Dust Off the Old Blog for a New Endeavor

It's time. Time to come back. 

A lot has happened since I last updated anything here. Back in the day, this was all about gamebooks and interactive fiction. While I'm proud of everything I accomplished in that area, and gamebooks will always be an important part of what I do, it's time to admit that that's no longer my main focus. It was an important era of my life, and one I will always cherish--and I do hope to write more interactive fiction in some not-to-distant day!

But for now, my focus is shifting. I think the best way to sum it up is to cross-post a Facebook post here, which effectively states where I'm at in my life. I'll paste it in below, to capture it for the ages (Facebook isn't good for long-term), and otherwise, expect to see more updates here soon :)

For those of you who are long-time followers, I won't blame you if you leave. But if you find that DnD, creative writing, game design, and comments on DMing professionally are of interest to you, then I encourage you to stick around. Without further ado...

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I turned forty last month. Four decades: childhood, teens, twenties, and now thirties, all complete and under my belt. 

I remember a Calvin and Hobbes comic I read when I was young; Calvin starts thinking ahead to future him, thinking of all the things that future him has done that kid him hasn’t yet done—the foods he’s eaten, the sights he’s seen, the friends he’s made. So often we fear aging, but isn’t it wonderful to have so many things that the younger versions of ourselves didn’t have? 

Younger me didn’t have Forrest, didn’t have Callie, didn’t have Story Tables, didn’t have five years experience teaching wonderful students at an amazing school. Didn't have memories of going to conventions and all the wonderful friends I made there (you will be missed, Geoffrey) I am so grateful.

And yet, of course, the clock is ticking. How many more decades do I have? We never really know, but another four or five at the outside, most likely. Could be a lot less, if the dice don’t turn up in my favor. I feel like my professional career is just getting going, and yet the years ahead to accomplish my goals are starting to look mighty short. 

If I could give twenty year old me some advice, I would encourage him to find his path early, not to wait. Pursue his dreams sooner rather than later, get married sooner rather than later, get started! Life isn’t as long as you think it is. 

This is true: I feel like I’m just now entering my prime. I think this decade will be the most productive and successful of my life. 

I was never very good at being young. I didn’t know how to let my hair down (ironically, since I kept it long) and have a good time. While others were out living it up, my idea of a great time was waiting until I found love to have sex, and staying up late with the guys playing Vampire the Masquerade. I regret nothing! Those times were amazing. And yet, I do wish I had danced more often.

I feel strong. I feel ready. And that’s good, because Callie and I are undertaking the most ambitious endeavor either of us has tackled yet: we’re trying to build a business out of our passion.

Decades seem to be a time of change; at least the last two have been, for me. When I turned thirty, I ended a failing relationship and moved halfway across the state to find a new beginning. I had the hard conversation with her the night before I turned thirty, so that I could go into the new decade on a clean start. It was hard, but it was the right move. It’s hard to believe that was ten years ago. Five years bouncing around the Bay, finding a career, finding love, earning a degree. And five years back in Ojai, working in paradise, but sometimes lonely.

This year, my relationship is the one thing that I’m 100% on. It’s a different kind of change the new decade ushers in: I gave notice at my job. Though I love teaching at Oak Grove (I can’t imagine a more perfect school for me!), teaching was never the long-term plan. Teaching, instead, was always intended to be a step on the path. For a time, I thought the next step on the path would be education administration, perhaps someday leading to founding a school of my own, based on revolutionary new ideas in education—ideas that the current research supports, but which the educational institutions of our society have not yet caught up with.

But in my heart of hearts, what I always wanted to do (and half the reason I became a teacher) was run roleplaying games for kids. I wanted to, like Becky Thomas at the Roleplay Workshop, eventually leave teaching to do this full time. But I don’t just want to run games for my little circle of students, I want to make an institution out of it. I dream of Story Tables branches in every major city in America, in the world. That, of course, is a damn long road, and I wouldn’t dare to make predictions about how far we’ll get, but hell if I don’t give it my best shot.

I look around, and I see a world that’s hurting. I don’t have much, but I have this one little salve, this pleasure, this escape, this opportunity for reflection and personal insight and growth, all rolled up with entertainment of a kind more satisfying than any other I’ve ever tried. I have that, and I want to share it. Somewhere out there are kids who need the same salve I was lucky enough to find, and I want to grow the institution that will bring it to them.

This is what I’m doing with my forties. Here’s to another great decade: the best yet!

Productivity Past Adrenaline

This time last year, I had just gotten my first break, and was bouncing up and down with excitement. I couldn't wait to get started, and dreamed of getting my foot in the door to really be involved in a career around writing and game design.

Now, at this time this year, I've got some fantastic products in the oven, which I think are really going to be game-changing, both in their fields and for my own life. But I'm in that awkward stage where I have all of the work but--not yet--any of the rewards. Once some of these things come out... well, I probably won't be able to quit my day job, but it should at least provide a little flexibility, something to invest in the next go round.

Yet I find myself in the unexpected situation of working on the most exciting projects of my life so far, but struggling with motivation. What's the cause? I ask myself.

In short, the adrenaline has worn off.

I'm not actually any less excited about any of the projects I'm doing. But projects like these are big. They're time consuming. They require sustained effort over time, and basically, you can't sprint a 100 K run.

Over the last few months, I've had to find creative ways to tackle this issue. Sometimes I haven't tackled it effectively, and let days, or even weeks, pass without getting much done. But I'm starting to put together a little bag of tricks to help me deal with this problem. Writing these out is a way for me to clarify it in my own mind. But also, hopefully, to give something useful to you.

1) Consistency, not Sprints: I've always had a tendency to work in bursts of high-octane energy. Consistency is a challenge for me. But what I'm finding is that one day of work, no matter how enthusiastic, can never match what can be done in a week. And a week's sprint, no matter how determined, can never match what can be done in a month, not if you keep a moderate, but steady pace over that whole time. Furthermore, if you run on maximum burn, you're going to burn out your fuel sooner or later. I'm a person with a lot of enthusiasm and determination. I've never been burned out before. It took me months of sprinting to get there, but it happened, and when it did, it shocked me. I didn't know what to do. Only over the last few months have I been tackling this problem and learning that I need to pace myself to accomplish something as big as what I'm building. It's not worth burning my energy out in one high-productivity week, if it then takes me two weeks to recover from it.

2) Plan Rest: According to an internet anectode*, a woman giving a speech at a conference lifted up a glass before her audience that was filled exactly to the halfway point. Quirking a smile, she asked, "how heavy is this glass?" The audience, expecting a different question, was taken aback for only a moment before they starting throwing out weights. After a moment she said, "Sure, it's not that heavy, right now. I can lift it easily. But if I hold it here for five minute? For an hour? All day? My arm would start shaking. Eventually I would drop it." IT'S SO TRUE. You have to put the weight down from time to time. No matter how excited you are to be carrying whatever it is you're carrying, you've still got to stop and rest from time to time. This doesn't mean you have free license to slack off whenever you want. That's why you plan the rest. Make time for you to set the burden down. My schedule for the moment: First, 10 minutes before bed each night, I stop work, take a deep breath, and consciously set it down. The temptation to just stay up working is strong, but I take that energy and remind myself to use it to stay focused the next day, rather than burning it out on not sleeping and then being exhausted the next day. Second: I've scheduled Sunday nights, past six, as a time for no work. A time for me to rest, to sit down, to watch a movie or play a game, or whatever I want that doesn't involve writing. What I find is that if I don't stick to this, then I find those activities creeping into my writing time when I get exhausted, and my overall productivity drops. If you take one thing away from this article, let it be this: Plan Rest.

3) Hours, Hours, Hours: This doesn't necessarily bear repeating, but it's the flip side of the above. When you're not resting, stay focused. Usually, when I start to feel like a project is taking forever, if I look back over the way I've spent my time, not much of it is actually going in to that project. Make sure to schedule time to rest, but make sure to schedule time to work, also.

4) Write Down Your Goals: I find this especially useful right at the beginning of a chunk of time that I have available for work. For myself, and I'm probably not alone with this, I often find myself incredibly excited at times when I'm not free to work on the project, but when I do have time, my mind is on other things and it's an effort to even remember what I need to do. If I've got two hours available, I find that by taking five minutes at the start of that time to do a quick brainstorm/freewrite thing about what my goals are and what the next steps for me are, it helps me A) get focused, B) remember why I want to do whatever it is I'm sitting down to do, and C) Clarify exactly what my immediate tasks are. This way, I can get started after five minutes, instead of after 45 minutes on facebook.

5) Sleep: Seriously! It's important. See Steps 1 and 2, above. We each have our own limits, and you know yours best, but when you think about it, the extra hour that makes the difference between enough sleep and not enough sleep really isn't that much time. How much are you really going to get done in that hour? Is it worth being at half-power for all 16 hours of the following day? Beyond which, if you happen to be struggling emotionally at all, being rested really helps with morale.

6) Keep a few Projects Going: Keep a few pots on the fire. Keep your options open. This may be just me, but I find that if I have only one project that I'm focusing on, especially if I feel obligated to work on that to the exclusion of other things, it dramatically increases my sense of exhaustion and frustration. I *always* keep two to three projects spinning at once. It helps me a lot to be able to jump to something else when one thing starts getting old. When your creative muscles start getting tired, you can turn to something new to get a breath of fresh air and re-invigorate that excitement.

7) Exercise: This is one that I'm still struggling with in practice, but I've clearly identified it as a priority. Like it or not, we live in these bodies for the duration of our stay here on earth. All of the energy we have comes from our bodies. Though it may seem counter-intuitive, exercise actually increases your body's level of energy. Bodies are like the machines in that old sci-fi book The Practice Effect. They get better at whatever you use them for. If you don't use it for anything except staying awake late at night typing, it's going to start to break down, and that's no kind of platform to work from. Not to mention, not a pleasant way to live. I'm not surprised at all when I hear about famous authors who run every morning.

8) Harness your "Slack Off" Time: We're all going to slack off to some degree or another, despite the best laid plans of mice and men. It's just a fact of the internet. It sucks you in. But it doesn't have to be wasted time. If you get in the habit of zoning out by keeping up with social media and reading articles or blog posts related to your area of expertise, well, that's actually pretty important to keep up with to stay connected.

In conclusion, it's been my observation that you have two basic resources: time, and focus. And both of these need to be managed. I'm excited about all the things I'm doing, but doing so much runs a very real risk of exhaustion. Making time to work is important, but if you don't have the focus to use that time effectively, it doesn't do any good.

It's challenging, but the most fun and worthwhile things always are. Honestly, this is the most fun I've had in years, exhaustion and all. Happy creating!


*Sorry, I don't remember the source! If you recognize the story, let me know!

On Blogging... and why we write

Maintaining this blog is an interesting learning experience. What I'm finding is that I feel a lot more comfortable when I've written the posts in advance. My intent, at this point, is to keep the Lone Wolf story going on Mondays and Wednesdays (which, of course, can't be written very much in advance due to reader involvement) and to put out one more deep and thoughtful post with actual content once a week on Fridays.

What I'm finding, especially for those thoughtful, content-ful posts is that if I put it off till Friday, I'm no good. I'm just stressed about typing it, and can't think about the actual content to really focus on it.

Which is why, tonight, instead of what I had scheduled for you, I'm going to write about Moonrise Kingdom.

If you haven't seen Moonrise Kingdom yet, go watch it. Right now. Stop what you're doing, go find somewhere where it's still playing; if it's not still playing, get a bootlegged copy. Then buy the dvd when it comes out.

This movie took me away to another, magical world, a place where boys can be men, where dreams can come true, where life is hard, but it all comes together in the end, and where true love can be found at the end of a very awkward and difficult rainbow.

I wish that was my life.

There are only two other movies that come to mind that have made me feel this way: Miyazaki's Spirited Away, when I was in college, and My Girl, with Macaulay Culkin and Anna Chlumsky when I was a kid.

What I really getting at here is this: it's stories like these that make me want to write. Sometimes, I come across something so spectacular, so inspiring, that I can't help but fall in love.

Here's where it gets tricky though. Moonrise Kingdom is a fantasy. It's a very good fantasy. Hell, it's MY fantasy, packaged up, put in a box, and handed to me tied up in a pretty, silver ribbon. And it makes me happy that someone out there understood me well enough, without ever having met me, to tell that story.

But it's still a fantasy.

I watched a very interesting pair of Extra Credits episodes the other night about Spec Ops, The Line. The guys at Extra Credit were basically blown away by this game because by the end it becomes clear that it's not just another shooter--it's actually critiquing it's own genre and making a point, a very real, very unpleasant point.

If you haven't watched these episodes of Extra Credits yet, the basic gist is this: Spec Ops, the Line, drives your character to actions that any reasonable human would question, but that you are so used to doing in games of this genre that you don't question it, only then they use the gameplay and story to highlight just how unnacceptable everything your character is doing is, without actually ever breaking the tropes of the genre.

As you proceed through the game, the message becomes more and more clear, and on more than one occasion, lines in the narrative break the fourth wall and directly address the player. The most powerful of these comes at the end, "You're here because you want to pretend to be something you're not... a hero."

The Extra Credits guys then go on to point out that all the big title shooter games, in fact many games and stories, especially popular ones, go out of their way to make the reader/player/viewer feel like a hero. It's a carefully cultivated fantasy.

This raises some very serious and disturbing questions for me. Is it actually okay to use fiction to live out fantasies that aren't, and never will be real? What are the moral ramifications of this? Or, re-phrased, does that actually make our lives better?

Escapism, fantasy and wish-fulfillment are all very nice, but does it actually make us happier, better people? Moonrise Kingdom made me incredibly happy to watch, but now, in retrospect, it kinda just leaves me feeling very depressed, because that's not my life, it wasn't my life, and now it never will be my life. The closest I can come to experiencing those kinds of events is through fiction, either enjoying it as an audience member, or potentially creating it myself.

I loved Moonrise Kingdom, but is it just wish fulfillment? If it is, is that okay? Should we aspire to something more than that in creating fiction? Or is that enough, once in a while?

Re-Design may be coming up

Things in my life are changing, and it only makes sense that my website would change along with it. Like many good authors, especially starting ones, I need a dayjob to keep the writing flowing. Fortunately, I'm taking steps in a direction I'm pretty excited about. I learned a lot about gamification at my last job, working with a small startup, and received recommendations from several sources that I should set up a gamification consulting business.

It seems to be something I have a knack for, and game design has been one of my top three passions for my entire life, so I think this might be a good choice. My only concern is that I've really set this up as a gamebook-related blog. I don't want to lose that, but I'm thinking of redesigning my site to include some of my other passions as well, namely: game design and gamification.

I'm still working on how I want to organize it, but just wanted to let you good folks know that the change may be coming. Any thoughts or comments are welcome, as usual!

Working from Home

This post will be a little different. My circumstances have changed, and I'm doing a lot of thinking now about how to continue my writing when life doesn't always accomodate the time you want to put into it.

There's an irony in the fact that while I was working a boring dayjob, I wrote with every free moment--but once I took a few months off to write full time, I was no longer able to put the same level of energy into it. I think that while I was working, writing was my escape from the annoyance of my eight hour workday. A promise of a better future. But I constantly lamented that I didn't have more time to put into it. Once I had the time, I faced other challenges: organization, structure, motivation.

I still managed to outline a novel and write 25,000 words, which isn't too bad for one month. I just feel I could have done better. But now I'm finding myself with April and May having slid by, and only brainstorming on two new projects to show for it, no actual writing yet.

At this point, I'm facing yet a different set of challenges. I have a new job, but this time, I'm working from home on a project that I'm actually very excited about.

I do this thing: when I get into something, I dive in fully, barely coming up for air. This can be great for writing a LOT in short periods of time, when creativity strikes. It can be good for any project. But it makes it hard to multi-task.

I'm still looking for that balance. How do I meet my work obligations and still make sure to set aside time for writing?

I don't have to deal with commute time anymore (working from home) so that's a big benefit. But at the same time, there's a loneliness to working from home that saps my creative will. I know I'm not alone in that either; I've read about other authors who found they really needed to get out and at least work a part time job in order to keep up their creative spirits.

Then there's also the same challenges I've always had, just the challenge of keeping myself on task without external structure. I'm definitely getting better at it; five years ago I would not have been able to either write the way I do now or work from home successfully. But I've still got a lot to learn.

What do you guys think? Do you face similar challenges? If so, how do you solve them?

If this isn't what gives you writer's block, what does? What do you think your biggest challenges as a writer are?