10 Minute Rule

I’m leading off with the blog today; putting firmly in my mind so I can put it out of my mind for the day. I want the mental space clear and ready to write fiction, because I have a ton of fiction to write. Before I get there I need to talk here about sports. I’ll start at the High School level and see how far I get.

My son’s team is terrible. I found myself saying that out loud the other day when my mother called and asked how his team was doing. They are 1-5 and ranked 29th out of a possible 31 teams in the 6A. This is in spite of being the 5th largest school in the state. Sloppy. Just plain sloppy stuff right there. If you have over 3000 students you ought to be able to find 24 (kicker and punter) starters to make a competitive team. They didn’t. They haven’t even found a coach who’ll stay longer than a year. I’m hoping this one will, if only to provide some consistency.

There are two teams with worse records in 6A, and it is my deepest hope that we get them on the schedule for the next two years. I am openly lobbying to get 27, 28, 30, and 31 on the schedule. We already will have 25 (who is a fellow district team and who we play in a few weeks). That could offer the chance for a 5 win season. Throw in a 5A team and we could be looking at a 6 win affair. In fact, we have a 5A this week. The team, Ironwood, has gone 4-3 this season, beating terrible teams and losing to the ones with winning records in 5A. We are not a winning record by any means, but we are larger (for however much that counts) and we did whip these guys 42-0 last season. Of course, that was a different coach and a different Talis-boy leading the secondary. Ironwood too has changed. They have a shifty QB who drank the Lamar sauce. I’ve been studying film this week in order to help the kid get an in-game and prep advantage. I’m going to teach him how to read the linemen preplay. He has the cues on how to read the qb once the play starts, but now the WRs are the next read. A two-stage read is an important skill for a safety, so here is an opportunity to grow and to harness that.

I was part of a panel today during which the host read a remarkably old bio that neglected to mention half my kids and the Lady Talis. I need to clean that up. Your bio is the image you put out of yourself to the world, and if I am denying half my family and literally half the books I’ve written then that is a bad look. I need to add roughly 40 volumes, two novels, and three novellas. Work needs to be done there to be sure.

That moment was a good moment to reflect on how far I’ve come since I first took work at Arizona State. The bio is likely slightly newer than the one on this blog, meaning I have work to do everywhere. It is a longstanding problem, me not keeping up with things of this nature. In fact it is only through thinking about this content that I discovered that my work appeared in an anthology several years back. This is not sustainable, though I’ve sustained it for decades. Funny how once you get old the things that were easy to overlook become all that you think about.

I live in a space where rewatching every episode of TV series is considered a significant accomplishment. I could end the blog there and you would already know everything you need to know about what that does to my psyche. 73 hours of actively watching TV only to flip through lists to locate another 70+ hours is the consumer version of what I do for a living. Here I see the dual sides of creation and consumption, but consumption wins out. Consumption is the driving force–a distraction from anything that is valuable. What bugs me most is that it is a distraction to me as I try to exist in the space. All I hear is the noise of TV–often that of high pitched Japanese girls screaming unintelligibly (to me) about things I’d rather not care about. To stop it I need to actively take control of the TV or tell the culprits I want to watch something else. Yet in this there is an inherent unfairness. I live with them. They are family that has a right to exist. Moreover, and more importantly, I have a partner who puts up with my taste for football and also deals with the nonsense alongside me. So, I have, IMHO, little right to constantly cancel the behavior.

Yet the impact is killing me.

I cannot focus. I cannot work consistently. I need to go back to white noise and headphones…

I had really high hopes for the week. They didn’t pan out. I did get started. I did get the ball rolling. I did complete some of the tasks required, but overall I was underproductive and left a lot of opportunity on the table. Most of my energy went in a very good direction, and I am insanely proud of having made a step forward with the Lady Talis. On the other side of the life-work balance… nope.

The key to maintaining life-work balance is having success in both. It does not have to be huge but it cannot be push pull. You cannot allow yourself to sacrifice either. I pulled back on the working this week. It had nothing to do with life. It was just me feeling a bit overwhelmed in general with the work and stressed over little shifts within the home environment. This destabilization vexed me all week and now I need to work twice as hard to get halfway caught up.

I will not let another week go by like this. I need to lock in on many levels.

I started thinking about the algorithms that track your internet activity and create ad profiles catered to what they think you want. It turns out there are story ideas in this (because of course there are). I started thinking about all the searches I’ve been doing and then thought about if a person started searching for something off kilter and a partner or lover found those searches… or if the past searches belonged to a loved one who passed away and the constant pop ups lead to depression. I think a lot about the algorithms in terms of youtube and what my kids watch and how I don’t want that to be attributed to me and my habits. It amazes me how open the younger generation is to feeding these algorithms and training the large language models to follow them. I don’t find it the least bit healthy, but of course it makes for great fiction.

Some Thoughts:

1. It is extremely hard to really determine what teams are better than others beyond, well, high school. Heck even then there can be legitimate factors at play in terms of play style and matchups. College football exhibits better coaching and more athletic parity in certain conferences. All this to say that, dang, I cannot figure out how good Drake is or is not.

Listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates wax poetic in his 2015 book Between the World and Me, is a stunning reminder of how important influences are to what we create–and IF we create–in our lives. I come from a place where I hold creation in extremely high regard, even if that creation is of a form I despise (tik tok) on a personal level I respect the act of creation and I feel the cathartic nature of the act when I do create and when I do think about what I am creating next.

Now, in this moment, I am thinking about the next story. I am thinking about the fantasy work down the world and how fantasy is largely representative of existing racial and social groupings and works sort of as a stand in for the complexities and desires of people–often a particularly disenfranchised set of people. I usually recreate these societal breaches forward, but I am considering reshaping them in the fantasy novel. I am thinking about doing entirely different comparisons; taking my personal what if’s of the future and casting them backwards thousands of years to build something… different.

World building is great fun and shaped, to be sure, off the modern world. When I return to the past it won’t be merely as a refracted image of now. It will be something far more sinister and something far closer to the truth.

I’ve been sitting on a thought for weeks now, waiting for the other part of it to click into place–to make the vagaries of my mind into something cohesive. The missing part clicked into place this morning when I started listening to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new essays–which start with a letter to his son. In that letter he described the rituals of a street fight. In that moment of listening I went back to a moment in another book, Sentinel, by Mark Greaney and thought about the beginning of that half-formed thought. In the Greaney book he talks about parts of Africa as being “lawless” and as he continued to speak of the regions all I could see were the laws, the rituals, the cultural mores put in place that he openly ignored and ascribed to a wild nation. This clicked into place like the lost piece of a puzzle that finally allows you to see the image you are meant to form. I realized then that the idea of lawlessness he and so many write of is really about wrongness. It is about encountering a world and or a system that doesn’t behave in the way you were raised or function in the fashion that media tells you a place should fashion and, as a result, it is hierarchally beneath you. That’s the entirety of it.

We ascribe wrongness and the less than value to what we do not understand and what we feel we cannot have a high status within. If we cannot see ourselves on the top of it, then the thing we are seeing is wrong and automatically less than us, barbaric, and likely needs to be stamped out, policed, and brought to heel. This functional approach has been applied to politics in such a divisive way as to make anyone who is on the other side seem as less than. Democrats are radical leftist hippies or martini sipping separatists with no relation to the real America. Republicans are backwoods idiots who are not smart enough to realize they are being manipulated or bible thumping puritans who secretly are the dirtiest people we know. All of it is self inflation.

I think the pulse of what I am feeling and thinking and writing in this moment is about the other. The other is rarely aspirational. The other is often oppositional and a threat to our way of life. Yet that is not how I was raised. It is not what I see or believe to be the American Dream. To me that dream is to rise to the top, not against any one group but alongside those who are willing to work as hard as I am and do what it takes in order to succeed. The creation of otherness is a short cut–a cheat code to allow you to remain comfortable where you are, or at least accept you inability to move forward (nay, your desire to look backward) as a reality that is to be accepted.

It is a reality that leads you nowhere. It is a circular state that generates nothing but hate.

Here’s a question: Can you come back from an 0-6 start in a fantasy season? Probably not. It is nearly impossible to do so, especially without help from other teams sucking at a level you are. I am presently 0-6 in the $$ league and struggling with getting to .500 in the beachborn league. In short, I am trash this season and there is no good news in sight. At this point I am doing a deconstruct on the failure to see where I went wrong. It wasn’t about instinct. I’ve made a few instinctual pickups, which have me at least making these losses competitive. No, the truth is I did not do the research. Study matters. I tell my kids this all the time. Study the film! Yet here we are in sucksville and I have nobody to blame but myself.

Can’t look forward if you’re always looking back, so today I am going to look forward and think about what I want things to be like a year from now. I know, you’re probably thinking that a year from now I will look back… maybe. Who knows. Still, here it is: I want to be in a better financial and mental place as of fall 2024. I think that begins with understanding what I need to do to secure a job future. I have a tenured spot now, but I don’t intend to be in this state forever. I ought to be looking elsewhere by next year and have a plan in place for what and when in terms of getting a spot to live and work that the Lady Talis and I are comfortable with. It’s October, so I will still be watching the kids play football, though mostly on TV. I am hoping the youngest has emerged from the chrysalis by then and become the player he intends to be at the HS level. His big bro is already doing it, so he needs to step up and get there.

The writing? A year is a long time away; long enough to have wrapped that next novella, be deep into (or done with) the next novel, and working towards a more established routine of how much to get out a year. My plan is in the universe–the yearly novel, novella, 4-6 books–so I ought to be grinding on that. The window for creating the Justice Engine is closing, so I need to get that out this next year, so that is my big side project over the next 12. Hopefully that is novel 2 on the schedule.

I have hopes and dreams and goals. I have a lot that I want to do/get done. That tells me that I am not satisfied and I have not peaked. This matters. Not only for me as a father who wants his kids to see him cook, but as a man who wants to be a leader through action. I need to get going and get right in that respect.

Health? I think maybe I’ll save all that jazz for Thursday. Gives me time to figure out what I actually intend to do.

I’m grading and watching another lovely Ambient Renders scene in which I can see the skyline of a cyberpunk city and listen to the rain falling against the windows. It chills me out. It makes me wonder who or what I would be in another life. I think about this more and more in relation to understanding the vastness of creation. What if we do come back as other people? What would that be like? What would I want the other me to be, to experience, to want? Most of my life has been spent writing fiction; pulling experiences from different realities and presenting them to an audience through the lenses of characters they could enjoy. I wonder from time to time how much of that is part of the fabric of our reality. When we die our energy goes somewhere and although the ‘we’ we are now is held together by memory, pain, and desire, what happens to our self–our soul when we let all of that go? Does it flow into another life?

I think, if I did experience another life, I would want that to have moments like my Ambient Renders. I think I would like to be sitting by a fire watching the rain come down against the windows and across a city lit in shades of neon. I think I would want to experience a reality where people were all moving in the same direction towards a larger understanding; a brighter future where the concept of personal wealth didn’t drive us to the lengths of insanity it does in our present reality.

Perhaps the things I want from beyond reflect the things I don’t have here. It is an easy reach to see and accept that. The truth is that my reality is unnecessarily dark and sad, and even the brightest moments are marred by worry and by fear. We shouldn’t have to live like this, but I have fought against it my entire life to no avail. We’re just conditioned to a certain way of being, and there doesn’t seem to be an end in sight. So, I’ll watch and listen to these beautiful renders and imagine a world of what if.