10 Minute Rule

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.

The air felt different.

“What? I don’t feel anything at all. It’s just like it is everywhere else around here.” He said.

Except that wasn’t true. She couldn’t explain it as anything more than a sucking presence that filled the stale air. They were at the apartment the kids had rented only a few months ago. She’d been hesitant to see them move out, her husband Roy not so much. The boys, 19 and 21 now were not what she would call adults. She didn’t think anyone would call them that. Grown, sure. Yet not adult. More and more she’d come to realize there was a difference between those things that marred this generation in a way that had not impacted her own generation–merely a quarter century removed from that of their children. What she saw as a problem to be observed Roy read as a hand to be forced. He’d done so more gently than she’d seen him do anything in his life. This, she suspected, was entirely on her behalf. She had wanted them to stay home–till they were each legally able to vote and perhaps even till they were sensible enough to do so. He’d been trying to move them out the door since the last of the pair had flipped his tassel and flung his square cap into the late evening sky.

But Roy loved her more than anything, so she won. Even when she didn’t ask to, she won.

But what had winning brought her in this situation. Standing in the doorway of a house that smelled of complacency and indecision she wondered not about their next steps but her own. What would she do? How could she fix it? Love is, after all, quite demanding in that sense. It was why she so rarely gave it. The cost of the exchange was an unending anxiety for the person to whom it was given. First Roy and now her boys.

“You’re going to act like you don’t feel it?” She wondered aloud.

“I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about, because if I do, that makes it real, which means we become engaged in the matter.” His voice was barely a whisper. Further into the bare space the boys were trying to microwave something resembling a meal. Her face soured. She caught herself and rearranged it into a smile.

She said, “Boys, how about Dad and I take you out for dinner?”

They looked up and nodded lazily, their eyes drifting back to the microwave and then refocusing on her like searchlights seeking some escaped thing. The smile glitched. She nodded vigorously now and said, “Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Get your coats.”

Outside the air felt normal again. The world was moving, growing. She’d feed them. She’d make sure there was enough for leftovers for the weekend, staving them off the thin diet of frozen meals for just a bit longer. It wasn’t real change but it was a small win. Sometimes those were enough to get you started. Sometimes those were enough to hold yourself together.

I find myself wanting to build a novel again. I say build, because much of what I’ve been doing is simply writing the story as it plays out in that conduit between my mind and elsewhere (a clogged pipeline at best). By build I am talking about a well crafted outline that identifies the individual characters and the world itself as independent entities who happen to be engaged in these moments caught on our ‘camera’ and woven together into a thread in which one character is set at the center. I don’t know that this type of build works for every story. It may be the sort of thing that works best in revision where you have a list of questions you ask yourself about each moment/chapter. I mean it like thus:

1. What is the weather? How does that impact what is happening around the scene?
2. What is happening in the wider world outside of the scene? What if any connection is there to the scene itself?
3. Consider the characters not directly related to the ‘action’ of the scene. What are their lives? What are they doing there?
4. Consider the perspective of insect and animal life. How do they view this moment?
5. Think of the land itself. What is the history of place that led to this land looking like this in this moment?

I’ve yet to come up with more, but these are largely the result of a lifetime of reading asides that ground the reader in time and place and provide a solid amount of background to where ‘the action’ is taking place, contextualizing it in a larger sphere of story. In part, I’d very much like to try building an outline around these moments and seeing how that shapes the world and perspective I have on the players in the story itself. Could be fun.

4 episodes in and I feel like the Giants are really about to poop the bed. I mean the way it is shot makes the entire thing look like a crap shoot. Nobody really has a sense of who is talented coming out of the draft. I feel like there are moments when I fear the team is playing moneyball. Perhaps they totally are–I mean how could they not given the salary structures and the cap? Far too much reliance is put on QBs who are likely not that good. The margin between decent and good is so small, and the margin between good and game changing is so great.

Speaking of margins, the vids are already starting to come out and College Football is getting its game breaker plays and glitches. Some of the stuff is controller stuff the game is built around that you have to get those stick skills to exploit. Some of it is just video game magic.

That is a brief and underwhelming post, but ten is ten.