Author: Benjamin

“But you can’t do that,” I said to myself, nixing whatever rising enthusiasm my idea-brain had just come up with. “It’s already after nine, and you still have to publish for today.”

I was driving west-ish on US6 away from Keystone back toward Silverthorne. The few-days-from-full waxing moon hovered high above the Ten Mile Range ahead-left. Wind whistled in through the open sunroof. In the cool mountain air, today’s blast-furnace Front Range felt so distant as to have become like a fading dream, rather than my lived reality of just a few hours ago.

What will I write about? I had no idea. Something will come before midnight. Something always does.

The air was heavy with firesmoke, and the moon illuminated the sky into a glowing blue-silver, and the mountains stood dark and distinct below. I came around a bend and Lake Dillon spread out in front of me, its planar expanse surrounded and contained within the bowl-like not-flat of the in-every-directions mountains. Under the moon the water shimmered silver like mercury.

What will I write about? Surely I can blow the dust off my fingertips and tap out on the keys some simulacrum of that shivery quiet sense of magic that even amongst the recent challenges of my life I could not help but feel.

Whispered promises from an estranged lover may not ring against your hardened heart, but still the gentle breath across your ear makes waves in your soul.

The third set of the Dominika Cibulkova-Andrea Petkovic match was the day-one highlight and, in some ways, lowlight for me.

Cibulkova and Petkovic are among my favorite players on the women’s tour. I like Cibulkova because she’s so damn feisty, bouncing around the court the way she does, and I’ve followed Petkovic ever since my first day at the U.S. Open last summer, when I walked by Court 6 on my way to elsewhere and saw Petkovic playing Kristina Kucova, the first professional match I’d seen up close, and just got engrossed. I’d never seen anything like it. They were just so damn fast and hit the ball so damn hard–and I realized that I was watching the approximately 40th-ranked player in the world play the approximately 70th, that what I was seeing was nothing compared to the quality of the really top players. But still, being able to sit two rows from the court made the experience too visceral to walk away from. (And, in the interest of full disclosure, Petkovic’s broad shoulders and glorious legs also helped hold my attention.)

So anyway. Cibulkova and Petkovic split the first two sets. The third set quickly became riveting though, by the standards of what normally constitutes good tennis, pretty goddamn dreadful: they played 16 games in the set and, between them, managed to hold serve three times. That’s … pretty horrible. Entertaining in that damn near every point started to the returner’s advantage, but horrible nonetheless.

There came a point when I began to wonder if we were watching some kind of weird negative-image replay of the hideous Isner-Mahut match from a few years ago that John Isner finally won 70-68. I mean, how long could this possibly go on? Usually in tennis the server has a major advantage. Given that serving requires such drive from the legs, it became easy to imagine that the serving here would get worse and worse and worse and that the returner’s advantage would grow and grow and grow.

But alas for poor Andrea, it wasn’t to be. Finally, in the sixteenth game of the set, Cibulkova figured out how to actually hold serve, and Petkovic went out.

Wimbledon started today. Over the past week, I was like a kid waiting for Christmas. This morning I woke up before 6am–coverage started at 5am MDT–and, just like Christmas, there was no going back to sleep. I got up and turned on the TV. Wimbledon. Fuck yeah.

Wimbledon is my favorite. Wimbledon has always been my favorite. I like the Australian, I’ve come around on the French, the U.S. Open is great, but Wimbledon is the one that feels really special to me. The conservatism of British mores can be pretty stupid sometimes, but the way it manifests at Wimbledon feels pleasant and soothing and elegant. They take away as many things as possible that might distract from the tennis. There are no on-court ads. Everyone wears white. And then they put them on those beautiful grass courts. It’s wonderful.

(When I was a little kid and Wimbledon would roll around, I used to take tennis balls out onto the lawn and try to bounce them, and of course they didn’t bounce, the lawn around my house being quite a different thing from whatever magic it takes to create grass tennis courts. I remember being perplexed and mystified that it was even possible to create a grass playing surface hard enough and consistent enough that you could play tennis on it. I still feel that way.)

Good question, and yes it is.

Free Refills means at least seven things:

1. It all started with a great idea.

2. Nothing beats anice cold beverage. (Is the break there between “a” and “nice” or “an” and “ice?” Here at Free Refills, we’re pretty sure it’s both, so we do neither.)

3. This Is Not A Blog, and these are not blogposts. They’re not even pieces. They are Refills. Enjoy.

4. The idea of charging for content on a per-unit basis is deeply culturally ingrained, but in a world in which it’s possible to copy digital content infinitely with no loss of quality, charging per-unit is a little weird, don’t you think? There’s got to be a better way.

5. The better way is to support the writer directly, so that s/he can continue to create without fetter. If the creator can create without fetter or fear, then giving away the work in digital form is not just doable, it’s best. Then everyone can get a Free Refill for their Cup of Delight.

6. The dominant money-making model in the digital world is supporting your content with advertising. But here on Free Refills, you’ll won’t see any advertising, ever. Advertising is a poison, and I won’t be a part of it. (Should the opportunity ever arise, I’ll take sponsorship, which is different.)

7. In a delightful coincidence that I was unaware of when I first conceived of what I was going to do with my website, free refills describes the ultimate day-on-the-mountain experience in skiing and snowboarding. In mountain vernacular, free refills means the rare and joyous occasion when it is dumping snow so hard that your tracks from your previous run are filled in by your next run. When that happens, it is pretty much the best thing in the entire world.

Free refills of any and every sort make the world a better place.

Some of what I was saying last week about Fruition (see here and here) means that taking the time to complete an actual piece every day may not be the best use of my time. Nevertheless, I’m intending to keep the promise of “something goes up on Free Refills every weekday.” I’m still exploring what that means. I’m considering publishing excerpts direct from the zero drafts, excerpts that will ultimately point to finished longer-form pieces. I like the idea, but I’m not sure how edifying that would be for a reader, nor how useful a practice it would be for me. (I’m not saying that it wouldn’t be edifying/useful, just that I’m not sure.)

Good that you asked.

What you see here on Free Refills is the fruit of my own practice of moving through blocks. Like many writers, I have struggled with perfectionism–sometimes to a crippling degree–and so back in the spring of 2015, I made my main project the work you see here. For the Free Refills project, I promised I would publish something here every weekday. With that promise, perfectionism ceased to be an option. And I’ve kept that promise ever since.

My name is Benjamin Lanin, but most people call me Ben. I’m a professional writer. I write books and long-form essays, because long-form writing is what I most like to read, but I also write whatever someone is willing to pay me for, because I’m a professional, and I do what it takes to make “professional” true.

I write on a variety of topics. Recently, I’ve written a lot about energy flow in the body, my practices as a writer, and the imbalances that are so clearly afflicting our society. I’ve also written a lot about tennis. I like tennis.

In addition to writing, I also coach (writers and otherwise), specializing in freeing up blocked energy. Over the years, I’ve developed (or stolen) some very specific techniques for dealing with those blocks. If you’re blocked, I can probably help.

What you see here on Free Refills is, substantially, the fruit of my own practice as I’ve learned to deal with and move through blocks.

When I started coaching Jerry on his writing, I taught him zero-drafting, and I gave the particular advice not to sweat the beginning too much. Writing is a body practice, I told him. The simple act of physically beginning to write will move you toward where you need to go. I said, “Just write, ‘You have to begin somewhere, so let’s start here,’ or something, and see what follows.”

When he handed me the first pages of his first zero draft, the first words were, “Let’s start here.” I laughed. Seeing them written out, I was struck by how delightfully inviting they are, and how incantatory as well. They move things forward.

You have to start somewhere.

Let’s start here.

(For a little background on what I mean by fruition, please see my Free Refills from Tuesday and Wednesday.)

Jerry and I started publishing pieces for the Training Tiger Woods project on the autumn equinox of 2015. (Energetically, probably more a Planting-a-Seed action than a Harvesting action, but an auspicious day for beginning nonetheless.) We’ve now published seven seasons of work here.

The project started as a place to explore using energy techniques to speed learning of and to more completely achieve our potentials within the realm of sports. Then, with the election and the massive turmoil that followed, we felt called to write about how to bring those same energy techniques to bear to adapt to and survive and perhaps ultimately begin to change the toxic energy that’s permeating our society.

The pieces I wrote for Tuesday and Wednesday call for a different relationship with our work. It has always been our goal to turn the work we were doing into books, and now is the time to turn our attention fully to that goal. Blogging the exploring and experimenting we’ve done so far has been a useful practice, and that exploring and experimenting will doubtless continue, but the act of preparing and readying a piece for publication once a week is now distracting from steady work that writing a book requires, where it’s best to write without immediate concern for putting something out there. So in order to best bring these works to fruition, we’re going to stop publishing here on any kind of a regular schedule. When something comes up in the writing that requests that we just get it out there, or when something interesting happens in our continued explorations, we’ll publish here. So please check back from time to time.

In the meantime, thank for you reading, and we hope you’ll be interested in our work as it comes to Fruition.

The goal with Free Refills has always been to have enough material here that it would support my goal of earning a full and vibrant living via my writing. But in what way? I’ve never really been able to fully articulate it.

I have long insisted that Free Refills is not a blog. So what is it? Today marks the 600th piece I’ve put up as part of the Free Refills project. I think it’s fair to call Free Refills a portfolio of my work. It is also proof (to myself, and to the world) that I continue to show up: I have earned, and every day continue to earn, the right to call myself a working writer.

Free Refills should give readers sense of what I do, what I’m capable of, and, I hope, a sense of what they’d like to see from me in the future. All 600 pieces I’ve written so far have been written at my own volition. But I would prefer to give my readers what interests them, in exchange for the financial support to continue doing so.