Good Riddance 2013, Hello 2014; or, Resolution Time Again

I didn't post here most of last year, not even songs for FAWM (because I never recorded any). Reason is, I spent most of my time on the epic final edit of Spanner. And this is supposed to be my main blog.

2014 will be different. Naturally, I have my resolutions. The obvious ones:

1. Finish the final edit of Spanner Book 1.
2. Practice my singing and my instruments for FAWM, not just this year's but next year's too.
3. Pick a non-Spanner NaNoWriMo novel to edit and get published.

The ones I've been seriously procrastinating regardless of year:

4. Start drawing again so I can finally learn how to draw comics;
5. Start taking photographs again (conveniently, digital cameras better than mine are cheaper than ever);
6. Keep at my workout program (just resuming it's not enough);
7. Improve my French, German, and Japanese;
8. Learn Python, Perl, and even C;
9. Clean house (and stop using the epic Spanner edit to avoid it); and
10. Resume regular posting to what's supposed to be my main blog, starting now.

2013 was a tough year: my mother's long recovery from surgery, the death of a cousin who was almost a brother to me when we were kids, the birth of my nephew and my brother's near-withdrawal from the family, my unhealthy obsession with a certain epic edit that even nearly ruined my health and prevented my 8th consecutive NaNo win (which I pulled off despite myself). 2014, on the other hand, will be the year I become a published professional author at last. I'll get back to posting about novels, comics, TV series, and the like as well. And of course I'll post drawings.

I've had my drink to the new year. The next step is to plunge into it. Here goes...

I Return From Isolation, In Time for Social Media Anniversaries

I've been procrastinating editing a lot lately, which kept me offline for about a week or two. Finally I said, "Aw, screw it," and got back on Google+ and Twitter just in time to find out that G+ is two years old today and in two days I'll have been on it for two years, and that I've been on Twitter four years as of yesterday. Significantly, G+ no longer slows down my computer to a crawl and TweetDeck's working for the first time in a month. Synchronicity or just serendipity?

Meanwhile Twitter recently killed off Posterous, exactly as I feared (and cynically predicted) when Posterous sold out, so over the coming month I'll be reposting entries from my now dead Posterous blog here and on the project blog. And I'll start blogging about books and music again, and I'll post photographs and drawings.

The important thing is, I'm back. And I'm relieved.

Blog Maintenance: November 26, 2010

What better way to procrastinate NaNoWriMo than to redo all your blog templates and then edit the posts accordingly? Now this blog, my project blog, my opinion blog, and my Posterous blog now look different than they used to. I'd even say the three Blogger blogs look a hell of a lot better than they did, now that I've updated their templates.

The reason I did it is because my Blogger templates were simply broken. I'd customized them for expandable posts and Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz share buttons long before Google gave Blogger its own. As directed, I'd copied the code off the customization blogs and pasted it into my own blog templates. It worked for a while. No longer. Upgrading was necessary.

Sometimes you just have to give up the old ways and join the modern world. I felt that way when upgrading my blogs. The old templates no longer worked. Now I find my Blogger blogs load faster than they did. Now it's the Posterous blog that takes a long time loading — but that may just be because I posted so many videos from YouTube and Archive.org.

One thing I noticed is that I made posts expandable that most people would consider too short. Early on, I was all but infatuated with the expandable post, to the extreme of making even two-paragraph posts expandable. I've grown out of that little neophyte vice. I've edited all the short posts on the Blogger blogs so that they're no longer expandable. I reserve that now strictly for the long posts.

In short, an attempt to fix my project blog quickly turned into a major blog overhaul. I guess I knew a serious change was in order...

In Which I Break My Media Silence, Post-AugNoWriMo

After I failed to win AugNoWriMo earlier this year, I spent nearly a month almost completely offline. Or at least avoiding my social media accounts except maybe an occasional visit to Twitter, and not blogging at all about anything. And now NaNoWriMo approaches, and I find myself in a sort of non-WriMo Panic Time. So here I am.

I have an explanation for my absence. Occasionally I find something that really obsesses me. This time around, it was something called the TV Tropes Wiki. I was always the kind of kid who got lost in encyclopedias, and I've gotten lost in Wikipedia numerous times. I got lost in TV Tropes for two full months, not writing any actually story words but merely listing (in a now massive Microsoft Word document) all the tropes (read: memes) that fit Spanner. I've got enough of an understanding of both the tropes and TV Tropes that it'll no longer distract me from writing my book.

Which reminds me: I need to update my NaNo profile now...

Preoccupations (Script Frenzy Panic Time, etc.)

I don't seem to be able to do two WriMos at the same time. Case in point: last month (March). I tried to finish recording some songs for FAWM and edit my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel for NaNoEdMo, and the result was that I was completely unable to do either. This month, I found I was only able to start adapting that novel into a movie script for Script Frenzy when I abandoned all FAWM follow-up. There must be some kind of short circuit in my brain...

That short circuit may be hard-wired in. I have problems teaching myself two different subjects on the same day.

There's another problem I've got that keeps me from doing the things I want. I wrote an entry about that, in fact. It's called Social Media Is My Crack. With the sequel What Keeps Me on the Internet Way Too Late at Night. Either I spend way too much time on Twitter and FriendFeed, or I spend way too much time reading articles on the Web. Or, to word it differently, I procrastinate on Twitter and the Web.

Anyway, I've procrastinated enough. It's Panic Time now. I need to write 58 pages of movie script (adapting guess which '07 NaNoWriMo novel) if I want to win this year's Script Frenzy. And that means back to writing...

I'll add a blog-related postscript here. A couple days ago as of this writing, Facebook announced that you can put one of their "Like" buttons on any site of yours that you want. Posterous added it automatically; earlier, they added a "retweet" button to all their blogs so that you can "retweet" an entry onto Twitter. So I decided to add a "Like" button onto a couple of my Blogger blogs, including this one. Turns out I couldn't load my blogs after that. So I removed the "Like" buttons. You can still "retweet" my Blogger blogs, of course, at least when Tweetmeme isn't down. My suggestion to Google: Add the option to "Share" single blog posts, not just the entire blog. If the competition can swipe from Google, why can't Google swipe from the competition?

Writer's Block Strikes Again...

I posted a few comments on the forums at JanNoWriMo — and then I proceeded to not even touch my computer at all until January was over. Why? Writer's block does that to me. Whenever I get blocked, my mind goes into the equivalent of fetal position. I sit in my living room recliner and think random thoughts that have nothing to do with whatever I'm supposed to be doing — or sometimes, like last month, I obsess over what I can't do. Which, in my case, was write enough notes for my '07 NaNoWriMo novel Bad Company that it actually (and finally) developed a coherent plot. Maybe I might even write some of it before NaNoEdMo...

What does it mean when I get writer's block? I don't touch the computer at all. Or any of my video games (Atari, Sega, PlayStation, etc.). I don't do any actual work on what I'm blocked on, even though I'm sometimes completely obsessed with it and even write notes on it in longhand, for whatever good that does me.

Anyway, my latest bout of writer's block is over and done with. Good thing I wasn't blocked for 4 straight months, like when I burned out on the first day of AugNoWriMo '08 and nearly lost NaNoWriMo that year (and even though I did win NaNo '08, the novel was completely unusable)...