I’ve been thinking a lot about how to get things done these days. The news cycle has gotten dire enough that some mornings it’s difficult to get out of bed. Other days there’s so much going on, and so much of it is infuriating that it’s almost impossible not to spend the entire day distracted. 

I got started making a big list of movies that had an important influence on me and I was trying to remember when I saw those movies, and when I confirmed via IMDB that I’d gotten it all wrong, it got me thinking about memory and the ways we use to remember things or attach them to our timeline in our memory. 

When I write, I do a lot of drafts. I’m lucky if I can keep it under double digits of drafts before I feel comfortable querying a publisher with anything I’ve written. 

Currently I’m running one D&D Campaign and playing in another. Like writing though, the ideas for new campaigns keep coming, much faster than my available time, made exponentially worse by the fact that roleplaying games being a group activity requires that several people’s schedules… several adult’s schedules… line up. The phrase “Gaming while adult” is spot on for the difficulties it implies. But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to play more often, just like not having time to write every story that comes into my head doesn’t mean I don’t wish I could somehow write them all. 

I often make playlists for writing. Usually they’re just songs that play well for certain genres, but when I’m writing something longer, I make a playlist for that specific project. Here are the top songs from my Four Corners playlist. 

When I was growing up it always seemed like I could only like one type of music. Maybe that’s a folly of youth, maybe it’s a sort of binary brainwashing that takes education to overcome: just because something’s good doesn’t mean the other thing is bad.

I recently read two great books: A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman and Fire And Blood by George R.R. Martin.