10 Minute Rule

Before I wander off to fanboy over Cassandra Cain (off to see Birds of Prey and I love me some bat family), I wanted to take ten to discuss the state of the NFL. So, here it goes…

The Giants PR machine just sent me the obligatory offer of home game season tickets. I am not in NY, but I am New York. Nevertheless, I am not in New York and do not plan to be for most of those games. I will not be buying.

But what would I be buying into anyhow? Beckham coming home to face the Giants crowd? Do the Giants have anyone who can cover that man? No. Well, Maybe. That has everything to do with how healthy he is come game time and whether or not the G-men make some moves in the upcoming draft. Let’s go there for a minute.

Wildout Theory: The Giants take Tua at #4. Jones is placed on the scrap heap a la Josh Rosen. Tom Brady is suspected to be considering NY as one of three possible landing spots for the coming season. Putting Brady under center and then going the next step to shop Jones and put Tua under that tutelage sounds like a good deal. In fact, I argue the Patriots would be interested in Jones, because he would fit their system fairly well. The larger question is: Do we want to commit to Jones?

I think the team needs to continue the steady rebuild. Give it one more year of the suck and maybe, yes, take Tua at 4 and Brady and ship off Jones for a 3rd rounder and see what you can develop over the year–see how you can cultivate a long term success following a stop gap approach.

What is Cli-Fi?

I get that question every time I bring up the subject. It isn’t clear what it is. To me climate fiction is not wrapped in the rules of sci-fi or fantasy or generalized fiction. Instead it is milieu writing of a sort, where the intersection between the social and physical world is deeply explored. The cli-fi shadowrun novel I was working on fits that bill. Of course, any real thought of cli-fi center around the world and the places we call home. Specifically it is a conversation about the changes that these places undergo as a result of technology, human intrusion, war, etc.

I need to spend more time writing cli-fi and publishing that sort of work (any sort of work, actually) in order to further establish myself in that writing world in a way where I feel like I belong there vs. in other literary worlds. The hardest thing for me to do as a writer is to write. After that it is to figure out where I belong as a writer.

Some Thoughts:

1. Glanced at the numbering and realized for the first time how close I actually am to the year mark. Crazy.
2. Not sure I am in a place of real happiness as of late. I have moments and those moments are often drowned out. Then again, I’ve always been a person of moments and those moments have always sustained me. In that fashion it is quite okay. On the other hand, it feels that my personal happiness more and more comes at the cost of those around me and I cannot stand for that.
3. Maybe I can stand for that, because I really have no idea what else to do.

I am extremely run down. I’ve been trying to do too much for too long without any real sense of a plan or schedule to any of it. The schedule I have been working on was theoretical and untested until one day it became actual and problematic. I don’t go to the gym. I don’t take care of my heart and overall health issues. I am not writing. I feel incapable of telling stories off the cuff. Most importantly, I don’t feel I have been the best life partner.

I forget things. I drain the romance out of situations. I make life seem unmanageable. I am, in a phrase, bad at the game. These are the truths I struggle to accept. As a writer I ought to be embracing these truths and turning them into story and through that story growing and changing into a better version of myself; evolving vs. devolving.

Instead I am blogging. I am getting by on the brief hits of accomplishment and joy that come from coaching youth sports, or getting asked to coach high school sports, or landing a major meeting with all the force and fluster of a multi-liked comment on instagram. I am measuring success in millimeters because that is as far ahead as I can look in my life. That short sightedness comes across as unpreparedness, and not caring, and lack of romantic vigor, and writers block.

But it isn’t any of those things and all of those things are merely symptoms of a life that isn’t a life so much as an existence the way a drowning man breaks the surface of the water to gasp for air and his lungs, filling with water, take in more of the water with that air and he tries to make a sound and all that comes out is more water and even some of that precious so precious air that he needs to breathe and–

Then he is gone.

I don’t want to be gone or overwhelmed or overscheduled or over writing or over this opportunity I have to treat a really good woman right or over my head with responsibilities I don’t want.

I want to be overjoyed, but right now all I am is over and out.

Salon recently published an article questioning whether or not Trump is behaving like a dictator. Cliffnotes: He is. What I found more disturbing about that situation is how readily we are willing to accept his behavior and moreover to excuse it. There are of course a number of factors involved in why that is happening. I will start with how the GoP works.

The Republican party is not so much a party of consensus as they are a party of hierarchy. They accept top down leadership and follow the will of their chosen leadership. This is best characterized by the way the party constantly shifts ideology and behavior based on whomever is the Republican president. Bush I congress was different by leagues to Bush II or Reagan or Trump. However, all four groups bent to the will of leadership. In fact it took an extraordinary act of what was then called betrayal for the Nixon administration to get impeached and forced to leave office. I argue that had Nixon had as equal a ‘don’t give a fuck–I’m doing me’ attitude as Trump then the man would have been able to blow off the situation and double down as Trump did.

Another reason we excuse it is because we don’t see everything. So much happens that much of the dirty stuff going on is basically ignored. We have a record deficit that is only getting worse and not one of these anti-deficit republicans are trying to stop it.

I could go on for more than 10 minutes about this, and I intend to do a follow up to the blog. I believe Sanders will be the nominee and that will be a polarizing moment for our nation that could lead us down a very violent and public national split. I hope not, but the rhetoric is so highly charged now that it feels inevitable.

Sitting in the main area of the conference I find myself wondering what it is I want to say. I’ve been through so many sessions over the past day where artists are laser focused on what they want to say that I find myself asking within, “what do you want to say?”

I’m not entirely certain of that answer. In this new piece I am imagining race and caste, looking backwards at the African countries and at the Indian caste and apartheid and in many ways at my own American culture and the idealized conception of how class and race are interrelated. In a way I am also looking at tokenism.

I think what I do is convince myself that I am telling these high level stories using fantasy races of my own creation as parallels, but in reality what I am doing is telling cool stories about people who are different. About the land as well.

I think this story is a bit cli-fi too. Not sure about the when of things going into it, but I am sure about the isolation the land creates and that I have not thought about things like water which will truly matter.

So, what comes out of this is I learned a little bit about what I need to learn a little bit more about.

Some Thoughts:

1. When it does rain in the desert it is no small thing.

The above image represents my DISC reading. This newfangled ENFP (the old me) indicates who I am according to a series of questions in which I am given 4 options and must mark one positive (thumbs up), one in the negative (thumbs down) and leave the others alone. It felt a lot like a crap shoot, because the language was so similar to me in places that I was not entirely certain that my thumbs up was a significantly different statement from my thumbs down. Thus I found my way to this reading.

I learned about the existence of this thing from a coworker who was curious about the reading I would get. I believe I got as expected… mostly. I don’t know that the reading was so wrong, but I don’t know that it was right either.

I am a lot of things and I am different things at different times under different conditions. I don’t necessarily view myself as a constant save for the reality that I am constantly evolving myself as a response to stimuli–be it environment or other influence.

Some Thoughts:

1. First day of the conference I am helping run. Learned a lot from the experience. Things went well overall.
2. Still learning about myself and my squirrel focus. It remains a problem in conversations and writing.

I am working on a short piece of writing for Shadowrun in which I am speaking from the voice of a specific character giving a report. This is the style I am most comfortable and familiar with in this type of Shadowrun writing. What I have noticed is that when I write these things the characters traditionally default to female. I still wonder why that is. It could be because I was in a graduate writing program that was mostly female and the authors I read were mostly female and the students around me believed that I could and should not write a female narrative.

Challenge accepted.

As regular readers know, my life is built on a series of challenges which will eventually end in Houdinian fashion with me attempting to beat death like some spiritual escapologist and… well, I don’t want to give away the ending. I do want to be more mindful of why I do things though. I thought about why I was making the character female and challenged myself to make the character male. It threw me for a loop. Turns out my male characters are quite stereotypical. So, here is the new challenge. Make this one different.

Some Thoughts:

1. It is really important that I move this 10 minute rule back towards where it was born: in the mold of writing about the writing. I used to use the space to work out my thoughts on story as well as life, but I talk story less and less in this forum and I write story less and less. The blog is a canary in the coal mine of my mind.

It has been a really good month in the magical world of work and writing. I had a chance to sit down with Troy Wiggins of Afrofantasy.net, and the dude is all kinds of cool. Check out his stuff. His ‘I’ve Got 5 On It’ series is really solid and an honest reflection on genre work as I’ve seen done. I personally spent the last few hours at a showing of Brother from Another Planet where I gave the opening remarks. Exciting opportunities await in the world of Shadowrun, so long as I can get my words done. Finally, I am getting in the right mind for the new book.

No, I have not been as diligent as I wanted. Derailed by work stuff and illness, I found that I had more excuses than effort to make time and that was a puzzling conundrum. Clearly I want to do the work, but it hasn’t been the top priority.

Some Thoughts:

1. Energized by the work tonight, but needing to find my way to bed sooner than later. Long weekend.

I started this with the some thoughts and find myself with only a few minutes left. I spent this morning working on my comments for a film presentation I am doing tomorrow. The presentation is on the film, Brotha from another Planet, and it got me thinking about American Dirt. Like BFAP the film is created by a white person who is telling a narrative about a non-white race. The difference is reception. There are likely more differences and I wonder about that book more and more after Stephen King and Sandra Cisneros wrote the blurbs on the back supporting it.

What is the truth there? What is the real problem? Is it the book itself or the fact that the writer clearly does not know how to act or how to promote her writing in a non-offensive way? A lot of layers to be explored there, I think.

Some Thoughts:

1. Still sick.
2. Still bothered by that dad who got at me last weekend at the game about coaching his kid. I am bothered that youth sports are really always about what the parent believes their kid to be and or an opportunity to push their own glory, position, and success. Few people coach youth sports purely out of kindness and an opportunity to spend time with their kids in a fashion that helps their kids improve as men or women in some small but vital way. I don’t know that I was always in it for that either. I know I was when I was coaching with the Juggernauts and leaving that team is a huge regret I still have. In truth I wish I could find a way to roster my kid with that team and that experience again, because where I am is largely about parents chasing rings and glory. I know it is, because that is exactly why we signed up. So, I shouldn’t be angry about that dad who came at me, because I understand exactly where he is coming from. I should be upset and I am upset at recognizing that I was there for the same exact reason.
3. I am also upset by his lack of respect, which goes back to the earlier point about why I was there. I was there to get respect and I didn’t get it from him though I did get it from a lot of the other coaches.
4. What happens next is anyones guess. We will enjoy the season and go from there.

Somehow, I am still very sick.

I am chalking this up to aging. I read recently that Steve Jobs has a brain that was the physical age of 27 when he died. He’d apparently made his brain reverse its aging through meditation. This is something I have heard in one form or another through various monks and such. None, however, point to anything that gets them over a basic sickness such as the flu with any speed. I have that flu.

I don’t find any joy in the feverish days and nights of sickness–especially at a time where my team is readying for a conference and I am all but powerless to help. I could and should take the time to work on my words, but I have not even been able to do that with any real mental strength. I have not been meditating, so I don’t have any of that Monk/Jobs sweet fire that everyone keeps on yapping about.

I do have a plan in theory to teach the elementary school class. I want to break the kids down into small groups, with each group responsible for an aspect of the story–Protagonist, Antagonist (I will use these terms but give secondary terms to help ease the transition into grown up language), Setting, some basic plot stuff (adventure, etc.) and I will give them a strategy to build stories themselves–leaving them with a ‘cheat sheet for storytellers’ that helps them carry the lesson on into the future. I really want what I teach these kids to last. I want it to stick.

What I want more than that is to get right physically. I’m a mess and I don’t know how to be a mess. I’ve spent years and years trying to overlook being sick and now that it is overwhelming me, I really have no framework on how to chill and take it.