NaNoWriMo 2023 Retrospective

First Published: 2023 November 29

Draft 1

Wow! I did it! One day early and sixty two words over, I have officially completed NaNoWriMo number 25.¹ Having now finished the story, I feel like now might be a great time to do a post mortem on the process.

I think that breaking it into pros, cons, and things I noted is probably a great way to do it. I’m not sure if I want to do it in a list wise fashion or as they pop up, but it’s probably a good idea to do lists, if only because I don’t have to write each word successively² and the three categories seem useful to me. The good, bad, and ugly, is another way to frame this.

First, the good:

• I got to spend a lot of time writing with a friend. We tried to meet up daily, but that was a very soft goal. Still, I think that we ended up meeting up at least half of the days this past month, including twice online.³ I really enjoy parallel play⁴, especially with this friend, and I hope that we continue to do something similar in the future, for all that I know that it will be different now that NaNo is over. I also know that I had a much easier time simply letting bad words flow onto a page than my friend did, and I worry that it might have been discouraging to write next to me.

• I proved that I can, in fact, write a full⁵ story in the course of a month. Even while juggling writing this blog every day, keeping up⁶ on Jeb, and doing my other writing in a day, I was able to keep the narrative in mind. This is my second NaNoWriMo, but last year I think that I ended up finishing the story I wanted to tell in less than fifty thousand words, so I had to extend it past where was natural. I nearly had the same issue this year, because I had two days left in the month but only 500 words left to write to hit fifty thousand. Deciding what I meant by doing NaNo was a difficult choice, but I’m glad I chose to have it mean that I wrote 50k, rather than wrote explicitly the book every day in November.

• I got to explore writing a more explicitly faith based narrative. For all that I know I could have done a much better job of it,⁷ I enjoyed writing something that took place in the real world, where the Church exists, and where I could frame the Church as a good, if often human, institution. I don’t know if urban fantasy will forever be the genre for me, but especially since I have historically read a lot of it, there’s no reason for me to think that I won’t continue to do it at least a little.

• I got lots of practice with first person. Almost everything else I write is in a third person so limited as to be almost first person, but the explicit difference is nice. I think that I could have been more intentional about the form, but I think that what intention I did use was nice.

• I got to practice plotting and then following the⁸ plot. I found that setting a loose story goal early on and then filling it in each day before writing worked really well. I might do something similar with Jeb, since I currently have the one sentence part.

The less good:

• I think that the book idea I had was better served as something that I wrote slowly and thoughtfully, rather than in the fairly rushed way that NaNo requires and expects. I don’t really have anything to add to this.

• I don’t know if it’s that, or if it’s something else, but I didn’t really love the book. It might have been better as a short story. For all that it was a cool premise, the one sentence synopsis of the book⁹ was really about as good as I ever got. I don’t really know if anything I did in the book deserves a longer one.

• I don’t think that I did a good job writing in first person. I think that I struggle to put thoughts to page in a cogent fashion, and that absolutely came up here. I couldn’t keep the character’s thoughts separate from what mine would be in the situation, not that I really tried.

• I think that I used a lot of cliches and did far more telling than showing, to the detriment of the story.

• I don’t think that I did a good job reflecting my faith in a positive way. The Catholicism was for more surface level to the story than I would have wanted.¹⁰

The things I noticed:

• Every day it was far harder to start writing than to actually write. I ended up adopting the motto of “the only way out is through and the only way through is forward,” which I typed at the end of each day’s plotting session.

• People get surprised when you tell them that you’re doing NaNoWriMo, far more than when you tell them you have a blog or put out a web serial. Not sure what’s up with that.

• I have trouble writing specific sensory cues. This ties into the next item, so I’ll talk about it more there.

• I became much more aware of the way that books I read this past month were written. The biggest difference between my writing and more or less everything I read was the sensory cues.

  There’s a concept of how well someone can visualize something in their mind. It’s a spectrum, as so many abilities are. At one end of the spectrum are people who can close their eyes and see the world in, if anything, fuller color than with their eyes open. At the other end, there are people who see nothing when they close their eyes.

  I’ve always considered myself more on the former end of that spectrum. However, as this month has progressed, I’ve begun to realize that there’s a difference between what I can do and what I do do.¹¹ Visualizing takes mental effort for me. When I don’t put forth the effort, things do exist in a void.

  Obviously, this shines through in my writing. Without meaning to, I simply elide through physical descriptors, simply because they are not relevant to the scene at hand. It’s something that a lot of commenters have noticed in my web serial, which is likely one reason that I have noticed it myself. I know it’s something that I should work on, especially if I want to really improve my craft.

  I don’t know quite how to fix it, so that’s probably going to be one of the priorities in the coming months

• I realized that I have finally shifted from being limited by the speed I can compose content in my brain to the speed that I can type. It’s kind of fun that the rate limiting step for me is now my ability to actually type.

  Related enough that it doesn’t get its own entry, I’ve realized that I don’t actually know how to touch type properly. I’ve decided to start actually learning for real, which will hopefully go well.

• Having one writing project makes doing other writing projects easier. There are flavors of productive procrastination to this, but I do really think that a large part of it is that once I’ve written one thing in a day, the next thing I need to write is easier because I don’t have to convince myself that I like writing before beginning the next one.¹²

• A consequence of becoming more comfortable writing is that I am becoming less and less satisfied with the way that I write, even as I start getting more external praise for the writing. I don’t know if this is a “we’re near the move from conscious incompetence to conscious competence,” thing or just a “I’m now good enough that I see how much room I have to grow”, or what, but it’s kind of fun. I think that the main gripe I have with my writing right now is that it’s rambly. As I mentioned recently, I’m going to start working on craft in the upcoming months, and I hope that one consequence of that will be words that taste better not just one by one, but when taken as a whole.

Now that I’ve done a quick and dirty reflection of how I feel about my NaNo this year, I’ll go through some of the questions that I can imagine being asked about doing it¹³:

• What is NaNoWriMo? National Novel Writer’s Month. It’s every November since 1999. The goal is to write a full¹⁴ novel in the span of the month.

• How did you come up with your story idea?¹⁵ I read a text post somewhere talking about dos and don’ts for including the Catholic Church in a work of fiction, especially urban fantasy, and was inspired.

• How did you feel about it?¹⁶ See above.

• Why did you choose to do this? Great question!¹⁷ I think that really I wanted to try to stretch myself this year.

• Do you plan to do anything with the novel?¹⁸ Probably not, at least for the foreseeable future. While I think that there’s something worth salvaging in the book, it’s deep beneath a lot of crud I’ll need to clean up, and I don’t know that I want to do that right now. I have the rest of my life, though¹⁹.

• How do you do it? I have gotten good at sitting down in front of a computer and just typing. I find that it helps to have a minute or so of free journaling at the start of each writing session, where you just open a new note file and start typing exactly what you’re thinking, then slowly try to redirect your thoughts to the book. At that point, take another minute to quickly plot out what you want to happen, and then start writing.

  As an example:

  Let’s see, it’s about half past 2000 right now and I don’t really have anything else on my plate today, thankfully. Once I finish this blog post I’m more or less done for the day, though I do need to figure out the title. If I was actually going to be writing right now, I might be doing some planning for a short story I want to write. A reason I don’t want to write is (I don’t have one right now)

  I find that writing like that really helps me kill the voice in my head that tries to stop me from typing, for all that the fiction I write is written far less informally.

If you have other questions, please feel free to ask, and I’ll respond privately. If I feel like it’s worth revising the blog over²⁰, I’ll update it with the new questions. Thanks for following me on this journey! Hopefully this blog will continue.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? I did not today, but I finished NaNo²¹ this item gets to be deleted for the next year or so!

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I did not finish it last night, but did finish it when I woke up early this morning and couldn’t fall back asleep.

• Did I blog? I feel like today’s was at least a little more coherent.

• Did I stretch? Nope!

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I made it through like 2 mysteries last night without getting distracted, but made it through the full rosary, even if quickly.

I

Moving to Markdown

First Published: 2023 November 28

Draft 1

Prereading note: Not only is this rambling, but it more or less is three blog posts stapled to each other, each of which was already rambling. I apologize in advance to my readers.

I do not remember exactly why,¹ but I was considering revisiting my post about footnotes today. I spent a fairly long time revisiting many of the same paths that I trod a few years ago when I first set up this blog.² In the end, I was unable to find any solutions to the issue of creating footnotes within footnotes.

Now, my readers may be interested in having nested footnotes themselves in LaTeX.³ If so, there are a few options.

• Be better at writing, and find a solution that does not require having nested footnotes. That seems to be the critical consensus among TeX users, which I find dissatisfying.

• Use the bigfoot package.

  • Pros: it lets you have arbitrarily deep footnote nests

  • Cons: Each nested footnote needs to be a layer deeper, which means that you can’t have like footnote 1 ref 2 ref 3 all on the same level. Given that the only legitimate⁴ use for nesting is editorializing on translations, that’s probably fine for its use case.

• use \footnotemark within the footnote, and then \footnotetext out of the footnote, which allows you to nest the footnotes. If you use the hyperref package, the footnotes even reference each other like they should.

• Write your own solution. I’m sure that those who know how to use actual computer science would be able to write their own package, should they so choose.

Now, of these options, I personally find the penultimate to be the best for my use case. I hopefully will not need to have nested footnotes in my actual thesis⁵, but if I do, using footnotetext and footnotemark works well enough, and fixes most of my issues pretty quickly. I don’t like having layers of footnotes.

That’s something that’s worth investigating. At a gut level, I feel like multiple layers claim that the point of a footnote is that it’s less important than the main text. I don’t generally agree with that line of thought. I’m bad at expressing thoughts right now,⁶ but I generally think of the point of most prose, even academic writing, is to convey a narrative. In an academic sense, then, footnotes are used to explain information which is essential to understand a claim but which is not directly essential to the narrative. For instance, if I was discussing how advances in rotational spectroscopy⁷ allow for better determination of molecular structure, the footnote there could have been nice for someone who might not know what rotational spectroscopy is.⁸ However, there might be information which is needed to understand the footnote. In the case of my footnote above, it could be useful to explain what quantized transitions are.⁹ Since the footnote level is already for context clues, context to context is still a context clue.¹⁰

Anyways, since I cannot have nested footnotes in the current way I’m writing, what can I do instead?

The obvious answer is to ask my father. I did, and learned¹¹ that he writes his posts in markdown.¹² Now, I was initially ready to immediately switch over to writing in markdown.

However, there is an issue. As you might have guessed from the last item in the ways to have nested footnotes, I do not have a great grasp of coding best practices, or practices at all. Readers may wonder how, exactly, I was able to go from TeX to HTML with an automated script, let alone set up an entire blog. To that, I answer, my dear sibling was willing to make the blog set up for me. Since the way I was writing 5 years ago¹³ is primarily in TeX, that made the most sense. To switch to markdown,¹⁴ I would need to change up some code in the make file. I don’t know how to do that, so I will need to beg and barter time from a family member who knows how to code, with hope that they will teach me.¹⁵

So, one thousand words into what was supposed to be a quick diversion, I suppose that I should start the actual text of this musing. Maybe I’ll just talk about markdown, which I’d like to learn, I think. It seems to have the benefits of TeX¹⁶ along with being more scalable¹⁷.

Both are markup languages, which is apparently where the term markdown comes from.¹⁸ Markup languages are just ways of turning plaintext into pretty text. Plain text is¹⁹ anything that you can actually type on your computer. You will notice that there is no bold key on your computer keyboard.²⁰ In most word processors that my friends interact with,²¹ you have to click a button that bolds the text. In a markup language, you would instead do something like (bold) this text (not bold).²²

Anyways, that is not where the similarities stop. The main differences between the languages come from the use cases they were created for. LaTeX was built to make TeX more useful. TeX was built because Donald Knuth²³ saw a reprint of one of his books and was fundamentally dissatisfied with how the equations were set on the page. Rather than any of the other solutions one could come up with, he wrote a processor which engraves pretty pages.²⁴ Given that he was a computer scientist²⁵ he made it Turing Complete.

What, exactly Turing Completeness is, is not relevant here. The short answer is that if something is Turing Complete, you can make any program in it that you can make in another Turing Complete language. In theory, this does mean that you can program Doom in LaTeX.²⁶

Markdown, by contrast, was written to make writing HTML faster. I vaguely remember hearing that HTML is not Turing Complete, which implies to me that Markdown would not be either. However, as I have repeated constantly, I am not a coder. This is not a relevant issue to me.

Since LaTeX was made for academic publishing usage, it is an incredibly powerful language. By default, it auto-numbers footnotes, has support to automatically make citations in more or less any citation style you like, and so on. When writing an academic paper, which often has a ridiculous number of revisions, number and locations of footnotes do not remain constant. As such, Markdown, which requires directly specifying what footnote a reference refers to, does not satisfice²⁷ for academic purposes.

Still, for a majority of the writing I do, I do not actually need to cite, or to have autorenumbering footnotes. I also don’t really use equations²⁸ For the academic writing I do, LaTeX is still superior, so that’s going to be what I stick with. For this blog, and most of the fun writing I do, however²⁹ Markdown might be the thing for me to switch to.

Eighteen hundred words in, let’s learn Markdown. It’s a very simple language, which will be nice.

To make italicized text, markdown uses either asterisks or underscores on either side of the text.

To make a link, I put the text I want to display in square brackets, followed by the link in parentheses.

To make an ordered list, I have a series of lines where the first begins with 1.³⁰ Indention makes nested lists.

To make unordered lists, it’s the same as an ordered list, though with dashes, asterisks, or plusses. Best practice is apparently to keep them the same, though that’s not always required.

You can apparently denote code by using quote marks. I’m not totally sure how to make quotes, but that’s hardish in latex.³¹

Ooh! I can strikethrough text semi easily in markdown, simply by using two tildes on either side. That’s pretty nifty.

Footnotes!³² To create a footnote, open bracket, caret, the number of the footnote, close bracket. To create the text for the footnote, the same, but then a colon and the text.

Highlight is double equals sign on either side.

Subscript is single tilde on either side.

Welp, as soon as I have the requisite makefile, and maybe before, I’ll switch over to our good friend markdown!

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? Almost at 50K!

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I will finish after this.

• Did I blog? I mean at some point I should stop letting myself just put random words on a page and call it a musing.

• Did I stretch? I’m sore at this point, which isn’t great, but I think that I’m less sore than I would have been if I didn’t stretch, so I should do it again today.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I made it through the whole rosary yesterday. It was a little rushed.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? I think I’m good getting rid of this goal starting tomorrow, since I don’t really care about it for the next, um, day.

On Songwriting

First Published: 2023 November 27

Draft 1

Five years ago today I mused about writing a song.¹ Today, I updated my list of goals for the year, and saw again that I wanted to record an album. While I’ve written probably an album’s worth of music, a lot of it is either choral or instrumental in nature.

Some of the choral and instrumental songs² would work on an album, especially since a few of my pieces³ have been recorded. However, as a person who loves the rock opera⁴ format, I kind of want there to be a narrative string tying my album together.

Is that demanding far too much of someone who is a Ph. D. candidate⁵ and has a rich and varied life outside of composing?⁶ Quite possibly. Then again, I find that I, like most people, do best when I feel pushed into my yellow zone.⁷ I also do want to write an album, for reasons that I don’t know if I’ve explored fully.

I think part of it is that I feel like my musical education is a little too academic. For all that I know a lot about music, and can produce competent music quickly, it kind of feels like a standard I use to judge an artist is whether they’ve created an album. Is that a fair judgement? Probably not.

Is that a prejudice I should investigate inside of myself to see if it really actually resonates with the deeper parts of me? Probably!

Will I? *shrug*

Accepting that elitism/populism⁸ is not a good enough reason to record an album, why else do I want to?

I’ve had friends ask to listen to my music on Spotify. I have so many moral objections to Spotify as a company, but I don’t know if they neatly overlap with my putting music on the platform. Certainly if my goal is letting my friends listen to the music I’ve written, it’s by far the past of least resistance. I know that more than a few of them refuse to install MP3s⁹, and so putting stuff on Spotify would make that accessible to them.

Doing things to please others is not a sufficient condition, nor is it even a necessary condition for doing something, for all that it’s nice.¹⁰ Especially since I know I have a tendency towards people pleasing¹¹, it’s worth seeing if that’s a good reason.

Let’s take a step back. Rather than thinking about why I, personally, want to write an album, let’s see if I can’t find some reasons that a person somewhere could conceivably want to write an album.¹²

• As mentioned above: feeling that they need to in order to comfortably call themselves a musician¹³

• Also as mentioned above, pressure from friends.¹⁴

• Monetary reasons.¹⁵

• They feel like the world needs to hear their voice

• Demonstrate musical proficiency

• It seems fun?¹⁶

• Hold yourself accountable.¹⁷

Let’s investigate how they relate to me:

• Feelings of inferiority: they apply to me, but I don’t know if that’s a healthy thing. I can get over it either by deciding that I don’t need to write an album to call myself a musician or by writing an album. Probably worth thinking more on whether I should move past that thought generally, for all that making an album will never make me less of a musician.¹⁸

• Pressure: I think that this is a driving force to me. I’m almost certain that my friends were just being polite when they expressed interest in me recording an album. Nonetheless, I still want them to be able to listen to what I’ve written.¹⁹

• Monetary reasons: as demonstrated by my lack of monetization of the book I’m writing, despite explicit requests to set up a way for people to pay me, this is not a motivation for me. Honestly, I am lucky enough that I can afford to treat art as a thing I do entirely separate from the monetary compensation it could produce. I don’t think artists necessarily make better work when they don’t have a financial incentive, but I think that I, at least, do.

• I don’t really think that the world needs to hear my musical voice. I’m getting a Ph. D. in part because I do think that I have something to add to the world. I’m writing a book, in some small part, at least, for the same reason. I don’t really feel like this idea resonates with me at all, which is interesting. The monetary one at least struck me as wrong. This just strikes me as irrelevant

• Demonstration of proficiency: I can see how this seems similar to the first reason, but I can see a difference.²⁰ I think that there’s something to this. I do love type two fun in retrospect.²¹ That’s at least one reason to record an album, I suppose. It would be cool to be able to point to it as something that I’ve written and composed, if only because it’s a cool flex.

• Fun/other positive terms: yeah ok, as discussed above, this is a motivation. I think that I would learn a lot about myself from writing an album. I think that I would learn a lot more in recording one. I think that I would learn a ton more in mastering and mixing and releasing. I think that I’ve gotten a thick enough skin from my web serial to be comfortable putting out my music for the wider world.

• Accountability: I think there’s also something about this to me. When the band I play in²² was more active, that was a reason to compose. Now that I don’t even go to open mics²³, I don’t have much reason to do music. Having an explicit goal would, hopefully, at least, keep me accountable.

Ok, so I for sure still want to write an album. This past month²⁴ has been really focused on my ability to output large quantities of prose. I think that it is an important skill to develop, but I think that producing better prose is also important. In an ideal world, I think that I, at least²⁵ would benefit from alternating between phases where work on getting more words out faster and getting the words which come out to be better faster. The better my first drafts are, the less that I will need to revise them, which means the less time that I end up needing to spend on a project, which means that I can get through more of the infinite projects I want to write.

For all that I’ve already decided that next month I’ll really explore the craft of prose more, I think that it could also be healthy and fun to get back into the practice of poetry. I don’t think that jumping right back into composing songs would be my best bet, because that’s such a jump to go from nothing to full songs. Instead, I think that a month of intentional poetry practice could be really helpful and healthy. I probably want to do some sort of metered form, but I have a few days to decide what, exactly, I want that form to look like.²⁶ So that’s December sorted.

I have vague memories of the goals I set for myself at the start of the year.²⁷ Hmm, it appears as though they were more implicit than explicit. Oh well!

I remember that one goal was to do species counterpoint every day. I still would like to do that. Given that I’ve been able to find the time to write at least 1800 words²⁸ a day every day today, I can certainly make the time to do a quick little counterpoint exercise. If I keep up the poetry into January, it’s not inconceivable that the process of daily composing music and writing poetry will cause me to explicitly create song. If not, however, I always have the option of making that a goal for February.

From there, I would have like 6 months to record the album, which means really that I need to dedicate a week or two to doing nothing but it.²⁹ That really does feel somewhat realistic. What else did I plan to do this past year? Even though it’s not the end of the year, I still have time to make the resolutions work.

I have yet to take an improv class. I have one more chance to make it happen.³⁰

Huh, otherwise, I think I’ve generally done ok with keeping up on the goals. Next year I do want to be better at getting the sleep I need. Very rarely are activities worth losing a night of sleep over, and I more and more realize that every day.

Well, while this post went on a long and rambly course, I guess I did reaffirm the fact that I want to make an album. I just need to write songs, compose music, and record and master it. I don’t need it to be perfect, just serviceable.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? I did! Yesterday too. I’m so close to the finish line, which is cool. I still don’t really like the book, which is ok. I will finish it, and then I never have to look at it again.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I finished plotting out the rest of the arc, and I sent the arc to the beta reader. Beta approved it, so now I just need to write it.³¹ Edit: I realized that, due to the frankly nonsensical way that I structured my daily word goals, every extra word I write today drops my goals for tomorrow by at least a word. That’s probably worth doing, if only because I’m tired of playing catch-up, and setting lower goals is one way to do that.

• Did I blog? I have! Look at this monstrosity. Gaze upon the madness.³²

• Did I stretch? I went lifting far too early today. It was fun, and it absolutely set me up for success today. However, I know without a doubt that I will regret not stretching if I do not. I’ll do it after this post.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I made it through a decade yesterday. I have higher hopes for today.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? No! I wrote the number of letters that I had hoped to this month, though, which is nice to realize.

Reflections on Today’s Gospel

First Published: 2023 November 26

Draft 1

Wow! The end of another liturgical year. Despite the fact that the Church more or less created the calendar we use¹ and absolutely created the liturgical calendar we use, the two do not line up. There is probably some legitimate reason for that. Off the top of my head, the fact that Christmas is not on January 1st, despite arguably being the most important winter day in the Modern Church², is already enough of a reason to know that the two would diverge. It does go further, though. The modern liturgical calendar begins with Advent, which begins on the first Sunday of November.³

I can probably think of some benefits of doing it this way. One obvious one is that it gives us, at minimum, two days a year that we can call the first of the year. For all that each day is special and perfect in its own way, there’s something intrinsically human about the desire to treat continuity as discrete. Hearing that it’s the end of the year spurs us to consider the next year and to think about how we might change for the better.⁴

Regardless of how important the fact that each year has ended in a new beginning, and will continue to do so until time itself ends, the fact that a year ends is equally important. It reminds us of other endings, most pressing of which is the ending of our life.

The Feast of Christ the King is the last Sunday of the Liturgical Year. Obviously,⁵ it concerns the end of time and the end of our own lives. It contains some readings that I’ve always struggled with, though differently as I’ve grown older.⁶

The first reading comes from Ezekiel. In it, we are told that we will be separated into rams and goats. Of course, I know that this does not mean that we are predestined, as is a common enough heresy in the modern age. The fact remains, though, that we will be judged. We are reminded constantly that only in accepting our own limitations and weaknesses can we truly be strong. The reading emphasizes this, saying: “The lost I will seek out, the strayed I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, the sick I will heal, but the sleek and the strong I will destroy, shepherding them rightly.”⁷

The second reading comes, as they tend to, from Paul. Here we are reminded that all will be raised on the last day, beginning with Christ. For all that it’s very easy and settled theology now, I’m more and more appreciating the fact that he makes incredibly bold and outlandish claims by the standards of how the world is otherwise known to work.

Finally, we get to the Gospel. This Gospel passage is quite possibly the easiest passage to understand what we are called to do, for all that it is also one of the hardest to accomplish. In no uncertain terms, we are told that every time we see someone hungry, thirsty, a stranger, ill, or naked⁸ we see Christ. We can either choose to ignore Him, or we can choose to help Him.

Of course, there is clearly more to the Gospel today than just that message. If there wasn’t, then there would be no way that the Church could justify letting the hungry starve, the prisoner live neglected, the ill die on the streets, or immigrants be torn from their families. Where we are able to draw the distinction, I do not know.

However, as I write today’s musing, I am in my heated home, wearing warm clothes and a soft blanket. I know that there are far too many people right now who are not inside, instead huddling for warmth in the bitter winter air. Knowing that each of them is as Christ to me makes me feel like I need to do more. When I look at what’s happening in the world right now, it seems as though no one has heard this Gospel.

A common objection to giving money to the poor is that they might waste it on something frivolous. As a person who believes very strongly in medicine, the idea that someone with a mental illness might self medicate with alcohol doesn’t really bother me. After all, I have plenty of friends who use different substances to self medicate, and I don’t judge them for it. Why would I judge someone living an objectively harder life?

I’m late enough in writing this musing that I don’t really have the energy to see what the great thinkers of the Church have said about this passage, but I would be curious. Maybe I’ll look another day.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? It’s far too late for me to start, but start I must. Yesterday I was in a similar boat, which is why the musing didn’t come out.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I said I wasn’t going to work on it on Sundays, and so I shan’t.

• Did I blog? I think this counts, for all that I chose actively not to yesterday.

• Did I stretch? Nope! I’m going lifting early tomorrow morning, though, so maybe that will count.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I’ll try to do a rosary tonight, but very well may fall asleep during it.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? I met with friends yesterday and called a friend for like 2 hours today. Even though it’s not a letter, it serves much of the same purpose, which is staying in touch with the people I care about and love. I also got to see some other friends during catechesis tonight, which is always nice.

Flash Fiction Friday

First Published: 2023 November 24

Draft 1

Prereading note: this is being written as a way to generate my fiction for the week. As a result, the first draft (potentially the only draft I post) will be very rambly and disjointed. I will pick up and discard ideas like small pebbles or shells on a wave-swept beach, sifting to find the one that speaks to me.

This is my third week in a row musing about what I want to write for Flash Fiction Friday.¹ This week’s theme is “A form of distraction.”

Alright, let’s start iterating.

Form of distraction could mean kind of distraction. Form can also be like the shape of an object, such as form over function. What shape does distraction take?

Ok that’s maybe too far into the weeds, but we’ll put a pin in that and maybe come back.

What do I want to do with a form of distraction?

The obvious meaning² is something we do to redirect our attention away from something we don’t want to deal with. Form here modifies distraction in the sense of a shape that distraction can be forced into.

If we instead make distraction the agent, and we the object³, we end up with a form of distraction being a way that distraction takes over us.

I haven’t been writing as much these past few days as I would normally like, so I suppose that it’s only natural that my mind goes to writing as the actual center of this story. A form of distraction here could refer to the ways that my attention are pulled from the writing and craft I’ve been dedicated to. Ok I also want to try using the writing advice that I read about recently. Since I don’t want to have to keep going to the musing about it and searching through the rambled prose, the rules are:

• No think verbs

• No remembering, only flashbacks

• Characters do not belong alone.

If I stick to those three rules, there’s also an implication that I’m in either first person or third person omniscient, since third limited, in my experience, at least, explicitly calls out the thoughts that a character has. Maybe that’s just because the writing I read is bad according to this method, but I don’t think so.⁴

Ok so I think that I want to have something about the form of distraction in writing. I need to have characters, plural, but I don’t know if I really want that. The two desires are clashing. I’m going to take a minute⁵ and try to form the fiction, seeing what I produce.

Quick note: even before starting to write, i realize that I don’t really want dialogue in this fiction. I write a lot of fiction in everything else that I do, and I think that this site being a place where I minimize dialogue in fiction might be a good idea for me. Maybe not. Ultimately, though, I’m writing this for fun, and it’s completely uncoupled from all the other writing I do, even more than the rest of it is fairly atomized. I’m going to write the first draft as free association and see what comes out.

Two lines in, I’m realizing that I want this to be poetry? I think that there could be something fun with a mixture between poetry and prose. Maybe the first half is poetry⁶ and then it shifts to prose, reflecting a distraction at a meta level. Is that too edgy for the sake of being different? Maybe! Bu we’ll get to find out, and that’s really the nature of doing short writing. At worst, it doesn’t work and I spent a few minutes doing some writing that didn’t end up working how I thought it might.

Ok, so I don’t really hate what I’ve written. I think that it’s a really strong start, for all that I ended where I think that I want the actual story to start. I guess the question is how blatant I want to be. The writer I cite for writing advice says that starting with the declarative kills the suspense of the other writing. I think that I’ll try leaving the reveal to the end, for all that I know that I’ll need to put the reveal somewhere that makes it better. What I’ve drafted so far, though, is probably good enough for me to start working on the other two and a half writing assignments I have for the day.⁷

Having now finished one of the writing assignments,⁸ it is now time, I suppose to try revising the FFF. Honestly, though, given that I’m spending time with my family, I don’t know what my motivation level really is. We’re all doing something else while watching a movie,. Then again, I should keep writing, if only because I want to increase my word count for the day. Maybe I’ll try my second assignment for the day.⁹

Well, I think that I honestly am pretty happy with the way this latest draft came out. I’m not sure if I quite want to post it, if only because I feel like there’s merit in writing things solely for my own sake. Now, I suppose, the question is whether I want to rewrite this draft or start writing the final thing I have to write today.

Let’s make a quick pro contra for each. Pros of redrafting this: it’s easy, and I think that it could be fun to reflect about what I wrote in a slightly more coherent manner. Cons of redrafting this: redrafting is really just code for rewriting wholesale, and I don’t know if I really want to do that. Pros of writing Jeb: I get further ahead of the writing that I give to my readers, and I have less stress about doing it in the future. Cons of writing Jeb: I have to figure out where I want the plot¹⁰ to go.

I think that it might be worth, if nothing else, trying to figure out where I want to take the book in the next few chapters. For all that it feels like I kind of have too many words to fill, the number of chapters I have left to tell my story is rapidly shrinking.

Honestly, drafting the book did a lot to help me start to feel ready for writing. I only got halfway through plotting the rest of this book, but I realized that there’s actually a very limited number of things that I need¹¹ to have happen in the rest of this arc, but I started working backwards. Unfortunately, that means that I still have the rest of the intermediate content to do, including the chapters I need to write right now.¹² Anyways, good job with writing today me.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? I did write the content. It’s weird for me to realize that I really only have six days to finish the book. I’m beginning to understand why so many authors put all the action in the last five to ten percent of the novel.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I did not, but I did start to plot it out, which is probably better for me in the mid to long term. A family member just caught up on it, though, which is pretty exciting!

• Did I blog? Wow look at this completely incomprehensible post. It’s still a post though.

• Did I stretch? I have been so lazy today. In fairness, I think that the day after a major holiday is almost always a lazy day for my family. It’s nice that we go from active rest, where we do things to make us all feel special, to passive rest, where we just spend time with each other.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? Despite the rosy description above, no.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? I am not. I’m meeting with friends tomorrow, though, which is a similar vibe.

Thanksgiving Ahome

First Published: 2023 November 23

Draft 1

I often feel like even when I reflect on a day, the hours pass by in a blur and I have no clue what I’ve done with any of them. I don’t really want that to be the case, especially today. So, as much as possible, I’m planning to treat today as a “day in the life” log.

Let’s start where my morning started. At seven am, my alarms went off. I groaned and kept my eyes closed for a few minutes, too tired to stand up. By the time I managed to remind myself that I was about to go make bagels, an activity I’m excited for, it was closer to seven fifteen.

Downstairs, I found that the bagel dough had risen a lot overnight. It was an incredibly soft and supple dough, which I was grateful for. I felt called to make larger bagels than we have in the past.

I suppose I should explain. My family has a tradition that’s around 8 years old now of making bagels on Thanksgiving morning. If I remember correctly, it began because I was a little sad that my family didn’t really have any fun traditions, and we were also planning to bring a bunch of friends over for Thanksgiving. I also was in a trend of baking bread at that point, and I wanted some way to feel connected to my grandmother. The combination of all of those meant that I thought it could be really fun to make bagels on Thanksgiving morning.

The book we first made the bagels out of said that a single recipe would make two dozen.¹ However, bagels have clearly grown much larger since the book was written, because each of the two dozen bagels was far, far smaller than what I could get at any bagel store. This year, since I did not measure anything, I decided to make bagels that felt closer in size to what I’m familiar with in the rest of my life.

Somehow, this meant that instead of the 30 or so bagels I expected to make, I had 18. That did mean that the boiling and baking went much more quickly, because my family’s oven can easily hold two trays of bagels. The pot was barely too small for six of the bagels at the size I made them, but it worked out fine.

After shaping and boiling,², my father came down. We chatted as I put the bagels into the oven, and we cleaned up from the mess.³ As the bagel finished, we threw a butter braid into the oven, because we all wanted something sweet in addition to bagels.

My mother came down, and we chatted for a bit over coffee and bagels. I delivered a few to a friend of the family, which is another long running part of the tradition. Since the first year we’ve made thanksgiving bagels, we’ve also delivered them to people around the community. In years where we made a few hundred, we gave out far more. Nowadays, the list of deliveries is far shorter, which is a relief.

Coming home, I helped arrange the table and then chatted with my family. At around ten fifteen, I started thinking about writing. I did a few typing exercises, since I would like to be faster at typing.⁴ I planned out the work I want to do today.⁵ I know for certain that writing my to do list on paper is more effective for me, if only because I tend to ramble and journal around my to do list when I do it virtually. However, the journalling is a nice way to reflect on my thoughts, and it’s far less coherent than I ever want to put out into the world, so it is what it is.

At that point, it was time for me to start writing this blog. I sign off for now at twenty to eleven, because the rest of the family is up and about and we’re going to start chatting and planning the cooking for the day. We’re more or less unscheduled until 1300, at which point I’ll need to spatchcock turkeys and start cooking This year, we’re shooting for a 5 pm eat time.

Well, I’m signing back on at 2100 or so. I chatted with my family, which was fun, and ended up spatchcocking the turkeys at close to half twelve. Due to some confusion with spices⁶, it took a while to get them ready to bake Since my hands were covered in turkey juice and, quite frankly, turkey, I did not weigh in. Given that we were still well ahead of time, I didn’t worry about it.

The internet assured us that it should take about eighty minutes to cook the turkey. We didn’t believe that, and assumed two to two and a half hours. However, as it turned out, we only needed ninety minutes, if only that. I have strong memories of this being true in past years as well, at least since we’ve started spatchcocking. However, despite the fact that the turkey is fairly overcooked, by traditional standards, at least, the breast meat remains juicy.⁷

While the turkey started to cook, we quickly browned the giblets, neck, and backbones.⁸ Once they had a little bit of color, we added them to a pot of chicken stock we’d made⁹ and started simmering the two together. The stock ended up getting used for stuffing¹⁰ and gravy.

After that, we started making cranberry sauce and other such dishes. We finished everything about an hour ahead of schedule, at which point we did some cleanup and had dinner. After dinner, we finished cleaning, hung out for a while, and had dessert. At some point during the day, someone came to visit.

I’m sure other events happened throughout the night, but I cannot remember them. Right now, part of the family has gone to bed, and the rest of us are all watching a dumb Christmas movie.¹¹ That feels like as good of a place to sign this off as any!

Also, I found out just now that I’ve never posted about bagels.¹²

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? Not yet! Will do after this¹³

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? No. It’s thanksgiving, maybe I’ll do some writing tomorrow, once the day kind of nominally calms down. We’ll see.

• Did I blog? Again! A blog, that’s nice. It was fun

• Did I stretch? I cooked all day, which was pretty exhausting. Exhausting may be the wrong term. It was tiring, as a day well spent often is.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? Nope!

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? Still no.

Bagels!

First Published: 2023 November 23

Draft 1 (22 Nov)

I’m writing this post tonight, but I know that I won’t get around to posting it until the morning. On the bright side, that means that I can write a second draft of it. Today, for the first time since starting the family tradition of Thanksgiving bagels, I made the dough before the morning of. I don’t know if that will end up being a good idea, but I’m glad that I no longer have to start waking up at 3 in the morning to begin all the prep work for the morning, especially since Thanksgiving is always a long day.

This year’s attempt at bagels included potato starch, bread flour, and vital gluten, which made for a very springy dough. I’m excited to see what it becomes.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? Started too late but did it.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I might start slowing down Jeb writing, because my mind is blank.

• Did I blog? did it. it’s right here, for all that the post isn’t going up on time.¹

• Did I stretch? made bagels, which is at least exercise. I was well into a cardio heart rate through the kneading.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? Not even a little. I didn’t pray it last night.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? Nope.

Something I’m Calling Carbonara Recipe

Draft 1

I’ve mused a few times in the past few days that, although I write a post a day and averaged out, come up with about a post a day, I almost never have a single idea in a day. Unfortunately, on days that I do not have any ideas, I also tend to forget the ideas that I’ve come up with on previous days

I had been considering writing about music, specifically writing music, but couldn’t find a post with that exact title. Searching through early posts on my blog, I remembered that one series I had was recipes I wanted to be able to remember, reference, and rely on in the future.¹ Although most of my food exploration has been slowed in the past few months,² I have at least one recipe that was a mainstay for me for a few weeks.

There are some important contexts to the story of the dish I’m going to describe. First, although I’m going to call it carbonara³, I’ve seen a lot of people on the internet get very mad at calling anything that isn’t exactly what their grandmother⁴ made carbonara. This is not, in any meaningful sense, a traditional carbonara recipe. However, of the pasta sauces I know names for, carbonara is the closest to describing what I cook.

The recipe requires the following ingredients:

• Olive Oil

• Pasta, I recommend spaghetti that you know releases a lot of starch⁵

• Lemon

• Salt

• Egg

• Black Pepper⁶

• Parmesan cheese or whatever local variation you prefer.⁷

• Optional: mushroom

The astute among you may notice that there are no specific ingredient amounts here. That is for a very basic reason: I only believe in measurements by the heart these days.

That being said, there are some constants in most iterations of the recipe. I almost always use a single, whole lemon. I tend to use two or three whole large eggs.⁸

Directions for cooking:

1. Put water and what seems like an appropriate amount of salt into the pot you plan to cook in.⁹

2. While the water starts heating, measure out the amount of pasta you want.¹⁰

3. If using mushrooms, chop them to desired thickness at this point¹¹

4. Once water is boiling, put pasta in water.

5. At this point, we are now on a timer, which is great and nice. Grate the zest of one lemon into a bowl, along with two or three eggs,¹² and as much cheese as it takes to make the mixture into something which resembles a thick paste.

6. It’s a well known fact that the two biggest issues that carbonara can face are a broken sauce and a sauce where the eggs have scrambled. To prevent both of these, I recommend vigorously stirring the beaten egg mixture as you stream in what seems like slightly too much of the pasta water, before draining the rest of the pasta.

7. If using mushrooms, put in about twice as much oil as you feel like you should use and cook the mushrooms until at your desired level of doneness.¹³

8. At this point, turn off heat on the stove and add the pasta to the oil and mushroom.

9. While stirring vigorously, slowly pour in the sauce. If you have done all the steps correctly, it will thicken as the water evaporates and the egg proteins set, but will not grow clumpy. At this point, squeeze either half or all of the lemon into the pot, again depending on how much pasta there is and how acidic you want it to be.

10. Serve immediately and eat before the sauce congeals.

Now, there’s a very valid argument to be made that this is not carbonara in any real sense. There’s no pork of any kind, at a bare minimum. Arguably, calling the sauce you make here mayonnaise is not too far off base, since it’s primarily an emulsion of oil and egg.

Taste wise, however, I have no complaints. The lemon zest and juice make what would otherwise be an incredibly heavy meal into something almost refreshing.

Oh, I realize I forgot to discuss the reasons that I started making this dish. Chief among them is the fact that I started keeping lemons in my home. The curious among my readers might ask why I started keeping lemons in my home.¹⁴ The long and short of it is that I had a friend who seemed appalled that I used lemon juice for all of my cooking needs. He argued that fresh lemons are just objectively better in every regard.

Truthfully, I cannot say that I disagree with that take, having now started to use them. Other than that, the main consideration was that I really just wanted pasta al burro¹⁵ every night for dinner, but knew that wasn’t healthy for me. This still scratched the itch, and had the benefit of a number of other macro and micro nutrients. However, I stopped eating as many lemons, and also wanted to eat more different foods, so I haven’t made this dish as much recently. Maybe I’ll start doing so again. We’ll see, I suppose.

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? I did. It was a slog and a half, but I did it.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I did not, but I’m too tired from teaching my first university level class and driving home. Tomorrow I have less on my to do list, and so I’ll hopefully have more mental space to do the writing.

• Did I blog? Woo! Look at this blog post.

• Did I stretch? Still no.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? My rosary last night wasn’t too rushed, but that’s about all the prayer I did.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? I brought the letters home with me, so I can at least hopefully make some time for letter writing. We’ll see if I do.

Dungeons and Dragons Again

First Published: 2023 November 20

Draft 1

As I said last week, I need to make a new character. Time passing, as it tends to, far too quickly, means that I did not get the new character made at all during the intervening hours. As I start this musing, I have less than 7 hours until the character is introduced to the group, which means that it’s time to generate character which rolls more dice.

I have the following things to optimize:

• Race

• Class

• Background

• Feats

• Point buy spread

I’m level four and get a bonus first level feat, which should help. Let’s start with Race, since I doubt that anything will really change too much. Other than a few racial feats, this is fairly self contained. I think my goal for a race is easier time criticalling, since crits double dice.

Race options that give benefits:¹

• Bugbear gets +5 feet on melee attacks, and I can think of places that would be useful. Also, +2d6 on a surprise round, which can happen often if we prepare well. It’s a clacky sometimes for sure.

• Centaurs get the option to charge and then bonus attack as a bonus action. Situational for sure but

• Custom lineage gives me a free feat, which can probably increase my dice rolls somehow.

• Glitchling lets me reroll a 9 or lower, increases odds of hit

• Grung lets me add a DC 12 Con saving throw to inflict 2d4 poison damage. I have to imagine most of the time people will succeed on that check, but not always I suppose

• Half Orcs get an extra damage die on criticals with melee weapons

• Lightfoot Halfling can hide behind any medium creature, which works well with Rogue

• Variant Human also gets a free extra feat

• Khenra lets me reroll any one as long as I can see my twin, so if I can convince someone else to play the race, could work.

• Kobold lets me gain advantage on attack rolls proficiency modifier times a day

• Kor lets me reroll every one, which is very strong.

• Green Merfolk lets me hide when only lightly obscured by nature, similar to halfling

• Minotaur lets me use a bonus action to attack with my horns if I take the dash action. Unfortunately, I think that I only get one bonus action a turn, so even if I dash as a bonus doesn’t work sadly.

• Amonkhet Minotaur has the same thing as half orc where i get an extra die on criticals

• Ixalan Orc also gets savage attacks

• Revenant doesn’t work in any way for this goal, but does have the fun benefit of letting me bring my character back from the dead. Could be worth considering another time, esp since they cannot die

Unsurprisingly, there are not too many options, especially given how many classes there are. Now I get to go through every feat available at or before fourth level to see how they balance, since I think that’ll be more impactful than backgrounds, and the two together should let me figure out my Class more effectively.

Relevant feats:²

• Vital Sacrifice. I can take 1d6 necro damage to deal an extra 2d6 damage on an attack or spell. ok if I build a char resistant to necro damage, that’s legitimately tempting

• Strike of the Giants: prof. bonus times I can add a die roll to a weapon attack

• Squire of Solamnia³ lets me add 1d8 prof. times

• Spell sniper doubles range and lets me pick up a cantrip. Add that to warlock’s um eldritch blast and we get a fun thing

• Sentinel lets me use my reaction to attack someone attacking an ally, or if they leave even if disengaging

• Savage attacker 1/turn reroll my dice. Question becomes what I mean by rolling dice, because wow that’s fun

• Polearm master lets me opportunity attack when they enter my space and also i can bonus action d4 attack. that plus bugbear and sentinel seems really fun

• Piercer lets me reroll a piercing damage die once per turn and adds a damage die to any piercing critical. That stacks nicely

• Orcish Fury lets me add one damage die once per long rest. That’s meh, but better than nothing.

• Metamagic Adept - Empowered spell rerolls a damage die.

• Metamagic Adept - Twinned spell doubles the attack dice

• Martial Adept - Precision attack adds a die

• Martial Adept - Quick toss lets me do a bonus attach thrown weapon which adds the die for damage

• Mage Slayer makes it so I get to opportunity attack any mages in range

• Lucky I’m pretty sure is banned

• Great Weapon master lets me bonus attack another creature when I successfully reduce a monster to 0 hp or crit

• Flames of Phlegethos lets me reroll all ones on fire damage from a spell

• Fighting Initiate - Great Weapon Fighting lets me reroll 1 and 2s on melee damage dies from two handed and versatile weapons

• Elven accuracy lets me reroll one non Str or Con die roll once whenever I have advantage. I’ve seen some people say that means three chances to crit

• Cruel lets me add 1d6 damage to an attack prof bonus times a day.

• Baleful Scion lets me do 1d6 necro damage and heal that much prof bonus times a day

• Agent of Order lets me do 1d8 force damage prof bonus times a day

Ok wow that’s a lot of options. Best options are those that do not limit the times I can use them explicitly, and come in the category of giving more places where I can attack and making attacks have more dice.

• More attacks:

  • Sentinel

  • Polearm Master

  • Mage Slayer

  • Great Weapon Master

• More dice per Attack

  • Vital Sacrifice

  • Savage Attacker

  • Piercer

  • Fighting Initiate - Great Weapon Fighting

  • Elven accuracy

Ok so I think that it’s better for me to do more dice rather than roll more often. I feel like I generally use reactions and bonus actions, so the second category is probably better Aw shucks, Vital Sacrifice explicitly says I can’t reduce the damage I would take in gaining the boon, which is a shame, but does make sense because otherwise I build something with immunity to necrotic damage.

Most likely backgrounds won’t matter, and I’m very quickly running out of hours to figure this out. I think, at least at the level we are, Fighter makes the most sense. Champion at third level doubles my chances of a critical, and that’s really my only goal right now. For all that Great Weapon Fighting is considered subpar, it does increase the number of dice I get to roll.⁴

I absolutely want Vital Sacrifice, and then I have to choose between Half Orc, elf, and Kor. If I choose Elf, I take Elven accuracy, which lets me reroll when I have advantage. If I take Half Orc, I get an extra damage die when I crit. If I take Kor, 1 on attacks become not one.

Ok so 1 will always miss, which means I roll no attacks. Kor feels better for that reason.

So I take Kor, Champion Fighter, and Vital Sacrifice. I still have my 4th level feat or raise statistics, point buy, and background to set up. There are far too many backgrounds but here we go:

• Astral Drifter gives me Magic Initiate which gives me access to cantrips. Relevant ones:

  • Booming Blade: if creature moves after being hit, 1d8 thunder

  • Magic Stone: ranged weapons are nice

• Giant Foundling gives me Strike of the Giants

I think Giant Foundling is the one to go for, especially because it works thematically. Now the question is whether it’s worth losing a level in Fighter for a level in rogue, which gives me access to sneak attack. I’m leaning towards probably not, because next level I get an extra attack. After that, though, might be worth switching over so I get extra dice.

Now time to generate stats and pick a weapon. I want something two handed so I benefit from great weapon master. Maul is the only two handed weapon other than double bladed scimitar, so I’ll take that. Mauls don’t do piercing damage, so that feat is out.

I’m going to do the nice sweet “dump dexterity, max out strength and constitution,” build. Assuming I’m allowed to take variant ability score increases, I’ll have

• Str: 15+1

• Dex: 9

• Con 15+2

• Int 10

• Wis 10

• Cha 12

From there, at fourth level I want a feat that increases my con by one, and then ideally adds hit points. Something that adds ac would also be nice. Vigor of Hill Giants seems like the choice, because I restore Con and Prof extra hit points every short rest. Since I know that I’ll be taking some damage from my feat, that’s a good idea I think. Oh, I wear chainmail, so Dex doesn’t matter, which is nice. Welp, sixteen hundred words later I now have my initial build for a creature. This took far more time than I thought it would, but in retrospect, I’ve never really read through all the options before. I’m sure that there will come a point where rogue will allow me more dice to roll, I just don’t really know when that would be.

Having now finished the session, things went well. I realized upon arriving that, even though I knew the mechanics of the character, I did not know such relevant information as name and appearance. I looked up Kor, and they’re apparently very washed out elf looking people. Alfred was the only name that I could think of, so that’s what he was named, and I decided that since he was also a giant foundling, he and Goob knew each other.

Anyways, we did not have any combat this session, which means that the only d6 I rolled were to inflict damage on myself with the hope that I might be able to use it next session. It was a fun time!

Daily Reflection:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? Woo! Found out my plotting included some stuff I have accidentally already covered, so we’re good.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I finally finished the chapter that’s been driving me nuts for about a week now. It’s annoying, but I hope that I’ll be ready to do more in the next few days.

• Did I blog? A part of me feels badly about using work I was planning to do as a blog post. That part of me is less tired than the rest of me.

• Did I stretch? I’ve fallen so far off of this goal.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? Yesterday’s rosary wasn’t too rushed, and I went to Mass, which was prayerful.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? Still no. It is annoying to me that I can’t just write letters, for all that I respect the fact that there are a lot of things I want to do that I cannot do.



Reflections on Today’s Gospel

First Published: 2023 November 19

Draft 1

Today’s Gospel parable is the parable of the talents. It’s a parable I’ve always struggled with, for a few reasons.

The primary reason I’ve always struggled with it is that it doesn’t account for failure. The two options presented are either making more from what you are given, or not doing that. There is no fourth servant who attempted to trade his master’s property and failed.

I suppose that’s probably mostly just because it would muddy the story. The priest in today’s homily pointed out that a talent is around 100 pounds of precious metal. There’s certainly something to be said about the fact that the rich man trusted even his lowest servant with so much money, and it does do a lot to explain why the servant was so sure he would be able to find it after burying it.

There’s something else in the parable that sticks out to me right now, though. Even though at first the parable appears as a straightforward endorsement of capitalism, there are limits.

The first servant doubles his five talents to ten. That’s a 100 percent increase. However, he stops at that single doubling.

Some might argue that the market forces¹ would not support someone creating so much more than five talents of wealth. Ten talents might exhaust the field, creating a monopoly. The second servant, however, starts with two.

When he doubles his starting value, he has nearly as much as the first servant was given. If the message of the parable is that more is always better, then he should absolutely have doubled his investment again. And yet, he didn’t.

Now, as Catholics, we know a priori² that unbridled capitalism is not good.³

In the context of what I assume we’re supposed to read the parable as, treating talents in the modern sense, rather than as a concept of wealth, it is a relieving distinction. Whatever gifts we are given are not needed to expand exponentially forever. As someone who finds that they’re constantly disappointed in lack of progress, that is a relieving proposition.

Of course, I mentioned at the beginning of this post that it bothers me that there is never an unsuccessful servant. Within the context of the parable, that does not necessarily hold. Those who try do not always succeed.

However, this is one of the places that⁴ the fact that the story is a parable answers the question.⁵ If our work is to use our talents for the building of the Kingdom, then there is no way for our work not to prosper.

They say that the road to hell is paved in good intentions. That may be true, but intentions are not action. To strive earnestly for a better world, with an open heart and mind, is to make the world a better place. Even if we do not see the ways in which our work helps those around us, we can be assured that there is no good we do which does not multiply to infinity.

As much as I want to go and read the reflections of great thinkers of the Church on this parable, I know that I need to take the advice I said above and not push for the sake of pushing. There are more upcoming hours in the day, and I hope that I will have the energy I need to do that reflection, but I will not count on it.

Update: I had my weekly bible study. This week, not all of the students were available, so we joined with another group. It is really interesting to see how much quieter my students are when surrounded by strangers. Even on the first day, when we were just meeting for the first time, they seemed much more willing to speak up than they were today.

I really hope that the same is not true for the other class’s students. I would hate to think that my being there made them uncomfortable sharing what they thought. Still, what little that each of the students said remained very well thought out.

Since I didn’t fill this out yesterday, two days of Daily Reflections:

• Did I write 1700 words for NaNoWriMo? I did yesterday, I have not yet today. As I said, though, there are a number of hours, which I hope to have time to do. Update: I have now written the words for the day. I’m starting to fall behind my plotting, which isn’t ideal, but is probably fine.

• Did I write a chapter of Jeb? I wrote about 500 words yesterday. I wanted to write more, but I felt like the pace I was trying to set was much faster than the pace that I needed to write for the scene, which really deserved and demanded a lot of focus. As I said last week, I’m not going to write Jeb on Sundays, and I’m going to hold myself to that.

• Did I blog? Technically I blogged yesterday, for all that it was a few words. I also, as you can see, blogged here.

• Did I stretch? I stretched my neck when stopped at stoplights.

• Am I doing better at prayer than a rushed and thoughtless rosary? I think I fell asleep in the middle of my rosary on Friday, and I didn’t do one last night.

• Am I doing a good job writing letters to friends? No. I have carried an unwritten letter with me for more than a week at this point, at every stop planning sincerely to write it.