Slacking in the New Year
I started out 2010 with a renewed vow to try to do all the various hobbies that I have had for years and years, despite the knowledge that each of them constitutes a full career unto themselves. One extra thing is I’m going to try to blog each Sunday about the week’s thoughts and such.
Sticking with my “personal development” schedule was illustrative of a few things. Mainly, I found that the last task dropped off simply because by that point I was too mentally exhausted to do it. There’s a lot of pretty engaged creative tasks in my schedule, and switching from “intensely thinking about writing fiction” to “intensely thinking about designing hermetic self-training programs” to, say, reading non-fiction that needs thought, all in the space of five hours, really kind of did me in. I’m not sure if this is something I need to get used to, or I’m pushing myself too hard or what. I am leaning toward the latter. It’s a lot. Maybe I should do one thing once a day, for longer. Still thinking about it.
December and January have had a lot of time off, and when tired broke things down, I admit that this week consisted of a lot of shooting other people (and getting shot myself) on Second Life. Hella fun first person shooting stuff and goofing off. Sue me. However, I did get some work in on Gaslit. I am about to join my dear little steampunky sim to the massive Caledon continent, by invitation, and am in a mad effort to get the place into shape for that. I finally found my Photoshop master file for the textures, added some more, created a new set for another section of the city, and away we go. It’s coming along alright, in that it’s growing organically, but I’m itching to work on the steampunky details. The furnaces and steam and pipes and such necessarily come after the infrastructure is in, so right now it looks city-like but not especially steampunky.
I’m also having to keep an eye on my bandwidth. The upgrade to 8Mb (which in Kazakh is really 2Mb but it’s better) took effect this month, and I have 20GB download a month before things start costing about USD$2 per 100MB beyond that. Second Life hogs a huge amount. My monitoring shows about 100MB for an hour-long battle, less if i’m just building. I figure 500MB a day will ration it out fair enough.Ah, for the joys of unlimited traffic.
I have discovered that I have a caiffiene addiction. This has happily coincided with the arrival of my personal Keurig at the office, so now I have solid sources of good coffee. The difference between no or little coffee and reasonable amounts of coffee on my mood and productivity is pretty amazing. With good joe, I’m awake and have a lot of energy. Without, I have headaches and feel like blah. I have no pride here. I like my coffee. And I only drink max 5 cups a day.
Get used to this rambling, for this is likely what summary of weeks will be.
Gear Porn
This is a shot of the collection of “gear” I carry on trips with me. It all fits in a bag about the size of a football. There is:
Kensington portable power supply (wall plug, car adaptor, plane epower adaptor, USB extender, PowerTips for 5 different laptops, iPods and Blackberry, looong cord for it), USB hub with power connector, UX90PS port extender, straight through ethernet, plug extender, iPod cable, FM transmitter, camera battery charger, microSD-to-USB adaptor, USB-to-PS/2 adaptor, spare batteries, battery power pack for USB, USB extension cable, mini-USB-to-regular cable, Datexx UltraBattery with USB charging cable, USB wifi adaptor, Bluetooth USB adaptor, two USB RJ-45 ethernet adaptors, 4 port USB hub (possibly redundant, but smaller than the big one), multi-card reader (CF, microSD, MS/MS Pro, SD/MMC, MS Duo, miniSD, SM, xD, MD), portable door alarm, 1 GB USB stick, wall-to-USB charger (output: 5V), car-to-USB adaptor, Kensington USB voltage booster (turns 5V into 6V) with Nokia usb charging tip, bag of plugs (airline headphone adaptor, headphone splitter, all the PowerTips.
I think all it lacks is a handcrank power source or perhaps a solar panel. But neither of those would fit into the bag, as it is now.
NaNo ’08: pwned
Well, somewhere off the coast of Maine on a flight to Brussels, I crossed the 50,000 words mark early on November 30th, and validated it when I got to my hotel on the other end.
My wordcount graph shows the big push there at the end. Even holding back a cold, I managed to break personal records of daily wordcount, logging 6600 on Friday the 28th! I didn’t really keep track of how long that took me, though guess it at about 4-5 hours.
And now… the editing. This is a publishable story! A hearty congrats to everyone who participated in NaNoWriMo this year!
Devoting Will
It’s time that I wrote a bit, as I’m horribly behind blogging. I won’t play catchup, but there have been some developments in the past month that I feel I need to explore.
First, I am taking another stab at the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again. I’ve doggedly tried to participate in this thing for the past four years, and the closest I got was 2004 with about 12,000 words. It was a Star Wars fanfic, which I saw as my warmup. This year, right now, I am sitting on 40,436 words of an original novel based on a dream I had years ago.
It’s been a somewhat surreal trip. Sometime around mid-month, I also began sorting through some of my keepsakes back from high school. When I was a junior, I actually wrote about 75,000 words of an original contemporary young adult fiction. I remember it was a major thing for me, but that I could actually pound out five thousand words while sitting at my Apple ][e back then. I remember the pride in printing the sucker out on an ancient printer, having to separate the pages until it made an awesome pile of paper over an inch thick. Wow! I was going to be an author, baby! I was capable!
And I was. Any way you look at it, no matter how bad the writing or the spelling or the story, for anyone to devote the time and energy to belting out 75,000 words of continuous prose is an achievement. It’s something most people just don’t do in their entire lives, because they aren’t interested or don’t simply put their minds to it. But back then, I did it. Never finished the story, but there it is.
So I found this awesome pile of paper and the notebooks and folder I used to create the story. I’d outlined. I’d created collages of my main characters from magazine clippings. I had a heavily marked up calendar for pacing. And, of course, over an inch of story printed in double-spaced text.
I also came across a lot of my old schoolwork, as I must have saved everything from life back then. Interestingly, there’s a note from, I think, my sophomore college writing teacher, telling me I could “aspire to higher than Stephen King”. Looking through the relics of my past, I realized that a lot of my mind was on writing back then.
So what changed?
For one, I started working for my livlihood around then, but that doesn’t even explain it entirely. The change was the internet, with IRC and online text roleplay bluntly replacing the energy that had gone into sitting down at an un-networked computer and writing. I’ve realized that over the years, but never did anything to address it. It was writing, wasn’t it? No, not at all.
Online text-based roleplay is not really writing, to me. Sure, it’s great typing practice and I think my ideas about character development, story pacing, action and generating interesting plot have been helped by the games, but in the end, it’s a lot of text devoted to roleplay logs that have very specific audiences. The sheer amount of text I’ve produced in roleplay is mind-boggling. I even have all the logs from one character I played for four years. Interesting? Sure, for me and maybe some people who remember the game. Publishable? Not in the slightest.
I don’t want to bash the games, as they’re interesting and I like playing them, but something’s changed now. My priorities have realigned in the past year, so when NaNoWriMo came up this year, I had a two week vacation in there and the will to actually finish it this year, with an idea that I’d been kicking around for many years.
Nothing spectacular, just the decision to devote the time.
Now I am very excited about writing. I chafe at commuting home so I can get there and dive in. Getting at least 2000 words down each day doesn’t feel like a chore, but a primary activity. I can find a place for it alongside my games and other hobbies (of which I have far too many). I think I made the decision to devote that time somewhere in this month of driving towards 50,000.
The next step is, of course, the gym, but I’m not quite ready yet. I am, however, excited about a better use of my time.
“It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — George Eliot
Winging to Warsaw
I got tapped to head over to Warsaw as the Secretary went to deal with the Russian aggression and such. It’s another country I’ve never been to, and I found it… alright. It didn’t really have the Old World Post Communist charm (?) that Kyiv had and that I found interesting. The trip went alright, despite a dead body being found a few rooms down from mine and some screwed up sleep.
The most interesting bit of the trip was on the flight from DC to Munich. I upgraded myself to business class with miles, and as I was settling into my window seat, my seat mate showed up and introduced himself with “Hi, I’m Joe”. I shook hands and greeted him, then noted that his garment bag said “Mrs Biden”. Now, in my experience, the only people who actually mark their luggage with just their name like that are people used to 1) others knowing who they are and 2) having others handle their bags for them. In my defense, I don’t watch TV hardly at all, so didn’t recognize Senator Biden right off. I did manage to confirm it before we took off, at least.
Sen. Biden was super nice, and lent me some of his massive bundle of reading material. We talked briefly about working on things that matter, even over jobs that bring lots of money. He asked why I’d joined State, and then said I was just like his kids, wanting to do meaningful things with their work and lives. Sen. Biden was on his way to Tbilisi, Georgia and not Warsaw. Then the meal came and I left him alone to read (he’s a busy guy even on planes).
It was a cool encounter and kind of random and startling, made even more crazy by his selection a week later as Obama’s VP running mate.
Then I was jumped from Warsaw to Jerusalem, so will blog about this visit later.
