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...

Figuring Out 2011

The new year is, as everybody knows, the most convenient time to set out new goals. For me, this year's set will be a bit different from the usual resolutions I've carried over from year to year.

This year, my goals are:

1. To finish the five volumes of the serial novel I'm currently writing and serializing online, Chaos Angel Spanner, edit them, and get them published starting in ebook form. Currently, I'm approaching the end of Book 1 and the beginning of Book 2. (Note: it contains large amounts of political, social, and sexual incorrectness, so it's definitely not for everybody, least of all the squeamish.)
2. To become good at playing one instrument. This year, I want to get back to playing the guitar. I'd better start in January, because Febrary Album Writing Month is just one month away.
3. To become fairly fluent in one language that is not English. I've been struggling with French since I was 10, so that's the one I pick this year.
4. To get back into good physical condition and get my body looking as good as my pretty face. That will take some prodding, and not just by my mother (who usually takes me to the gym with her). It will probably also require some changes in my diet.
5. To read at least one book a week, and post my impressions here.
6. To take at least one photograph a day starting today, and do a complete Project 365.
7. To draw at least one picture a day and get my drawing skills at least back up to where they were in the mid''00s, when I pretty much stopped after discovering NaNoWriMo in 2006.

Classes I'll be taking this year:

1. Web design. So far, the introductory class has introduced some tags (specifically tables) and CSS (starting with boxes and layouts) that I never learned even though I've been working with webpages and HTML on and off since the mid-1990s.
2. Photography. A photographer friend is holding classes, and I'm taking them. The intermediate class will require that I get a tripod.

I hope to achieve all these goals this year. Previous years, I've been distracted from all my goals. This year, I believe I can pull them off.

Here goes...

Goals for December 2010

After winning NaNoWriMo for the fifth straight time, the question is: what should I do after that? That's where the Big, Fun, Scary Goals (link coming soon) come in. I don't have my complete 2011 list drawn up yet. However, I do know what I want to do in December.

My list of December goals:

1. Win NaNoFiMo and finish Spanner book 1 (my JulNoWriMo winner, not the NaNo-winning Book 2).
2. Draw at least one thing a day, whatever that thing may be.
3. Get back to learning French: review one lesson and do one new lesson a day.
4. Start practicing my guitar again, because FAWM is only three months away.

Even though my word goal is 50,000 words once again, I'm going to give myself time to achieve my other goals. And I actually believe that I'll be winning my first FiMo this year despite the fact that my goal is 20K more. The reason: deadlines.

Anyway, to begin...

My Fifth NaNoWriMo Victory!

It's official: I've just won my fifth consecutive NaNoWriMo! You can see my word count in the NaNo word count widget to the left. Come to think of it, I should have inserted the widget into the sidebars of this blog and my project blog. I realized this when I put another counter widget in that place. Next year, I'll know better.

Next comes NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month). My goal: finish Spanner book 1 or write 50,000 words, whichever is more. I haven't written much since I won NaNo about a week ago (I reached 50,000 words on the 22nd and the word count validator bot made it official on the 25th), so this counts as another good excuse to get writing again. This will be my fourth FiMo, but I'll be going for my first win — significantly, writing a novel other than my '07 NaNo novel, Bad Company. I'll post my progress toward completion on the project blog.

A NaNo winner who wants his novel published can't rest on his laurels. I'll get back to writing soon.

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?

After a Busy Week...

#JulNo #5090 #songwriting #writers #Bloggers The second week of July '09 was surprisingly busy for me. At the end of it, though, I got my most important Internet-related business out of the way (getting rid of that archaic and extremely slow dialup connection and joining the modern world), so I can now get back to the proper business of writing. (As for those hash terms I'm now putting at the beginning of my posts: those are Twitter search terms for my Twibes. The Twibes in question are the JulNoWriMo, 50 Songs in 90 Days, Songwriting, Writers, and Bloggers Twibes respectively. That's because TwitterFeed tweets my blog posts.)

Most of my business had nothing to do with writing (novels, songs, blogs). However, I did get one short story written, added to my JulNoWriMo word count, and posted to my project blog (warning: some people may not be able to handle it, hence the many disclaimers). Now that I've finally upgraded my internet connection and immediately upgraded all the software that needed upgrading, I'll be able to return to my 50 Songs in 90 Days songs and my JulNo novel writing.

I'll be a lot more productive in the next week. First, though, I need to get some good rest. Waiting for that dialup connection kept me up at nights...

Back to The Space Helmet Show...

My Agenda for the First Week of January 2009

I have something of an ambitious agenda for the first week of 2009. First of all, I intend to write a whole lot. More information on that in the project blog (right here, to be exact). Once the first 30,000 words are out of the way, I intend to retool all three of my blogs, set up at least one new account (where, I'll say later), and start the initial work on my new homepage and project website.

What do I plan to do this New Year's weekend? Besides writing Bad Company, I want to get my blogs reorganized and properly customized. The political links that are still on this blog, I'll move to my opinion blog (which I also want to find the best name for), and I'll find other links I think better complement this particular blog. I'll make major changes in the blogrolls for each blog. I'll do the rest of the customization that got left behind when I abandoned my blogs back when I burned out on writing in August. I'll probably even change my template for this blog, and maybe even the project blog as well.

The other Web-related project I have in the works this weekend is my new project website. It will have the same name as my project blog — Spanner's World — and the project blog will be the associated blog. Eventually, I may even set up a "Spanner's World" forum for my projects, opening them up to public comment. The project page will be for my projects, of course, within the fictional universe that centers on my manga project Spanner and such side projects as Bad Company and its sequel Black Science.

So that's my plan for the first week of 2009. Now all I have to do is to keep myself to it...

Introducing the new Space Helmet Show blog

I haven't posted to this blog since June. Right now I'm transferring all my political opinion posts to a new blog called Dennis Jernberg's Opinions, which I'm reserving only for my politically incorrect opinions. I've dropped the name "The Outside View", which I wanted to pick back in 2001, back when blogging was new and I merely wanted to blog. I'm more myself now than I was then, and I'm a far more public person. And so I've renamed this blog after its URL: The Space Helmet Show, and I've given it a new purpose. It's now the blog I'll use for my most miscellaneous stuff.

I made the decision to start a blog of my own back in 2001. But I didn't actually set up my first two blogs (this and my project blog) till last March. Until my burnout last August, I kept more or less up on my project blog. However, I eventually all but abandoned my opinion blog (this one in its original incarnation), and even before then I was posting the miscellaneous items that I'll now focus on here.

Behind the handle "Space Helmet": I was the weird kid in school. I had already been diagnosed as autistic — one of the first ever to receive that diagnosis — and in retrospect I was a classic Asperger's syndrome case. (For some reason, I seem to have outgrown this; I'm far more normal today, and far more high-functioning, than I was then.) In high school, the jocks took to calling me "Space Helmet" because I was so weird. Recently, I decided to take it as a handle, just because it amused me. (It's not the only one, of course.) So when I tried to set up my opinion blog with the title "The Outside View" but couldn't put the name into my URL because all permutations of it had already been taken — it probably became so common so early that it long ago became one of the hoariest blog-name clichés — I resurrected the old nickname the high-school jocks had thrown at me and put it into this blog's URL. When I created my new opinion blog and moved the old opinion posts there, I decided I might as well take the URL I picked and use it as the name of this blog.

If I want to refer to my politically incorrect opinions, I'll now do it through links to my new opinion blog.

Now I need to go back to my blogs and change a whole lot of settings...

My Internet-Related Goals for June 2008

Last entry, I made the decision that just as I set my project-related goals for this month, I should set some blog- and website-related goals too. So these are:

1. To build up the links and blogroll section of my project blog, Spanner's World, so that it's adequate for my purposes.
2. To find out how to put subject indexes and tag clouds in my blogs.
3. To learn how to promote my blogs on the Web and blog search engines and using other Internet promotion tools.
4. To resume learning HTML so I can start designing my website.

These goals shouldn't be tough like some of my writing and drawing goals. It's mostly a matter of learning and finding out so I can do it.

I'm a public person now, even if I don't yet have much of a public. I have an Internet presence, and this month's goals are intended to enhance it. The Outside View is supposed to be my soapbox, though it isn't yet. And, even after almost a decade, I don't have my website designed or online yet. I'm getting back to doing all this, starting this month. In addition to my writing and drawing, I need to maintain and improve my public presence on the Internet. Ultimately, I intend to post the first issue of Spanner online on September 9 — which, not coincidentally, is main character Shira's 9th birthday (she is 14 when the story begins).

I've got my work cut out for me. Now all I have to do is do it.