Tag Archives: writing

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Resolving

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As recently mentioned in other Internet quarters around the globe, making “resolutions” for activities or behaviors that one wishes to undertake around January 1 is completely arbitrary.  If you decide that you should be doing something different with your life, you should probably just do it.

I think the spirit of the “New Year’s Resolution,” though, is that if you HAVEN’T been taking stock of your various states of affairs throughout the year, maybe the turn of another year will make you pause and reflect.  And while reflecting on your past year, maybe it will dawn on you that some things need to change.

A friend and I have been talking over the last couple days about the litany of tasks that we have been procrastinating on for various lengths of time, all of them too long.  We’re going to make a concerted effort to hold each other accountable to completing these things over the course of these coming months.

One of the things that didn’t make my list was returning to my blog; I figure that you, O Internet, can hold me accountable for that.  I really fell off the wagon when I was working up in Oshkosh again, and I never made the time to get back to it when I started working in Madison.

So anyway, why not a new start in a new year?  Like all of the things that I’m going to be writing in 2011, please don’t expect consistent quality.  Just expect consistent content, which, in and of itself, is likely to breed higher quality over time.

General, Uncategorized

Stick to That Schedule

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My hour-to-hour scheduling has been going OK, but the weekends are still a mess (my fault), and I have missed days here and there with getting enough writing accomplished.

You may wonder how this factors in with a new blog I started reading this week– it’s called Digital Photography School, and my friends at Lifehacker clued me into it.  I picked up that new camera at the end of January, and I’ve taken it out a few times to shoot, but I would like to get better, and in order to do that, I need to shoot a lot more.  I would also probably benefit from some reading on photography in general, and without going out and buying a new book, I figure the Internet is a good place to gather up some tips.  Or I could try a library.  They still have those, right?  Do they still offer books for free?  AMAZING..!

Anyway, I should try to find a spot in the schedule to add shooting time in.  I could probably get by for the time being on an hour or two per week, so it shouldn’t be that tough.  Maybe add that in to give my weekends some structure…

Hope you’re either recovering from St. Patty’s Day, or laughing at those that are.

General, Uncategorized

Things That Are True

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So I have 2 days left on my vacation, then it’s back to the real world and really working.  A good thing that I can think of about going back: I did have to get caught up on all the little piddly shit that was sitting around on my desk before the vaykay started, so I’ll pretty much have a clean start on Wednesday.

But anyway– there are a few things that I’ve figured out over the last several days (some more serious than others):

  1. I could do very well with about a month off from work.  However, the week has shown me that I can get things accomplished if really put forth some effort.
  2. If I just wrote out everything that I have to talk about from those years being a kid in E.R., it would be an extensive memoir.  Who would have ever thought a person could say that about that place?  Certainly not me when I was living there…
  3. Having a maid would be great.  The number of household chores that pile up in a house of just one person is amazing.
  4. Even when you buy Oakley frames for your prescription glasses, they don’t include the hard case.  No joking.
  5. I haven’t watched a football game from start to finish since last year.  I know this is going to sound nuts, but I got so used to watching tons of baseball over the summer, a football game seems REEEALLY LONG.  I think the key comparison is the way the sports are televised.  The NFL, being such a TV-driven enterprise, has very frequent TV commercial breaks, and halftime takes a while…  It’s just a different sort of sport, I guess.
  6. Speaking of football, beating Charlie Frye means nothing.  Yes, there were a lot fewer penalties this week, but against that Seattle team, all you had to do was not shoot yourself in the foot.  Possibly losing two more defensive players isn’t good for the banged-up Packers…
General, Uncategorized

Box of Money

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I’ve been off from work this week so I can invest a little extra time toward completing the writing I need to finish on my thesis.  I’m writing a lot about my late middle school/early high school years and some of the things that my friends and I used to do together.  This led me invariably back to my brief but serious comic book phase.

X-Men #25

I remembered how we enjoyed collecting and reading comics (especially all those Marvel mutant titles), but 1991-1993 was also a sort of hey-day for treating comics like commodities or investments.  We were mesmerized month after month by the pricing guides as much as we were by the books we were reading, and the publishing companies obviously took advantage of that, will an endless parade of limited editions, special #1’s, hologram covers, foil embossing, and can’t-miss crossovers (like the Death of Superman, and the Valiant “Unity” series).  I can’t remember if we were just ignorant to the fact that they were printing so damned many copies of every issue that they would never be worth anything, or if we just didn’t care.  Either way, it’s probably best I got off the train when I did, about halfway through my freshman year of high school.

Nevertheless, it is nice to pull these things out once in a while and give them another read.  No matter what a waste of time and money our parents thought it was, there was some decent writing and compelling characters in some of these comics…

General, Uncategorized

Added Benefits

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In the process of working on some thesis-related paperwork, I had occasion to review a story that I wrote about three years ago for a fiction class.  I enjoyed most of it, and I did feel like I was able to give it a solid, honest critical assessment, having not even looked at it in such a long time.  I was saying to Wordy that I could probably clean up the ending a bit and try to send it out for publication.

Then just this afternoon, I was having a conversation with Ron Rindo, my thesis director, about a very similar thing: what a fabulous idea it is to finish a piece, set it aside, and don’t even think about it for a couple months so you can look at it with a fresh perspective.  That not something that I’ve always taken the time to do in my academic career, but where this thesis is concerned, I think it’s absolutely necessary.  It’s a shift of thinking to go away from a standard, stone-set academic calendar to the notion that this is MY project, that I get to do at MY pace.  Quality has to be most important thing, and I’m going to try to be mindful of that from here on out.