of the world. As I write this I am starting to recognize that the world we live in is probably the problem. The space in which we perform these post-routine moments is the problem. I need to find the adventure in that space and redefine those moments.

How?

Yeah, I don’t know how to do that. I think I will start by turning my energies inward towards that space and trying to find the adventure in that space. I was the happiest I’ve been in years in that space when we were redefining it. When we were reshaping how the living room looked I was having a wonderful time. When we were setting the pace of how that space worked and functioned, I was having a better time.

I ought to start there.

I’ve been coming to Pacific Beach for over a decade. It started as a family trip and as my family grew and changed it became a new kind of family trip. During Covid we hid out on the beach, working remotely as the one kid who was with us at the time stayed in a separate room and did classes. I worked on my first major market novel from the beach. Fittingly, I am working on the revision of the sequel to that work on the beach and I am working on my MFA from the beach. All of this coincides with me turning 50–another beach milestone. I’ve had so many on these beaches that it feels as though my past and future flow in and out with the ocean tide.

This birthday is different. If feels more like a couples trip since we are with the daughter and her husband. Other kids could’ve come. They all chose not to for various reasons. They’ve been making those choices more often–opting to fold into their own lives vs being a part of ours. It pains me when they do this to the point that the important moments–like my 50th are overlooked in pursuit of whatever they happen to have going on at the time. I have a legitimate fear that I failed in raising my three birth sons and was equally incompetent in nurturing the growth of the two I came to love as my own. The girl, she’s fine. She worked her shit out. The boys are working theirs out, but have all but uniformly decided that I only exist as a function of their needs. That is not the relationship I am trying to have or intend to moving forward.

These are the things I am thinking about here on this first day on the beach. I get a few more. I intend to make the best out of them.

I decided to keep going from the last ten, because I really wanted to get through the schedule and come up with a realistic sense of how this team might perform in my waaaay to early college predictions. A lot of that means looking at how other teams have performed and coming up with a sense of whether or not this can be a breakout year for the team. Short version: I think it can. Here’s why:

UNC played with a walk on QB last year. They lost three in three weeks, leaving them with basically nothing. Not to knock the skills of their season-long QB, but he wasn’t the guy. They were competitive against teams prior to and in games in which these major injuries occurred. I am left from this information, and the knowledge that there are 9 qbs on roster fighting to be that guy, that there is indeed a chance they are better and are poised for a breakout year.

No, it won’t start on the 13th with South Dakota. SD is a better football team than Colorado State. Houston Christian, the following week, is not. By the time this team begins divisional play they should be a 3-1 or at the minimum a 2-2 team. Those divisional games are hard to call. These teams know each other. there is a lot of history, in spite of the UNC roster being fairly new. They can handle the Idaho teams IMHO. I believe they beat Sac State and lose the next two home games only to rebound in Flagstaff and beat NAU. W win will happen against either Portland state or Eastern Washington but perhaps not both. It comes down to momentum and courage at that point. All of that adds up to a 8-4 best case record and a 5-6 worst case record. Both are a vast improvement. One may be enough to get a trip to the playoffs.

Since I have ten minutes I thought I might take a look at my son’s upcoming football season. This particular son plays for the University of Northern Colorado, a D1 FCS team who has struggled to be competitive over the past few seasons. In 2023 the team went 0-11 with major blowouts of up to 40+ points peppered throughout. The schedule is anchored by Big Sky Conference battles. That 12 team conference fielded four of the 24 teams in the FCS playoffs that year. They earned 5 berths last season–a season in which UNC improved to 1-11.

UNC is bad. Like really really bad. In terms of All-Big Sky players they fielded a first team punter in Hunter Green, and a honorable mention in Freshman Safety Cam Chapa. Chapa did not transfer. My son adds a lock down corner to the field and alongside another transfer gives the team a real chance to turn around the pass defense. At the same time there were losses. They lost their DB coach to ACU. That is huge. However, the new corners are locked in and have been working on their own to understand how to get better and how to help this team. This lends me hope for a good season, not just for my kid as an individual but for the team as a culture. This is a team that is learning how to play together and ready to show they can win.

So, can they?

Week 1 brings them up against DII Chadron State. This is a good first week, because Chadron is not a good team. This will give the kids a chance to get on the books with a W leading into a battle against an FBS Colorado State team that may be considered a top 35 team in the FBS preseason polls. Can they win? The entire season turns on this moment. I think, given the fight they put up last season against this team, they get the W. That leads us to the remaining schedule… which I will need to get into another day.

Some Thoughts:

1. Has it been almost a week since I wrecked version 7 and moved to 8? Time moves very quickly when you aren’t entirely focused on it.

Eating breakfast at I-Hop I found myself sitting across from a couple that resembled the swole grandpa and Glamma ads plastered all over the internet and social media feeds. The muscular man wore a gray too tight tee with American flags located across the chest and on the sleeves. His hat didn’t say maga–he was too young for that. It said King. He was bearded in the fashion of a TV special forces operator. At this point I need to reflect on some of the notes my editor hammered me with yesterday and point out that he has white skin (I only express skin color in what is, apparently, a faux pas or imperialist way). The wife was tanned to the point where it felt unnatural. Her long pink nails and yards of quaffed blonde hair felt out of touch with her age. Likewise her halter top and sweat pants looked like they belonged to her teenage daughter.

Now I am just being picky in my description. The point to all of this is to say what the Lady Talis explained to me. Some people are unimaginative. They reach for the idealistic look that is right there and easy for them to obtain. Low hanging fruit mistaken for self-actualization. I worry that more and more people in our reality are shifting towards this. I see it in my kids. I see it in my co-workers. I’d see it in my friends if I had enough to constitute a sample size. We are increasingly becoming disconnected from self, and as a result self-actualization is becoming an assimilative practice. This is as unhealthy as it sounds.

Some Thoughts:

1. It occurs to me that in this era of targeted advertising, I may be seeing these ads while younger audiences are not. I still wonder why they come to me though. I’m not quite 50, I am not at all white, and my search history argues athletic affinity. My weight doesn’t. My activity level doesn’t. However, they ought not have access to those…

The hardest thing to do when taking feedback isn’t to recognize that what is being offered to you is being given to help you create better work. The hardest part, for me at least, is recognizing how poorly what I created was received. My upcoming novel clocked in at a little under 80,000 words. The feedback consisted of 568 comments spread across those 180 pages. None of them were positive. The comment were so thick that google is unable to open the document in drive. It just keeps crashing from the load of notations. The system, it seems, wasn’t built for that level of distaste.

The hardest thing to see when taking feedback is that what you thought of as good work is actually not perceived that way at all. You may in fact be far worse, at least on first draft, than you believed and as such there is a tremendous mountain to climb in order to reach a place where your work is readable. That is where I am right now. I sit in the shadow of that mountain questioning every sentence I put together. I am wondering not only about plot but about voice, characterization, etc. Feedback is difficult and painful. It may leave you feeling like there is no way to make what you created worthwhile and that you should quit writing altogether. I felt that. I am still feeling the echoes of that emotion as I write now–as I question every sentence that I am writing.

No matter how it is prefaced, brutal honesty is important to a writer. As a writer you need to be strong enough to take it. You need to be strong enough to accept that you are not yet at the place where you may believe you are. At the same time you need to believe you are still capable of getting there. You need to believe that you are not an imposter. All of this is easier said from the pulpit of a ten minute blog than it is carried out in real time. It takes time. It takes sadness and courage and reevaluating why you are doing what you’re doing. It also takes a fighting spirit to stand up to the criticism and say, I can make this ten times better.

The choices you have after receiving criticism are threefold, but only two exist in the publishing world. You can ignore the criticism if you’re publishing on your own. If you aren’t your choices are reduced to quitting or making the necessary changes. I’m choosing the latter for my work. I just need to pick myself up off the ground and get to the point where I have the courage to actually get started.

The big thing I thought about in the transition from 7 to 8 was why I failed. There were a number of factors that contributed to the slow decline and eventual failure to write. For a while I didn’t have much to say. I eeked out a few hundred words a night if lucky. I didn’t have a coherent thought maybe two or three times in a week. That is not a good state for a writer to be in at any hour. Yet, those days were days when I did do good things earlier in the day or expended a great deal of energy teaching and so on. What was it about blogging for ten minutes that was so very taxing? Perhaps the answer to that is the same as the answer to why people find it so hard to write. The expectation.

I want this space to be meaningful, but if I am going through it–if I am not of sound mind–then I cannot be meaningful in the words I put on a page. Often I wish for direct translation. I wish I could stir my emotions into words in real time, and let that feeling be my guide in my writing. I’ve constructed, after a fashion, a way to do that in novels. I have intense emotional sections throughout the outline and if I am feeling that, I write that. However, with this blog I wanted to do things in a regular way. Friday is fiction (fail). Tuesday I look back to the past (sometimes) Wednesday I look at sports (because it is the day of the waiver wire in the fantasy football league). All of these blocks don’t let me be free to write what I feel. Often I overlooked them, but largely I thought about them as guardrails on my thinking.

As we move to the new iteration I will focus on writing what I feel. I will endeavor to lock in for these ten minutes and let my mind and mood connect with the page in an unscripted fashion. I will be looking to the page as a form of catharsis. The days of my life are filled with all kinds of madness and strangeness. The blog is an opportunity to share a bit of my insight with the world on a daily basis and, through that, get you locked into how to be better writers. Understanding how I write may be helpful to others down the road (so long as this thing exists).

That is the charge. That is the goal and the hope moving forward for this 8th iteration of the Ten Minute rule. I will be better this time. I will take these ten minutes seriously and vitally. I may not hit 500 or 300 or even 100 each time, but I will make sure that what I do say comes from the heart and soul. That is why I started this process publicly and that is the main reason to keep going. Anyone can do ten minutes a day and come up with heartfelt content. I’m here to prove that.

I’ve been doing the math a bit more on my 2 hours for 1000 words or 500 WPH process. This has been working for me for a few weeks now, and I am developing the novel exactly on pace. There are days where I write more, of course, but I haven’t missed the mark. I am at 26,000 words, which given how much I have NOT written, puts this thing in the 60 K range at least. Still no idea if I will sell it or not, but I don’t really think that is as important as proof of concept. I believe this method works. I recognize that the last stage of this is 24 hours of revision over the course of seven days after seven days off to not think about the novel at all. Honestly, if you put that kind of time into your writing you are definitely going to perform peak revision. So, the three phases of writing–planning, drafting, and revising are all to be neatly laid out and developed. I have yet to touch the planning. I think that is going to require the same 24 hours as the revision process. There is more to be discovered in these bookends, but I am in the middle part right now and here is what I have learned.

It is hard to write for two hours without stopping to stand up and walk around. Thus, I suggest breaks at 40 and 80 minutes. Take ten minutes each time. This aligns with the 100 minute grid, which leads you to the 10 words per minute number as suggested in the title. You will be surprised how easy base ten thinking changes your mindset on writing. The stuff just flies out of your brain and on to the page–even in the tough sections. I am sticking to the 5 days a week. I skipped yesterday so I wrote today. That means I get tomorrow off as well. Then, come Monday it is back to the page.

This method is stackable up to the boundaries of your brain capacity. I may be starting a grad program soon, which entails a ton of writing. That means stacking another two hours to get the words done. It will be an entirely different beast, and I am ready to take it on.