Anti-productivity

I’ve been finding it hard to find time to write lately. When I have ‘free’ time it seems to turn into ‘me’ time. It feels like I get to the end of a day and have wasted another few hours of potential. It’s not just that either, there are so many good distractions and right now I am in need of distracting. At the end of the day I make choices and some days, weeks and months those choices are not the ones that lead me to happiness. I used to go writing every day after finishing my 8-5, that slowly devolved to one or two nights a week and then it moved to just Saturday mornings. Then it was ever other Saturday, now it’s whenever I can squeeze it in. I’m not one to post the shit that’s bothering me online in a public forum. Airing dirty laundry never seems to make anything better and comes across to me as offering up excuses and I won’t be a part of that micro drama bullshit. Lately, I haven’t been writing, hopefully soon, I will turn that around.

There was another mass shooting this week. The funny thing is, it doesn’t matter if you read this post the day I write it or two years from when it was written; There was another mass shooting this week. This is the price we pay for the second amendment. The people who died for our right to bear arms are a necessary sacrifice to uphold that amendment.  As a society we decided this is fine, some of us don’t agree with it, but overall, we vote and decide as a group and the majority rules. The only way to change things is to amend the amendment. There really is no other way. Laws that abridge that amendment will not stand up in court. I think I need to read less news, it’s all a downer these days. I could focus on science and technology maybe? I do like the idea of an alien species making it to our solar system long after we’ve wiped ourselves out, and finding a car orbiting the sun. Our entire species could play one last joke on the universe and that’s not a bad thing. The meaning of life is to give life meaning. Which is to say, there is no inherent meaning. Laughter, family, friends, holding onto the good times and consoling each other during the bad, this is what we have. Keep your heads down when the shooting starts.

I have posted another chapter to TZC6, chapter 30. I’m working on 32 right now, and 31 is in the ‘think tank’ where I try and go back and make edits and ponder what ramifications it will have on the future of the book. A standard practice I implemented to keep from writing myself into a corner.  Overall the word count on this is over 60 thousand, not horrible, but, as I said, I’ve slowed down recently.

It’s that time of year again: Convention season! Woot! This year the cons are separated by only a weekend, so I have Gamicon on the 24th and GaryCon starting March 8th. Those will be busy weekends and historically I am much more productive when the season is over. It probably helps that I have more daylight and warmer weather to travel around in too. I kinda don’t like driving after dark anymore, my eyes have always been very bad and my night vision is for shit, so more than half the battle is just getting out. As much role playing that I do you would think I would have a hand at crafting some material for Dungeons and Dragons, adventures and such. I tell myself that I don’t because, as most people in the genre will tell you, there is no money in it. The reality is, writing in any field is tough, my books are providing around $150 a month right now, so not a living wage, and I suspect a good D&D module would add a lucrative $10-20 to that monthly total… My point is, I’m not making bank so why not dip my toes into the adventure pool? I think the hard truth is I don’t have an adventure in me. My game master style is ‘Sandbox’ not ‘Plot Driven’. I create the world, full of things to do and then turn over agency to the players to make of it what they will. Yeah, old school baby. No adventure paths, no linear ‘you must go this way’ plot devices. It can be frustrating at times to both the DM and players, but it works for my group. So, writing for rpgs would be problematic. I read and use premade ‘adventures’, but they are all options and all tailored for my game. The rise of ‘pdf’ releases at low cost has been an insane boon for me. I have more reading material for gaming than I will ever get through and that is awesome. The only thing that bothers me is that sometimes I think I am missing out because I simply cannot read fast enough.

I have passed the point where I know I cannot read everything I want to read before I die. It will just not be possible. I have categories of reading: Work, Learning, Pleasure and Gaming. There is some overlap, especially between Work/Learning, Learning/Pleasure and Pleasure/Gaming. I’m fond of space operas, those hit the pleasure category pretty hard. Right now I’m struggling at work to learn Visual Studio and Visual Basic so I can support an ancient ‘Windows Forms’ application and that sort of reading/research is important to keep a roof over my head. After that I need to read up on hardware and parallel ports…which is sort of pleasurable, but also for work. New things come out all the time. See what I mean? Death will claim me, hopefully with book or kindle in my hand…