This is important to me because I’ve allowed work to become a monster that has eaten all my time for many months. While I’m sure it makes sense to the general public, it doesn’t much help me any. Despite the fact that I’m pretty good at it, I don’t consider myself a corporate worker. That’s not what I get my internal self-worth from–or, at least it’s not where I get the most important elements of my self worth from.

Work is a big collaboration, you see? It’s fun in the sense that you’re building something with other people that you could never build yourself. But like a writing collaboration, its like twice the work for half the reward. Writing is all internal. It’s mine. No one can make me change anything, and only the reader and I an decide if it’s good or not (editors are, of course, a class of reader).

In addition, I’ve found I need to work in my basement. At least that’s what’s going on now. A few months back, Lisa and I bought laptops and wireless router for us to use wherever we wanted. It’s cool, of course. And useful. My thought was that I could probably write while vegging in front of the TV, or whatever. This was pure and total fancy, and the fact that I thought it would work goes to explain exactly how far out of reality I had gotten. Write while watching American Idol? Yeah, right.

As soon as I got my butt planted downstairs, though, the WordWerks started to flow again.

Now, I’ll fully admit that the NCAA tournament has stepped into the mix this past weekend, and will probably continue to do so until my beloved Cards are no longer playing. But I can deal with that.

Louisville basketball has its power. That cannot be denied.

Of course, I disagree with those assessments–except, maybe for the last one, which I’ll get to in a moment.

Bobby Knight, like Crum, and like John Wooden before them both, knows what the hell he’s talking about (Wooden is, of course, another “old hack” of a coach who says he no longer enjoys the game of college basketball because of what it has become). These three coaches have 15 National Championships between them. They know a little bit.

None of them are very happy with the current game.

For the record, here is a link to the excerpt of Knight’s point of view.

Of course, this is not Knight, or Crum, of Wooden’s blog, so I want to talk a little about the subject, and what it means to me.

The last few weeks I’ve spent quite a bit of time watching chunks of old games. Two of my favorites are:

Dream Game End
Dream Game OT

Watch these clips. Sure, they’re great because the represent what I consider the best moment in the history of UL/UK basketball. But mostly I want you to watch the game flow itself–look at the way defense was played on the inside. It’s all about intelligence and positioning. It’s about quickness and athletic grace. Now, go watch any modern clip. Watch the game inside the paint. Nasty, eh? Today’s game of college basketball is just a mini-version of the pro game. It’s a wrestling scrum. Also, watch the offense. See how patient everything feels. There is no shot clock beating in the back ground. The guard sets things up. His team mates move where they are supposed to. Realize that if a shot clock existed in this game, it never would have buzzed–so it wasn’t needed in order to speed up the game itself. The mere existence of the clock, however, would have changed the feel of the game.

Don’t want to see a Louisville game? Well, how about Villanova’s run to the 1985 championship?

Villanova was an 8-seed who used a strategy that primarily consisted of running their offense until they got a great shot, no matter how long it took. They won 66-64. Though they did not often “hold the ball,” several of their possessions ran over 50 seconds. They shot 78%, mostly due to intelligent shot selection. Their strategy is no longer available, of course, since the 35 second shot clock would make them speed up their offense.

Here’s a really interesting clip of that game. Watch the whole thing. Pay attention.

End - First Half

I love this clip because it directly shows how the defense really should be the one initiating the action. Watch how the game is flowing so gloriously, watch how the open inside game allows for athletic alley oops and slicing drives. Then come the final two minutes and see how Rollie Massimino out-coaches John Thompson and gives his kids an edge by using the fact that Georgetown won’t play defense to his advantage. Making the other team play defense the way you wanted them to was once a really useful strategy. These days, a coach really can’t force an opponent out of a zone–especially if his guys struggle to hit a few shots. In the old days, there were ways to attack things assuming you could take your time.

In a recap of the situation, Harold Pressley, Villanova’s star, said:

We had lost those two (regular-season) games because they got us to play their tempo,” Pressley said. “They forced us into quick shots - not bad shots, but quick shots. Once you started doing that you were doomed.”

Think about that quote. See how it plays with Knight’s opinions. Consider what it means to have a “basketball IQ.”

For me, the shot clock and the three point line have fundamentally changed the game of basketball, and in a terrible, terrible way. Those two rules make the game one-dimensional. They change the goal of an offense from “get a great look close to the basket,” to “get an open look with your toes on the three-point line.” Defensively, it means that you have to extend yourself. Your guards and outside presence need to be able to put intense pressure on the ball when it’s 20-feet from the bucket. Yes, this would logically open the inside…except, of course, that coaches then adjusted and begin driving their big guys to get more physical in their approach to shutting down the inside game.

This is about when the term “Good No Call” entered our lexicon, and then became uttered about 10 times a game.

I hate a “Good No Call.” It’s a bad phrase and a misguided rule of operation. The reason it’s a bad deal is that the rules also say a player is able to break the rules four times and remain in the game. Railing against referees is always fun, but I’ll refrain from going to far on it today except to say that even with the 3-pointer and shot clock, the game would be more open if the referees just called all the fouls all the time. Players would foul out for a few games, but they would adjust.

This all ties into the 3-pointer and the shot clock because the two ideas have fueled a massive movement to a single style of play–that being one that seeks athletic defenders who then mill around in a quick-minded offense that looks for either a dunk or a 20-foot-shot. Gone are Bobby Knights glorious movement offense and the Wooden/Crum approach of inverting your guards (because you really don’t want outside shooters down on the blocks any more). The dribble drive is now practiced well by only a few guys who are both quick enough to get around their perimeter defenders and strong enough to hold their own against the thugs who await them in the paint–most inside/outside play is now about the entry pass, very much like the NBA. Going to the hole now requires a warrior rather than an athlete. Or, perhaps, the term “athlete” itself has changed to be overwhelmed by the warrior flavor over the poetic.

In addition, interior passing–a staple of the high-low game favored by Crum and Wooden in particular–is on the decline due to the ruggedly physical nature of game in the paint. It can still work if you have the right players in there–Louisville’s David Padgett is all-the-rave about his passing, but you don’t see it nearly as much as you once did. Actually, I suggest we have had several point centers in just Louisville’s history (Rodney McCray being perhaps the best of my personal memory), but they were so prevalent across the world of basketball that they didn’t stand out as particularly odd or noteworthy. I view the fact that Padgett stands out in today’s game is a measure of how this part of the overall game of college basketball has degraded.

Finally, this also means defenses have it relatively easy in today’s game. They really just need to be able to play hard for 20-25 seconds at a time. Or, actually, if they are playing a team that panics or isn’t mature, they can play 10-15 seconds of good defense and then let the shot clock force their opponent into a cruddy shot. So the defensive Xs and Os that guys like Knight, Crum, and Wooden once laid down are also very different. Coaches teach maximum intensity for short bursts now. In the old days, a Villanova-type offensive strategy would feel this pressure, and run the offense for 40-50 seconds. Eventually, if their ball security skills were good enough, the defensive intensity would fail and a lay-up or alley–oop might well present itself.

In all of these ways, the game has “passed by” these older coaches, though I struggle to use that term since it suggests the game has gotten more sophisticated or better in some fashion that these guys couldn’t possibly understand when in reality it has become far less dynamic and not nearly as athletically beautiful as it once was. The ability to shoot the 12-15 foot shot has gone by the wayside because it is now the worst possible shot to take (and hence the shot that most defenses are geared to try to force). The use of the lob pass is a relic because it’s really rare that a guy can run free through the lane without getting a forearm shiver that stops his momentum.

For my money, this change is bad. When I was a kid I used to love coming home late at night and turning on that fledgling station known as ESPN and seeing delayed broadcasts of teams that ran tons of weird systems–Ivy League games with their myriad of screens and hundreds of passes, the fanciful strategies of the Dale Browns of the world, the Cincinnatis who tried to actually hold the ball all game to get UK out of their zone and lost something like 24-15 because Joe B Hall wouldn’t play man-to-man to force the action. I thought the 4-corners was a fascinating offense, and caused most teams who ran it a lot more trouble than benefit. I was almost always happy to see someone go to it when they were ahead of us. But it was a great, great offense for a team like UNC when they had someone of Phil Ford’s talent run it. To me, that was something that made college basketball fascinating.

The game today loses something because it is one-size fits all. The best offensive strategy is obvious–shoot the uncontested three. The defensive strategy is also obvious–hard pressure for 25 seconds. The refereeing has morphed over time to an NBA-like approach. Everything is pointed to the team with the most athletic/strongest players winning almost all the time (not every time, of course, but a lot more times than it used to be when the game was more about quickness and grace than about speed and muscle).

Obviously, there are those who think it’s a great game. And of course, I still watch it. I mean, what’s a guy supposed to do in March? But I admit I feel bad for the kids who have no memory of what basketball was like in the 70s and 80s.

For me, that will always be how the game was meant to be played.

As you might be able to tell from the looks of the site, I’ve finally come into the modern world, kicking and screaming and throwing all sorts of tantrumy fits. I’m now running everything through Word Press. I’ve ported bits of the old site here, and I expect I’ll bring in more over the next several days and weeks. But at least those lonely seekers will be able to find my stories and my list of work. I’m debating about whether it’s worth finding a way to import all my old journal entries. Daily Persistence was a customized perl-driven engine, so I’m not sure I can do an automated port.

On the writing front, I should note that I recently received a copy of the Futures anthology which contains “Picasso’s Cat,” which is a fun little piece. The anthology is full of great stuff by people you’ll recognize. You can get it here.

Anyway, I’m off to figure more of this stuff out…and, of course, there’s that short story I’m working on. It’s all about a …

#

The collaboration with John is coming along. It currently stands at about 6K words, and is back with him. This leaves me with the specter of deciding what to do next. My original intention was to jump into writing something new. I’ve managed, however, to convince myself that this is not the wisest course of actions. Instead, I’m looking at my novels. Yes, that’s right–I have novels that need to hit the market.

A few of them are technically still on the market. By that, I mean I have previously sent them to editors and have not heard anything from them. I think, however, that after three years I can enact the statute of editorial limitations and assume I’m free to submit them elsewhere. So I’ve been looking at my inventory the past day or two.Novels are such different beasts from short stories. Working on one feels different. I look at the screen and see some 200 words, but I feel the weight of the work’s entirety. It’s daunting in a way. A couple weeks ago, Lisa and I visited Chicago’s Art Institute. Her favorites are the impressionists–Renoir and Monet are her Led Zeppelins of the art world. [grin] It’s an amazing feeling to be standing up close to a masterpiece, to see the individual brushstrokes and the choice of color, and to realize that the painter–at arms length–could not actually “see” the piece. But as he stepped back the entire thing fit into place. I can imagine Monet’s sense of satisfaction as he found things that worked.

Writing a novel is like that, except there’s no way to really step back and take in the whole thing at once. A novel is a messy piece of reality that way. As an “artist” (nice pretentious word, eh?) you’re working blind and without a net. You apply your keystrokes up close and you hope they work. No. You don’t hope. I don’t think a real writer hopes their stuff is working. I think a real writer knows it works.

Right now I’m a real short story writer. I know pretty much when I’ve written something short that works. I also know scene-by-scene if something is working at a novel length. But still, after writing drafts of what–seven different novels?–I would be reluctant to say that I really understand what makes a novel work.

I said above that the novelist is working without a safety net. That’s true, I think. But as I sit here thinking about it, I see this is faulty thinking because it’s incomplete. Writing is like life. There is no safety net. To think otherwise is, perhaps, to have already lived at half-throttle.

Anyway.

It’s time to get them out there.

So I will.

Three hours on the Apple site gave me several ideas on what to do next. I explored all the easiest options, but none worked. My issue was such that after that point, all the options required me to start with a drained battery and then recharge. Seeing as the process to drain a Nano battery takes many hours, I’ve spent much of the last week performing a troubleshooting tip each morning, then (when it failed) leaving it to drain for 24 hours before starting all over again.

The good news is that as of this morning, it appears that the Nano is working.

But, needless to say, this was a little frustrating and more than a little bothersome.

It makes me double-clutch when I think of all those Mac/PC commercials that Apple is running.

Not that today’s will be much better. [grin]

I’m working heavily on the Bodin collaboration right now. John’s done a bunch of work getting it to a spot, and now I’m trying to take it a bit further before doing the tag-you’re-it thing. The problem is that where I want to go has required me to go back and tweak a bit of what John wrote–we do that a lot…two steps forward, three back. Whoever said collaborating was double the work for half the pay wasn’t far off.

But, honestly, you collaborate for fun. Or, at least that’s what I’ve done in the past, anyway. And John’s a fun writer to work with. He’s a idea pack-rat, and full of interesting tid-bits. I never know what he’s going to get around to.

On the other hand, this story has been a bit more messy than the other two we’ve done. It hasn’t been as focused, and we’re discovering the plot as we go. This is a hard way to write as an individual, and requires even more patience while collaborating.

Regardless, I think we’re about at the halfway point.

Have a great day.

As a result of some of that something, I’m out of time this morning. I’ll see if I can detail a bit more of all this something come this afternoon at lunchtime. So if you see this in the morning, you might return sometime and see if I’ve put something up.

See you sometime.

Have a great someday.

I made good progress on the latest story while I was out–the 8,000 word total in its previous form has rounded out to about 5,500. It moves much more cleanly, and I admit that I enjoy reading it myself right now. And, finally, the collaboration I agreed to work with John Bodin on has about crossed the halfway mark, and we’ve picked up a bit of steam. Looks like it should finish sometime soon.

One more older tale to go, then it’ll be onto some fresh ideas.

I’m ready–so very ready. [grin]

Have a great day.

Just for completeness sake, that entry was titled “Unlucky Number 11.” It was about a story I’m re-writing. In the entry, I recounted its essence of bloat and otherwise basically ponderous nature. In it, I also mentioned that I liked the story, and that it was all there.

This is where, it turns out, I was wrong

The tale has required major, major surgery–that shouldn’t be too surprising, I suppose. I’ve cut and pasted (mostly cut) and I’ve reworked, and I’ve thought and I’ve scribbled. I’ve worked at the corners, and selected different words. And this morning, as I was ending, I hit that gold that makes writers who they are.

In other words, I discovered exactly what this story is really about.

I was so happy. The feeling I had was like watching a man take off and fly, which I’ve done once at Cirque Du Soleil, and believe me, it was an awesome experience. When I went to take my shower, I could have danced in the tub. But I didn’t. Please note, it’s very dangerous to dance while covered in soapy water, and this page does not endorse such acts. Unless you really want to.

Anyway.

Today was a good day.

Who knows?

Maybe my latest breakthrough is related to the psychic grace received by moving out of the shadow of Microsoft.

Or not. [grin]

Regardless, I recommend it so far. Seamless transition, easy to use, and appears to convert well to Word format for document sharing.

Have a great day.

The fact that this story ever saw market is a little embarrassing.

That it saw market so many times is an indicator of where my brain was at.

Thank the powers that none of the editors I sent it to actually printed the thing. [Fat chance, but stranger things have happened]

The story itself is perfectly fine, by the way. By that I mean the story’s purpose and its fundamental content. The characters and plot are interesting (to me at least), and are meaty enough to hold structural integrity with regard to story mechanics. I’m convinced the manuscript’s past failure had nothing to do with the story itself, and everything to do with the writer.

I wish I could describe how freeing that feels.

Problems within me can be overcome, you see. But a dead story can only be grieved for and left to clog hard drives.