I've Moved!

I will be leaving this blog up for now, since it's free, but I have decided to try to consolidate my online writery and geekery on my new site, [doughagler.wordpress.com]. I migrated all of my posts from this blog, as well as a couple others that have been floating around out there, so everything here can be found there, plus everything I write going forward.

As I think about it, I will actually probably close this blog down at some point, but for now it's staying up. As I said, though, there's really no reason not to go over to the new site and read things there.

Hard Reset

Current goings-on in my corner of the world, combined with a question posed by Margaret Weis this morning in Facebook, have combined to get me thinking about the idea of the hard reset.  Holding down the power button and counting slowly to ten and then powering back on.  The technological nuclear option.

I think about the need, sometimes, to hard-reset a creative project.  Margaret Weis's question this morning was about writer's block - when does it happen, what do you do about it, etc.  I realized that writer's block happens for me sometimes (often?) because I am avoiding the fact that what I'm doing is going nowhere and a big chunk of work has to be tossed.  On a few projects, this has meant completely re-writing the whole thing, starting over essentially from scratch (Epic is definitely one of those, and continues to be).  Other times, a project dies on the vine because I am not willing, or ready, to prune as drastically as is required.

Ironically, I have just recently had to hard reset this very blog.  It was hacked, and had was registering with Google as spyware.  My RSS was spamming and soon.  So I migrated, brought my posts over with me, and restarted.  I have no idea if this will work out - we'll see.

I'm part of a number of institutions, one of which is the Presbyterian Church (USA).  I honestly believe that this institution, if it is to return to functionality and meaning, is going to have to hard reset.  One good example - of the students who graduate from seminary (which is graduate school for ministers), only 20% of them have any hope of getting a job in the thing for which they just spent tens of thousands of dollars and 4+ years training.  There are only jobs accepting first-time pastors for 20% of the people looking for those jobs each year.

Life is kind of a roller-coaster sometimes.  Imagine if a roller-coaster cost $40,000, not counting cost of living (you still had to pay rent and get groceries while in line), and the line lasted 4 years, and then once you got on, there was a 80% chance the ride would break down.

We would rightly shut down that roller-coaster, fire everyone involved in building it, and apologize to everyone who has ever ridden on that disaster.

For those following along at home, the roller-coaster is the PC(USA) ordination system, and among other things in the denomination, it is time for a hard reboot.

What Would It Look Like...?

What would it look like if I got my shit together?

I have what seems like a relatively common problem - I care about too much.  I want to do too much. As a result of the overload in my life, I'm either working all the time on various projects, or wasting time and trying not to think about all the things I'm not doing.  The switch is on or off.

Periodically, I even finish things.  Over a year ago, I finished the final draft of Parsec, and we're now working on getting it up on Kickstarter.  I finished what I think is an excellent resource on the issue of the ordination of sexual minorities.  Every week I finish a sermon and other stuff for worship, as well as the many other things that I do for work.  I finished editing the first five chapters of a friend's novel as well as editing the system chapter of a friend's roleplaying game.  I'm collaborating with two colleagues on a new website, including weekly video posts and building up a Twitter and Facebook audience.

Typing things like that makes me feel a little better about the whole situation, but I don't even want to start listing the unfinished projects - even if I limited myself to only listing ones that I'd spent, say, a hundred hours or more working on.  There are - Way.  Too.  Many.

If I was inclined to triage well and to discipline myself, this wouldn't be a lingering problem.  I have yet to figure it out.

I imagine that the answer is to say no, to say goodbye, to projects that I really care about, but which I don't have the insight or time to bring to fruition.

I really don't want that answer.  Which means it is probably the right one.

Make Sure You Vote

Specifically, among other things, make sure you vote for How We Came to Live Here (Best writing) and Day After Ragnarok (Best setting).

Ironically, I think that both products could easily be up for both awards - HWCTLH for best setting and DAR for best writing - but that's just my humble opinion.

Word of Anesthesiacraft

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts now that I am mostly unemployed, one of which is NPR's Science Friday podcast. In catching up on back episodes, I came upon a topic from September 18th - the relationship, during the Romantic period, between science (natural philosophy at the time) and the arts. One vignette is about Samuel Taylor Coleridge helping his friend Humphrey Davy experiment with the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas). Davy finds that nitrous has an anesthetic effect, and writes a paper saying that this could be used in surgery. At the time, however, it was thought that the agony of surgeries like amputations was medically necessary, however, because it was believed that this mobilized the body to heal.

Now we know better, for physical ailments anyway, but this podcast has had me thinking all day. In my own experience, emotional pain can be very necessary to enact change or healing in a person's life, much the way that physical pain was thought to be necessary to surgical patients in the 1800s. In thinking along these lines, it suddenly struck me that WoW is serving me as an anesthetic for my feelings of boredom at this point in my life.

I compared it to nitrous oxide. I enjoy playing WoW, just like I'm sure I'd enjoy taking some recreational nitrous oxide. I know WoW isn't as extreme as abusing a medical anesthetic, but the connection was made in my mind. What I realized is that it may be necessary, in order for me to be more creative and more productive in my creative endeavors, to take a break from WoW so that I will have to feel my boredom. Hopefully it will motivate me to do something about it.

We'll see how it goes. I want to see if I am in fact more productive, or if I am instead just more bored without WoW for a while.

Anybody out there had an experience of taking a break from some consuming hobby? What was it like for you?

Dual Posting: A New Idea

Pam and I did a lot of driving today, going to church and saying goodbye to friends and hanging out with others who needed some support. Basically a half tank of gas all told, from home to Berkeley to San Jose to Oakland to SF back to home. Long day.

Sometime during that driving, between the bathroom breaks and caffeine binging and arguing about directions, Pam came up with a terrible, wonderful idea that I expanded upon.

I and a friend from seminary open a gaming store in Portland, something we both have wanted to do for a long time. Then, we also start a church, and we rent space in the storefront to the church.

I've always wanted a storefront church in an urban area - its one of the things I've pictured for a long time when I've thought about where I will end up in ministry. I've also wanted to run a game store since I was about, I dunno, 13 or so.

I've heard it called "tentmaking", and when I talk about this plan, people tell me that I really light up. And I feel lit up. There are a lot of downsides, but I've talked to the friend in question and he really likes the idea so far. I want to pursue it, at least to see how far it goes.

Part of me thinks the following: statistically, no matter what we do, 80% of the seminary graduates in the PC(USA) this year will not find first calls because there are five times as many seminarians graduating as there are first calls. So what the Hell else are we supposed to do? We need to get creative, because the denomination is cranking out seminary graduates at five times the rate it can absorb them. This hardly seems like responsible stewardship, but those sour grapes are old at this point. They're basically w(h)ine. So I need to figure something out, since in the numbers game of first calls, I'm screwed.

I wonder if there is any support for an idea like this in the denomination? I know money goes to new church developments, but I also know they say I need 5 years of ministry experience before I can be an NCD pastor. Well, where am I supposed to get those 5 years?

Running a game store and storefront church in Portland, that's where.

Dual Posting: A New Discipline; A New Escape

I recently posted a new discipline I'm taking on - I'm going to try to write one poem per day in the next couple of months or so, totaling 60 poems in all. Then I'll reflect on the experience and decide if it is something I want to do long-term.

Fair warning, I cannot guarantee any kind of quality if I'm writing one a day. Frankly, most of them are likely to suck. But if you want to follow along, I'm posting them all here, and might dual post some of them on this blog as well. I don't post about it often, but creative writing, prose and poetry, are both big escapes for me, and always have been, so it might be a nice little change from so much game design talk.

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled game design talk.