When I am not writing, I am obsessed with television and video games as much as I am with reading, because it’s a different style and structure in each medium and I want to learn them all.

My favorite writer on TV right now is Issa Rae, because “Insecure” hit Netflix and all of the sudden, I realized how brilliantly her pilot was constructed when it came together…. but not enough to keep you from clicking “Watch Next Episode.” Maybe the pilot could work as a standalone. Maybe.

But what I learned is that I wanted to keep learning from her, because I wanted to see another episode in which she built up a plot in one way, and then unravels the sweater so that you don’t see it coming. The way she does it is by using emotional intelligence gathering on herself and others, which is every bit as interesting to me as watching espionage, because in both stories, there are things that go horribly wrong by not having the right information and consequences cost a lot more than they can pay….. one literally, the other emotionally.

Issa Rae’s comedy and drama comes from gathering intelligence and it turns out that either her perceptions are completely wrong, or her friends’ are. She digs into the complexities of really trying to own yourself, because you become stronger when you can admit that mistakes have been made.

In every book, TV show, or video game, it’s the writers that draw me in. The second thing is the composers. Once I’m done with a video game because I’m tired of it, I still listen to the score a lot. For instance, the full orchestral version of the Fallout 3 score is as beautiful as “Galaxy News Radio” is entertaining.

Now that I’ve played the intro to Fallout 4, I’m glad that Galaxy News Radio has been replaced by a DJ that plays the same music, but he sounds like he doesn’t know anything about being a DJ. There are lines that are so funny that I’ve fallen over, and I’m impressed at how Bethesda has continued the details that made Fallout 3 great. The reason I’ve only played the intro is that I could tell quickly that it was a console interface that had been adapted for PC. I hated it because I had to learn it, when Skyrim and Fallout 3 had the same game game mechanics ( and I rearranged the keyboard so that it was the same as Skyrim and Fallout 3).

I also would hate to start a game that didn’t have console commands, because it’s so handy in Skyrim. The game is stable on its own with a few unofficial patches, but the more mods you add, the more problems the game has with starting quests correctly, etc.

I am also very, very picky and I will not stick around for bad writing. I either like no writing at all (like match three phone games), or huge, epic sagas. I will look up the intro to Oblivion on YouTube and put it at the end. It grabbed me even more than the opening to Skyrim, because here’s what happened.

Video games are programmers. Most programmers are neurodivergent. Most programmers are also used to extensive documentation. So, Patrick Stewart was hired to do only the introduction, and he showed up to a bigger dossier than he’d ever been given for any character in his life. He said it was delightful…. actually, he’s said it several times, and I appreciate it because it has promoted the game many times. It’s one of the best opening cinematics in any video game because of THAT VOICE. I’ll put it at the end.

I played Oblivion when it first came out and got bored with it pretty fast because I was older, and when you’re older and you’ve played video games since you were a kid in the 80s, the more complicated keystrokes/controllers seem like too many buttons. Believe me, they are. I haven’t even figured out how to favorite weapons in Skyrim for easy access, and it’s been 10 years.

However, I didn’t come across Skyrim on my own. My brother-in-law had an XBOX (I don’t remember whether he’s upgraded or not, but you don’t need to update hardware for that game. Anyway, I was watching him play it and I loved the story, but hated the controller. So, I got it for PC and found the game mechanics much easier. It’s fun to fight the battles, but at the same time, the main storyline has to be compelling for me to even finish the game, much less play it twice.

I will say that since I have played both Oblivion and Skyrim now, I liked the ending of Skyrim’s main storyline, but the ending of Oblivion’s A plot made me fall out of my desk chair…………. just like I did in the 90s with StarCraft (iykyk).

Speaking of which, when it came out (I don’t remember what year, but not recently), StarCraft Remastered was $10 on Blizzard.net, and it was the best $10 I’d spent for the last several years. It’s a great storyline, and it’s so damn quotable. I remembered the interplay between Jim and Sarah like it was yesterday. Sometimes I’ll still start up a campaign just for old time’s sake, like keeping an old NES.

In terms of being able to study structure in writing from books, I find that I get the most and the least out of Stephen King. That’s because we write in exactly the same style. We don’t start with a plot, we find it. His “On Writing” is one of the best books in the world, but I still can’t figure out how to let go and get the story out without thinking too much about it. That’s because I’m not the kind of writer that can think all the way to the end of a story, because I don’t know which direction I’m supposed to go after a while and it all becomes character study.

I want help, and I don’t. That’s because if someone helps me with the plot, then it’s not my story anymore. I want to be able to tell it the way I want to tell it. I’m talking about things like craft and research to have enough information about a subject to know which way it would go in a real situation.

For instance, I’ve been trying to figure out a sermon that makes sense comparing Jesus’s escape to Egypt as a toddler to a modern ex-fil op since “Argo” came out. It came to me during the scene when Tony explains to the higher ups at State that “the only way out of Tehran is through the airport. We send in a Moses…………….” If I hadn’t already been sitting in the theater I would have needed a chair, it hit me so hard. That being said, I’ve put it off and put it off because when I write spy jargon, it doesn’t sound real. I need to read enough declassified operations that would fit my theme, and the most interesting part is that I need recent ones the most because they’ve taken place in the Middle East. It can’t happen, though, so I’m combing through a lot from WWII to The Cold War, both through newspaper articles from the time and non-fiction books.

Here’s why I want to learn what really happens during an ex-fil and how it would go down in The Middle East. My father told me about 35 years ago (and he got it from Harry Emerson Fosdick, then pastor of Riverside Church in Manhattan) that “every good sermon begins in Jerusalem and ends in New York, or begins in New York and ends in Jerusalem.” It’s a code for being relevant. Start with the past and connect it to the present, or start with the present and tie it to the past. I have found that the latter works better, because when I start with the news or history, it is interesting, but the people are sitting there thinking, “how in the hell is she going to tie this all together?”

Then, when the light bulbs go off in their heads as to what dog you’re walking, you’re going to get one of three reactions. The first are smiles and excitement like they’ve gotten to the part in a novel where they can see the plot twist at the end. People have known these stories for years, just not necessarily new ideas on them unless their pastors are really digging into different interpretations/criticisms.

The second is tears, because sometimes the message really drives home something powerful going on in their own lives What I know for SureTM is that if you touch a nerve, people will say “it’s like you were only speaking to me.” “How did you know that’s exactly the message I needed to hear today?” In today’s lingo, I have no doubt that as I was shaking hands at the back, at least one person would say, “you didn’t have to attack me like that.”

It’s the point of church to begin with- to have community when those things come up for you…… which is why we had several atheist members at bridgeport and as far as I know, we still do. They don’t have to believe in God to believe in social justice.

The third reaction is raucous laughter, because I have to make sure everyone is still awake. If nothing else, I do two things to make sure even those people get something out of it……. the ones who are weaving in and out, lost in their own thoughts and then paying more attention because they didn’t know why everyone else was laughing….. I also make sure there’s a soundbite. I don’t leave it there, though. I don’t sum up scripture in, what is it for Sorkin? 11 words?

No, I find a way to have several illustrations that all tie back to that one line, so even if people can’t remember the entire sermon, they’ll definitely remember the tl;dr.

However, I haven’t been asked to preach in a very long time, so now my foray into an intelligence operation of Biblical proportions, it would just be a theological essay- as I am wont to do even while telling you about a million other things. I’m just not there enough to really tie a point together like I really want to, because the best way to knit a sweater in a story is detail, the immersive experience of playing a video game, reading a novel, or watching TV. The difference is that it’s all self-help based in reality, not “grandfather in the sky.” Divinity is too close for that.

I hope that, as in past entries, I’m making it clear that theology is one of my special interests, not that it has to be yours. I’ve said it before, but I accept everyone. I don’t care if you’re an atheist or not. I’m trying to impart lessons to an international audience, and Biblical references are something that connects a lot of the world. However, I don’t use Biblical illustrations for everything because it’s not the only way to use a world language as the world gets closer through the same cultural media. The internet and VPNs have changed the way we watch media, both here and abroad. I love setting my VPN to Canada or Australia when my browser will allow me to do that. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. It depends. It always works on my desktop, it sometimes works in the app.

And sometimes, those illustrations work better than Biblical ones because the Bible is ancient and pop culture is happening right now. There are so many sci-fi TV shows/movies that I think represent the same self-improvement I use in Christianity by quoting nearly anything. I wasn’t kidding when I said I quoted Snoop Dogg in a sermon. My friend Kina was going to be there, and she was in a band called “Twisted Whistle” that did an acoustic version of “Gin and Juice,” like The Gourds except in four part harmony.

So, I knew I could make her smile if I worked it into my sermon, and it just so happened that the lectionary couldn’t have been more perfect. The Psalm that day was particularly beautiful, so, I started with telling everyone that the Psalms were written like poetry, and, like all Biblical stories, have had music set to them for centuries because setting a tune to the words is what helped people remember them before they could write. Then, I said that I knew it worked, because I knew all the words to “Gin and Juice” because Kina had finally slowed it down enough I could understand the lyrics. I got a little closer to the mic, and I sang Kina’s bluegrass version of the very first line, which is the only one I *could* sing in church……..

Then, I told my mother’s favorite memory of her mother. In the end, she had very bad dementia. She could hardly remember a thing, but tears rolled down my mother’s face when a music therapist got her to sing “Jesus Loves Me.” My mother had never heard her mother sing before, but showing again that theology is imparted through music.

Then, I sang the first line of the Psalm from the Episcopal setting I’d learned years ago……. from memory.

So, after establishing how it was finally written down, I explained the context around why it was written the way it was written. No one will remember that part of it because it was just color commentary However, I’m going to bet that if you know any of the songs I’ve mentioned, you started singing them, too. I sang the first line of the Episcopal setting to close as well, because you can get people to remember things if you set them to music….. or so I’ve been told. 😉

The quadratic equation is “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.

What “Plotting by Notting” means is that I am taking in a fire hose amount of information when I look at other stories, no matter what form they’re in. Even when it looks like I’m not wiring and I’m just sitting there or gaming, I am still lost in my own head, trying to figure out how this or that plot device will work for me in the future. I have so much energy for writing, though, that the “notting” part takes me a while to det to because it’s so far down on the list of priorities.

The last author that really got me hooked in a way that I couldn’t let go until I’d finished the last in the series (at the time) was Diana Gabaldon. It took me three or four tries to get into Outlander, but by Dragonfly in Amber I was reading a thousand pages in two days. It was insane how fast I inhaled it.”Go Tell the Bees” is my least favorite because Gabaldon told us we’d get answers to questions we’d had since book one, and we didn’t……. and this is supposedly the last book. In a lot of ways, it was a “choose your own adventure” ending…. or, “Monty Python and Quest for the Holy Grail,” I think there’s more story to be told, but no one asked me. I’m sure that there’s fan fiction that addresses a lot of my questions, but I don’t want to wade through the D papers to find an A. I don’t have that kind of time.

What I’ve found with my “Words are Hard” fiction prompts is that I’m pretty good at short story ideas, but there comes a point quickly where I say, “this is as good as it gets.” I think this comes from my father’s preaching advice……. “when you run out of things to say, stop talking.”

I don’t spend time fleshing anything out more than that, because these are training exercises…. or at least, that’s how I see them. I am walking before I run….. this is “couch to 5K.”

Oh, and I almost forgot. Here’s the intro to Oblivion, with Patrick Stewart. As soon as he stops speaking, one of my favorite brass intros in any orchestral starts, called “Reign of the Septims.” This is the kind of music that makes me glad game soundtracks are available so I don’t have to play to enjoy the symphony and/or choir. Even if you don’t play video games, you’ll enjoy this: