How to blog

Step 1: Decide to start blogging regularly in order to keep up a good connection with "your people."

Step 2: Enthusiastically write a first post announcing this change. Tell everyone everywhere.

Step 3: Have a thought that you think about putting on the blog.

Step 4: Decide "meh, why would someone want to read about that?" (even though sharing thoughts was exactly the reason you started the blog)

Step 5: Forget to blog.

Step 6: Remember, then feel guilty about it.

Step 7: Blog.

Repeat.

Video Game Sacrifice

I was telling my Discord server that I just got my sons into playing Civilization 5 and how it had been nearly 10 years since I had played Civ. Someone remarked that was a long time to go without Civ.

And they were right. I did miss it. I miss video games a lot.

But when I decided in 2018 to bring writing back into my creative practice, I had to cut something, and video games went by the wayside almost immediately.

Now, if you've listened to Chit Chat with Chris and Matt or followed me on Twitter or...watched me on Twitch, you'd know that I still definitely play video games. And there are still times I overindulge in them. But I also know that some video games are part of my self-care, part of how I can manage my stress throughout the year.

But there's certain things I can't do. I can't get into a big multiplayer FPS thing. I can't touch anything Free-to-play. I like it too much, and it'll suck away time that I can never get back.

As it is, I'm having a hard time justifying the 125 hours I've spent on Elden Ring...

Doing consistent creative work requires making choices. Not all of them are fun.

Unrealistic Characters

My Guardian of the Two Worlds series is about a girl named Jane who is caught between trying to be a normal teenager and living a “secret” life of her family’s clan of fighting dangerous spirits.

But the most unrealistic thing about my books isn’t the anime-like martial arts and superpowers, or the Miyazaki-Last Airbender-esque spirits floating around. It’s that the teens communicate with extreme clarity and emotional vulnerability.

And it’s not just to “that one person who gets me” - Jane is open, vulnerable, and direct to her family, her friends, her romantic interests, and even her enemies. And whenever she isn’t, there’s some sort of issue or fallout that arises from it that is usually only able to be resolved by returning to open and honest communication.

I know it’s not “accurate” or “realistic.” I’ve been working with teenagers for years. But it is an intentional choice for them to do that because I want the characters to model what we should all strive to do in our relationships. I mean heck, let’s be honest, most adults don’t even communicate like that. But it would be better if we did.

My hope is that Jane - or at least how she handles her relationships - can be aspirational.

Checklists

I'm back at work now, but the students aren't back yet, which means it's time for my annual attempt to figure out the best possible system to manage everything I'm doing at the same time!

Yay!

I think I've talked about before that. I regularly review and modify my work schedules and methodologies. However, this time I'm trying something very very different. And it was inspired by all the traveling I did.

Checklists.

When you travel with four small children and you're bringing all of your clothes, food, and in the case of one trip nearly all of your kitchen appliances, you can't get anywhere without checklists. Between the sheer volume of things to remember, and constant interruptions from children, I would undoubtedly forget something important. So I have persistent checklist that I have saved for any time we travel. In preparation for these trips, my wife and I also made a bunch of task checklists to make sure we didn't forget to do something before we left either.

During the second trip, I realized that all of those checklists made the entire process a lot less stressful. I wasn't constantly trying to rack my brain through everything, because I had offloaded it onto literal pieces of paper.

So I got to wondering: what if I had a checklist for every day of my life?

And I don't mean a to-do list, of which I've used and have had various iterations of in the past. I mean more like a pre-flight checklist, routines written down that I want to accomplish every single day. After all, one of the barriers to getting a lot of creative work done is mental fatigue. And there are a bunch of studies that show that that mental, decision fatigue wears down throughout the day as you have to make decision after decision. Decision. By creating a routine with a physical checklist that I had to check every day, I could offload a lot of the mental stress of decision making.

So I drafted a version while I was on vacation, and then two days ago I printed them out: for evening and one for morning. I'm back on an early morning routine where I get up extra early to give myself time to work on writing and podcasting etc. So the evening checklist is all about preparing for the next day: packing my lunch, making sure my keys and wallet are in the right place, deciding on what I'm going to be working on the next morning, that sort of thing.

The morning checklist is pretty sparse since most of the time is reserved for the created task that I decided the evening before. But it does include things like walking the dog and making sure I have time to make and eat breakfast.

It's gone decently well. So far. There are glitches in the system, particularly in trying to get to bed on time. It's waking up super early. Means I have to go to bed earlier that I'm used to, and my body hasn't quite adjusted to that yet. I also think the checklist need a little bit of tweaking still. But, I do feel like it has already made a vast improvement in getting myself to do what I want without added stress.

I'll keep you all updated on how it goes, but if you try it out or have ideas that could improve my checklist system, let me know in the comments!

PS: I dictated this blog post while walking the dog, so please excuse any weird typos, transpositions, or odd word choices.

The Archives are Incomplete

I've wrote a blog post while on vacation #2 a couple of days ago. It was a good post, talking about the creative things I was thinking about and struggling with before I left on the trip.

I also wrote it in the squarespace app, which while I like the interface, is clearly not designed for users who have children interrupting them every twelve seconds (and therefore you have to put your phone down and pick it back up over and over).

So I lost the post.

I was so irked by it that I decided to not bother until my trip was over, since it was all a massive waste of time.

But then the next day, I had a major ephihany that cleared up several questions I had written about in the blog post.

That's the irony of trying this constant blogging, especially when I write about the things I'm struggling with. The blogging itself clearly helped with figuring out the problem. But putting it all out there makes me look... I dunno, wishy-washy? Fickle? I spend all this time saying I'm thinking or doing one thing, and then because of that I change my mind. If I don't say anything, then it looks like I have a plan all the time.

But that isn't really the truth, is it? So I suppose it's probably better to be open about the entire process rather than perpetuate the myth that all creators and writers always know what they're doing all the time.

Anyway, heading home today. Had a great trip, but the day job starts up again tomorrow. Still, I'm encouraged and rested about the future.

Refinement: Chris the Author

Some of you know the story: I wrote my first “novel” when I was 15. 118,000 words, most of it just a jumble of Star Wars and Final Fantasy 7.

When I think about why I did it, I can never come up with a conclusive answer. I think saying “I was compelled” or “I had to do it” feels a little disingenuous, since it makes it sound like a mystical calling. But the reality is, I didn’t have a reason to do it other than I wanted to. Took me about 9 months.

I started writing in earnest in 2007. I had some query interests in 2009 and 2010. In 2011 I was fired from my publishing job and ended up going back to school for teaching. I didn’t do a lot of writing post 2012, which was my first (and most difficult) year of working in education and the year my son was born.

I stopped writing for a while, figuring I didn’t have the time or energy anymore. I started the podcast in 2014…or 2015, I can never remember (and the date on the podcasts are wrong because it changed when we moved servers.) In 2018, a student of mine read my novel and was angry at me that I had stopped writing and demanded i resume. I wrote what would be the first draft of Heart and Soul Fist in March of 2018 in about 30 days flat, though it would take much longer to rewrite and revise it to where it is today.

In 2020, I published Heart and Soul Fist, I wrote I Summoned a Ghost to be My Girlfriend. I wrote Spirits of Summer after that and published it in 2021.

I’ve joined classes, read newsletters, subscribed to communities. I’ve paid a lot of money to people to get my writing analyzed, critiqued, and improved.

I’ve written millions of words.

I obviously like doing it.

So why does the idea of “being an author” make me uncomfortable?

—

Earlier this year, I read a book about Self-Publishing for Money. I’ve read like three of them, so I can’t remember which one I’m thinking of right now. It honestly doesn’t matter, the content of all these books is basically the same.

In order to be commercially successful, you have to write what sells, not necessarily write what you want.

Of course, there’s a compromise in there. You can write things you want to write in an area that sells and have the best of both worlds. Then, the advice goes, you can write that weird thing you wanted to write once your audience is established.

This advice always gets me tied up because while I love Heart and Soul Fist and the characters and world and the stories, I know it’s “too weird” to ever hit commercial success in a way that I would want to. It no longer fits in the current YA mold, and honestly I think post-COVID the story feels…disconnected. Like the story is out of time and old. Irrelevant.

So maybe I should drop it. Or at least, postpone it.

This then rubs against the advice that you should finish a series. But do you finish a series that isn’t commercially viable? Isn’t that just sunken time when I could be writing something else that would bring me closer to the dream of “professional creative”?

Maybe all of this is just fear. Fear that if I try to write something that fits more clearly into genre conventions that it’ll fail, and then I won’t have an excuse as to why I couldn’t make a career. I would just be a bad writer who has spent 23 years thinking he was better than he was.

—

I’m working on something more genre-convention. It’s very Mandalorian-inspired, with a touch of Elden Ring. it’s basically the story of a Knight slaying dragons - both literal and figurative. I’m currently using EVERY SINGLE TOOL I know to prep it.

I think I just have to do it. I have to try and write it and see what happens when I do.

What do you think?

Refinement and the wisdom of Qui-Gon

During one of my recent day-job trainings, there was this quote about stating a mission that’s really clung onto me. The gist of it is that you need to repeat what your mission over and over in order to refine it and make it clear to yourself and to everyone else.

I guess it’s kind of a less “woo woo” way of thinking about “manifesting” something in the universe. If you’re at all familiar with the concept of “The Secret,” apparently you’re supposed to just “put what you want out there” and the resonance of the universe somehow materializes a million dollars or something. I don’t put any faith behind that idea, but I do think that there’s truth in the idea that what you’re concentrating on is going to cause you to achieve goals because…well, you’re concentrating on them.

I think this can be best summarized by my favorite bit of “Star Wars wisdom” which comes from a throwaway line in Episode I: The Phantom Menace when Qui-Gon says to Obi-Wan “your focus determines your reality.”

This post feels a little rambly, but what I’m trying to get at is that I need to start refining what the mission of my creative “career” is. What I do right now is really fun - just doing whatever the heck I feel like whenever I want to. But in reality, it’s not going to generate any more money or influence. Not that anyone reading this needs to always feel like their creative works or journey should be in that constant elusive pursuit of “professionalism” but…I can’t let it go. I’ve tried, but I can’t.

So if I can’t let it go, then I should try to take it a little more seriously. I have the skills, but I don’t have “the mission” which determines the focus. I once wrote a Medium article saying that my mission was “writing positive things for teens” or something, but I don’t think I’m there, anymore. I think COVID took that out of me, though I’m not sure why (something worth thinking about, I suppose.)

So…who do I want to create for? And why? What benefit is it to the world?