There are times when I envy sports writers. I like to imagine that whatever is going on in the world at large, no one feels cheated when they load the sports section and read, “How about them Dodgers?” 

(We’re with the in-laws for a bit, and caught the last half of Tuesday’s game with the Diamondbacks on TV. What an adventure! Leads given and sundered, errors all around, a crucial bottom-of-the-ninth double to tie and a mad dash for home by Freddie Freeman to win. Of course if you’re the sports writer, the next two days you have to sit down to write about the losses… but I didn’t watch those games on TV.)

The blank newsletter page doesn’t feel that way to me, this week. When I started this project I set clear guidelines for myself, around not writing anything I didn’t want to write, but that remit’s broad enough to include things I want to write about but am not done thinking or feeling my way through yet. This, I suppose, is one of the perils of newsletter writing as someone more comfortable thinking / feeling in novels than essays, and perhaps more comfortable doing so in series than in individual novels.

I have been thinking a lot about the world, and my family’s place in it. You too? Maybe? I feel two pulls, one toward a sort of neo-Confucian ethic of Public Service, and a more Zhuangzi take, informed in particular by two of my favorite stories: the one about the useless tree, and the one about the turtle in the mud. These pulls are in tension with one another. I feel it is the sort of tension that permits one to walk upright. 

We’re all called to make a world to live in, and for our children to live in. Each of us shapes that world—at a bare minimum, we build the place around us, or the place where we hope to be, or the world we wish our world to become. 

But the world is shaped in many ways. And this world, the one where our pockets all hold weirdo magic mirrors full of lying demons and shouting angry people who by default have our permission to bother us whenever they want, is replete with trillion dollar forces evolved to exploit the trick of human biology that means that when we are anxious about something, or scared of it, or mad at it, we scratch at it—or poke it, or click on it. It’s so easy to have your life drained away by the vortex—to be convinced, one click at a time, that you should be thinking of, not anything in particular, but anything other than what you ARE thinking of. We surrender V’s last inch, not under durance but under a zergling rush of competing urgencies.

Inspired by a range of sources (including the first chapter of Andy McCullough’s book on Clayton Kerhsaw, The Last of His Kind, while visiting my in-laws—them Dodgers again) I’ve been experimenting with an alternative approach, and I’ve found joy in it. Removing myself from the Great Link is part of the approach, but only in that it affords room for its primary step: deciding what I’m going to do, with full cement-block-breaking commitment. Deciding, one hour at a time, what is the most important thing for me in this hour.

When I sit down to work: this is the most important thing, for this hour; even for this fifteen minutes. Everything else can wait. That tells that essential force involved in writing books, call it muse because the only reason I can see to use a bunch of other words more compatible with psychological materialism is to not feel childish, and the desire not to feel childish, as the man says, is the great indicator of childishness; that, anyway, tells the muse: you are loved, you are important, you have your place. Then, when I turn to raise my kid, my kid becomes the most important thing. When I find myself called to Do Something: assume that scrolling an app that makes some of the worst people in the world a lot of money is not a politics. What then?

I’m still working on that last part. But to tell the muse, so often placed to one side for this or that necessity: be cherished, be loved, be more important than anything else—it feels good, man.

I’ve been rereading Paradise Lost. Some parts of it hit a bit different than they did back in the bright college years. This time in particular a bit of Book II hit straight to center of mass (line 496-505):

O shame to men! Devil with Devil damn'd

Firm concord holds, men only disagree

Of Creatures rational, though under hope

Of heavenly Grace: and God proclaiming peace,

Yet live in hatred, enmity, and strife

Among themselves, and levie cruel wars,

Wasting the Earth, each other to destroy:

As if (which might induce us to accord)

Man had not hellish foes anow besides,

That day and night for his destruction wait.

• I’ll be at Readercon in Quincy, MA next weekend—signing books at 3pm on Friday, and talking on panels throughout the weekend. You can find my full schedule here. See you there, if you can make it!

• My friend Adam Becker has a book coming out next year called More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity, about, well, what it says on the tin. It looks really good and confrontational, and I’m excited to read it. If it strikes your fancy, preorders, as always, are love.

• Last week saw the initial digital release of Triangle Agency, which I backed on Kickstarter. I haven’t had this much fun reading a tabletop RPG book in a long while and I read a lot of ttrpg books. I have taken screenshots to send to friends! Triangle Agency is a sort of Control-meets-Paranoia (the ttrpg) take of the “working for a Mysterious Organization fighting the supernatural” material—it belongs on a shelf next to Apocalypse Keys probably but they’re asking different questions very differently, and bringing a lot of fresh ideas to the genre. And, really, the book itself is so much fun that it’s worth a read even if you don’t plan on playing it (though if so, be careful about the Binding Contract Sentence at the beginning of the GM section). You can buy the digital edition here and download a free demo.

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