10 Minute Rule

One of the most important things a person can do in order to be better is to study their own habits. My habits are not going well as of late. This self reflection was triggered by my brother reaching out and asking about combating writer’s block. I gave him the truth of all that I do and all that needs doing and then watched myself not do that and instead endeavor to do everything I told him not to do. This as I am staring at an 8500 word piece that doesn’t want to come along nicely.

Instead of writing I sorted wires and plugs and tools. I did all of the things I tend to do while avoiding work and pretending to be productive. I even wandered around the internet doing things towards projects other than what I’m supposed to be locked in on. So, the post mortem is this: I did not cook. Heck, I didn’t even really get started. However, the realization that came as a result of the phone call was useful. I have work to do and I need to settle in this week and get it done. School is spinning up, novel revisions are about to come due, and I still have it in my mind to take on more projects. Add it all up and I have a busy season ahead. I cannot afford to dither.

Some Thoughts:

1. Tomorrow I ought to go back to 7.1 and remember and reflect on how this iteration started…
2. Probably best not to talk about these kids on the blog all the time… one day they’ll read it and be like, “what the hell?!” I say that as I just considered an aside about one of them.

I’m having the strangest waking dreams about death. They boil down to the idea of being on a journey and staring down the line of my life back to the moment I’m in now but doing so feom a place terribly far away. I don’t know what to make of it but it scares me. Death scares me —I am afraid of the loss and of the absence of everything. It isn’t a jump scare fear but a deep and resounding terror that I often need to force out of my soul. I run from it but I think maybe there is a truth in it that could be worth exploring if I understood how to do so without losing myself. Perhaps that’s what the tunnel is.

Some Thoughts:

1. Another week emerges and I feel like I am starting to get a grasp on how to function here in this space and time. Schedule is key.
   
2. watching season three of umbrella. Show is starting to slip in terms of character and character arc. It isn’t as good but there is still something there in terms of plot.
   
3. nearly missed the blog tonight. Bad on me.
   
4. 
   

I’m at the page before 8am and that means I get to blog early. This is a positive step in getting back to a healthy home routine. I’ve been out of routine for several months–through Italy and back. A great deal of this inability to settle is the inability to have a stable routine I can rely upon in order to help me settle. Here I am now with my calendar and my office space and my hopes that I can work this out somehow. It won’t be a same time every day routine–my work schedule isn’t built for that. More days than not, however, I will have the same chunk of time available to me week to week, or some slight variation thereof.

The basic obstacles at play here are work, kids, and energy level. I feel like I am more of a morning person as of late. Perhaps the inability to sleep past 5:00 AM is a part of that. However it shakes out, the goal is to find that sweet spot where I feel productive and the mind (as brain fogged as it may be) is feeling irie. I need enough time to ramp up, and enough time to really sink into the work I am doing–be it short fiction, game writing, or real novel stuff. That means (for me) a minimum of two hours and a safe block of 3-5 to include breaks. That is a grip of time in a day, and hard to do when I am working. However, I’ll do all I can to make it work. I mean, that’s the entire point of me being functional outside of my relationship and fatherhood. It is the other thing I have.

Some Thoughts:

1. Brain Fog. I did not give the idea much thought. In fact I assumed I’d suddenly slipped into early dementia territory. However, it turns out that Long Covid sufferers may also be dealing with everything going on with me since Covid. Among those issues are the blood pressure issue that seems to defy both medication and exercise (no matter what I do, it appears to react and shift from systolic to diastolic issues based on what I’m paying attention to more) and brain fog–an issue that may be related to the blood/brain barrier, which argues that it is again a blood issue. I’m no doctor, obviously. I do think that I’m smart enough to follow this rabbit hole far enough to be able to have a conversation with one at a later date and start to learn about what can be done.
2. Is being really really frustrated with your kids a symptom of covid too? Maybe that’s just a symptom of fatherhood…

Here’s a thing I know about myself: I like being in control of the story. I like being able to do the weird and let the story go where it wants and let the characters do as they do without worries of another writer changing the plot. This is a key reason why writing in a shared world is good for me. It forces me to create story and character that is so clear cut that any writer can pick up the thread and roll with it. That’s really hard to do, because in story you want to be able to keep a little to yourself. The key is to create personality for the character that is so vivid that other writers know how the characters are going to act. That is a really good thing.

That’s a good side of the issue. Another is the creativity aspect. I feel like I have struggled as of late in terms of being deeply creative. More often than not as of late I have been reading and think: Wow, this is really creative. Why didn’t I think of that. I don’t want to feel that way–I want to be the guy creating madness….

I wanted to write about Kamala Harris. I wanted to write about how I think they should relaunch New Edition as a reality show. I have a lot of thoughts digging their way through my brain, including the impending second watch through of Deadpool III (it isn’t as good as I hoped and lacks anything resembling a solid plot, but Jackman is just that guy. He’s enough. The cameos are tough). I wanted to plot out wonderful ideas for a backyard that includes a black screen for outdoor viewing (oh, it is a thing). All of these are things I want to discuss but haven’t arrived as fully formed posts. Instead I’m in that liminal space again. I’m floating between what is done and what needs to be done and in that space a million ideas are waiting to be realized.

I don’t pull on those threads. I don’t let myself give into these wonderful ideas that I would chase down till completion. Instead, I make lists and figure out what needs to be done next, focus on that, and get it done. It ain’t wonderful, but its a living.

Some Thoughts:

1. Man I shoulda waited till Thursday for the waiver. More football news out there. Yet I will wait a week to share that and my thoughts on the olympics… maybe.
2. College ball player is already feeling the back pain. He needs to get time with the trainers and understand what is really going on there. He’s got 4 years of college football life ahead of him. Don’t burn out week 1.

Driving my son home today we had a conversation about how practice went. He responded with generalities like ‘fine’ and ‘did good’ but not once did he dig into the critical aspects of the practice. I went and looked at the tape and saw a kid who is not ready to compete at the varsity level. He’s jittery; uncertain of where to put his feet. He reacts late and without fluidity to the ball being in the air and the qb making reads. As a result he wasn’t on the field much. He did not, as the kids say, cook. He needs to get lower in his stance. He needs to read specific areas of the field, watching his 3rd develop and discovering how to move forward into the flow of the play. He can get there. He needs to deal with adversity on a much higher level before I believe he will get there. He hasn’t dealt with that on a serious level in his life and it is those kind of moments that will shape you.

Meanwhile, his big brother is into his summer training for his first D1 season. He’s ready. He found a training partner who was better than him–an Notre Dame All American CB who can push him and he can learn from. That connection has propelled his preparation, and now I see the kid striving to excel in his first year–maybe with the hopes of transferring to ND and stepping in for his training partner when that kid declares for the draft this spring.

The pros are about to start their summer of preseason, and I’m excited to see how that plays out. On three levels I have things to watch and talk about. Success is around the corner… that or the other thing.

I don’t even know if I spelled that right. In fact, I should never ever use the term sesh agin–even facetiously. Moving on… and unto the point of the blog. I write a lot of material in a shared world where everything I put out there becomes latticed in with the work of others–who may be working independently–to form canon. The problem with this is that many of us are working independently and furthermore… we be working with our own agendas and occasionally not reading other people’s work. All of this leads to a lot of mistakes and confusion and retcon. I’m in the middle of such a process. As I am trying to clean up some messes I made on the way to building something beautiful, I am discovering there are pieces of it that were modified by others and pieces still that make no sense whatsoever. We don’t have a loremaster, persay, but we do have several people who know their stuff enough to point out the errors. So, I’m learning where things have gone wrong and how I am working with the fruit of said poison tree.

Yet onward I work.

This is to say I’m having a really fun time digging through all of this old lore and picking up threads of forgotten stories and trying to weave them back into the fabric of this shared world. I’m super excited about parts of this project. I am definitely geeked about the opportunity to build new lore in this world. We are creating a lasting piece of gaming that people should play for a long time. That brings me joy to know that others can have fun with what I created.

I just gotta make sure I get it right.

Some Thoughts:

1. Bought a new TV. Nobody cared. I suppose they cared enough to realize they needed to redownload apps. Well, I’m excited about it. I’m also hopeful they don’t ruin it with dang downloaded viruses….
2. Football is back this Thursday. How did I not know until this very morning? I don’t even know who is up for the hall. That’s wild behaviors for a football fan on the level of myself…

When I was a kid I used to glitch really bad. Not me, persay, but everything around me would break mysteriously within a small window of time. I started to think (realize) that it was me. I believe(d?) I somehow would glitch the system, making things that normally work not work merely because I approached them during this terrible window of time. Now I don’t glitch like that so much anymore. However, today was rough because it truly felt glitchy. It wasn’t tech this time. Instead it felt like anything that could go wrong would go wrong–as though my reserves of luck had run entirely dry and I was operating in the deep red.

It started with a case of the clumsies. The sink nozzle turned against me. It actively assaulted me, soaking me from head to toe while I was trying to put flowers for the Lady Talis into a vase. After I’d mopped and changed I went to eat a wrap I’d picked up from salad and go and indulge myself with a cucumber mint lemonade. The universe had other plans. Somehow reaching left across the small table I was using to hold my meal caused that drink to fall right and completely off the table landing on its head. On the floor. Spilling everywhere. So I went to get the mop bucket and fill that with water. It rebelled, sliding into the sink and again causing water to spray everywhere. I put that cleanup on hold–the sticky lemonade took priority. Retrieving the mop and half filled bucket, I returned to the room to cleanup the mess. Then I went back to clean up the other new mess. Finally, it was time to eat.

They put the wrong stuff (or just bad tasting stuff) in my wrap. I tried to power through for the sake of little victories (any meal is a victory in my book and if you’re eating once or twice a day, you don’t get a lot of victories). Of course the wrap fell apart and created a small mess. I gave up then. I threw away what was left and called the day a loss. This was 2 pm. I’ve had over 6 hours since of dodging falling scissors, making wrong turns, discovering my favorite dry cleaners is suffering from a plumbing issue that shut the store down, and a rather inane student freakout. My day has been…. bad.

A Better Tomorrow, yeah?

blogging from the phone because I don’t want to make it back to the office. I’m beat. Been working all day towards getting the house right—building it back for the fall. There’s a lot of the building back to be done. There’s a lot of growing to be done on my part — growing with the changes in home and the evolutions at work—me fighting the gpt war.

I’m tired but more than a little invigorated about the road ahead. At the same time my knees hurt and I’m feeling the darkening approach of 50. I need to continue to lose weight and build back my body the way I am building back my home and mind. It is all about the road ahead and being the best version of myself as I move along it.

Well, I’m back.

It took me a while to get right. I was drowning for a long time in this awful sense of being stuck in time and place–a groundhog’s day feel that was in fact what was really happening in the house and in the area surrounding it. I slipped into my office early in the evening after installing a new TV in the bedroom and sitting for the first movie viewing. The TV was one of my ‘small wins’ but it was enough to get me moving. I also spent time in the pool and was able to really think through how I want to use the backyard as multi-use space. Once I’m done here I’ll head out back to check out whether or not I can use a projector without a screen. Who knows? I will.

The main thing is that I am writing again. I feel like I was starting to fade hard, and I needed to read some good work that inspired. I did (and a continuing to do) that. Then I wrote a ten minute bit of fiction yesterday and now we’re off. It feels very good to be back and feeling like I am ready to produce. I am not exactly FULL of ideas, but I do have several spidering out of my brain and I am going to try to write down and think through as many as possible.

I’m stoked. I’m ready. Let’s freaking go.