Hey folks.
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In the grand scheme of things, I’ve realized several things:
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1. That trying to juggle working nearly full-time, full-time college, and any sort of private life is nearly impossible, at least not without killing myself. Ah, there’s some joy.
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2. It’s also the fast road to sickness, judging how I handled a 35 hour work week in addition to Senior crunch time with was almost the same amount of time when factoring in my usual class and homework time. That’s nearly half the week there, and when you factor in eating, sleeping, and an hour and a half roundtrip commute, “free” time becomes rather scarce. Not that I’m really complaining or anything, if I was you’d be seeing a picture of my in mounds of black eyeliner and a bad black dye job since it is more or less that stressful.
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3. It also puts the kibosh on updating blogs and other cathartic wastes of time. I did find some time this weekend to open up and play some FES, so that cheered me up, along with seeing Iron Man and Speed Racer.
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I won’t promise that I’ll be updating more regularly, at least not until after finals are over this weekend, but I will more often.
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Addendum: I’m currently trying to write a final paper on George Lamming’s Natives of my Person for a lit class, and considering the beating my brain took earlier today on my History final, I’m surprised at how coherent I am writing both it and this. Boy, deconstructing and phrasing the relationships between men and women in post-colonial colonial fiction in terms of nation and national (as in peeps, not things belonging to a nation) is actually sort of fun.
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Please shoot me now.
After trying abortively to write something for the webnovel project, I stunned myself with the realization that I Was Doing It Wrong in time-honored ‘net parlance. I was (and am, really) more concerned with doing something to gain experience. Which is fine with most things, but with creative endeavors you can’t just do something to do something, and I forgot that. Creative things come from within, whether it’s from the soul, the voices in the back of your head or the Force, and you can’t just force yourself to make something truly creative. Blasters are all well and good, but sometimes hokey religions work far better to mangle a quote.
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So I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to force myself to do something I don’t really want to do just for the sake of experience. After reading through the unfinished draft of my NaNoWriMo novel, and going through the bits of the things I was planning on doing for the webnovel, I surprised myself. For all that my writing skills had improved over the course of two writing classes, most of the stuff I’ve done since NaNoWriMo ended lacked “something.” My NaNoWriMo draft had that “something” along with a paper I did for my Brit Lit class of all things. In my drive for greater technical skill and experience, I’d forgotten about the really important thing, the stuff that has to be there for a project to be truly “creative.”
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Put another way, a lot of those writings lacked the passion I’d put into that paper and poured into that NaNoWriMo novel. Maybe it’s just me, but you can tell the difference. It’s the difference between technical elegance and art, and neither craft or inspiration alone really does the trick. Par for my course, I’d forgotten about the inspiration and passion part in my drive to become a “good” writer, which if nothing else makes me an idiot. Nothing new perhaps, but I still feel stupid nonetheless.
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So no, no webnovel from me. Instead I’m going to finish and edit that NaNoWriMo novel, posting chunks of it at a time, and I’m going to infuse that work of passion with all the skill I’ve got. I’ve slowly lost sight of why I wanted to write in the first place, and doing this is the way I’ll get that back, and maybe get a sweet novel out of the deal. Who knows?
I will fully acknowledge that this will likely end in failure, either to personal apathy or to my mind turning into a flaming wreck. I will further acknowledge that my past sworn objectives like anime reviews or doing weekly anime release roundups have either hit the dustbin or are so inactive that it gives bears in their winter dens a run for their money.
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But hell though, if I’m going to do something, I’m going to do it BIG, y’know? No point in half-assing half-assing something, right?
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Anyway, while I’ve got the story, characters and setting mostly nailed down, I still haven’t decided if I’m going to do this weekly or bi-monthly. Odds on bi-monthly since I want time to edit the chapters and stuff.
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More than likely I’ll add the novel chapters as sub-tabs under a general tab on the right (like the About and Article tabs that are already there), and just create blog entries whenever I post a chapter for people to comment on.
…A HEAH being a Horror to End All Horrors, of which today’s was seeing some stoned/drunk/nutzo black guy on the bus sagging so far down I could see his whiteys and the outline of his junk through them. Combine that with his weaving all over the place and him smelling like an open sewer made me want to claw my eyes out and rip my nose off at the same time.
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Now that I’ve utterly disgusted everyone, on the to the positive end of today’s topic! Read more
…On a 160 GB external HD from Seagate no less. I could have gotten one twice the size for about the same price at the local Best Buy, but Seagate stuff is generally pretty reliable and the drive itself is a tad smaller than my DS. That’s nice, since a lot of the larger storage size PHD’s are like carrying bricks around, apparently.
Now I get to stare at it lovingly and hope I don’t need to restore my backed up data. Sigh.
I won’t regale you guys with the obligatory meme picture, but that’s more or less because I’m lazy, not kind.
This place will be my repository for my anime stuff and my fiction writings, since I get the feeling that Wordpress is far friendlier to text than DeviantArt is. No doubt I’ll have something a tad wittier to post in a bit, but you’ll have to excuse me as this is my second attempt at installing this and the arcane workings of MySQL have kinda fried my brain.
Just don’t break the furniture kids.