We Now Return You To Your Originally Scheduled Programming

I may be one of the few diehard Game of Thrones fans who hated Season 7.  Pretty much everything about it felt wrong to me.  The pacing of the story was way off.  The Winterfell storyline made no sense, even when it was resolved in the finale.  Major characters disappeared for long periods of time while minor characters got a lot of screen time.  If this season ran for 10 episodes like seasons past, perhaps that wouldn't be a problem, but with only 7 episodes to work with, it felt like precious time was being wasted.  Perhaps the biggest issue I had with season 7 was that it veered away from the one element that made Game of Thrones different from any other show on television: the fear that a character you cared about might die.  Did I think Jamie or Daenerys might die during their clash?  No.  Did I think Tormund or Jon Snow was going to perish when they took on the Army of the Dead?  No.  There was only one "heartbreaking" death during season 7 and I wasn't even sure what that character's name was until I read it the next day.  To me, season 7 was all about making the fans happy.  Let's bring two major characters together and have them flirt all season long even though we know they're related!  Let's have the intelligent characters suddenly know nothing and get outsmarted by the characters who haven't proven to be the brightest bulbs!  Let's give Ed Sheeran an extended scene on the show!

My gut reaction was to blame the two guys who write the show for TV.  If they weren't so focused on their next project, maybe they would spend the proper time fleshing out the story the way it should be done.  The more I thought it about though, the more I realized they were doing the best with what they had to work with.  For 5 seasons, they could use the books in the "A Song of Ice and Fire" series to help write the shows.  For season 6, they could tie up the loose ends from what happened at the end of the last book.  They even had sample chapters from the upcoming book to help guide them.  When it came to season 7, all they had were some broad conversations with the author of the series.  They got a general sense of how the rest of this journey was supposed to go and they wrote seasons 7 and 8 based on that information.  It wasn't going to play out exactly like it did in the books.  It might not even be all that close to George R. R. Martin's original vision.  But was that their fault?

I would say no.  It has been 6 years since the fifth book in the series came out.  The release of that book roughly coincided with the end of its first season on TV.  The show was a massive hit, especially with the mind-blowing, unexpected way that it concluded.  The actors on the show went from relatively unknown to huge stars.  And the genius behind this material?  He might not have shown up on your TV screen when you tuned into HBO every Sunday night, but he became a ginormous star in his own right.  Everyone wanted to hear from George R. R. Martin when Comic-Con rolled around.  And more often than not, he was there.  The spotlight shining on him was well-deserved.  But while he was soaking in all of this fame, he seemed to forget to do one thing: keep writing.

Why the Game of Thrones review in the middle of my Crossfit blog?  Because I have clearly been guilty of pulling a George R. R. Martin.  This blog obviously pales in comparison to A Song of Ice and Fire and I haven't been living it up at Comic-Con, but I have been guilty of not putting out new material.  I was already a solid 5 weeks behind on this blog before I came to the conclusion that I needed to take a break.  It wasn't that I didn't want to write.  It was more of a decision that other things in my life needed to be a higher priority.  There were things on the home front that needed to be taken care of.  Jenn's company underwent a merger and we had to figure out how that would play out.  I needed to spend time reconfiguring our investment strategy.  We had family issues to deal with after my uncle and Jenn's grandmother died within a week of each other.  I put together a preliminary draft of our will.  That's the more serious stuff.  On the lighter side, Jenn and I apparently traveled a lot.  (In all honesty, it didn't seem to me like we were traveling a lot, but almost everyone I've run into recently has mentioned all of the trips I've taken, so it seems like there's a good chance I've been oblivious to how much I've been away from home.)

Add it all up and I am now 3 months behind on this blog.  How could I possibly catch up on that much writing?  Well, the situation isn't nearly as dire as you might think.  Back when I started falling behind on this blog, I would jot down notes on the workouts I had completed.  So it's not like I have to think back 3 months and try to recall what happened during those WODs.  I have a small cheat sheet for each one.  When I completed all of the tasks that I decided were a higher priority over the summer, I developed a plan for getting back on track with this blog.  I wasn't going to stress myself day after day after day trying to catch up.  I decided instead to do a rough draft of each of the posts and save them in a Word document.  They all need some sprucing up, but the transition from what I have now to the published product will take much less time than if I was sitting at my laptop everyday trying to burrow through one completely fresh post after another.

With that in mind, my long-term plan for getting current on the blog goes like this:

• Each day I will try to put out two posts
• At this moment, I am 38 posts behind (yikes!), so if all goes well, I'll be current around the time that you get ready to carve into your Thanksgiving turkey
• I'll try to put out new posts on weekends.  I'll try to put them out on days when I'm out of town.  Blogger allows me the opportunity to set a time for when they will be published, so if everything goes like I hope, I'll be able to get ahead on my two-a-days and have them scheduled to publish when I would like.

I can't promise that everything will go as I would like because as readers of this blog know, my plans have a way of fizzling out.  At least that's true when it comes to the plans I make inside the gym.  I also may have already lost both of my readers, so this plan could be moot.  But when I began writing this blog, I wasn't expecting to have any loyal readers at all, so nothing has really changed.  If the only people to click on this blog are the tried and true folks stumbling across it while looking for Russian porn on the internet, I'll take that as a win.

So without further ado, we now return you to your originally scheduled programming...