How to Stay Motivated, Learn New Things, and Complete Projects

My answer to the question: "How can I stay motivated ... and practice every day."

“Progress Debunked” is Six Weeks from Publication, and Other Updates

If you don’t know the story behind Progress Debunked, you can read this post. I’ve spent the last few weeks finalizing the interior of the book for both print and ebook versions. I am nearly done. In about two weeks I’ll be sending out review copies. If you’d like a free copy so you can be one of the first to review on Amazon, let me know. (You can use the contact form on the lower right if you don’t have my email address.)

Publishing has been taking up most of my spare time, but I have made some conceptual progress on a few of my other projects, primarily on The First King of Montana and my fantasy computer game, tentatively retitled Sagas of Orthadel.

Last week I took my family on a road trip through Montana. We all had a great time. It was the kids’ first real road trip out of state, and my wife’s first time that far north. And it gave me, as a novelist, the chance to get a feel for the place, the people, the landscape, and its ecology. The experience has given me some fantastic notes and images to work with. For example, I knew Montana was big, but just looking at maps and photos and satellite images doesn’t really give you a good feeling for how big. And we traversed it in our van. Riding across it on horseback would be an entirely different story. It also gave me a better feeling for the towns, cities, and ranches. Even the largest cities there feel pretty isolated. Their post-apocalyptic versions would be even more so. Let alone the ranches way out in those central-Montana valleys, where a single saloon will draw in regulars from 50 miles around. We saw cattle grazing in wetlands by little creeks you could jump across, surrounded by hills and mountains of parched desert and fragile, desertified pine forest as far as you could see.

And there’s a lot of local pride in Montana. People up there love where they are, and in parts they’ve done an incredible job of preserving the primal forests. Much of the state is natural or man-made (overgrazed) desert, but there’s also true wilderness there. Up north they connect with the endless untamed Canadian wilds. Wolves and grizzlies, and tall, thick forests to the horizon, black within. To meditate on them is to fill your spirit with a beautiful and holy kind of terror.

I realized for the first time on that roadtrip that to write a novel about Montana, let alone the first king of Montana, is to promise something awfully huge. I’m not sure how else to put it. It’s a big task. The place has a big spirit. I will have to put everything I have into my novel if I am going to even come close to doing it justice.

Sagas of Orthadel, the Tolkienesque fantasy computer game I’m working on, is also shaping up to be a big task, if doable. It will be a real-time strategy with some role-playing elements, based on my board game Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player guides a handful of characters possessing both hereditary powers and learned skills. Players can either cooperate against outside foes or vie for political dominance. Characters can marry, have children, teach each other skills, die, create artifacts, and exploit or heal the natural (simulated) ecosystems around them. Most of the basic rules have been playtested in board-game form, but it will likely take several years to finish the computer version.

The basic reason for this is fundamentally the same as with my novel: the subject matter is huge. In this case, though, it’s not a real place. Rather, I’m trying to capture an ideal, an ideal that goes beyond what any philosophical essay or novel, or even series of novels, could really capture.

Modern novels have lost the ability to investigate consequences. Of course, novels have never been interactive. But before the modern era this was not important. Life was interactive enough. Novels were used to express lived experience, and thus carried experiential knowledge. But you can’t trust novels to do this anymore—novel-writing has become a craft that is more dependent on style than on content to satisfy a reader. It’s all illusion, it’s all surface now.

Today, books don’t teach you anything. They have no message.

Modern authors are even proud to have no message.

And the most “literary” novels today are the worst. Magical realism? Post modernism? You can’t trust them not to frivolously negate their own reason for being, if that makes any sense to anyone without a graduate degree in the humanities.

The modern novel (and movie, too) has given us—has indoctrinated us with—a false version of reality. It is false because it can be false. It is anchored to nothing but popular opinion. And popular opinion has run away with itself.

What I am saying is probably still far from clear. So let’s take a specific example. Female heroes in modern storytelling. What’s the first image that pops into your mind? Is it:

(a) a warrior

    or

(b) a mother

Yeah, okay, you say, it was (a), but so what? Can’t women be warriors too?

Sure they can. But is it healthy for a culture to focus on teaching women to be warriors when in reality they will more often be mothers? How many popular movies or novels can you think of where the hero was a mother and her heroism consisted of doing really well as a mother?

And if you think I’m just making a point about “gender issues” here, let’s talk about men. How often are male heroes heroic as warriors rather than fathers? Even here we see an unhealthy tendency toward pure fantasy in our modern entertainment. Fathers are much more common that warriors. In fact they should be just as common as mothers.

Which, again, isn’t to say that there are no differences between men and women and their respective duties in a culture. The very idea that there are or should be no differences between men and women is another example of the veil modern storytelling has pulled over our eyes. Our fictions have come to sacrifice reality for the sake of popular political messages. But to champion a popular political message is to champion no message at all, but merely to flatter the prejudices of one’s own age. It’s to say, “Yeah, those [republicans/democrats] are crazy and you really need to vote [conservative/liberal] because they’ll fix things.” But this sort of binary message is utterly worthless. It’s pure propaganda. A vote is just a millionth of a decision. What about how people live their lives? The only respectable task for a novel, the only worthy task, is to teach people how to live better.

The same goes for a computer game. The example about fathers and mothers and warriors above is in fact right on point when it comes to the game I’m writing. Characters can be father, mothers, warriors, rulers, teachers, craftsmen, and farmers. Balancing these roles is a major part of the game. And the right balance isn’t some arbitrary percentage decided by how liberal or conservative I, the author, am. It’s determined by the ecology of the rules of the game. You can see what happens if you make all your females into warriors and none of your males care about teaching the next generation. Sound complicated? It’s not. At least not as a game. It will take a lot of work to code, as any game does, but the gameplay itself won’t be much more complicated than in most popular computer games. I am designing it not simply to be beautiful and fun but also—if all goes well—to mirror something important about reality. It will go against the modern tendency: it will be designed to teach future generations. 

Why Evil Exists: The Insights of Boethius

I've just posted my essay on the Problem of Evil on Twenty-Five Centuries.

Updates: Indie Publishing, Games, and a Screenplay

This month my plan was to post an essay on the Problem of Evil. But that essay is growing longer and more involved than I expected, and it looks like it won't be done until next month. So stay tuned.

Instead, here's a brief update on what I've been working on.

I've been spending most of my free time preparing Progress Debunked for publication: proof reading, formatting the Table of Contents and section headings, choosing fonts, and the like. It's starting to look more and more like a book. This is my first time publishing, so I'm still not sure quite how long it will take. I need to get permissions to publish quotes, find a graphic designer, get an ISBN, and several other odd things. It could be a month, or it could be autumn of this year. I'm committed to having digital, paperback, and hardback versions all available by the end of 2017.

The more I read about independent publishing, the more convinced I am that it is the way to go. It's faster, it gives you more control over the process, it earns you better royalties, and it is now more common for new authors to make a living by self-publishing than by "traditional" publishing. What's interesting, if you look at the history of publishing, is that self-publishing was actually the most common sort of publishing before about 50 years ago. It is the real tradition in publishing. It's only been in the recent era of mega-corporations and mass marketing that people have been convinced (mostly through advertisement) that you've got to publish through one of the handful of companies in New York that dominate the business. But a revolution is sweeping through; that era is ending.

I'm not so sure anymore that it will be impossible to make a living by writing. Tens of thousands of indie writers you've never heard of are supporting their families on book sales.  So we'll see. My first goal in writing is still to express relevant, important ideas as clearly as I can. Money is a secondary concern--and only pertinent because it might make it possible to write full time.

***

I've also made progress on a number of side projects. I'm re-writing the end of Part I of The First King of Montana. What's coming out this time around is more human, more emotional, has more grit, and feels more real.

Over the past several months I've merged several of my boardgames into an semi-cooperative, Tolkienesque, epic fantasy game: Bloodline of the Eldar. Each player is a different fantasy race, and you play over several generations. Characters can create magical artifacts and realms, marry, pass on magical abilities to their children, and teach one another ancient skills and crafts. The victory conditions are different for each player -- some players may have selfish motives -- and the game typically climaxes with a epic war between good and evil. It's fun, but it generally takes 5-6 hours. I've started coding a computer version of the game, which should speed it up.

My kids keep asking to play my fairy tale game, where you can choose to play a hero, princess, or monster. (Usually I play a dragon or giant, and they play the good guys.) As a hero or princess, you go around the map rescuing people. As a monster, you steal their treasure. Eventually, if the good guys make enough friends and find enough useful items, they can work together to defeat the monster, either by making it into a good monster or chasing it away. The game is set up so that it is almost impossible for the good guys to lose, though you can get into some sticky situations--for example, as last time when BOTH kids' characters were transformed into frogs. You might also get locked in a tower, wounded, or put to sleep by magic. For all the possibilities, the game goes quickly. It only takes about 15 minutes, but usually the kids will want to play again and again. Definitely worth it to try and publish, I think.

A couple months back I read Walter Scott's Ivanhoe for the first time and loved it. It's a story about feuding between Saxon and Norman knights in the era of Prince John and Richard the Lionhearted. My wife and I watched the 1952 movie version and after listening to me rant about how the film had dropped all the most compelling aspects of the novel and everything I would put in a screenplay if I wrote it, she said, "Well why aren't you writing it?" So I wrote my own screenplay. It turns out that two of the main plotlines are romantic (one tragic and one happy), and as a fan of Jane Austen and Emily Bronte, my wife has helped me enhance these. To do this I've had to deepen one of my antagonists -- Bois-Guilbert, a Norman and Templar knight -- and make him more sympathetic. The screenplay that has emerged (to flatter myself) is more tragic, more Shakespearean even, than what Scott originally wrote. We'll see. I've got to sit on this one for a while.

Against Heideggerian Philosophy

On my new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries, I discuss how Heidegger has led modern philosophy into a sophistical morass of timid "everydayness":

Heidegger's Philosophy as "Idle Talk": A Challenge

Twenty-Five Centuries

I've started a new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries. Here's the "About" blurb:

Since the birth of Greek philosophy twenty-five centuries ago, along with Cyrus the Great’s introduction of religious toleration in Persia and his rebuilding of Jerusalem, the Western world has been engaged in a vast dialogue, across both space and time. Some call this the Great Conversation, and when it touches on eternal themes, it is called Philosophy.

For anyone who has read and been personally touched by the classics, modern ignorance of this conversation is heart-breaking to behold.

I write this blog in the hope that I can contribute, in some small way, to the revival and continuance of this twenty-five-century-old conversation. 

Do not expect a dry survey of the history of philosophy here. I mean to do philosophy. I mean to carry on the conversation. I mean to challenge the way we think, the way we live. 

Modern Western civilization, far from being the peak of enlightenment it pretends to be, has declined into ideological barbarity. Scientism. Progressivism. Materialism. But also: Populism. Anti-intellectualism. Reactionism. 

We know this well. Satirists, cultural critics, and angry pedants abound, all attacking our failing culture. But unless we can do something positive to contribute to its health, even the truest, most relevant criticism is futile. 

The Great Conversation is Western culture. To forget it is to destroy our identity. So our first and most important task is: to remember. 

Each essay will attempt to reconstruct a portion of this Conversation stretching back to Socrates, and to bit-by-bit help us to remember who we are, and why.

My first post is about the civilizing effect of Homer on Greece: How HOMER'S EPICS Will Teach You Valor.

Littleton - A Parable

There was once a town called Littleton where no one lived much more than two or two-and-a-half months. The people of Littleton grew to adulthood in 21 days, and they even managed to learn to talk by this point, though theirs was a simple language. Most of them raised their families during weeks 4-6 of their lives, and declined into old age in the third month, seldom living past 80 days.

You might think that the people of Littleton were more reconciled to their own mortality the we longer-lived folk. That perhaps, with death so near, they would be forced to come to terms with it in a more profound way than the rest of us. And actually, for the first few decades of Littleton's existence, this was true. Though the people of Littleton had less time for study, this only made them study deeper, and they were apt to understand the deepest, simplest facts of life: death, love, taxes, and family. With these concepts firmly and concisely in grasp, theirs was a happy existence for a time, despite its unusual shortness.

They soon came to realize, however, that certain things were lacking from their lives. Because they had so little time, lawyers and doctors, for example, were very rare in Littleton. Though they were swift learners, two or three months is simply not enough time to learn all the facts necessary for a law degree or an MD. The most prestigious careers available were things like construction or auto mechanics. Littleton had access to a few instruction manuals in such things, and your most well-respected jobs involved meticulous following of directions written down by someone from another town or era.

Over the decades a new career began to emerge, their most prestigious yet: architect. What happened was this. Since all their most clever students went into construction, these exceptional intellects were able to find flaws in the classic manuals being used. So they began to add annotations. In some generations these manuals grew bloated with commentary, and in others they were cut back, summarized, and made more concise than ever. As a result Littleton began to develop a discipline of architecture that was superior even to that of the outside, longer-lived world.

Littleton had never had the skill or patience to build itself a town hall and truly put itself on the map where small cities go. But now it did. The skill had been built up--not in any one person's head--but in the collection of manuals being passed down and improved from generation to generation. Patience had been cultivated by this same process, by seeing how many generations had to pass away for the manuals to grow. And now it seemed that the year or two it would take to build a town hall wasn't as long a time as it might seem, though it would be something like twenty generations.

But of course, even just drawing up the plans for the town hall was a challenging process. No one architect, no matter how brilliant, had the time to learn both all the principles of architecture AND understand every detail of the new building. But by their deep and simple wisdom they knew that they needed SOME kind of overview of the building, if it was going to hang together and be a unified work of architecture.

The most visionary of their architects, then, were designated as "Eagles" -- those with wide, if incomplete, vision of the whole. They were not expected to understand how specific bricks were to be fitted together, nor even all the mathematical principles behind the Littleton theory of architecture. Rather, they were expected to know very basic, broad, ideas, such as (1) What is a Town Hall for? Why are we building it? (2) What sort of aesthetic qualities does it need? Should it appear massive and intimidating, or warm and welcoming? (3) Where should it be placed in the town? What buildings should it be next to? (4) What is the relationship among all the other specialties needed to build this building? For example there should be specialists in roofing, finish work, foundations, etc. What should be built first? How should this all be organized?

Such questions are more than enough for one Littleton lifetime, and bit by bit an Eagle Manual began to grow and establish itself as the basic guide to running the project. Other manuals grew as well, one for each specialty, as mentioned above.

After just a year the project began to take shape. It started to look like it was going to work. The Eagles, in particular, felt it was all very feasible, and might even be done within another year. Great trust was placed in their abilities, and rightly so--for a time.

In the meantime, Littleton had become famous for its small-scale architecture. The project of building a town hall had led to a flourishing of sorts. Extremely beautiful and quaint cottages had sprung up all over town, and people came from miles around to see these uniquely distinctive homes, built according to a theory that had developed entirely independently of the outside world. For outsiders, it was like seeing something from another continent.

Littleton became rich. And now its troubles began.

More specifically, it was the Eagle named Tommy McShort that began to derail the project. It wasn't that he didn't care enough about the town hall. It was that in his pride in his Eagleship -- the discipline that put Littleton on the map -- he believed he could discover the principles need to build the town hall bigger, more beautiful, and faster than they had previously imagined.

On the face it, his theory was perhaps only a little more daring than most. Usually, this wouldn't be a problem. Later generations would catch the mistakes and cross them out. But when an Eagle makes a mistake, it can create special problems. Previously, Eagles had understood the sacredness of their task, and knew that it was very easy to lose past insights if you didn't read the manuals carefully enough.

But this was the very chapter McShort had neglected to read over! The Eagle Manual had grown very long indeed, and McShort had been, as I've said, just a little less careful than most, and he'd missed the first chapters, thinking he would skip to the "good part". And now there was a problem. Because McShort was telling his apprentices to skip the first part of the book too, for he had done fine without it. (So he thought!) And thus each generation after McShort grew a little more flippant and ignorant of what had come before. They were losing their respect for the past. Meanwhile, they were growing rich on their fame as the Master Architects of Littleton, and so didn't spend much time worrying about it.

Within a few generations things were very bad, but only the Eagles even suspected that something was wrong. Each generation argumentation broke out among the apprentices about what was the best approach to learning Eagleship, and many questioned if reading the Manual was even that useful at all. After all it was very long and took several weeks to read over, and perhaps that time could be better spent on more practical questions. Master Eagles had a harder and harder time answering these questions because they hadn't bothered to read much of the first few chapters of the Manual, which was the part that explained the answers in most detail. More and more confused fluff was added to the end of the Manual -- and this was what most new apprentices now seemed to prefer to read.

Meanwhile, specialist architects, without the firm guidance of the Eagles, were also beginning to veer off track. Littleton Stonemasons, in particular, had begun to develop a pride to rival that of their masters.  While the Eagles quibbled over seemingly unanswerable questions like "What is a Town Hall for?" and "How big is too big for a Town Hall?" at least the Stonemasons had been discovering practical principles useful in constructing ever-more-quaint cottages and stone lodges for the tourists to gawk at. Stonemasons began to add comments to the front of their own manual saying, "Most important!" or "This is what it really means to 'hang together!'"

Though they had largely forgotten why, the Eagles were still skimming through other manuals, trying to get an idea of their contents. It was while doing this that Johnny Quickson decided that these pithy self-promotions of the Stonemasons were really much more profound than they seemed. He put forward a new fundamental principle of Eagleship: "The Mortar Principle." It said, basically, that as long as each tiny part of the Town Hall was mortared to its neighboring parts, everything would hang together even if no one could quite grasp the whole. Things like "aesthetic beauty" and "purpose" and so on were useless concepts that the craftsman who physically built the townhall wouldn't need anyway.

Now, these ideas might sound exceptionally stupid, especially coming from the inhabitant of a town whose fame was derived from the aesthetic beauty of its dwellings. You might think that the cottage-builders would come to the rescue and put these Eagle in their place. But it must be remembered that all the inhabitants of Littleton (except the Eagles, that is) still believed in paying respect to the old manuals. And all the old manuals said that the Eagles were the smartest and in charge.

So rather than putting the Eagles in their place, the cottage-builders themselves began to take on this new aesthetic-free, purpose-free style of architecture. And thus began the "Post-Quaint" era of Littleton, when the merit of a new cottage was measured merely in how many aesthetic rules it broke and old traditions it disrespected. Freedom to innovate began to trump all else. Unfortunately for Littleton, more tourists were pouring in than ever, providing them with even more money to be spent on still more extravagantly weird little dwellings.

And in this way, the Eagles' own disregard of the Manuals began to infect the rest of Littleton. Rare indeed was the individual who attempted to get any kind of overview of what a single Manual, let alone all the Manuals, had to say. Without the leadership of the Eagles, this had become all but impossible. The Town Hall project fell to ruin. And now, only a rare few in Littleton have the courage (or the time) to figure out what went wrong and how their Golden Age had come to end. But as long as a few inhabitants still read the old manuals for pleasure, especially the earliest chapters, perhaps some few of them will eventually come along with the know-how to start putting the pieces back together.