Let’s face it, you’re capable of typing a darn good email. You can craft an effective communique, or to assemble a commanding presentation, or to close a sale.

No, instead, I have found my greatest challenge is plain and simple: the tough days. I don’t know about you, but on my best days, I notice my productivity is stronger for obvious reasons. I am rested. I am clear-headed. I am energized. These are good days. They are too rare.

It isn’t that professionals in relationship-focused roles can’t afford to have tough days. We can afford to strive for more good days. To everyone’s benefit, right?

So, to be more efficient on the job, more often, one must also be efficient at recharging in life.

How do we achieve this?

I am convinced I became the person I am today because my bedroom window faced east.

Some people, hippie people, believe their children are born under a certain star and become senators, or the kid trips into a vat of radioactive violins and becomes musician, and that that is how destiny works. They’re valid interpretations, but my theory is grounded in reality.

It isn’t a superpower, but it is a mythology. My parents moved my family to Vermont when I was three and my bedroom windows faced east. Straight up our long driveway, toward the mountains, and toward the rising sun. As far as I’m concerned that was when I was born, so I’m theoretically twenty-seven, through revised mathematics.

You want your characters to elicit a reaction. Violence, disgust, joy, anger, they need to summon something in your guts. Perhaps they carry an identifiable trait. Perhaps they remind you of somebody, or some time, or some place.

They MUST be exceptional. Why else would we want to read about them then? They cannot just be a person in an interesting place. That is not enough to engage. It will leave the reader skipping dialog and going straight for the setting. Then they are left wondering.

Some stories can skate by on a unique setting, but the magic trick is that a unique setting just becomes the best character, so you've sort of succeeded in that case, but not well.

Take, for example, a story I wrote about a prayer-server in a world where middle management administers divine retribution to those who pray for it. The most important thing about that story was that Heaven had a backlog and was behind on its work.

The character was a nothing. He was a tour bus. Most of the interesting writing was going on elsewhere.

You need an exceptional character that can contest against an environment, exceptional or otherwise.

Let's try to flesh out this failed character.

Destiny is a $60 bookshelf.

Part 1: Why Is It So Hard To Reviews Destiny?

Bad marketing can turn insecure people into jerks.

You've seen folks of that sort, their words weed-whacker buzzing and thrashing all about the Internet, summoning the jargon they've been taught to justify a purchase. Good jargon indicates good marketing and good long-tail marketing contains language to turn customers into delighted evangelists. Ideally, these people promote a product long after the purchase. Once the person has bought the item, and experienced it, they’ll want to talk about its worth beyond the dollar amount applied to it. It doesn't matter if it's a $1000 iPhone 6 pre-order or a $60 copy of Destiny. When certain people buy things, they’re going to have to talk themselves into the purchase again and again.

During the PS4 Destiny beta, I found myself falling into hours-long hysterical fits while creating dramatic, epic haircuts and unlovable face in the game's character creator.

I encourage you to study my full Vanilla Destiny review here and speculation on rumors surrounding the Rise of Iron expansion here.

You can also discover Ghost Little's Destiny-inspired Suns Go Dark, part of our free books collection.

You can enjoy the character creator's greatest hits below:

Marvel Cinematic Universe’s modern era of storytelling continuity welcomes everybody to the dork-engineered popular culture.

I remember walking out of a podunk two-screen theater in May, 2008, and it was still cold. My ego was glowing and my friend and I were congratulating each other. We had previously relished in the noir film Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, starring Robert Downey Jr. as an wit-soaked con man who was clawing and self-narrating his way out of the gutter of small-time New York crookery into LA’s equally-loathly private investigation scenery. Seeing Downey as a maximum-level skuzzball in that film armed my friend and I with insider knowledge that not many knew—he was visionary casting as Tony Stark, aka Iron Man.

We hadn't really realized this was the start of the shared universe craze.

“Why don’t you just turn it off?” Rebecca Hall’s character, Evelyn, chides during TRANSCENDENCE’s opening.

part i | TRANSCENDENCE is full of bad ideas

What high school sophomore scribbled this story, eyes leering in bored desperation at the stains on the classroom ceiling, searching for a clear thought as his math and home-ec classes ooze and BLORP together? Truly, if a high school sophomore conceived of the story of a man that dies and is reborn again as a godlike computer through his wife’s pants-on, lights-on, Facetime-on-iPad love-facsimile, then it was most certainly proof-written by his gluten-free former-missionary Earth Sciences teacher.

"The last of his people comes to a strange land."

part i | Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge is a suicide note

As a reminder, only sociopaths take full, physical glee in videogame violence.

Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor's Edge positions the series' main character, Ryu Hayabusa, as an outdated, barbaric relic. All he does is slaughter. He's kept his face hidden. He hardly talks. His favorite weapon is a sword, one sharp enough to hack off limbs. You can't track him. His agility is inhuman. Other global forces from outside Japan whisper tall tales about the ninja and just how many people he has killed in his life. The actions of a videogame character are being dragged into a realer light—what, did you think nobody would notice when you just spent two full games leaping over rooftops, summoning demons to modern cities, killing the demons, beheading people, and then vanishing off into the secluded hills of Japan. It's like, man, Japan is full of psychos, isn't it?

In games and in real life, I mean. Right? There is a western videogame producer somewhere snorting over his early-morning Monster Energy Drink, wondering who makes a game where your avatar is a masked, remorseless bladestorm in this day and age? When will the Japanese learn that that isn't what videogames are about anymore?

Ryu the super-ninja is outdated.

It was not difficult to decide on the best games on the PlayStation 3.

The first test was to try to remember which ones I really liked.

The second test was to try to write about them. Some couldn't summon strong memories. Others were pungent with feeling, really slathered in emotion, you know? The PS3 was a strong system. If somebody asked me which games they should buy for it. This is the list.

These are the essential PS3 games.

The Best PS3 Games of the Generation (Alphabetical)

BAYONETTA

 — Bayonetta is your first crush ever.

Forget about Bayonetta's narrative. Bayonetta herself certainly has. She is impossibly-proportioned, seriously, her giraffe-neck legs are about twice the size of the rest of her torso, for some reason, the artists chose to draw her like those oddly-figured visualizations fashionistas pencil together to show how the swooshing, dramatic clothing is appearing in their minds, and it isn't until they actually try to put thread to cloth that people are usually people-shaped, not Bayonetta-shaped.

With the two Hobbit movies, we, the people that bother to think, and wonder, and hope for good movies set in worlds other than our own, are living the life. We are not living well, though.

The movies are so long. They serve so many masters, standing trial accused of Being A Chopped-Up Hobbit Movie and three charges of Being A Lord Of The Rings Movie. There are a lot of places for them to go wrong and send out ripples of wrong across all of that real estate.

Two questions arise: