You would think I could, by now, identify when I’m on a lucky streak, whether for good or ill. And I guess that’s the problem – I’ve got luck coming out the wazoo, but it seems to be the full spectrum, a veritable wazoo rainbow of fortune.

I chose a winner for the Preakness Stakes this year, after betting on the same horse for the Derby. Admittedly, I’m taking all my cues from a much more seasoned veteran, but this is still the first time I’ve won anything, pretty much ever.

Just before the race, though, I was hit by a car. Fortunately I was in my own car at the time, but it was a little nerve-wracking when the girl who hit me, in an attempt to minimize damage, swerved to miss me and drove straight at a lemonade stand.

The girl managed to miss the lemonade stand and toodled down the sidewalk after putting a big dent in my car, and for a second I thought she was going to drive off. Fortunately, the mother of the girls running the lemonade stand ripped the other driver’s door open and, as politely as possible, queried, “WHAT THE F*** ARE YOU DOING, YOU F***ING B****!?”

(This is the new, sanitized version of alexmattingly.com – I like swearing for comic effect, but this was a hurricane of motherly rage, which is no laughing matter.)

Anyway, all’s well that ends well – the other driver turned out to be a twelve-year-old with a driver’s license, so I wound up talking to her dad on her iPhone while she complained in the background about how she’d already wrecked her Lexus. Super Mom gave me a glass of lemonade and, in an act of Divine Mercy, apologized for how she’d yelled at the girl, which is pretty amazing, frankly, since about five minutes prior the girl had nearly made pâté of her daughters. Meanwhile my girlfriend, who had witnessed the whole thing from her porch, also managed to restrain herself from first-degree murder.

Sometimes that’s all you can hope for, that nobody dies and nobody kills, and your losing streak is nothing more that a literal streak of paint down a fresh dent in your car.

“Alex, you need to update your blog.”

“Shut up, I’m working.”

“No you’re not. You clearly have a Jack and diet coke sitting on your coffee table, and you’re watching Deep Space Nine.”

“That’s my process. You have to respect my process.”

“Your process seems to involve a lot of binge drinking.”

“YOU DON’T KNOW ME.”

So, wrestling with a conscience is no easy thing, it turns out. That little bastard knows all about you – he knows your excuses, he knows your habits, he knows precisely what you aren’t doing and why you aren’t doing it. In the original ‘Pinocchio,’ the wooden puppet smashes the cricket with a shoe. I kind of get that now.

The problem, obviously, is where to begin? I’ve got a new feature at Punchnel’s – Ken Honeywell thought it would be funny to expose my ignorance about baseball, for instance. And Everything and More is wrapping up, the last leg of Tom, Ellen, and Remley’s journey having already started. This is all stuff I should promote here, but I’m too busy with work.

Work is one of those things I want to promote on this blog, but can’t help feeling like I should keep separate. I’m all about the compartmentalization, and it seems wise to keep writer-Alex separate from working-Alex, despite the fact that it’s not exactly hard to connect the two. So I’ll quietly suggest you keep tabs on all this new business about Indy Reads Books, and just keep my mouth shut. If you make the connection, great. If not, the worst thing that’s happened to you is that you’ve found out about one badass new bookstore. Worse things have happened to you, I’m sure.

That’s where I am today. That’s what things look like. How about you?

The good people at Punchnel’s are making me feel like a prince – I’ve got two pieces up this week as ongoing series, and I think you should read them!

First, of course, is the new chapter of Everything and More, which I’m just pleased as punch about. Pleased because we’re entering the home stretch – only a few more chapters to go, and I earnestly hope the ending will be satisfying and fun. I had such a blast writing this story. The origins came from an experiment, and it seems to have worked out.

See, when I was a wee writer in middle and high school, I had all these grandiose ideas for all kinds of epics, but no endurance to actually write the damn things. But what I’d do instead would be to write character studies – a couple pages of description, with character history and physical description and story elements woven throughout, so that even if I never wrote the stories I’d feel like these were real people.

After some serious frustrations with another novel, I decided to go back to my old method and write up some character studies. I described Tom Avon, Ellen Cambry, Uncle Paul, Jon Remley, and so on, and then out of that the whole novella developed. It was both a fun exercise, but also a startling reminder how important character is to story. There are things I know about the characters that will never make it into the novella, and yet it feels like those elements are present as I write. I hope it reads the same way.

Second is my new series, Victory Season, in which I’ll be following the Indianapolis Indians for an entire season. I feel a little out of my depth here, but god, isn’t that what writing’s all about? Scaring the shit out of yourself and hoping you can get through to the other side of an impossible project?

If nothing else, I’ve gotten a lucky ball cap out of it – that’s worth the cost of admission alone.

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” – Douglas Adams

There’s a new chapter of Andrew Quit up today, in which our hero, fresh on the street from his old job, tries to land a new one. The big baby.

But it’s hard, isn’t it, being in a new situation? We like what we know. Familiar territory is also safe territory, which is probably one of the reasons I don’t write more outside fiction. Still, when the opportunity came along to write a stage show, I jumped at the chance.

This is kind of my mode of operation. I heard an interview on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast where he spoke with Conan O’Brien, and one of the things Conan said was how his big wins most often came from trapping himself in a situation where the only way out was success. I’d like to say I’m in the same boat, and sometimes I am – I like to commit to things I’m not always capable of seeing through. But unlike Conan, sometimes I don’t get out of the burning building in time.

In this case, though, there’s a happy ending. I’m writing for a stage show being written/produced/directed by Cari Ray, who also has a CD coming out, and is opening a store, and probably a million other things that make her the hardest working woman in the state. So it’s exciting to be working with someone with that kind of energy, and maybe it’s a little contagious. Maybe I was too excited when I promised to have a whole script on her desk within a few days of our first phone call.

But I got it done (a day late, but, hey. You know.) and I’m happy and excited with the result. I’ll post more here as details come in, but pretty soon I’m going to get to go to a theater and see words I wrote being spoken by honest-to-god actors, and frankly it’s a little terrifying. Good terror, but terror nonetheless.

Because when you write a blog, or write a story, you don’t have to watch people experience it. You don’t have to be there for the precise second when a joke lands to see if anybody laughs. And so it’s scary to think about, but it’s also exciting – I’m out of my comfort zone, and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a lot of electricity beyond those familiar walls.

“All worthy work is open to interpretations the author did not intend. Art isn’t your pet — it’s your kid. It grows up and talks back to you.”

-Joss Whedon, AMAing on Reddit

It’s Monday, which means a new chapter of Andrew Quit. Coming a bit close to the wire on this one, although it’s a self-imposed wire, so who knows what that actually means…

One thing I’ve decided to quit, hands down, is thinking that I can’t run another mini. Lindsey and I are now at 10.2 miles, which is a hell of a thing. You never quite believe you can run a mini-marathon until you’re this far in training, and then suddenly the fact that three miles ever felt so hard seems like a strange and silly thing.

The mini is in May. 13.1 miles. We’ve run 10.2, and our regular runs are ranging in the 4-6 mile range. Not to brag or anything, but that feels pretty damn good. Is it shameless to use such a short blog post to brag about my running? Sure it is. But sometimes being able to brag just means you haven’t given up – you haven’t yet quit.

It’s important to know your enemies.

Every goal you have, every aspiration, every attempt at getting something done will come with a certain amount of resistance. And sometimes that means people who disagree. Sometimes they’ll disagree loudly, and you’ll find yourself bogged down on Facebook getting into arguments over religion, or politics, or personal beliefs. You’ll do research on the opposition – learn about your enemies, what makes them tick, learn how you can undermine their arguments.

But it’s a waste of time.

I used to like to argue. It felt like Getting Shit Done. When you argue, all this energy can come pouring out, and maybe you’re eloquent and smart and clever, and maybe you’re quoting Darwin and Hegel and Groucho Marx, and maybe you feel like, afterwards, you’ve really drawn a line in the sand. But you’re wasting your time. I certainly was. ‘Know your enemy’ doesn’t always mean learning about the people that disagree with you. Sometimes it just means knowing who your real enemies are in the first place.

For instance. Below is a chart. The circle is the known universe, and the arrow is your path through it:

Pretty easy, right? You’re on your path, you know what you’re about. You know what you’re doing and why. But then:

Aww, hell no. Those red dots? That’s not acne. Those are the people trying to break you down. Those are the guys standing on the sidelines, telling you why you can’t, why you shouldn’t, why you should keep your head down and work your day job and not worry so much about what it is you’re trying to do.

And you can argue with them. You can stop, and yell, and curse. You might even get a couple converts. But you know what you’re not doing? Moving. Every time you stop because of one of those red dots on the sidelines, you’re losing ground and momentum on your life’s work. It feels like you’re getting shit done, but you aren’t. You’re pausing. You’re stopping. You aren’t working.

These people aren’t your enemies. I don’t care how loud they yell – they aren’t your enemies. Your job isn’t to engage them, isn’t to argue – it’s to move forward, fast and swift, until you get done what you need to get done. No matter how many people seem to be against you, there’s only on reason you stop, and it’s this:

That’s right. You don’t stop until that blue bastard gets in the way, the one guy to actually stand between you and your goals. You’ll know him because he isn’t arguing – you don’t choose to stop because you want to pick a fight. You don’t choose at all. He stands between you and your goals like a wall, and no matter how much you try to ignore him, he isn’t going anywhere, and your goal starts to seem more and more distant. What do you do in that case? The energy you have to beat him is directly related to how much energy you’ve spent fighting the ones that didn’t matter.

If you’re smart – if you’ve conserved your energy, ignored the haters, kept your goal in mind and kept fighting through for it – there’s one thing you can do when that little blue dot gets in your way.

You bulldoze the bastard, and you don’t ever look back.

So I’m at Walgreen’s, picking up my requisite diet Mountain Dew and a pack of cigarettes, when I notice something strange on the cashier’s t-shirt. Walgreen’s has some new campaign featuring Donald Trump, operating under the tried-and-true principle that nothing boosts sales like the endorsement of a failed real estate tycoon turned reality star. To promote the campaign, workers are wearing t-shirts with the slogan. Nothing unusual there, but what was odd was that the t-shirts also have a QR code on the sleeves.

As if the line between clerks and customers wasn’t already a little blurry, I can’t think anybody’s going to get behind this idea. Encouraging customers to stop employees so they can scan their t-shirts doesn’t do anybody any favors. It gives creepy old men another excuse to get uncomfortably close to employees (as if they needed another one.) But even from the customer stand point, what are you supposed to do, exactly?

“Excuse me. I’d really like to learn more about this promotion. Can I scan you?”

Nobody is going to do that. Nobody sane, anyway, which is presumably at least part of the demographic Walgreen’s hopes to reach. And I’ve never been clear who’s scanning these codes, anyway. While it’s true that there are some good organizations making use of QR codes, I’d really like to know who’s scanning their shampoo bottles because they’re dying to see a new commercial for Head and Shoulders.

But maybe I’m thinking about this all wrong. Maybe interactive t-shirts are a really good idea. There are already shirts that play video. Why not shirts that dispense candy and coupons? At a pet store, why not a ‘Pat the Bunny Shirt’ with real animal furs that allow you to test-pet an animal without having to buy? Employees could walk around with dog, cat, and rabbit fur (shaved humanely from forward-thinking animal volunteers) on their clothes, and customers could walk up and take the animals on a test run with no worries of emotionally connecting to an animal in need of adoption!

Bookstores could staple sample pages to t-shirts for customers wanting to browse. Music stores could put speakers in the place of shoulder pads on attractive looking blazers. Real estate agents could wear uniforms that emit that fresh-baked-cookie smell that is so appealing to prospective buyers. And enterprising young bloggers could have t-shirts that loudly announce “HE’S BEING SARCASTIC” any time we enter a room.

The nightmare blooms like a small black flower.

I’m waiting for a bus at the side of the road. A friend is with me, though I can’t see his face. It is very dark, and it is cold.

The bus pulls up and a driver steps off, but this is not the real driver. The man who steps off the bus has long hair and a grimy beard, and in his hand is a knife, and then the knife is moving and he’s killing my friend.

I can’t run. I can’t fight. I watch, frozen, as he stabs and stabs again. My friend is dead, and then the killer turns to me, and his knife is glinting and clean when the fear wakes me up.

In the darkness I move to check my phone, see what time it is, and in the dim cellular light I see something small and black crawl across my arm. I drop the phone and try to brush it off, then worry I’ve brushed it into the bed, start searching the sheet with the light of my phone, but there’s nothing there. I’m not sure there ever was.

And as I start to fall back asleep, a thought: a nightmare might escape. Somehow, between wakefulness and sleep, it might creep out through the crack. An infant nightmare would be small and blurred, indistinct, its boundaries still forming. It would be a feeling of pins, a darkness, and it would be quick. You might confuse it for something else – a black fly, or a spider, creeping across you arm.

You would think, as you fall back to sleep, that something now exists that should not, but it’s a silly thought born by nightmare, and you are so tired, and the bed is still warm, and soon you fall back asleep.

You fall back asleep while something small – like a black fly, or a spider – creeps away and begins to grow.

There’s a new chapter of Andrew Quit up as of Monday, but of course I’m a day late. I say ‘of course’ because I’m frankly a bit overdue for blogging, which leads me to today’s discussion of priorities.

I’m lucky enough to be working on a few things at the moment. I say ‘lucky’ because the worst part of writing is always that first blank page. Once you get something going, the momentum helps keep it going. Having a couple projects underway helps avoid all that.

The problem is that, even when I’m writing every day, I’m not getting enough done. Not nearly enough. Because life’s short and all that, but, more accurately, because life’s too short to spend hours laughing at cats on Reddit (EVEN THOUGH THEY ARE ADORABLY HILARIOUS.)

The upshot of all this is that I have, by necessity, started prioritizing my projects. It was never conscious, but here’s what I’ve noticed my priorities are when it comes to writing:

1. Paid projects
2. Projects with deadlines
3. A novel
4. Short stories
5. Shameless self-promotion (hi there!)

Believe me when I say that number 1 up there is not exactly a common thing. But this last week I’ve been working on a script for a show I’ll be announcing soon, and between that everything else, this blog has suffered. More than that, though, my feeling of productivity has suffered. As much fun as it’s been to write a script, it’s not the same as writing a novel, or a short story, or a blog. Each has its own flavor, its own character, its own muscle. And so the longer I go without writing a particular genre, the weaker those muscles get. It’s like cross-training, except you can smoke and drink and eat an entire bag of Cheet-os without feeling bad about yourself.

If the above are what my priorities are, here’s what I want them to be:

1. EVERYTHING

That’s write. I want to write everything every day. Which is kind of ridiculous, but, again, not as ridiculous as the amount of time I waste on things I don’t actually care about. So I think that’s one of the directions this blog is going – I’m going to see if I can get my ducks in a row. I’m going to see if I can prioritize everything ever all at once, and you get to watch the meltdown when I learn the hard way that it’s impossible.

I hope you’re looking forward to it as much as I am.