...and the sad thing is, it could get worse

So, I've come up for air after spending the past four months or so writing a novel.

I've spent the time doing that, looking for a real job (no joy there), and taking a walk every day. I've been without a television or a radio. YouTube has been my friend. I've listened to a lot of music, but I've pretty much been ignoring what's been going on in the world. Anything I've known about what's been going on in the world has come from either Facebook or Ravelry, a website for knitters.

Don't laugh. Ravelry sometimes scoops the national networks when something big happens because, with over 2 million members, Ravelry is everywhere and Ravelrs are smart.

Anyway, in the past few days since I sent the manusscript off to soe beta readers, I've been looking at a bit of news. And, you know, I wish I hadn't. It's just too depressing, both the headlines and the background noise. Rioting in Egypt. Extremists beheading hostages. Both Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are talking about running for president again. Televangelist John Hagee thinks that the unemployed should be made to starve to death - well, I think the word he used was "allowed" to starve to death, but it comes out to the same thing.

That last may be the thing that bothers me the most. Because, you know, I'm still unemployed. Working, since writing is very damn hard work, and only people who have never written think otherwise, but getting paid for work right now. And, at this point, I'm not only not making money, but I'm losing the place where I've been staying tomorrow and I don't have anywhere to go. And becuase of that, this Hagee guy, who professes to be a Christian, wants me to die.

He doesn't know me. He knows nothing of my circumstances. He isn't doing anything, as far as I've been able to discover, to find jobs for the unemployed. He just wants to abandon a growing segment of the population of our country to die because...well, I'm not sure exactly why. He says the Bible says that those who don't work shouldn't be allowed to eat. However, I'm not sure that his attitude really represents the sort of Christian charity that I was taught that followers of Christ are supposed to show their fellow human beings.

I guess it's par for the course in a country where the rich are getting richer, the middle class is in danger of becoming the poor, and much of the corporate world advocates not only not paying workers a living wage but wants minimum wage laws overturned so that they don't even have to pay their workers a minimum wage that is inadequate to support an individual, much less a family. There are times when I think a certain segment of our society (and I'm looking at you right now, Koch Brothers) won't be happy until we becoe a feudal society, where a very small number of very reach individuals owns the rest of us, body and soul. There is something very wrong when, in the richest country in the world, there are not jobs for everyone who wants one, where some people don't have a roof over their heads and enough food to keep them healthy enough to work.

Because, God knows, I want to work. I'm willing to do anything I can physically do - and, of course, that is legal and moral. But, in three years of looking, of submitting so many resumes that I've lost track of their number, I haven't gotten even one interview. Oh, people want my labor. They just don't want to pay for it. So, I've done volunteer work. I've tried to generate my own job by advertising my tutoring services, but it seems like everyone who has enquired about getting tutoring for themselves or their children suddenly loses interest when they discover that I expect to be paid for my work. You know, like everybody else in the world.

I realize that I've said most, if not all, of this here before, in other posts. But I have to be honest: I'm getting kind of tired of being expected to do a thing, but then denied the basic conditions in which to do that thing. I'm told by society - get a job. But then I'm not given the opportunity to compete for a job by interviewing for jobs. Even worse than that, I'm condemned by certain segments of society for not working, but then I'm told, through their rhetoric in the media, that because I'm not already working, I'm not even allowed to have the basics to be able to have a chance to win the job if I do get an interview. I don't deserve, in their opinion, even a place to sleep safely, a place to keep myself and my clothes clean, enough food to keep myself healthy enough to do a job if I can even find one. I'm not entitled to have a phone and an address - but who is going to hire anyone who doesn't live anywhere and who can't be reached by phone to come in for an interview?

You know, I intended to write a nice, upbeat, "Yay, I wrote a novel...I've always wanted to do that" post today, since I've been away so long. But I just don't have "upbeat" in me today. And yeah, I'm feeling a little sorry for myself today. But things aren't all bad. I'm getting some mentoring toward getting some money coming in from my writing. It isn't going to be easy, working from the street, but I'm determined. Well, some people would call it stubborn. I'm going to fight these idiots who think I should just be written off because I happened to lose a job in the general downsizing that came in the wake of the financial sector shooting the world economy in the head.

But, you know, as stubborn as I am, as determined as I am, there is a stubborn, contrary part of me that almost wishes that the whole situation had made me suicidal. Becuase if I was - and I am not, so don't worry about me - I'd find a way to get me to John Hagee's church, and I'd sit down on their front lawn or whatever it has, and I'd have me this big sign that said: "Okay. You think I deserve to starve to death. Great. I'll just sit right here and do that for you and see how you like watching it. See how you like how that really looks in practice."

Becauase if I deserve to starve to death, the people who want that deserve to have to watch it, up close and personal.

"Return", Chapter 2

And, so, Chapter 2, very short, but introduces the second timeline.



Chapter 2

I awakened with a start.

What had I been dreaming? I remembered it seemed vividly real, whatever it was. But all I could recall now were tears and fear, and the feel of lips on the palm of my right hand. I could still feel those lips. I looked at my hand in the dim predawn light filtering into my bedroom, touched my palm. Not even that could erase the sensation left over from my dream.

I had been myself in the dream but...not. I had been in another place, another time. An impossibility.

I looked at the clock on my nightstand. Eleven o'clock, straight up. I'd only been asleep for an hour or so. I'd been in bed before ten, ridiculously early for me. I'm never in bed before midnight. But I had been so sleepy that I couldn't keep my eyes open. When I'd dozed off grading papers and put a thin red line down an essay I was reading, I figured it was time to give it up and go to bed.

It was hot in the house, and I got up to get something to drink. Since it was still so early, I considered staying up for a while to do some more grading, but I was so distracted trying to figure out what the dream had been about that I just went back to bed.

How could a dream be that realistic? The details started to come back as I sat on the side of my bed and sipped from the glass of ice water I had brought back from the kitchen. I was remembering everything that had happened in the dream, remembering as if it had all happened to me. It was a total memory - sight, sound, odors, touch. It wasn't just the sensation of that kiss on my palm. It was the cold of the night and the warmth of the long cloak over my dress, the weight of it, the texture of the fabric, the hood over my head. I could feel the man's - John's - arms around me, holding me close. I could feel his lips on mine, the tickle of his beard against my face.

I could feel the motion of the cart, hear the clopping of the horses hooves on the packed dirt road. I could smell...what?...rain in the air, the fragrances of the flowers in the garden, other aromas I couldn't quite identify. Why could I smell rain in the air, still? It hadn't rained in over two months.

Most of all, I could feel the love between these two people. It was sweet, it was passionate, and it was deep. It was something they were willing to risk everything to hold on to, even their lives.

I lay back down after a while, knowing I should go back to sleep. The alarm would ring early. It was a work day tomorrow. But I lay in the dark staring at the ceiling for a long time, trying to figure out what had just happened. And trying to decide if I was more afraid that I would have another dream like it or that I wouldn't have another like it.

Copyright, Elaine Frei, 2014

Being a storyteller isn't always an easy thing, and here's one reason why...

I just happened onto the most interesting question. At least, from my point of view as a writer, I find it fascinating. Of course, it's controversial. All the best questions are.

The question is this: What country should fictional villains be from?

Perhaps it could also be asked as, What ethnic group should fictional villains be from, because the dilemma comes up in that form from time to time as well.

You know how it goes. Someone writes a book or makes a movie or an episode of a TV series, and someone gets bent out of shape because the bad guy is obviously from a specific nation or appears to be of a particular ethnic background, and someone starts shouting about stereotyping and bigotry. If the villain is specifically referred to as being from Mexico, some people get upset about that. Or the bad guy in a movie appears to be from an Arab background, other people start jumping up and down and accusing everyone involved of being both racist and prejudiced with regard to religion.

And, honestly, it isn't just nationality and ethnic groups. I've heard of cases where a fictional bad guy (person?) is a woman, and some people start complaining about sexism. Or the villain is referred to as or appears to be gay, and there are claims of homophobia.

See? This is a question that can get quite complicated. This is especially true because there is the potential for cries of "foul" no matter how you, as a writer or a filmmaker, identify your villain. Even the white guys can get mad, if you make a white male the bad guy. Talk about a no-win situation.

I wonder if there would be an outcry if the "bad guy" turned out to be a computer.

Oh,, wait. That happened. Remember "2001: A Space Odyssey"? I don't recall that anyone got that upset that HAL turned out to be homicidal, but I might just not be reading the right web sites.

I think the big problem here is that this dilemma is the Kobayashi Maru of writing/storytelling dilemmas. For those of you who are not "Star Trek" fans, Kobayashi Maru is a test of character given to Starfleet cadets. It posits what turns out to be essentially a no-win situation. Similarly, the writer cannot win in assigning a nationality or an ethnic background to their villain.

It isn't as big a dilemma for the writer. The writer can choose, if he or she wishes, to not write anything about the villain's nationality, ethnicity, or religion. Not so the filmmaker - whoever plays the villain will look like somebody, whether a specific background is intended or not.

I suppose that one can cut the knot of this question and say that this wouldn't be a problem if people would quit being so sensitive about things like this. Unfortunately, realistically, that isn't going to happen.

The realistic solution, I suppose, is to either stay away from as much identification of nationality or ethnicity as possible with regard to the villain, or else just make the villain whatever he or she must be to serve the story and just not worry about the inevitable fallout.

I know. I'm avoiding the real question, as originally stated. But that's part of the Kobayashi Maru. You can treat the issue as a no-win situation, or you can redefine the question.

I choose to redefine the question by saying that you don't have to search for a "safe" nationality for the villain. You can skirt the question, or you can just do what you're going to do with the understanding that someone might give you grief for it. Personally, I prefer telling the story without the villain having to be any specific nationality or ethnicity. But if you're writing a story in which that is integral to the plot, you can't do that. And in that case, you have to understand that there very well might be questions raised about why you made the storytelling choices you did, that you had to make your villain from such a specific background.

No, really. Does your villain really have to be black? Or white? Or Asian? Or European? Or male? Or female? Or gay? Or straight? Why?

And, honestly, if you can't take those questions, and if you don't have good answers for them, maybe you shouldn't be a writer.

Movie Monday: The Richard Matheson Edition

I had planned on writing about movie trivia today. And I'll still get to some of that eventually.

However, when I started to do some research on one of the bits of trivia that I intended to write about, it came to my attention that writer Richard Matheson died earlier this year. One of the legends in the field of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, Matheson wrote novels, screenplays, and teleplays that have entered the larger cultural consciousness. Mention "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet", and even people who are not fans of the genre probably know what you're talking about. Bring up "The Incredible Shrinking Man", and even more people will know exactly the film you are referring to. Even people who claim not to "do" fantasy have probably seen "Somewhere in Time."

Matheson had a hand in the creation of all these films and television episodes and many, many more. In several cases, he wrote both the novels and the screenplays for the films they were based on. Others of his novels have been filmed more than once.

"I Am Legend" is an example of how Hollywood has felt that Matheson's work bears repeating. He published "I Am Legend" in 1954. In 1964, it was filmed as "The Last Man on Earth" and starred Vincent Price as the only man left on Earth who hasn't been affected by a plague that has turned the rest of humanity into zombie/vampires. Hollywood revisited the story in 1971, this time calling it "The Omega Man" and with the Vincent Price role taken over by Charlton Heston. More recently, the story reclaimed its original title, "I Am Legend" (2007), with a new star, Will Smith.

Matheson also wrote "The Shrinking Man" (1956), which became "The Incredible Shrinking Man" on screen in 1957 and then transmuted into "The Incredible Shrinking Woman" in 1981. "The Incredible Shrinking Man" is a classic science fiction/horror film that follows the 1950s convention of blaming the horrible fate of some unfortunate human on radioactivity. Here is the trailer from when the 1957 film was released:



Other films that were made from Matheson's work, some with the screenplay also written by him and some not, include but are not limited to "What Dreams May Come (novel, 1978; film, 1998); "Stir of Echoes" (1999), from the novel "A Stir of Echoes"; and "Hell House" (1971), which was filmed as "The Legend of Hell House" in 1973). "Somewhere in Time" (1980), the great romantic time-travel fantasy starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour, and Christopher Plummer, was adapted by Matheson from his 1975 novel "Bid Time Return". The made-for-TV film "Duel" (1971), directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Dennis Weaver, was adapted by Matheson from one of his short stories. We'll be back to "Duel" in a little bit. Here is the trailer for "Somewhere in Time":



Matheson also adapted classic science fiction and horror stories by other writers for the screen. In 1961, he adapted two Jules Verne novels, "Robur the Conqueror" and "Master of the World", into a film, also called "Master of the World". This film, which starred Vincent Price and Charles Bronson, featured a flying ship, fascinated me when I saw it as a child. Here is the trailer:



Matheson also adapted several Edgar Allen Poe stories for the screen, including "The Fall of the House of Usher", which became "House of Usher" (1960) onscreen; "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1961); "Tales of Terror" (1962) which included "Morella", an amalgam of "The Black Cat" and "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"; and "The Raven" (1963), the cast for which included not only Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff, but also a very young Jack Nicholson. All of these films were directed by Roger Corman."

In addition to his film work and his novels, Matheson also wrote for television, including several episodes for the original "Twilight Zone" and a classic episode of "Star Trek", "The Enemy Within" (1966). One of the episodes he wrote for "The Twilight Zone" was actually filmed twice, once for the original series in 1963 and again as the fourth segment of "Twilight Zone: The Movie", in 1983). Matheson also wrote what is, for my money, the most frightening episode of "The Twilight Zone" ever filmed, "Little Girl Lost" (1962). This story concerns a little girl who disappears from her bedroom one night. Her parents can't find her, but they can hear her. I won't say more, because if you haven't seen this episode, you really need to, and I don't want to spoil it for you. I first saw this episode when I was maybe six years old, and it scared me more than anything in any film or TV show ever has. Ever. And really, you need to see it. Go search for it on YouTube. The whole episode is available there.

Matheson had such a long and rich career, it would take days to review everything he wrote. And so I won't do that. However, I do want to return to the whole idea of movie trivia for a moment because one of my favorite pieces of trivia concerns the TV film "Duel" which I mentioned before. According to several sources I've come across, Matheson discussed at various times how he came to write the short story that the film was based on. It is an interesting story for anyone who has ever been tempted to ask a writer the question all writers dread: "Where do you get your ideas?"

Turns out, Matheson got the idea for the story that became "Duel" on November 22, 1963, the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Apparently, Matheson and a friend of his were in Simi Valley, California, playing golf, when they heard that Kennedy had been killed. They decided that they needed to get back to Los Angeles, so they packed up and drove back toward L.A. At that time, the only road between Simi Valley and the San Fernando Valley and L.A. was the narrow, winding, two-lane road over Santa Susana Pass. The road was a dangerous one, with sheer drop-offs in several places. As the two men navigated the road, a truck came up behind them and tailgated them for a fair distance. It was apparently a fairly nerve-wracking experience, and a story, and then the screenplay, came out of it.

This story is interesting to me for a few reasons. First of all, I'm always fascinated by writers describing their process. Second of all, I know that road and traveled along it frequently all through my childhood because I grew up in Simi Valley and when I was young it was a small enough town that one had to travel to San Fernando Valley or Los Angeles to do most shopping. I can picture being tailgated by a truck on that road, where the truck couldn't pass because the road is too winding and there are no shoulders large enough for a car to pull over and let it by. It would be an extremely frightening experience. The other reason that this particular story intrigues me is that it is dated so accurately. I know, as most of us who were alive and old enough to remember do, exactly where I was on the day Kennedy was shot. And because I know where I was, I know that I was within a few miles of the area where the event that gave rise to the story happened to Matheson and his companion at the time it happened to them. Which tickles my senses of proximity and synchronicity.

Yeah, I know. I'm a geek.

Anyway, I thought I'd leave you with the trailer for "Duel", which was, by the way not filmed on the road where Matheson got the idea for the original story. It would have been a lot more frightening if it had been.

Happy Science Popularizer Day - and, yes, I just made that holiday up

Today, coincidentally, is the birthday of not one but two scientists who are notable for writing books about scientific subjects for the general public. The work of the popularizer is often a thankless job, but one that I think is important because I believe that the more one knows about the world, the better off one is, and the sad fact is that each person cannot be an expert in every field. Therefore, popular works that inform about fields that can be technical to the point of confusion for one who is not an expert can be quite valuable.

So, today is the birthday of Jared Diamond, who was born on this day in 1937. Diamond has written such books as The Third Chimpanzee (1991), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), Collapse (2005), and The World Until Yesterday (2012). His training was in physiology, and that is what he has taught at UCLA, in the medical school there. His writing, however, has seen him branch out into a number of fields, including anthropology, human evolution, and history.

Diamond has come into for his share of criticism for his work, including charges that he is too Eurocentric, that the arguments he makes in his books are weak, and that the large roles he assigns to geography and environment in the shaping of civilization are misplaced.

Like Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, who was born on this day in 1941, has been criticized for things he wrote and said in the course of his career as a paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, science historian, and prolific author of both specialist and popular books and articles. Among those criticisms were, like Diamond, that some of his explanations and arguments were weak. It is probably important to note that, especially in Gould's case, this criticism particularly has mostly come from those who disagree with his ideas and want to discount them.

It also probably has to be said that Gould did indeed take some stands that were controversial. He was co-developer, with Niles Eldredge, of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which claims that evolutionary change is not a slow, steady process, but occurs rapidly and in bursts, with long periods of stability in between. Gould was very vocal, as well, about his rejection of sociobiology, the idea that social behaviors are rooted in biology and evolution. Additionally, Gould did not approve of cladistics, a method of biological classification, which brought him a measure of criticism as the use of cladistics became more and more widespread.

Gould was also criticized for his politics, which some critics characterized as "Marxist," charging that he let his politics interfere with his scientific positions. This was probably exacerbated by Gould's willingness to discuss his father's Marxism and his statements that his own politics were probably to the left of center. But, he also claimed that his politics were different from those of his father. Still, today, there are those people who discount Gould's contributions by pulling out the "Marxist" label.

Gould did not hesitate to address the subject of religion, and claimed that science and religion are not, as some argue, in conflict. However, he also claimed that the two areas comprised "non-overlapping magisterial" that, while they do not conflict, also do not really have anything to say to or about each other. He spent some of his time writing about this idea in a book called Rock of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (1999).

While Gould did not criticize religion as a category of knowledge as some scientists, notably Richard Dawkins, do, he also spent a significant amount of his time arguing against creationism and intelligent design and against their inclusion in public school science classrooms. Among his efforts on this topic, Gould testified against giving creationism equal time in the classroom in the landmark case McLean v. Arkansas in 1982. The case, which ruled that "creation science" is actually religion and not science and that its inclusion in public school science classrooms violates the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the Unites States Constitution, has been influential in subsequent rulings relating to the teaching of creationism and intelligent design.

Gould was a prolific and eloquent writer. He wrote nearly 500 peer-reviewed papers during his career, around 100 book reviews, 22 books, and a long series of essays that included a series called "This View of Life" in Natural History magazine. He published several collections of these essays in book form. Gould was also a fixture in science documentaries on PBS and elsewhere.

Sadly, Gould died in 2002, at the age of 60, cutting short a remarkable career that, among many other accomplishments, saw him named a "Living Legend" by the US Library of Congress in April 2000.

In honor of the day, your assignment, should you decide to accept it, is to go out and find some good popular science writing to read. I don't care what subject you choose, and it doesn't have to be something by either Gould or Diamond - although as a huge fan of Gould's writing, I would certainly not be sad if you chose to read some of his work, which can be challenging but is always rewarding.

A day to write...

I finally got a day to work on my book today. Not much writing, but lots of timeline-building, which is the backbone of this project. Everything else flows from knowing what happened when. Because, among other things, context is important.

Maybe that should be in all caps: CONTEXT IS IMPORTANT.

But that's not what I have on my mind today.

What I have on my mind is fact-checking, and it's perils.

For example, I've just been taking a list of films from 1945 and checking (mostly with the Internet Movie Data Base) to see exactly when during that year those films were released. And, predictably most of them have more than one date. This makes sense, since movies often have a New York City premiere and a Los Angeles (Hollywood) premiere. Sometimes, the premiere takes place somewhere else (there's one on this list that had its premiere in Washington, DC). However...

There is one film on this list, for 1945, that IMDB and Wikipedia agree premiered on November 3, 1944, although IMDB also lists a New York City premiere on January 26, 1945. Because I treasure accuracy and the full story (and because I can be a bit obsessive about research) I want to know what's up with the difference in dates. So far, I can't find anything to indicate why there is such a discrepancy. The Turner Classic Movies website only gives the release date as 1944 and says that information on the premiere is "not available". The little information box that comes up in the right-hand corner when you Google the film (which is "The Woman in the Window", directed by Fritz Lang) agrees with the January 1945 alternate date on IMDB as the release date. Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, agrees with the November 3, 1944 date.

It isn't that I haven't come across films before that have an early premiere and then are released more widely a significant amount of time later. But I rarely cannot find some story about why the lag between premiere and wide release occurred. This one is obviously going to take some digging.

It probably doesn't matter in the long run. There's no guarantee that I'll use the information in what I'm writing. In fact, chances are I won't use it. But now I want to know.

Ah, well. Even if I never do find out what the story is behind the disagreement in release dates, what I have learned from this particular little tour around the Interwebs is that I'm probably going to have to track this movie down and see it. I've got a weakness for film noir, and I've seen a couple of good reviews of it as I've been looking around for the real, authentic, and authoritative release date.

And meanwhile, I need to get back to my research. I had promised myself that I would be done with major research on this project by the end of March. Well, March was really busy and I was being extremely optimistic when I set that deadline. Well, it will get done, and I'm still far, far from the Tim Powers (if you aren't familiar with Tim Powers*, you should be, especially if you like reading urban fantasy) prescription for knowing when you're done with research. I was able to ask him one time when he knew when his research was done. His answer was, when he had been doing research for a year.

I'm only a couple of months into my research on this project, so I'm not worried yet.

-----------------

*Tim Powers is a really good writer, one of my favorites. He writes fantasy, often urban fantasy. Start with Declare, like I did. Or with Last Call (which is the first volume of a loose trilogy, that also includes Expiration Date and Earthquake Weather. Or, if you like your fantasy a little less modern, start with The Drawing of the Dark. Or, if you want to start with something shorter, start with his novella A Soul in a Bottle. They're all good.

Really. This is good stuff.

Happy New Year...now get to work

Look at that. We've all got a brand-new, shiny year to play with.

The triskaidekaphobics will probably have a rough time of it but, you know, you can't please everyone. Years aren't like buildings; you can't just rename the 13th year of the century the 14th year and go on like nothing happened.

Well, I guess you could, but it would just confuse everyone.

This is the day that people traditionally make resolutions for the year ahead, promising themselves to behave themselves and quit doing the things they think they shouldn't be doing and to start doing the things they think they should be doing but don't really feel inclined to do.

I don't make resolutions.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, the track record of humanity, collectively, for keeping resolutions, is not that great, and I don't like to set myself up for failure. I'm good enough at it without building it into the plan for a year. But, more important, I've always believed that if something is important enough to do, there's no good reason for waiting until an arbitrary day to start doing it.

What I do try to do every year, on the first day of the year, is to sit down and think about what direction I would like to go during the year.

First and foremost, I hope to get work this year.

I've proably mentioned here that I've been out of work. At this point, it has been a little over a year since I've worked at a paying job. This is not my choice. I was let go from my previous job as a result of the economy and, although I've been looking faithfully, there really hasn't been anything out there.

This is something I don't have complete control over. I can apply for job after job after job, but that doesn't mean that I'll get an interview, much less a job. The official jobless numbers in my county are still above 14 percent; the unoffical numbers are just about universally agreed to be close to 10 percentage points higher than that. But I can continue to look and to apply and to hope for the best. I can also continue to do volunteer work at Central Valley Professionals while I look for work. The things I do there, including writing and presenting workshops for other jobseekers, are helping me develop new skills that could help me get work.

While I'm looking for work, there is no reason for me not to continue to work on ongoing writing projects that can eventually become revenue streams for me. And so I will do that, and look for other, smaller projects that can pay off more quickly than the two big, ongoing projects that I'm currently working on.

There is also this blog. I intend to continue blogging every day, or as close to that as I can manage. I want to continue writing the Music Sunday and Movie Monday posts. I would like to do more social and political commentary here, as well. Previously, I tried to stay away from politics, especially, here, but the lessons of the recent presidsential campaign included, for me, that it is important to keep the conversation going on the issues of the day, rather than expecting our elected and appointed officials to do the right thing. Because, you know, it isn't a foregone conclusion that they will know the right thing, much less do it.

So, I plan to focus on two things this year - looking for a job and trying to create my own job through my writing. Neither one is mutually exclusive of the other, and even if I am successful in finding a job, I will continue writing. Continuing to write implies also continuing to read. And I will do that.

All that should keep me more than busy this year.

Well, that, and trying to nuture a social life, and keeping up on popular culture, and coping with the things that come up and make life interesting and, occasionally, frustrating.

Watch this space. We'll get through 2013 together.

In which I gripe about writing styles...

As a writer myself, there are just some things about other writers' styles that bug the crap out of me (that's a technical term, by the way). One of those things is when an entire novel is written in the first person, present tense. It just irritates me. I don't write in that style, and I don't really want to read it.

I bring this up because I recently finished reading The Bone Bed (2012, Putnam; 463 pages), Patricia Cornwell's latest Kay Scarpetta novel, which is written in that style. It is a tribute to Cornwell's ability to tell a story that I stuck with the book to the end. I really wanted to know whodunit, and so I hung in there and finished. It was a good book. I have some quibbles with it, but they are insignificant beside the huge problem I have with the first person, present tense in fiction.

Actually, I should say "in novels", because I've read a few short stories over the years that are written in that style, and they don't bother me nearly as much. Not sure why.

I have finally figured out why it does bother me so much in novels, after thinking about it quite a lot. It's just awkward to read. It is also awkward to write. I've tried, and it just doesn't work for me. There are too many problems to deal with in keeping the story always in the present.

Also, there is the fact that it imitates the real world a little too closely for my taste. Really. We live our lives in the present tense. When I'm reading a novel, part of my reason for doing that, always, is to escape the real world and go live in some other world for awhile. And, in truth, even if a novel purports to take place in the everyday world, it really is creating an alternative universe. That universe might be almost exactly like the one we live in, but it isn't.

An example: I read a piece somewhere the other day...I can't remember if it was a comment on a forum, a blog post, or an article of some kind...that was complaining about the new television series "Elementary", which modernizes Sherlock Holmes and plops him down in modern-day New York City. Good show. I had reservations about it going in, but I like it a lot. The complaint of the writer in question was that no one in the series ever wonders why this modern-day consulting detective has the same name as the consulting detective in the novels and short stories that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in the late 1800s and early 1900s. They figured that someone, at some point, would think this was strange and comment on it.

What the writer did not account for is that in the universe of the television series, those books were never written. In the series, Sherlock Holmes lives in the 21st century and is a real consulting detective; he is not a character that Doyle made up over a century ago.

So...when I read a novel, I want to feel like I've gone somewhere else, am looking in on a world, a universe, that might be very much like the one I live in (or not very much at all like the one I live in). By writing in the past tense, the author gives me a clue that this is the case. It comforts me to have that clue, and it disturbs me to a greater or lesser degree when I don't have it.

Ah, well. It's probably just me. Maybe because I do write, this sort of thing has the capacity to bother me more than it bothers someone who doesn't write.

This brings up a question, however: As a reader, and as a writer if you are one, what bothers you when writers do it in a piece of writing?

Research and headaches and thinking too much, oh, my!

So, this is me, complaining.

I'm on the third day of a headache - migraine, sinus, or a combination of the two. Makes it really difficult to get anything accomplished.

Oh, I've gotten a few things done. Wrote some on the novel I've been working on, the one I started for NaNoWriMo last November, that hit a block when I started working on my non-fiction project. It will be interesting to go back and read what I've written the past couple of days and see if it makes any sense when I don't have a headache.

So, that project is going now, but the non-fiction work is still in the water, so to speak, because I've hit a block there. That mostly has to do with ongoing research (I tend to research as I'm writing, a section at a time, rather than doing all the research and all the writing, separately) issues. The local public library system here doesn't seem to have the sciences as a priority, and it is difficult to find up-to-date sources. In something like history, having access to up-to-the-minute work in the field is good but not necessarily imperative. Of course, you want to make sure that there haven't been any recent discoveries of primary documents or anything, but history, by its very nature, doesn't change that much in the retelling, unless you're working in relatively recent times. The bigger problem in history is watching out for sources that claim to be authoritative but are actually revisionist.

In the sciences though, and especially in paleoanthropology, which is what I'm researching currently, new discoveries are made frequently - at least, there have been several discoveries, or, at least, announcements of discoveries, that have the potential to rewrite what we know about human evolution in the past year or two - and if the writer is not aware of them, he or she can look like an idiot when the book comes out. There are periodicals, of course, the science journals where the official announcements and descriptions of new fossils are made, and my library system has a pretty good online source for some of those journals that I can use; otherwise, the online presences of most of the top journals make it prohibitively expensive to do research. You can either subscribe to the online journal for hundreds of dollars per year or you can purchase access to individual articles - sometimes at $20 to $30 or more per article. There is no way I can afford that.

But, books that are up-to-date in the field are rare in the local library system. And, for some reason, they are also rare in the library at the local state university. Added to that is the fact that if I use their resources, I have to use them there. Oh, they have a "community borrower" card for non-students, but that costs, last time I checked, $100 per year, and then you can only check out two or three books at a time. While I understand that students should have first access to the books there, two or three is a ridiculously low maximum. At the private university I attended for my upper division work on my BA, the community borrower card costs something like $25 per year, and the non-students is allowed to check out something like 25 books at a time, despite the fact that it is a much, much smaller library. Unfortunately, their collection of books on paleoanthropology is very small. Now, if I were researching something in history, or in theology or biblical studies, I'd have access to more than enough research materials there.

But a lack of research materials is not the only problem I'm running into presently regarding my non-fiction writing project.

There is, in addition, my blessing/curse of an oversize dose of curiosity and my belief in the principle, stated by John Muir among others, that everything in the universe is attached to everything else. It goes something like this with me, on this project:

I'm writing about archaeology and physical anthropology (hence the current focus on human evolution), and so I'm thinking about beginnings a lot. Part of what archaeology looks at is physical evidence for the beginnings of civilization, and before that, the beginnings of agriculture, and even before that the beginnings of art and other symbolic thought that mark the beginnings of behavioral modernity. But thinking about the beginnings of behavioral modernity in turn leads, at least for me, into thinking about the beginnings of humans. Which leads to thinking about the beginnings of mammals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of animals, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of life, which leads to thinking about the beginnings of the earth...the solar system...galaxies...so that, pretty soon, I'm wanting to go find things to read about the beginnings of the universe. The questions that topic raises can be all kinds of frustrating, not least because I don't have the mathematics and physics to really understand most of the work on the subject.

What is more immediately frustrating to me is that I've been being very good about staying focused on the topics directly related to the book I'm writing. A long as I've got work to do on it, sources that I can use for research, I've been very good at staying on task, researching a section and then writing it, then starting the cycle over again for the next section. But now that I've got a temporary break due to inadequate sources, my mind is wanting me to go seriously off the reservation and start looking into some of the questions that I have about other kinds of beginnings than just the ones that archaeology and physical anthropology are so key in studying.

I'll be fine when I can get back on track with research sources. I know I will. It's this down time that is driving me crazy.

That, and this damn headache, which is better today - else I wouldn't have had the concentration to write this blog post - but still needs to go completely away.

One of "those" days...

I think I'm working on a head cold. Yippee!

On the positive side, I'm on furlough from work this week and next, so I don't have to try to work through the lack of ambition that always comes along with any cold I get. It's really difficult to generate any enthusiasm for writing about the crappy economy (or even a good economy) when I don't even feel much like dragging my happy butt out of bed in the morning, but I don't get sick days from work. So, even though my bank account isn't happy about two unpaid weeks off work, if I'm going to get sick, this is probably the optimum time to do it.

Also, I don't have any real plans for the holidays, aside from watching the Doctor Who Christmas special on Christmas night and then having some kind of a DVD-watching marathon over New Year's Eve/New Year's Day - maybe Doctor Who, maybe not - so, getting a cold now isn't really going to interfere with anything social that I really wanted to do over the holidays.

But then there's the negative side of the equation.

I'm working on a couple of writing projects - one the completion of the first draft of my novel that I started last month for NaNoWriMo and the other a short guide for beginning anthropology students (or maybe three short guides, one for cultural anthropology, one for physical anthropology, and one for archaeology) that I aim to e-publish. I had planned to get a lot of work done on these while I'm off work. I'm having fun working on them. But, even if it's something I'm really having fun doing, it's not nearly as much fun in the middle of sneezing fits, headaches, and achy ears from my backed-up sinuses. Oops! Maybe should have put in a TMI warning there. Sorry.

The point is, I'm not getting nearly as much done so far as I'd hoped. Maybe it's just because my brain has decided that furlough from work = no work at all. A significant part of me would be perfectly happy to sit down in front of the television and watch movies all day. In fact, I was getting a good start on that while I ate lunch, watching Marley and Me while I ate the leftovers from last night's mac'n'cheese dinner. But I couldn't even enjoy that because I knew I was wasting time that I could be writing on a day that I didn't have to write anything for work. So, I came in and turned on the computer (again, for the third time today), determined to get something productive done.

I don't know if I can rationalize writing this post as "something productive" or not. Probably not. So, I'm going to post this and try to get some work done.

I'm a NaNo winner...

Yeah. That's me. I won NaNoWriMo. Several days early.

I have to admit that I'm quite proud of myself. When I started out the month, I wasn't sure that I could do this, that I could stick with it, and that I could find enough words to reach the NaNo goal.

But I did do it. I validated my entry today, at an official 53,681 words, although the word count tool I've been using claims that I've written 53,722 words in the month. I'm not going to quibble; everyone knows that every word count tool counts a little differently.

So, I'm taking a little time to bask in the glow of reaching my goal, the NaNo goal. It feels good.

But, really, the NaNo win is just an interim goal. The draft isn't finished yet. I think it might be about half finished. So, maybe a month's more work? A month and a half, since it's the holiday season and I don't know that I'll be able to write very single day. And then there will be a second draft, and probably a third. Maybe even a fourth, if that's what it takes to get this novel in shape.

I don't have any illusions. A lot of what I've written this month will change. There are time-line problems. Dialogue will have to be re-written and cut, and perhaps added to in some cases. Events will likely not remain in the order I've written them in the first draft.

None of this is a problem. This is how a novel gets written. There might be that rare writer who can produce a publishable novel. I'm clearly not one of them, and I have my doubts about anyone who would claim to be able to do that.

So, I'll continue to update the process here from time to time. Because I still need to be accountable for getting the work done. And who knows, maybe as I get this thing in shape, I might even post a preview now and then.

Nearly-the-end-of-the-week NaNo update...

So, yeah. It's been a few days since I updated here on how my NaNo is going.

Well, I've been writing every day, although word counts have not been as high every day as they have been being. Still, I've managed to write more than 1,000 words every day. Since I'm ahead of the curve as far as where I need to be to finish my 50,000 words by the end of the month, that's okay.

So, the daily word-counts:

Day 13: 2,428 words
Day 14: 2,089 words
Day 15: 1,963 words
Day 16: 2,053 words
Day 17: 1,320 words

I think yesterday (Day 17) was my lowest daily word count since the beginning of NaNo. It was a weird day, and a busy day, and I didn't write until evening. Still, it was a productive day, because while I was writing, I realized what needs to take place as far as a big reveal, and that it is nearly time for that to happen. This means that the work is on track and is generating the "and then..." that is necessary to keep the story moving. And, I hope, the reader turning the pages when this thing is finished.

As of the end of Day 17, my total word count stands at 36,640, which means that there are 13,360 word to go to win NaNo. More or less; different word count apps give different results. I'll have to see where I stand on the 25th, when NaNo's official word counter is supposed to go live. At any rate, I expect that I will be over the 50,000 minimum by the end of the month, god willing and the creek don't rise.

That doesn't mean, by the way, that I expect to be finished with this first draft by the end of the month. Most novels are more than 50,000 words long, and this novel will be no exception. When you think about it, 50,000 words really isn't a lot. Not if you expect to tell a story with any sort of complexity to it, anyway. But the end of NaNo won't mean the end of the project.

This is the novel that I intend to finish, after starting a few over the years. With any luck, it won't be the only one I complete. That's one of the interesting things about this experience. Even though I've been focusing on this project this month, I keep getting all these other ideas of things, both fiction and non-fiction, that I want to write.

NaNoWriMo, it turns out, is valuable in a lot of ways.

NaNo update, through Day Twelve

NOTE: Because I'm an idiot sometimes, I posted this to my other blog instead of posting it here. So, technically, this is a repost. Full disclosure, and all that.
Since I'm procrastinating on starting the day's NaNo writing, I thought maybe this would be a good time to post an update on my progress since my last report, on Day Eight.

Day Nine saw me write 2,705 words, bringing my total word count to 20,597 words, but I took Day Ten off and recorded no word count. I felt kind of bad taking the day off, but I had an opportunity to spend a good part of the day at the library at Fresno State to do some research for a non-fiction project I'm working on (not much this month, but it's a long-term project, so the time off isn't a big handicap. I found some material that will be very valuable to the project, so I'm glad I went ahead and took the day to do that.

It was difficult getting back in the saddle, so to speak, on Day Eleven, but I managed to write 2,167 words, to bring my total to 22,764 words. I wasn't especially pleased with what I wrote on Day Eleven, but I was pleased that I wrote, and that the story moved forward just a bit, even if there will be major revisions in the next draft. That's a given, so not a problem at all. As one of my Facebook friends said about giving hints ("Spoilers, sweetie!) about what you write in a first draft, everything will change anyway, so it doesn't really matter.

Yesterday, Day Twelve, I wrote 4,023 words, by far my biggest one-day output, and my total now stands at 26,787 words. That means I'm halfway to the NaNoWriMo goal. It's a good feeling, especially considering that it isn't quite halfway through the month. I can see now that my first draft won't be finished by the end of the competition, but that doesn't really matter. The goal is to write 50,000 words in the month, not finish the draft in the month. So, since I wrapped up writing for the day late yesterday afternoon, I've been basking in the glow of being Halfway Done.

But, now it's time to cut out the back-slapping and get back to work. I'm not going to try to equal yesterday's output. I'll be happy if I can do what seems to be my usual output of around 2,000 words today. Heck, I'll be happy if I make the daily average of 1,666 words that it takes to win NaNo if one writes every single day.

One thing I do think is interesting is that I'm seeing, as I write, exactly where some of the changes will have to be made in the next draft. I'm starting to adjust my work as i write, so that the new work will be more in line with what I want the next draft to look like, especially in terms of the story's timeline. But I'm being very good, so far, and not trying to go back and fix things I've already written now. They'll still be there when I finish this draft and go back to do revisions. It's enough, right now, that I know the direction I want to go with the story and can see what I'll need to do in the next draft to point the beginning of the story more squarely in that direction. And, that I can see more clearly every day exactly what I'm going to need to do as this draft goes forward to get to where I want to be at the end of the story.

The bad thing is (and I don't think it's really bad, just more ambitious than I had really planned in the beginning), I'm pretty sure that there is going to be more than one book before the whole story gets told. Which means lots more work ahead. Good thing I love the process as much as I do.

Day Eight...

After an unpromising start yesterday, I managed to write 2,083 words, bringing my total through Day 8 to 17,892, which means that if I'm good and keep to my goals, I should top 20,000 words today.

When I signed up for NaNo, I was hesitant. I'm not good with the completion thing when it comes to my writing. Now, if there is a reward at the end - a paycheck or a grade - I'm good. I don't believe I ever missed a deadline for a writing assignment when I was in college, and the only times I've missed deadlines for work, something out of my control has been going on - family emergencies, electricity outages, computer issues. But if I'm working on a project "just because" - just because it sounded like fun, or just because it might pay off someday - very often the work just slows down to a trickle and then stops altogether when something new and shiny comes along.

This is not something I'm proud of, and I'm getting better about it. But NaNo is one of those things that doesn't have enough of a carrot to it to keep me interested just on that basis. I'm finding, however, that it isn't as difficult as I thought it would be to motivate myself to sit and write every day, and to sit long enough to make my word-count goal each day.

Yesterday was a case in point. After I finished work, I had to go do laundry. Because we don't have a washer and dryer here, that means a trip to the laundromat. And laundromats, I've found, are like a box of chocolates. You never know exactly what you're going to get. Well, yesterday what I got was disobedient children and a mother who couldn't control them. They were there when I arrived, and they were still there when I left. I left with a splitting headache. I was so proud of myself that I hadn't yelled at anyone while I was there that I bought myself McDonald's for lunch as a reward.

But, being in a crappy mood after that adventure, and still having a headache by the time I'd gotten home, brought the clean laundry in, and eaten lunch, I really wasn't in any mood to write. I contemplated vegging in front of the television until it was time to go pick my roommate up from work, but there was nothing on TV worth sitting there for. So, I turned the computer on and started to write. With little success. I wrote about 700 words in a little over an hour, but I wasn't especially happy with what I'd written, and thought I'd probably call it a day. I had to leave to pick Pamela up anyway.

The funniest thing happened, though. After I got back home again, I had a couple of hours before time to go to Knit Night, so I thought I'd come back in and at least try to write a little more. I wasn't expecting much. An hour and a half later I had written probably what I like best of all the writing I've done on my NaNo project. I still had the headache. I was still in a crappy mood. But I overcame, and wrote something that might even be good. Goodish. Whatever. I went ahead and I wrote.

So, I'm beginning to think that maybe this is what I'm doing NaNo for: just to prove to myself that I can persevere, can get over the completion issue, and don't have to be "in the mood" to write. I've conquered that in my work writing. Now is the time to conquer it in my writing generally.

A week in...

I'm seven days into NaNoWriMo now, and I'm feeling good about my work and where it's going. New things are happening, and I've introduced a subplot that is meant to merge with the main plot later on. These are good things.

I wrote 2,598 words on Monday, Day 7 of NaNo, and my total is now 15,809 words.

I think one of the best indications that things are going fairly well is that I sat down to write at about 2 p.m. yesterday and came up for air at right around 5 p.m. I had completely lost track of time and had no idea that I had been writing for three hours. It has been my experience that this happens when the writing is going well. If it isn't, I end up glancing at the clock about every five or ten minutes.

I'm not sure when I'm going to find time to write today. I've got some errands to run in awhile, and I should go do the laundry, and then tonight is Knit Night. I could take the laptop with me to Knit Night if I don't get to write before then, but I'd rather knit. One way or another, though, I will get some writing done sometime today.

Sunday writing...

Sunday was Day 6 of NaNoWriMo. I was afraid that by Sunday, I'd be running out of steam/story to tell, or that I'd start to get bored, or that I just wouldn't want to write because Sunday is, well, Sunday, and I take the whole "day of rest" thing very seriously in a secular sort of way.

Turned out I was worried about nothing. I wrote 2,761 words on Sunday, and my total word-count is up to 13,211 so far. I introduced my villain, which was lots of fun. Although it was strange. I found myself writing in a slightly different style in that scene. Oh, well. That's what rewrites are for. But, it will be interesting to see if that continues when I write the villain's scenes.

I'm happy with how Sunday's writing sessions went (I wrote twice, with a sanity break in between scenes). I think I've advanced the story, and that is good. The writing is still probably a little dialogue-heavy, but I like reading dialogue-heavy novels, so I'm not seeing that as a particularly bad thing at the moment. There will be more action to come, however.

NaNoWriMo, or I commit to the insanity of writing 50,000 words in a month

Call me insane, but I've signed up to participate in NaNoWriMo this year.

I think I signed up once a few years ago, but if I did, I didn't end up participating. I definitely plan to change that this year and go for the 50,000-word goal. I know I can write that many words in a month. I think it's just a matter of having the will to do it.

I'll be reporting back here periodically on my progress, perhaps not word counts, but more on my adventures as the month, and my novel, progress.

I don't have any illusions about producing a finished, publishable novel in a month. I do hope that I will be well on my way to a first draft that can be molded into something publishable. I say "on my way" because 50,000 words is really kind of short for a novel these days. And because I tend to write long; I can make a novel out of a note. This is not necessarily a good thing. But I'm getting better, thanks to blog posts, posting on forums, and the occasional Tweet.

Well, wish me luck. NaNo officially srarts Tuesday, and I plan to do a lot of writing between then and the deadline on the 30th.

In which I demonstrate one of the reasons for the name of this blog...

I'm trying to write a book. It's non-fiction, so there is a certain amount of research involved. The conventional wisdom is that at some point you need to stop researching and start writing. I'm getting better at that. Well, I'm getting better at writing as I research, which is a start, I suppose.

Anyway, I had to run some errands day before yesterday, and while I was out I needed to have lunch. I had suspected that this might end up being the case, so I took a book along, one that I'm reading, or re-reading, actually, as research. And so as I ate (a pizza, Canadian bacon and pineapple; it was very good), I read.

Well, I tried to read. You see, when I'm reading something really interesting, I tend to read a little and then think a lot about what I've read. I often make marginal notes, and make notes in my current writer's notebook besides. And sometimes, I indulge in a bit of Tangents 101. Which means I read three or four pages and ended up with four pages of my notebook filled with notes that really have very little to do with what I'm writing about. Or, at least, they demonstrate the John Muir saying about how everything in the universe is connected to everything else.

Sometimes the connection is very tenuous. Other times it is clearly identifiable but no especially relevant to what I'm supposed to be doing.

The book in question is Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search for Common Ground Between God and Evolution (Perennial, 1999). It's a really good book which, as I indicated above, I've read before. A couple of times. I'm reading it this time because I'm writing about anthropology, and evolution is a key concept within the field, especially within biological anthropology. So, it is on-topic in a number of ways. In other ways, not so much.

Today's problem was that I got to page 38, and Miller was writing about the origins and early evolution of life. Specifically, he was discussing the long period of time between the time of the first, prokaryotic cells (cells without nuclei), and the appearance of eukaryotic cells (those are cells that have nuclei), and the long period thereafter between those cells and the appearance of the first multi-celled organisms. Now, all of this is a subject of infinite fascination for me. And so I made some notes about how much I'm interested in this, in beginnings of all kinds. Who knows, I might want to write about it at some point.

Somehow, from the beginnings of life I ended up at the beginning of the universe, and how difficult a subject that is for me for various philosophical reasons. Difficult, but also fascinating. I also ended up at how questions of the beginning of the universe and of life are subjects that tread all over both science and religion.

But that isn't all.

Miller also gets into, on the same page, the questions science has concerning whether or not the earliest multi-cellular organisms there is evidence of (from Australia, in the Ediacaran Hills, he says, although there has probably been further research since he wrote in 1999) are or are not directly related to organisms alive today, or whether all life on earth today is descended from other organisms that came into being separately, somewhere else. This is another idea that really tickles my imagination, and I spent some time on that as well.

Yeah. I was in the restaurant for a full hour after I had finished eating, playing around with these ideas. Didn't really make any progress in the research toward what I'm trying to write. Made myself want to go off and read about the origin of life and the origin of the universe and the geological history of the Earth

All of which also goes to explain why it takes me so long to read a book sometimes.

Resolutions, anyone?

I don't usually do New Year's Resolutions.

Having said that, however, here are my resolutions for 2011:

1. Read more. I have always been a reader, ever since I learned to read right about the time I turned three years old. Yes. That's very early. But I was an only child and there were no nearby neighbors to play with, so I had to do something with my time. Anyway, for the past few years, first with taking care of my mother, and then after she died, trying to keep my head above water both emotionally and economically, I just didn't have the time or feel the inclination to read as much. Part of it was that I often just couldn't find books I wanted to read that badly. I probably picked up ten or fifteen books and then didn't finish them for every book I read all the way through. Well, my intention with this resolution is to read more, to finish more of what I start to read, and to tell everyone all about it over on my new reading blog, Reading With (an) Attitude.

2. Write more. I write for a living. I like my job a lot, but I want to do much more with my talent, such as it is, than write about the financial markets. Last year, I got a good start on a novel, but then between running into some issues with how I wanted to frame the story and just plain getting too busy with other things so that writing the novel got lost in the shuffle of daily events, my work on it dwindled down to practically nothing. The goal here is to resume work on the novel, with a more specific goal of having a decent first draft finished by the end of the year. That goal should really probably be to have the draft done by the middle of the year, but I do have other obligations, so I'm attempting to not burn myself out by pushing too hard.

3. Walk more. I've got arthritis. It hurts to walk sometimes. But, since I'm now without car, I've got to get over it and get moving. This is not an effort to lose weight, although that would be good too. It is simply an effort to be able to get around and get the things I need to do, done.

4. Knit more. And learn to crochet. I already knit quite a bit. I should actually be working on finishing a project now, since it needs to be done in the next couple of days. But, it's New Year's Day, it's raining outside and I feel lazy. And, it will get done. But, I need to advance in my knitting this year, so that I can make more, and more complicated projects. Specifically, I need to master enough lace knitting to make a shawl this year, and I need to make a sweater this year, just to prove that I can do it. As for the crochet...I can crochet enough to edge a blanket. I need to be able to do more than that, well, just because I need to.

5. Spend more time on the internet forum where I am a moderator. I've been woefully inadequate in that recently, and I need to get back there for that reason, and just because I miss my friends there. If this involves setting up a time management schedule and specifically scheduling time to be there during the week, I'll do that.

And now, my question to you is, what are your resolutions for the New Year? Or, if you didn't make any, why do you choose not to make resolutions?

Happy New Year!

I'm writing...just not here that often right now...

I just thought I'd drop by to say that, no, I haven't abandoned writing since John's creativity experiment wrapped up.

But I have been working on a novel that I'd been think about and playing around with for years but never actually got around to working on more than sporadically. I've hooked up with a writing group on Ravelry and this month there's a challenge going on. I committed to writing 25,000 words this month and am already at 16,765 words. Maybe I set my goal a little low, but I think it's more about getting in the habit of working every day, whether I feel like it or not. Whether I feel inspired or not. From that perspective, the whole thing is working out marvelously.

At any rate, I'm around, I'm writing regularly, and I'm feeling good about that.