#to be clear by rough I mean like rough draft. prone to change. not bad

[reborrowing]

rooooough sketch of a potential “snail” owner?

lives alone in a witch’s garden on the edge of town. friends consist of whatever random bugs she encounters. terrible posture.

[weaverofthreads]

On the process of writing a novel...

Ok, so this began as a DM to a very dear friend who had said they were super excited to work on a novel of theirs that they'd abandoned for years, but they felt a bit lost when looking at the project again. They had "too many characters, too many intrigues" and they didn't "know how to create order" for all their ideas. They didn't know "what to keep, what to remove, what to change" and wanted to know if I had any tips.  

I began to reply in messages and then realised I needed to make a whole post out of it, so here it is! All 3k words of it. This is for you, darling! I hope it helps.

Things I found extremely helpful when planning my novel for NaNoWriMo this year, after also taking some time off from it.  

Most of this comes from Alicia Lidwina’s Four-Part article on her NaNoWriMo prep process, and setting up a writer’s notebook, for 2018. You can find the link to the first part here and I highly recommend you check out the whole series of articles for a more in-depth read. 

Content of this ‘essay’: 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials

Project 'Stats' & Overview  

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

Things to Consider, and Important Bullet Points

Get to Know Your Characters  

Chronological Order

Tangential and Preceding Events

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, Sub Plot Ideas  

List of Locations

Scenes

Chapter Outline

NaNo Plan

Additional Notes and Tips for Writing

Ok. Let's begin.  

First of all, I'm not saying that this is the only way to write or organise a novel. It can be tackled in as many ways as there are writers in the universe. This is just the method I used to get my ideas crystallised and organised. 

Preparation, Groundwork, and Materials.  

Take your preparation seriously. I bought a cheap but still nice A4 sketchbook with blank paper for maybe £2 at the local hobby store, and used it solely for the purposes of being my Novel Notebook. It doesn’t have to be a pretty, perfect, Aesthetic(TM) journal at all. Its function is to act as a route-guide through the process.  

I bought a cute sticker from Etsy and used it as the front cover design so that I liked the book and that it felt a little bit special, without being too intimidating to put a mark in. Then I left the very first page blank, and opened it to the first double page. On the left, I wrote ‘Contents’ and then moved on to the right and wrote ‘Project Stats and Overview’.  

I used a pen that was comfortable to write with, which for me was important. I’m a very tactile person, and having nice paper and pens (not necessarily fancy), made the process feel good.

Project Stats and Overview

This is the bare bones of the book, and includes details such as:

Project Working Title: (in my case it’s Weaver of Threads)

Targeted Wordcount: (to give yourself an idea of the scope, but it’s not necessary. For me it’s 50-100k)

Genre: (for me, fantasy)

Series: (will it be one book or more? For me, probably more than one, and at least two).  

Inspiration: (here you can jot down all sorts of things which inspire your world and your writing, and it can be anything. In my case, I began with “density and lore, and feeling of being grounded in a real world from LOTR and Tolkien.” And I went on to include other writers and novels in the fantasy genre, as well as elements from our own world, such as Mongolian herding communities and way of life, the history of the Persian Empire, and Renaissance Florence!).  

Project Timeline: Give yourself a structure, and be realistic. If you know you’re a slow writer who’s prone to distractions, be generous, but if you’re someone who responds well to short deadlines, tighten the time frame up a bit. I said “November 2020 - November 2021 for the whole manuscript” because I know I’m a procrastinator who gets dejected if they shoot past intense deadlines….

Editing Deadline: December 2021-January 2022. I know I can edit fairly quickly, so I made this one much shorter.  

Main Requirements Prior to Starting: What do you need to get sorted before you can get going? It could be purchasing a laptop or figuring out a magic system. In my case, it was the latter.  

What Happens in your novel?: This is not ‘what do your characters do?’, but what, in one sentence, actually happens in the book. For Fellowship of the Ring, you could say ‘a diverse group of people assemble and set off together with the goal of destroying the Ring’. LOADS more stuff actually takes place, obviously, but that’s probably the key thing that happens in that book. So, write the same thing for yours. I’m not going to tell you what happens in mine, because that would spoil it :).  

That took up the first A4 page of my writer’s notebook, and after that, I moved on to Mood and Key Imagery. 

Mood, Moodboards, and Key Imagery

On the left hand side of the page, I wrote down the words and concepts that sprang to mind when I thought of the novel itself. These were in no particular order or placement — just a random cloud of ideas in a rough column on the left hand side of the page — and they included: history, mystery, love, friendship, betrayal, nostalgic, homesick, sense of belonging, sense of place, searching, closeness, secrets… etc. etc.

Then on the right hand side, I wrote down five key words that I wanted to associate with the novel. These would form the ‘visual aesthetic’ in the background of my mind, and could be very easily expressed with a moodboard.

This same process (writing down words and creating a moodboard) could be achieved on a website like Pinterest. Take your time with it, find the right visual clues that really match the essence of your story, and create a final mood board with a limited number of panels that will be your novel’s ‘true north’ when it comes to feelings. If you're artistically inclined too, you could draw sketches of things relevant to your world too.  

While this stage is really important for solidifying the feeling and mood of the novel, don’t get stuck here and spend forever procrastinating on Pinterest or whatever. Once you’ve crystallised that ambiance, it’s time to move on. It’s also perfectly fine to come back to this at a later stage if you find yourself running out of inspiration or drifting a bit. Daydreaming, drawing, mood-board-ing are all great ways to work on your novel on days when you don’t feel like writing.

Things to Consider:

Alicia Lidwina asked herself some questions which helped me get past the ‘block’ that I’d created when thinking about the novel, and those were:

What scares me about this story? (in my case it was the scope of it - it was easy for me to get lost in over-thinking tiny details and get too overwhelmed to handle the big picture)

What will readers take away from it? (in my case, I hoped that it was a sense of friendship, people from desperate cultures finding common ground, and a sense of being grounded in a real, tangible world.

What is its selling point? (essentially, why would an agent/publisher choose yours over the next one in the pile?). Don’t be bashful about this. This is your notebook, so if you’re proud of a feature or aspect of the story, write it down. In my case, there is no ‘Big Bad come to destroy the world’, no Chosen One who is the only one who can stop it. There is an antagonist, but it’s on a personal scale, and that’s the selling point. It’s about two people going on a personal journey to uncover a lost piece of knowledge that’s arguably not all that world-changing on its own, but which means the world to them.  

What will be the three biggest issues in writing the first draft? Identify the three biggest roadblocks, and then take a bulldozer to them. For me, it was time management, getting mentally stuck, and the sheer darned effort of it becoming overwhelming!

Important Bullet Points  

These are five key facts about your novel, distilled from the sections above. They include: What’s at the heart of the story? How long is the story? What’s the narrative focus of the story? What are the maximum number of main characters? And the maximum number of supporting characters (this obviously doesn’t mean you can’t have other, less important characters too!)?  

Relationship between the two main characters is forefront

50-100k words

The novel’s focus is on the characters’ main goal (had to be more vague here so I didn't give it away)

2 main characters

3 supporting characters  

If you find you’ve got too many main characters (not necessarily a bad thing to have a lot of characters - look at A Song of Ice and Fire after all!), then figure out whose story you want to tell here. You can always write another story with other characters in a connected novel, or a sequel. You don’t have to tell everything all at the same time.  

Speaking of characters… 

…Get to Know Your Main Characters:  

Here you can write character sheets for each of your main characters and cast. There are hundreds of these templates available on the internet, asking questions like ‘how would your character react to [insert event]?’ etc. to get to know your character. If this isn’t your thing (it isn’t mine) then at least write down some useful information about them. Rough height and weight, hair, eye and skin colour, general temperament, and any other defining physical or mental traits. 

Next came the Chronological Order

This does not have to represent the final order of the novel’s structure, nor the order in which you write the manuscript, but you need to know what happened within the timeline, and when, in order to be really clear when you’re telling the story. You can write the manuscript out of order, and you can tell the story with flashbacks or in a different order, but you need to have the underlying chronology securely in place so that your writing makes sense and so that you don’t confuse yourself or the readers in the process.  

Preceding and Tangential Events

These don’t need to be in the novel itself, but it may be important to define the sequence of events that also led up to the moment where we pick up your story, and what is happening elsewhere so that you can be sure of these too. In my case, I defined the events that concerned one of the supporting characters’ lives so that I knew how and why they were at the point they are in the story. It relates directly to - and heavily influences - the events of the novel, so I needed to have this person’s history nailed down as well, even though I don't tell it all explicitly in the book (because that would be unnecessary and a bit dull).  

Basic Premise, Plot Definition, and Sub-Plot Ideas (plus writing a synopsis)

Alicia Lidwina defined the story premise helpfully with the following formula:

Story Premise = Main Character + Desire + Obstacle

Pick a different colour for each of these components, and write a short paragraph to explain them in the context of the novel. Alicia Lidwina used the following:

[Main Character] “Harry, an orphan who didn’t know that he’s a wizard, [Desire] got invited into Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and wanted to live his school life to its fullest, [Obstacle] but a certain Dark Lord who killed his parents is trying to rise into powers again and kill him in revenge.

Do this for your novel, and keep it really short.  

Plot Definition: This is even shorter than that! It’s a single sentence!! It’s most closely tied to the desire of the character, and lies at the heart of the story. It’s most likely a distilled version of the ‘what happens in the story’ from the Project Stats page, so check that to see what you wrote there.  

Sub Plot Ideas  

Five bullet points (no more) for things that are happening concurrently and which are related in some way to the main story. For me, Kae and Tomas are doing their research, so that’s the main theme, but beneath that there are a few other related incidents.

Writing a Synopsis - developed out of the points in this section, and includes:

Who the main character is

What the stakes are (the story premise is your guideline)

What the main plot line is

How the MC resolves the problem in the main plot line

How the book ends.

List of Locations  

Start with the main ones and add to it as you go on. Write a little bit of information about them so that you have something to refer back to. I also drew a big old map which I found very helpful and also really fun to do.

List of Scenes

It’s very important to map out every single scene that happens in the novel. Use your timeline to help with this, but remember a scene is not necessarily a chapter. You can have more than one scene within a chapter, but try not to have too many.  

I used small post-it notes (sticky notes) and wrote down things like “M joins K’s clan at the fire and K learns about magic” and “K studies at Citadel, intro to Citadel, magic, and characters” as separate scenes. Once you’ve written down everything that is going to happen (this will take some time! Get a drink and some snacks ready, and go slow), you can stick them into your notebook in the order you’d like to tell the story. Some chapters may have just one scene, while others may have two or three. I didn’t have more than two in any of my chapters, and actually ended up splitting some scenes that I’d made too vague in this section into more chapters. It doesn’t have to be set in stone, but it will form a road map.  

Additions and Notes:  

I left a section of the Scene Outline bit of the notebook blank for things to add in as I went along. I haven’t used it yet, but I might.  

Chapter Outline

I arranged the scenes into the chapters already by sticking them in order, but you could do a chapter outline separately after this. It’s up to you. 

NaNoWriMo plan:  

I did this back in October, and wrote down the main goal for nanoprep, which was to finish the background info. Breaking that down further, I listed - magic (how does it work exactly), geography, and politics. 

After that, it was just a case of writing the 1667 words a day. *spoilers, I got distracted and didn’t do NaNo this year* . What I should have done, was break it up into chunks and write down my goals so that I had something tangible to use as a road map, and I will be doing that now for the novel as I take it up again outside of NaNo. Having check boxes and manageable goals really works for me. Find what will work for you, and if it turns out not to, adapt!

Some final pointers and tips:

Set regular goals for yourself. Whether you work by saying ‘I’ll write 1000 words a day’ or ‘I’ll write something every day’, make a structure for yourself. If you slip and miss a day, week, or month (I didn’t meet NaNo this year because I chose to work on another project instead *slaps forehead*), don’t beat yourself up. Writing is a craft and it takes a long time and a lot of discipline to master a craft.  

Your first draft does not have to be good. At all. Your first draft is just words on paper. A first draft is the block of marble taken from the quarry, and subsequent edits and reworking is the process of carving the sculpture itself. The editing that is done by the publisher or the professional you employ to edit it for you later, is the final polishing. Don’t be demoralised if the block of marble seems very rough when it first lands in your studio. That’s ok!  

Take regular breaks. Writing is hard work, and most people can’t concentrate on something successfully for longer than 55 min's, and if you’re doing that, you’re already doing really well. Personally, I’m at 15-20 on a good day. Write in little sprints of ten minutes or so, and then get up and stretch, look out the window, maybe leave the room, come back in with a fresh approach.  

Stretch your hands, and wear wrist braces when you work. Seriously. I gave myself tendinitis on my first major project, and couldn’t use either hand properly for weeks. The ones I have are these, and they allow me to work safely for much longer.  

Keep hydrated. Have a bottle of water on the desk in front of you between your arms as you type and sip it, otherwise you’ll forget. 2 litres a day is usually recommended, but know your body and drink accordingly.  

Treat yourself. Whether that’s something as simple as a decadent hot chocolate after your first chapter/chunk/sprint is done, or a new notebook or a pen or that sticker set you wanted on Etsy or literally anything nice, reward yourself for the hard work you’ve put in, with tangible things you can look at or experience and say ‘I have that because I did the work’. It’ll help with your sense of achievement, especially if the project is a long one.  

Join a local writer’s group for feedback. With the current Covid-19 chaos, this is probably not possible right now, but getting constructive feedback on your work from someone who hasn’t been cocooned in the project in the way you are, but who respects you as a writer and wants to help you grow, will be invaluable. It’s too easy to exist in a little isolated bubble and think you’re doing ok, when in reality you could be creating bad habits which will be difficult to break later. By these, I mean things like ‘filler words’ you don’t realise you use, or other pit-falls it’s easy to tumble into when you can’t see the wood for the trees…It’s intimidating, and it might take some courage to work up and do, but I promise it’ll help you grow. You don’t have to do what the people suggest, but it’s great to get outside opinions all the same.

Submit work to writing competitions. This will help with showing agents and publishers later down the line that you’re not only committed, but hopefully talented, and will help you to push yourself. Use the world of your novel for the setting, and get to know it by writing short stories on the competition’s theme set there.  

Read. Read the writers you admire, and read them ‘actively’ - figure out exactly what it is about ‘that’ sentence that made you shiver, and use the same techniques in your own work (don’t plagiarise, obviously, but if it was alliteration that made the sentence work so well, use it yourself! Perhaps it was the metre of the line? Great, now you know a rhythm that will drive a sentence forward or slow it down etc.)

Enjoy it. If you’re not enjoying what you’re doing, it’ll show in the work. Take a step back if you start floundering, and ‘interview’ yourself about why it’s not fun any more. Refer back to the sections in the notebook that helped to clarify the plot/process, and see if you’ve wandered away from them. Make yourself answer questions like: ‘What is the main reason I don’t want to do this?’ ‘What is the character’s motivation?’ ‘Should I scrap this section?’ (don’t delete it, but cut and paste it into another ‘scraps’ document, and then start afresh from the last place you were happy with. Nothing is wasted - it all goes into building the world and getting to know the characters, even if it doesn’t get explicitly told in the finished product, so don’t be afraid to do that last bit).  

Good luck!

I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions or things you’d like to add to this, please feel free to send me an ask here on Tumblr.

If you’re a new writer hoping to get an agent or publisher, you might also find this post on ‘talking to a published author’ helpful or interesting.

If you would like to keep up to date with my own novel’s progress, you can follow me here on Tumblr, as well as on my writing Instagram @rnpeacock

[projectnaga]

a 21st anniversary, a 1st anniversary, and the state of the translation

Well, here we are. It’s the 14th of May, 2017. It’s the 21st anniversary of Genealogy of the Holy War’s original release, and the first anniversary of the release of its first complete translation.

God, it still feels so weird saying that. Complete. Not only did i actually do it, but it’s actually in the game and people are actually playing it now. i swear, it was only days ago that i was still puttering away at the earliest drafts in some dim corner of tumblr, just as a lark. There’s something surreal and heartwarming about seeing people play my work en masse. Thanks, people.

After the first release, we published five updates in relatively quick succession up until July, at which point we just.... stopped. And stopped. So what happened?

Full disclosure: it’s squarely my fault. Honestly, it’s getting kind of embarrassing. DDS has put in plenty of work since then and has a nice fat stack of bug fixes and assorted technical cleanups ready to roll out, and at this point i’m literally the only thing holding back the stack. i’ve still got a lot of work that i want to do on the script for the next iteration and i’m still chipping away at it at a very slow rate. i keep setting targets for finishing up, then promptly letting those targets whizz by. Hell, about a month ago i genuinely planned to have everything done in time for another anniversary release to be plausible, and as you can plainly see that did not pan out at all. It made sense up until February, being that university was still a thing i had to contend with, but now? Yikes.

What needs fixing, then? As far as i’m concerned, a hell of a lot. my first pass over the game was, in hindsight, not particularly careful. Working on Genealogy was very much a learning process - i’d certainly never done anything like it before - and it’s as much of a mishmash as you’d expect of a product of somebody whose expertise and translation philosophy slowly evolved throughout it. Before we launched i certainly made efforts to straighten things out and retranslate, relatively speaking, the worst parts at that point (hello, chapter 1) from scratch, but it really came down to the wire so a lot was missed. The current product certainly gets the job done, but i can’t help but wince at screenshots: all the flaws of my work are suddenly blaringly obvious to me much too late.

And you know what? Genealogy deserves better, and not by virtue of being a particularly special game or anything, but because anything i work on deserves better. If there’s only one thing i’m good at, it’s holding my own feet to the fire and demanding stupidly high standards of my work. At the risk of sounding like a pretentious wanker, i can’t say i fancy the idea of settling for anything short of clear, tonally and conceptually accurate encapsulations of the text and narrative, expressed in as natural and readable a manner as i can muster. i’d like to think i accomplished that with the majority of the game, but i can’t sit back until everything is up to scratch.

So, what’s coming up, then?

Tweaks to Genealogy

Fun fact: i am really, really not good at keeping notes on what needs changing and what has changed. It’s kind of hilarious in the saddest possible way. Every time i keep meaning to but then something catches my eye, then something else, and it’s all so fast that i don’t even think to record it and before long i’ve forgotten what i’ve just tweaked. Either way, some of the most prominent incoming changes (that i can actually recall) include:

Lex, i’m sorry to say, did not fare particularly well in my first pass; i did a pretty bad job with portraying his tone and nuances, including literally his first block of dialogue in the entire damn game. Thankfully he’s the only character who got substantially distorted like this, but fixing him up was a top priority. Just about every speaking role he has has been redone from scratch.

The majority of reworking is proving to be in the first generation chapters. Honestly, i’m not surprised; being the first part of the game i did left them much more prone to error than the rest of the game. There’s still a fair few second generation corrections, but still.

boy shitting howdy i used the word “geez” a lot and in hindsight it drives me up the wall. at the absolute minimum that’s been reduced heavily

Probably the biggest amount of legwork involved is tidying up the epilogue’s map narration grand finale, specifically ensuring that the individual parts actually cohere properly when the game combines them in any outcome. The way English grammar is structured makes this somewhat more difficult than it was in Japanese, and it’s probably the biggest reason why i’ve been slacking off. While we didn’t do the worst job in the world as things stand there are plenty of rough spots which i need to sand out. Thankfully the script itself is still sound for the most part, so it’s just a matter of presentation.

Fire Emblem: Thracia 776

It shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that we absolutely plan on doing Thracia 776 next. I’ve been planning on translating it for several years now, DDS has already done some preliminary hacking work on it (pictured above), and these days i have the fortune of having a lot of friends on hand with a vested interest in seeing Thracia done properly. It just makes sense, y’know?

As some people might know i started work on the script of Thracia a few years ago, but i’ve sort of let it slide for a while because of other commitments. Once i’m done sorting out Genealogy, i’m absolutely climbing back on that particular horse. i’d rather not make any hard time commitments for myself or anyone else since that would be a great way for things to end horribly, but considering i’m now much more experienced at this and have much more in the way of assistance and support in my favour, i get the feeling it’ll be a smoother project than Genealogy. At the very least, whenever we launch, the script will certainly be less bumpy than Genealogy’s was on this day a year ago.

Other stuff?

iunno. probably not, idk. we’ll see what happens

In conclusion

Really, in hindsight, i can’t believe how stupidly lucky i've been to have had the chance to work with such talented people on this. First, to have friends like amielleon and gringe who were willing to advise me on the translation and writing processes and, once or twice, step in to compensate for my shortcomings; then to work with hackers as talented as DDS and Azimuth, who as far as i’m concerned went through absolute hell to make my vision for the finished product a reality. Did i deserve all this? Probably not, but holy hell am i glad it all happened anyway.

okay maybe i should dial this back a bit

And if you’ve played it, thanks to you too! There’s still nothing quite like seeing my work being played by other people out in the wild (specifically, by people i don’t know who most likely weren’t coerced into playing it by my self-aggrandising shenanigans). If you haven’t played it, well, why not give it a try sometime? At the risk of overselling myself here, it’s a good translation for a good game.

[thesportssoundoff]

The Story Of GSP And The Golden Carrot

Joey

Feb 26th, 2017

As much as we want to avoid the acknowledgment, MMA is very much a sport. A flimsy one but one none the less.

As a sport, its fans are prone to extreme mood swings. An MMA fan can go from angry to desolate to joyous to overenthusiastic in a matter of minutes. Anecdotally, I follow a normally sane rational person on twitter who went from tweeting about the death of the UFC to mapping out how the company could have a 3 million buy PPV with GSP signing that day. Sports fans of all kinds are emotional to the point of irrationality BUT we all have something in common.

The golden carrot.

If you follow a bad sports team, the golden carrot is always the draft. "Hey if we keep sucking, we can get a nice draft spot and get some damn good players!" In 2010 as a miserable Knicks fan, the golden carrot was LeBron James. "Clear up enough capspace and we can get LeBron James and another max player! Let's just suck enough to find our way into the right spot!" LeBron didn't come----but we did get Amare Stoudamire and then it became a new golden carrot; the two max superstar player. Yankees fans like myself are prepared to sit through a potential max 80 win season in order to see our young phenoms progress in the minors and the majors. The golden carrot? The idea of finding a homegrown superstar to pair with an actual free agent superstar in 2018. Browns fans spend every November to April chasing the golden carrot of finally finding the right mix of players, coaches and front office people to be a competent credible long term force in the league.

Golden carrots.  

For MMA fans, the golden carrot is a bit harder to define. In 2011 when UFC business started to turn on its ass a little, the golden carrot was a game changing Fox deal. When fans were growing impatient in 2012, the golden carrot was the return of GSP and a bevy of Strikeforce additions. Throw in a genuine HW rivalry (look at the numbers Cain and JDS shows did either as headliners or in a main/co-main capacity) and you could see the carrots being dangled. In 2013, business was good but they still did enough wacky stuff ("Watch Chael really try to win the title this time!", "Anderson vs Jones or GSP if he wins one more fight!") to entice fans to be patient. 2014, UFC business was not as hot as 2013 and so the carrot was the promise that one day, the injury bug would be gone and big fights would return to the mix. 2015 proved to be the answer as those pushed back "big" fights did happen with some random assortment of "huh?" type fights to keep us preoccupied. 2016 was all about getting fans to the next Conor McGregor event with enough big flirting with names ("Hey Fedor might want back in!", "We're still talking to Brock!", "At any given moment, we'll have GSP back!") to keep the carrot going. We're always searching for the next new star or the same old faces in new places or something exotic and wacky to keep us excited. Golden carrots are essentially the lifeblood of MMA.

2017 started slowly for MMA and the UFC. The biggest event to this point is Chael Sonnen vs Tito Ortiz which did like 6,000 fans live and a $500K gate to go along with a pretty nice (but nowhere near 2016's highs) rating number. The UFC is sluggish out the gate with all sorts of issues. Orgs are suing orgs, union attempts are suing fighter associations, fighters are free agents but not free agents and WME-IMG finds itself getting lambasted from all sides. From big fights struggling to get made to fighters trying to flex their financial muscle (some deserved, some not so) to a new philosophy about letting fighters explore free agency, we're entering a very rough start to 2017. WME-IMG bought the UFC but perhaps underestimated how absolutely ravenous UFC fans can be, especially when things don't go their way. They bought a company without realizing that their fanbase can be a prickly group of folks. It hasn't been pretty for WME-IMG and it's probably going to continue to get worse before it gets better, especially as the UFC begins negotiating more and more television deals.

But lo and behold, they've found the power of the golden carrot.

In a span of a few days, WME-IMG and the UFC had a bevvy of news drop that seemed to momentarily erase all of those whiny pesky fan complaints. GSP was signed to a new deal guaranteeing the UFC a return of one of its top stars from yesteryear (and if we've learned anything it's that MMA fans love old people getting brain damage). Despite everybody fretting when GSP spoke openly about concerns over head injuries, we're happy he's back because star power is the only power we care about as fans. Word dropped that Cyborg was given a retroactive TUE, whatever the hell that entails, which means for people who enjoy her, we're going to get to see her fight for a title. Whether that title should exist in the first place is neither here nor there but hey! She's back. Then news dropped that Ronda Rousey retirement talk might be just a smidge premature as well. Jose Aldo vs Max Holloway was given the all important time and place, meaning in June we'll get to see what on paper may be a top 10 fight at featherweight. Conor McGregor, still on the outskirts with the company for whatever reason, may be buddying up with them again to put on  a fight or two. This Floyd Mayweather vs Conor McGregor fight which in a perfect world wouldn't even be sanctioned gains some traction. Nick Diaz starts suggesting he's ready to come back and fight as well.

50% of the stuff WME-IMG is going to try and put on probably won't happen. It doesn't matter though. MMA fans like to get built up, disappointed and then built up again. We're in this not just for what happens inside of the cage but also for the drama outside of it. Remember a large percentage of us are transported pro wrestling fans searching for the next KEWL thing to follow. We've stuck around---but you can't shake the pro wrestling gene out. The "casual" fan has their minds made up on what MMA is and it's UFC with Conor McGregor hijinks, not the Khabib vs Tony Ferguson five round masterpiece we'll get. This isn't out of bitterness either! It's business! The business of MMA is about golden carrots and whether we ever get the carrot is irrelevant. We'll just get new carrots to chase!

And if WME-IMG is figuring that out, maybe the sport will be a-okay after all.

[junker-town]

How do NBA players avoid injuries when they jump 4 feet in the air?

Why proper landing form can make the difference between a long career and one that fizzles out due to injury.

DALLAS — Dennis Smith Jr. is flying, several feet above the court. It’s the Dallas Mavericks season opener, a sold-out affair at the American Airlines Center, and the rookie point guard with volcanic hops has picked this moment in the second quarter to show off his 48-inch vertical leap.

Smith had just baited his defender, Atlanta’s Taurean Prince, into a screen, only to blow by him the opposite direction. He plants with his left foot, just inside the line that separates the second player from the third on free throw attempts, and rises with the ball in the right hand. He’s barely 12 minutes into his professional career, and he’s attempting a dunk that would be remembered for the rest of it.

Prince is behind Smith and another Hawk, John Collins, is ahead of him. They’re both sensational athletes whose max verticals measured at 36 and 38 inches, respectively, at the draft combine. The top one percent of the one percent, you could say in your best Bernie Sanders accent. All three rise up together like a Hollywood action section.

Smith first absorbs contact from Collins, and then Prince. The ball flies off one way as the baseline official calls a foul. Smith’s body twists at the waist, his torso parallel with the ground and his legs flailing beneath him. His left knee bends at a 45 degree angle, and he sinks back to the ground awkwardly.

Though Smith pops up instantly, he purposefully takes a foul to head to the locker room. The Mavericks call it an ankle injury, but Smith plays normal minutes in the second half.

“It was just a rough collision, or whatnot,” Smith says after the game. “I just took a quick breather.”

Smith misses the next two games with swelling on the same left knee reconstructed from ACL surgery his senior year of high school. The Mavericks have invested their future in Smith, and he’s a case study for a massive undertaking.

How do you make sure an explosive, franchise-changing talent stays that way?

We tend to view injuries as a cosmic dice roll, only talking about them after they’ve happened. It’s a backwards facing approach. Much more goes into injury prevention than what’s seen on the surface.

Dr. Jeff Taylor, an expert in biomechanics and injury prevention at High Point University, is trying to change that. Taylor has helped author 10 different studies on these topics in an effort to raise awareness in the public sphere.

Why? Because what happens before an injury, he said, is infinitely more important.

“If you start looking at rehabbing after an injury, it’s already too late,” he told SB Nation. “From an injury prevention standpoint, if we can prevent that initial injury, we’re going to prevent all of the financial and psychological and physical after-effects.”

“If you start looking at rehabbing after an injury, it’s already too late.”

The NBA increasingly understands injury prevention. Training staffs treat every ailment for cause nowadays, not just effect. A symptom like back tightness, for example, could actually be due to a hip problem.

“A preventative approach, in terms of training and preparation for a season, it’s what the NBA is now,” said seven-time NBA All-Star Grant Hill, now a Turner sports analyst. “So it’s a lot different than it was 20 years ago.”

Hill is the most famous example of an injury-prone player shedding his label. He played in just 47 games from age 28 to 31 due to severe ankle injuries, but had a career renaissance as a role player in Phoenix, one of the first training staffs to adopt holistic medical practices.

Injury prevention is now a “big science,” Mavericks trainer Casey Smith told me. Mavericks players all have biomechanical screenings that help find what Smith calls “movement inefficiencies.” These often point to asymmetric weaknesses in the body -- if one leg is stronger than the other, it can lead to debilitating physical problems. Athletes are particularly susceptible to repeated problems once they have a history.

“The biggest predictor of injury in the NBA is previous injury,” Smith said.

Dennis Smith Jr. is the Mavericks’ most important patient, and much of that work will happen behind the scenes. But laypeople like us need visible examples that Smith displays on the court to get a clue into the Mavericks’ larger plan.

You should have already noticed the most prominent one. It’s the way Smith lands.

Smith’s titanic clash against Atlanta is, in a sense, the worst-case scenario when a player jumps into the air. Every jump requires a landing, and every landing comes with physical force that must be distributed somewhere. The concern with incredible leapers like Smith? The higher up they go, the harder they must come down. It’s simple science.

Taylor, the doctor who has studied these situations, pointed out two clear dangers. First is when they land with their feet outside of their shoulders, or his “trunk.” The second is when the leg hits the ground relatively straight, rather than angled at the knee. Both actions put additional force directly on the joints.

“Something we certainly try to do with our athletes is teach them how to land,” Taylor said. “Land differently, land better, land more safely.”

Vince Carter regretted not learning this sooner. He didn’t really figure it out, and didn’t care to, until he was in his 30’s. “I’m paying for it now,” he told me.

“I would recommend learning how to land because, shoot, I came into the league in the era where if you fly like that, you were allowed to knock guys out of the air and there was no ejection,” Carter told SB Nation. “These guys have it good, to be honest with you. They can say what they want, but back then, you were trying to fly through the air and Alonzo Mourning and [Charles] Oakley could knock you out of the air. It is what it is, but you’d better learn how to fall.”

The best way for a player to realize the importance of falling properly is through bad experiences that expose poor technique.

By then, though, it’s usually too late. The most obvious case study is Derrick Rose.

Even when not bothered by defenders, Rose often landed with his legs too straight. His biomechanical tendencies caused his legs to flail in the air, too. Because Rose failed to sink into his landings, his joints absorbed far too much force.

Those examples originally showed up on By Any Means Basketball, a YouTube channel that analyzes potential causes of injury. The man behind it is Coleman Ayers, who runs an athletic performance training organization. He harped on another factor that can help explosive players avoid injuries: falling.

“Some players have something against falling down when they land,” Ayers said. “They land in an awkward position, because a lot of landings in the NBA, it’s such a high speed game, it’s impossible to land in a perfect position every time. When you land in a vulnerable position, a lot of players try to absorb that force in the wrong way, rather than falling down.”

Rose was one of those players, and his knees have paid for it. And one player who draws comparisons to Rose — a player who has even compared himself to Rose — is Dennis Smith Jr.

Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports

The good news for Mavericks fans: Smith’s mechanics bear few similarities to the former MVP. He generally lands correctly and on both feet when unhindered by opponents or contact. He’ll sometimes smooth his landing by taking two or three quick steps when he comes back to the ground, another natural way to reduce the force that comes with flying so high.

Take this dunk from Smith, his own variation on Rose’s reverse dunk above. Smith’s legs don’t flail like Rose’s did, and his legs are much less straight upon landing.

OK! http://pic.twitter.com/kqnmn0sIML

— Bobby Karalla (@bobbykaralla) July 8, 2017

Still, anytime a player flies that high, there are dangers.

“His landings are a little more severe,” Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle admitted.

No one can land perfectly every time. Grizzlies center Brandan Wright told SB Nation that he was taught how to land from an early age to take impact off his body. He has still suffered from various lower body injuries that have combined with other ailments to limit him to 40 games the past two years.

“I used to be, early in my career, a one-foot jumper, but for safety reasons I started jumping off two feet a lot more,” Wright said. “I can land a little bit stronger, I can take contact better in the air. I can prevent more injuries.”

He’s not the only player to change his style for health reasons. Clippers star Blake Griffin wrote an article on The Player’s Tribune titled “Why Ain’t He Dunkin?” explaining why went from about 200 dunks each of his first four seasons to just 68 last year. Minnesota point guard Jeff Teague, now 29, said he stopped dunking entirely.

Smith’s worst landings come from his most audacious dunk attempts, such as the ones at the Las Vegas Summer League and that show-stopping attempt in the regular-season opener. So far, the only consequence has been the two missed games, but every improper Smith landing adds additional stress and opens up the possibility for catastrophe.

Ayers and Taylor both suggested that the nature of the dunk attempts are Smith’s problem. While Smith declined to talk about his landings for this story, Mark Cuban told SB Nation that Smith is aware of the concerns about the way he lands.

This isn’t to suggest Smith should stop dunking, but not everything can be dunked. Dallas has every incentive to keep its young, future star healthy for the next decade, whatever it takes.

“He's been working extremely hard to do a lot of things with our guys, with balance, with core, with all those things,” Carlisle said. “All those things help strengthen the joints. He's been doing that stuff from day one since he got here. He's made great strides in every area. Look, we've got to watch it, and he's got to keep working.”

The science of injury prevention is just that -- preventative. No one can land perfectly every time, and it isn’t a panacea for violent collisions several feet in the air, like Smith’s aerobatics in the season opener.

Eight teams passed on Smith in the draft, and the possibility of serious injury in the future may explain why. The Mavericks benefitted from those teams’ decisions, because Smith is the kind of player that can shepherd this franchise into a post-Dirk Nowitzki era.

But that will only happen if his body holds up, something the Mavericks and Smith are working towards every day.

“Can we prevent every injury? No,” Taylor said. “But the non-contact injuries certainly can be prevented.”