Monthly Archives: January 2008

The Floodgates Are Open (So To Speak)

Posted on January 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

I finally finished the work I brought home. La-de-freaking-da.

This morning on the train, I had an idea for a short story. Science fiction, this one. It was fully formed — I have the beginning, the middle, and the end. I typed it into an email on my laptop and sent it to my personal email account before the train got to Union Station, so at least I won’t lose it; it’s a good idea, just the kind of thing I used to read in Analog and Asimov’s (and still do, when I have time to pick up an issue).

Great. I’m delighted. Over the holidays, I intended to write a professional article I have been putting off for a year; I got part way through it, but didn’t finish. Then I got the idea for Meet the Larssons, and dropped the article to work on that (the novel is much more fun than the boring article, anyway, and doesn’t require me to read any cases). Now I’ve got this damn story idea nagging at me — “Oh, work on me for a while, I’m just a short story, how long can it take? Then you can go back to the novel. It won’t be any time at all.”

I don’t know how real writers do it, but this is always my problem with projects — the next project comes along, and it’s all shiny and new, and the old project (in the novel’s case, all of five days old) seems so blah in comparison, that I end up abandoning both the old and new projects rather than make a choice.

Enough of that. I’m 38 years old, and my life is never going to get less busy than it is now. If I’m going to be a “writer” I need to actually do some “writing,” and not just use my writing as an excuse to sit on my ass in front of my laptop even more than I already do. The new story can wait until I have made some solid progress on the novel draft. I will not touch the short story until March, and then only if the novel draft is acceptably far along (as determined by the accountants of PriceWaterhouseCoopers).

That said, now I’m tired and going to bed. Additional Meet the Larssons word count for the day: nada.

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Blogging Against the Clock

Posted on January 7, 2008 | Leave a comment

I’m posting against a timer tonight — only 15 minutes for this post, because I brought too much work home that has to get done by tomorrow morning. I had to catch the 6pm train home tonight if I wanted to have dinner with the Mrs., Princess, and Junior, because tomorrow is the first day back at school for the kids and we needed to put them to bed closer to their regular 8pm bedtime. We got them down just before 8:30, which isn’t bad considering they needed a bath and have been going to bed well after 9 for the entire winter break. Everyone managed with a minimum of fuss and bother, which was a nice surprise, and Junior even cleaned up his toys after dinner without screaming about it (the brownie that was waiting for him when he was done was a powerful incentive).

Once the kids are back on their regular schedule, I expect to start getting into work earlier — I’ve been getting in to the office at 9:30 or later since New Year’s. I have court tomorrow at the Daley Center at 9:30, so I need to be downtown by 9 at the latest, though, because I forgot to throw the file in my briefcase before I ran out into the rain to catch the train. I’ll have to get up early, since I want to get another run in before the weather goes back to normal.

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Walking back to the office after running some errands during lunch today, I saw a small group of anti-war protesters holding up a big yellow banner urging an end to the war, and others holding anti-Bush signs. I had forgotten that the President was in town today (despite having to look at the enormous picture of him looking completely befuddled on the front page of the Sun-Times this morning — not what I wanted to see over my oatmeal), and his motorcade was apparently on its way down Dearborn. I debated staying to stick out my tongue, or moon him, or glare disapprovingly as he drove by — I didn’t have the time or materials to make a big “God hates fascist pigs” sign — but I decided that it wouldn’t make me feel any better, and he wouldn’t care, and I didn’t want to waste a billable quarter-hour.

My 15 minutes were up a couple of minutes ago. Back to the grind.

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A Different Kind of 5K

Posted on January 6, 2008 | Leave a comment

I don’t mean a race. It’s 10:26pm on Sunday night, and I have now written 5,012 words of the novel. I think five thousand words a week is a manageable pace, so that’s what I’m going to shoot for by each Sunday night.

The working title for the novel, by the way, is Meet the Larssons. The only thing I am certain of at this point is that this will not be the actual title of the book when I am finished.

Also, I am writing in OpenOffice Writer at this point. This is my first time using the OpenOffice suite, and I love Writer. It’s faster than Word, and has all the features I need without contributing to the monolith in Redmond. I tried doing an organizational chart in Draw, which I thought was cumbersome, but it may just be my unfamiliarity with the software. That said, I may try an application called Scrivener, which has some cool features beyond just word processing.

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Rockin’ Saturday Night!

Posted on January 6, 2008 | 1 comment

My mother-in-law offered to babysit last night, which was very generous, but we didn’t have any really good ideas for what to do. Ultimately, we decided to spend several hours at the Starbucks around the corner with our laptops. I wrote another 1500 words for my novel, and the Mrs. worked on her website. It was very pleasant. I know it’s pretentious as hell, but it worked. We didn’t have to put the kids to bed, I didn’t even buy web access, so my distractions were limited to coffee and the pumpkin loaf. Mrs. Unfocused gets distracted easily at home, too, because there’s always something that needs doing even if the kids are in bed.

So yes, we brought our laptops to the coffee house ( apologies to Scalzi), but we weren’t trying to be hip — just trying to get some things done, which we did. I’d like to have 5000 words written in the novel before I go back to work on Monday, which shouldn’t be impossible, although I have a response to a motion that I really need to finish, and I’ve completely stopped working on my article (which I really need to go back to soon). Now we’re talking about trying to do a Starbucks night once a week, at least when we don’t have other weekend plans.

The weather today is crazy warm — I just checked, and it’s 59 degrees. I went for an 8-mile run late this morning, wearing SHORTS. I’m going to try to get another couple of outdoor runs in before the weather turns bad again later this week. Shorts in Chicago in January — if that’s the future of our out-of-kilter climate, then there is clearly going to be an upside to global warming.

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Weekend Assignment #197: Surviving the Writers’ Guild strike.

Posted on January 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

Karen Funk Blocher at Outpost Mavarin is taking over John Scalzi’s old beat and giving out “Weekend Assignments” for bloggers. This week it’s Weekend Assignment #197: Now that the WGA strike has had lots of time to affect the prime time television schedules, how is it affecting you as a viewer? What shows do you miss most, aside from reruns?

My response:

It hasn’t affected me at all. I know this sounds really snobbish, but I don’t watch any series television. I occasionally watch the news, and now that the primaries are in full swing I’ll watch MSNBC and CNN more in the evening, but that’s it. I’m working my way through my brother-in-law’s DVDs of the first season of Battlestar Galactica, which is fantastic, but it has taken me three months just to get halfway through the set. My kids mostly watch DVDs (we were watching shows from the second season of the original Scooby-Doo cartoons earlier this evening) or children’s shows that are always reruns anyway — they’re not old enough for series TV.

My wife and I gave up series television a couple of years ago. I remember when we knocked it down to just a few series — House, Desperate Housewives, one or two others — because our Tivo was getting too full. Then we dropped everything but House and — for my wife only — that show that was about Saturday Night Live (not the Tina Fey show, the Aaron Sorkin one). Then I got too busy to bother with House, and my wife’s show was canceled, and we were done.

It wasn’t that we didn’t enjoy the shows when we watched them — we did. It was just that something had to go, and I really couldn’t give up any more sleep. The thing is, once I made the decision to stop watching a particular show, it was really, really easy to stop giving a rat’s ass about it. And once you make that decision about one show, it’s even easier to stop caring about the next one. Deciding to give up the last show was probably the hardest, because I knew that I was entering the realm of the crazy no-TV people, who didn’t understand cultural references and couldn’t carry on a simple conversation at lunch, but who was I kidding? I was barely watching it anyway, so the only conversation about television I could participate in would be the one about how backed up we all are with stuff on our Tivos. Now the only shows backlogged on the Tivo are Thomas the Tank Engine and Super Why. And I’m one of those people who drift off when the conversation turns to TV series (the way I always drifted off when the conversation turned to sports, or golf, or cars).

What do we do instead? In 2007, I worked. Most nights, if I wasn’t on the road or stuck late at the office, I came home, helped get the kids to bed, had dinner if I missed dinner with the kids, and then worked until 11 or 12. If I didn’t have to work, the Mrs. and I might talk or go to bed comparatively early, or read, or just mess around on the Net. On weekends, if we watched anything at all, we would watch one of our backlogged Netflix movies (I think we’re responsible for a measurable percentage of their stock price, because it takes us months to watch a movie). Series television? Who has time?

One thing, though: starting Sunday night, presumably because of the continuing WGA strike, NBC is bringing back American Gladiators, with Muhammad Ali’s daughter and Hulk Hogan as regulars. That I might watch.

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More on resolutions

Posted on January 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

I posted my perennial New Year’s resolutions from the previous post at the NaNoWriMo Big, Fun, Scary Goal Center forum, and decided they were too vague, so I added some detail on some of them, and admitted that others were unrealistic (at least for this year!):

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Some of these require more specificity. I want to get my 5K time down below 20 minutes, which is not so terribly far from my PR in both 2006 and 2007 of 20:26, but will certainly take some concentrated effort.

Language skills. I have been teaching myself Spanish off and on for a couple of years, and plan to do a little more with that this year, but this is actually my lowest priority goal this year.

Go back to TKD: I just registered myself and my daughter for Family TKD at the Y, and I think my wife and son will end up joining the class, too. Perfect! Also, this helps with “spend more time with the kids.”

If we buy a piano this year, I will learn to play at least one Billy Joel song.

Writing: a couple of weeks ago, when I started my blog, I said that my writing goals for 2008 were: keep up with the blog, write one professional article and one short story before NaNoWriMo 2008, and win NaNo. I’m having to modify those goals slightly because I started hashing out a novel the other day. So now my new writing goals are: keep up with the blog, write one professional article and the first draft of my current novel before NaNoWriMo 2008, and win NaNo.

I will not grow taller.

Learn to draw: again, probably not this year.

Superpowers: I plan to go up at least one belt level in TKD this year — that and breaking 20 minutes for a 5K would be superpowers enough for 2008.
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So, yeah, I started work on a novel on January 2. I’m such an idiot. I don’t know what I was thinking — I had a plan, and the plan did not involve working on a novel until November, which was comfortably far off. But an idea I’ve been kicking around occasionally since I was in high school more than 20 years ago popped back into my head with a new angle that I couldn’t resist thinking through. That’s the problem with ideas — once you get one idea and start going in a new direction (such as, “I’m going to start writing fiction again”), you can’t help but get flooded with ideas related to it. This isn’t NaNo, though — I don’t have that kind of tight deadline, although I’d like to finish the first draft of this novel before I have to start a new one for NaNo.

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Go, Barack, go.

Posted on January 3, 2008 | 1 comment

Unbelievable. He really pulled it off. And it looks like Hillary will come in third. Will she do the Dean scream?

I keep thinking that I am old enough and cynical enough not to get enthusiastic about politicians. Yet every four years there’s one candidate who convinces me that he’s the right guy for the job.

And that candidate never, never, NEVER wins the nomination. That candidate almost never even makes it to the Illinois primary. That candidate usually runs out of money, or energy, or gets caught with a girlfriend (yes, I’m a Gary Hart supporter from way back) long before I would ever have the chance to vote for him.

I’m ready to be disappointed — he could lose, or I could be wrong about the guy, but this time maybe my guy has a shot.

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Happy New Year

Posted on January 1, 2008 | Leave a comment

I can’t say I’m sorry to see the end of 2007 — there weren’t any major problems at home or at work, but it was a stressful year and I’m glad it’s over.

We did have a very nice New Year’s Eve, including the countdown for the kids at about 10:15, outside in the snow. We told the old year not to let the door smack it on the ass on the way out, and now we’re ready for 2008. Today we met up with some friends and took the kids sledding, which in the flatlands here is a treat. They had a blast, which was fun.

Back to the office tomorrow. I’m feeling particularly unmotivated, but I expect that will change when I get back into the thick of it.

I’m not much for resolutions, but if I were going to make resolutions, they would be exactly same as they would have been for 2007 or any of the last 7 years:

Get my 5K time down.
Learn a new language, or an old language better.
Go back to Tae Kwon Do lessons.
Spend more time with the kids.
Take the Mrs. out more often.
Learn to play the piano.
Start writing again.
Grow taller.
Learn to draw something other than stick figures.
Obtain super powers.

The problem is not that I can’t achieve any of these things, the problem is choosing a manageable number of them to work on, while maintaining a full-time job where I am essentially paid by the hour.

This year, I plan to focus on the writing, through this blog, at least one professional article, at least one short story, and NaNoWriMo. We’ll see how that goes.

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