10 Minute Rule

Yep. A thing.

This is the day and space where I spend 10 minutes writing a story off the top off my head based on a random word I find online. Today’s word is:

Ulosis

They say that muscle gets stronger by breaking. The tissues pull and tear apart, straining under the pressure of exertion until they can no longer take it. The, broken and drained, they rest. They heal. They knit themselves back together because they have to. The muscles must be ready in the morning, because the body is going to keep moving; keep living in spite of itself. For a normal person a 3rd of your body weight is muscle. A third of yourself tears itself apart in a never-ending quest to support you; to deal with the stress and weight of simply being.

What they don’t talk about is the small percentage of you that doesn’t survive. Occasionally that stress–that weight of daily living of pushing yourself beyond that which you are accustomed to–that stepping outside of your zone tears down the toughest third of you in a way that cannot be fixed. Instead of knitting itself together another process begins. Ulosis.

It starts in the part of you that you felt was the safest–the strongest. Where the muscles tried to knit themselves back stronger the bonds can no longer grip. The muscle and skin thicken, hardening along the gossamer cord of that idea of self repair. Not ever injury can be repaired. Some leave a mark. Often it is small, barely noticiable or a sliver beneath the skin. Other times it is more. A visible thing that bears witness to your pain; your failure.

Ulosis is but the start of a scar. The formation of this new thing you carry with you. This new way of understanding and interacting with the world.

Interesting day of writing. I am falling deeper into the message of the story I am trying to tell beyond the plot and the resolution. The human story is what really makes me tick as a writer. The rest feels a lot more like channeling these stories from wherever they arise, but the character message–that deeper bit–comes from me and my experiences. It is why I love telling stories and, to be honest, it makes me feel clever to sort in a meaning between the gunfire and swordplay.

Perhaps what drew me to this particular story is the idea of family. I’ve written very little about the idea of family. What is family anyhow? Why is it we put so much value in blood connections. I feel more bound to the family I’ve chosen than some bound to me by blood. The choice is what matters and what is honored by choice the blood is a social responsibility and I am interested in speaking to why each have value but in different ways.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tomorrow is Freewrite Friday. It shall be a thing!
2. I was recently reacquainted with the Kimberly Story, an AZ folklore tale that actually originated in El Paso. It is a doozie of a story with some connections to real events. Whether or not the story itself is real remains to be seen, but I do want to make it a part of my composition class.

I just had the conversation with my partner about holding the 2020-21 fantasy football season. It feels like the NFL season will be happening. It will be janky as heck, but it will happen. As such we will carry on in a fantasy way. I haven’t given a ton of thought to what that looks like in terms of players and draft and concepts, but I will have something ready for you all next week. This week is back to youth football. Specifically, I want to talk about the national championships, the AYF, and the insistence to play in spite of covid.

The Empire Sun Devils (out of Cali) posted this recently:

This is a clear indication that these folks expect to play throughout the year and at least one league outside of AZ (NYFL in Nevada) is going hard. Our own team is first up on the Sun Devils schedule. We also play another one of their opponents, the OC Buckeyes, earlier in September. In other words, we are also good to go for the season.

I am still on the fence. I feel like this is a great opportunity for exposure and excitement for the little guy. However is it also a great opportunity for exposure to Covid-19? While we are working on ways to limit exposure (face and eye shields, personalized water, no snacks, coaches are masked, limited fans, etc.) there is no sure way outside of isolation. Likewise I am also sending my boys back to f2f school where the biological security is also suspect.

I have a lot of thinking to do on these issues in the coming weeks. I know there is exciting football available, but is it worth it?

I’m deep into this novella and trying to get the end sequence handled. I need to figure out how the protagonist finally overcomes the antagonist in a way that makes sense. I do not have an answer to that problem and thus do not have an ending. There are other loose strings left to tie up in the story, but overall I do not think I will tie them all up. I want to leave the readers guessing. I want them to feel like they’ve gotten a sense of who the character is and found some interest in his life and now he’s going on with his life and they ought to feel curious and hopeful about what happens next.

At the same time, there really are not enough words in a novella to dive as deeply as I would like to. I want to be able to dig into the character, so in rewrites I think I will consider ways to deepen our understanding of his lasting conflict–the one he comes into the story holding and that which is a step closer to resolution after the interruption that is this story.

I’ve needed to fall into writing something like this for a while, and revisions over the next week will be a happy happy time. Also painful. Always painful and excruciating. Detail work always is.

Some Thoughts:

1. My partner thinks I only say not so good stuff about her on the interwebs.
2. I think she is amazing.
3. So there.
4. In other news, I’m slowly coming around to the understanding that nobody actually cares if Trump is crazy or narcissistic or greatly resembles an African dictator in nature. His people dislike the idea of democratic rule so much that the majority — the great majority — of them will not allow anything beyond republican rule and that is a sad sad situation.

People are quick to believe anything that reinforces what they want to believe–want the world to look like. Often what they (we) believe flies in the face of truth. For example, I want to believe we can safely have a youth football season. The mounting evidence suggests that there is little chance of that happening. I’ve yet to accept this as reality, which is the same ‘entry point’ people use into conspiracy and the lunacy of cable news. In short, there is always somebody wiling to tell you what you want to hear.

As I plan my writing I am thinking of ways to incorporate this sort of thinking into prose. Minding the NDA I am writing a mystery/whodunnit in which there are many suspects and I need to layer the story in a way that lets the reader reach conclusions before the characters do and feel good about being right–until they are wrong. Such agitations are the joy of the story, and are exactly what I believe will help it last in the memory of the readers.

I also want to use what I am learning in the world about polarization to make the distinction between who the characters like and dislike and write to that divide in a way that amplifies it from the personalities of the various players in the story.

It all sounds like intense planning, but I intend to just write it with these thoughts in mind and see how it all turns out.

Some Thoughts:

1. Lately I have been aware of every pain and every twinge in my body as though tensing for some major malady. I do not think there is much wrong with me or that anything is about to happen. I have been lax on my pills and that is the sort of thing that makes those pains and twinges become a problem.

The world is crazy.

Or maybe not. Maybe we just feel more on edge because our President is making sure to dominate the news cycle with full blown crazy. He is full blown crazy–so far as megalomania can be described as crazy. I’m not a fan. I am also not a fan of his dude Roger Stone who was recently caught on a hot mike saying, “I don’t want to argue with this negro” and then moments later denied saying any of it. He did. Normally his saying it would be accepted as fact due to the fact of having it on tape, but in this world of alternative facts we are expected to believe whatever reinforces what we already believe or have been told to believe.

So, we are in the time of the science fiction I grew up with.

Beyond the psychosis of the political realm and how it applies to what we are dealing with on the ground, we are dealing with the Coronavirus. It is a real thing folks. California is shutting down the schools for face to face for the fall. Yet we are still going ahead with such things here in AZ.

What scares me most of all is that these are not informed decisions. I have been steadily tracking the news networks and Foxnews.com and OAN no longer cover the coronavirus. If they mention it at all it is usually to praise Trump’s response or take a dig at Fauci (which is gross). Contrast that with Reuters who has a steady tracker at the top of the page daily. So, because it isn’t in the news folks are starting to believe it isn’t a problem. It is. We don’t have a way to stop it.

That is where we are at. This is the reality we face. We have a lot of soul searching to do before we get out of this…

Some Thoughts:

1. I reversed the title number to 4.830 and it had me wondering about the future.

When I create stories it is important to me to get the facts right and to make sure the stories happen in a place where it matters. By the latter I mean that the place should be integral to the story. After all, if it happens here, it should be happening here for a reason. Now there are exceptions. There is always the conversation of universal constants. There are scenarios and events not bound to a specific place, even if they are bound to a type of place. For example, a rural vs. urban setting changes how a scenario unfolds.

I am thinking about this at present, because I am working on a novella that takes place in a particular city. I wrote half the thing without knowing anything about the city or about the profession of the protagonist. I got a lot wrong. It made me go back to the start and revise and consider what argument I am making with the piece. It humbled me. It brought me deeper in touch with the character. So, in the end it turned out to be okay. By okay I mean that I will probably do this same dumb thing again. As with this time around I will revise and ensure through that process that place and profession and space matter. I spend too much of my writing not honoring the things the characters do or places where they live. I do a good job of the deeper stuff–the stuff I draw from my experiences or from that otherwhere that stories sometimes arrive from. I just need to get the facts in shape.

Some Thoughts:

1. I really want my job at the Center for Creative Writing to be about creative writing and making that accessible to people. I feel like that has not been the case. It has largely been about politics and hand holding and listening to people’s complaints about the dysfunction in our office. All offices have disfunction. We just need to find a way to get past it and get back to the point–which is not providing experiences for a handful of friends and people we want to be our friends that we call a ‘local writing community’ and instead get out there into the streets and connect all types of communities through the power of the written word. I need to figure out how to accomplish that goal.
2. More and more it is starting to look like people are split on whether to take CV-19 serious or to go about their business by pretending not to take it as serious so they can actually go about their business. I’ve been sitting in the latter category more than I should. Especially when it comes to sports.

Yeah, it’s a thing now. Each Friday I am going to find a word and build a freewrite scene around that word. Creative Calisthenics are happened. Here we go…

Mein

Andy didn’t want to go to the party, but if he hadn’t he wouldn’t have met her. She moved through the room like a yacht, swift and regal with a sense of purpose that made him turn his head. Well, maybe it was the dress. Specifically maybe it was the way the dress showed her long legs that ended in blue heels that seem to glow in contrast to the black dress. He was smitten. He was also married, a fact his wife pointed out to him as she watched his head swivel hard to the left.

His head snapped back to center and he tried on a guilty smile–all scruff and attitude. He said, “No, baby it isn’t at all what you think. It’s her mein. You know?”

Saraya clearly did not know. Red was bubbling to the surface of her brown skin in a way that never ended well for him. Andy met her eyes. He said, “Your beauty is all I’ll ever need. What that woman has isn’t beauty. It’s a certain kind of attitude. she has this air of royalty about her. You know, like we should know her from somewhere.”

The red spread along Saraya’s cheeks until it touched the corners of her false smile. Andy frowned. He sighed and stole another glance at the leggy blonde and stuck it in the back of his mind. It would be something to think about later when he slept on the couch.

Progress report: I didn’t start the 10 day novel program. It is going to happen soon, because that is a format I want to explore. Most of what I learned about writing came from books like that I read growing up. I lived on books on writing. I gobbled up craft info in pursuit of getting better. What I found interesting is by the time I reached my masters program I was no longer gobbling up info. I went from wanting to know to convincing myself that I already knew. I fear that this is the effect of higher education. I’ve spent more time post edu trying to regain the ability to learn and reaching out to those sources of information that I began this journey with.

So that is the source of this reflection: What happens when we stop trying to be learners and become convinced of our own strength of knowledge. I had a curious incident with one of my kids the other night where we were talking about facts about the Novel Coronavirus and who was #1 in new cases. He thought he knew the answer and when we said it was something different he actually said, “let me get my phone” and came back with an answer that supported what he already believed. That answer was wrong. In truth our answer was wrong as well (CDC reported 61,000 new cases in Texas over the last 7 days). He wasn’t really interested in being wrong so much as he was interested in being right, which commonly takes root in the teenage years and never seems to let go for any of us.

That is what I have been trying to get better at: Being wrong and accepting that I don’t know and that I need to learn and that there is value in learning. As I learn I get better in my craft and I discover what works best for me.

The NFL is coming back. High School Football is coming back. Youth Football is coming back. College football…. Not so sure about that. We’ve already seen a number of teams talk about changing season plans. The Big 10 is going conference only. The PAC is talking about the same. Ivy shut it down. I think the conversation is being shaped by a loss in profit. We know games cannot be played with full stadiums and that revenue helps to keep the lights on in those stadiums. High schools like youth are funded by the students themselves and that guaranteed income creates a sense of necessity for those programs to play.

There is no absolutely safe way to play contact football. The new (soon to be mandated) face shields will take a important step forward, but there is of course a general risk.

I am in the mindset to wait and see what the schools do. So far what they are doing is playing–they are stalling the public announcement, but we all know what is what. My kids start back to practice on the 29th. The school still wants me to coach and I am still resisting. In truth, I will not do it because I have no desire to coach my kids past a certain point (fly on your own l’il bird) and I don’t want to devote my time in that manner.

At the very least we know NFL is happening in some form and that does mean fantasy. I’ll be starting that discussion next Wednesday.