Posts tagged podcasting
Tim Kail's Wrestling Journal, 2/15/25

Sometimes I'll be sitting calmly at my desk at work when I'll remember something particularly embarrassing from my past. A girl I tried to flirt with who wasn't having any of it. Something deplorable I said in middle school. That time I hurt a friend's feelings. 

Such memories are accompanied by the following thought, "I hate myself". Then there's a whole other category of dark thoughts related to mortality that pop up like Wack-A-Moles. I'll find myself with nothing to do after completing a task, and then the dread slips in, seducing me into a tiny spiral, "What does any of this mean?" 

For the past few weeks, I've been attempting to course correct this pattern of thought by "staying in gratitude", "reality testing", and "thought stoppage". Much to my surprise, the results have been positive. When such thoughts arise I say to them something like, "No thank you" or "I know what you're doing and I choose not to accept it". I feel like I'm getting to know myself better, because I know exactly what prompts the dark thoughts and I know their goal. When you know those things, it's harder for the thoughts to take shape in reality. They're actually fake-thoughts based in fear that only become real when you accept them as fact. But if you cut them off, you start to recognize the little game your lizard brain is playing.

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WOW - EP149 - 2017

For the second to last episode of 2017, Work of Wrestling podcast returns to the original three-part format of the show!

For the Lock-Up, I review everything in pro-wrestling that I've seen in 2017. I focus primarily on WWE, discussing some of the highs and the lows, what stood out to me as particularly memorable and what WWE can do better (from The Festival of Friendship to the squandering of Bayley).

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WOW - EP147 - Survivor Series 2017 Review

This year's Survivor Series fluctuated between "fine" and "fun". Nothing was terrible, but nothing was too memorable, and in-between existed a lot of legitimately good fun. 

The basic conceit of Raw and SmackDown facing off in competition would resonate more if the stakes were clearly outlined and involved more than "bragging rights".

We might know the motivations of the characters when they're outside the squared circle (i.e. Kurt Angle wants to keep his job, Shane McMahon wants SDLive to be more than the B-show), but we don't know what an actual win in the wrestling match itself signifies. The concept of "why" any of this is happening doesn't have an instantly accessible answer beyond, "Because!"

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My Message To the Pro-Wrestling Journalists & Podcasters Of The Future

At the end of 2016 my weekly podcast, The Work of Wrestling, will go on hiatus. During that hiatus I plan on restructuring the show so that, in the future, it will be distributed in a highly focused, seasonal format. I do not yet know how long that hiatus will be and I do not yet know how long those seasons will be, but I am excited about the prospect of reinvention and return.

While I still plan to continue writing about wrestling whenever the mood strikes, it feels like a good time to offer a "see you later" (rather than a goodbye) to The Pro-Wrestling Community, particularly to the younger writers & podcasters currently honing their crafts. You are the ones who will take up this mantle, push it into the 21st Century and beyond, and change the way people think about professional wrestling (for the better). Your passion, your ingenuity, and your progressive perspectives will be needed for our Community to ever grow up.

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WORK OF WRESTLING - EP79 - MISSY KEEN

While I spend most of my time these days writing arts criticism related to professional wrestling, at heart I'm a fiction-writer. That's what I've done my whole life, and that's what I'll continue to do long after I've written or said my last word on pro-wrestling. While I love the writing process itself, I am not enamored with the "literary world".

Readings, wine-tastings, workshops, conferences, literary-networking, talking about books, waiting six months for a response...all of it interests me a lot less than working on something and then sharing it directly with you free of charge. 

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