Brain Enema of a Savage Mind

All right, so I thought there was about to be some major changes to the website.  More specifically I was going to change the entire engine that drives this blog, but after some experimentation I’m quite happy just staying with Wordpress.  Sure, there’s some things that I’d like to see, but nothing that is of major importance - and pretty much every other solution kind of sucks, or is just serious over kill for my needs.  I think the only major change is that I’ve made three posts in a row - it’s been awhile since I’ve done that.

However I’ve started cleaning up a lot of my older stories - putting some polish on them, so that I can post them to this website.  Several are very short stories, others are incomplete, but maybe putting the polish on them, and putting them up here will help inspire more writing on my part.  I’m hoping the creative spirit is going to be a part of the new year, but we shall see.  In the meantime keep an eye out for those snippets sometime in the next couple of days. 

written by Alex \\ tags: deep geek, writing

It’s November first, and that means I need to get cracking on this novel thing.  Of course it figures that the very first day of November is a crazy busy day for me.  I might skip out on swinging by Pixel for a sip of the casked Flower Power.  That one I already have a good idea of what it tastes like, and I couldn’t actually be there for more than a few minutes anyway.  I have a hockey game tonight, so by the time I get home it will be close to passing out time - I’m sure I’ll be exhausted.  However I’ll try to manage to put in a brief writing time after hockey.  I won’t hit the 1600ish words I need to average each day, but I should be able to make up for that this weekend.

written by Alex \\ tags: writing

So for the second time I am going to make a go of NaNoWriMo.  Last year I tried to accomplish the 50,000 word “novel” but I petered out on it rather quick.  I’ve mentioned a few times that I’ve been looking to jump start creativity so I think this might be just what the doctor ordered to get things off the ground.  Even if I don’t manage to “win”, I’m hoping it will at least get me back in to the swing of writing regularly.

I don’t have any particular idea for what kind of novel I’m going to attempt - but I’m not going to even really contemplate that until November 1st.  I figure the best way of going about this is to just jump right in to the mix by writing whatever comes to mind at that particular moment and let my brain take me wherever it is that it wants to go.

50,000 words in 30 days, huh?  Break it down and that’s about 1667 words a day.  That’s a couple of single spaced sheets of paper.  I know I can do that.  In college I could rattle off a couple pages on just about anything in an hour or two.  I’m going to have to forget about the over all goal and break it down in to smaller objectives.  It’s an easier way to operate, breaking a big thing down in to smaller chunks.  If I manage to keep that pace up for the first couple weeks it just might give me that confidence boost needed to plow through to the end of the month.

There’s still a couple more weeks before it begins, so I’m not going to give it much thought until the thing kicks off on the first.

written by Alex \\ tags: writing

As I had mentioned earlier I’m trying to bring a little more organization in to my life and I had been looking at various methods of doing so. One of my biggest hurdles has always been remembering things. I tend to remember I need to do something pretty much minutes before it needed to get done by. Things without a firm date have a tendency of sliding out of focus for me. Obviously this was the first thing I knew I’d need to address if I were to have any hope of bringing a little more order to my life (not too much order mind you, I do enjoy some amount of the chaos).

I had been pondering getting a PDA again, though I never used it as much as I should have - for whatever reason I just felt uncomfortable carrying one around so it was never with me when I needed to keep track of something. A few people have recently suggested I try using a Moleskine notebook. I looked at them a couple of times and they are very nice, so I made a mental note (ie, a bookmark in my browser) so that I might come back to that idea at a later date. Well yesterday I was reading some article on Lifehacker during a particularly slow moment at work and lo and behold they had a link to an article about converting a small Moleskine notebook in to your own custom day planner. This person actually made the decision to go from a PDA to a more simple approach to things and it inspired me. So last night I made a trip to Borders and ended up picking myself up a couple of the notebooks. One of the smaller ones (grid paper because they were out of the lined notebooks in that size) and one of the larger lined ones for jotting done story ideas, random observations, anything at all that might help the good ole’ creativity start flowing again.

I broke out the ruler and a drafting pen last night and started dividing the notebook, one week over two pages. Right now it only goes up until the end of June 2008, but I’ll add several more months to it. Then the last 60ish or so sheets will be used for todo lists, notes, etc. I bought some post-it note reinforced tabs so that I can divide the sections in the back accordingly.

Now I’m armed with my new lo-tech PDA and feeling ready to get something done! Or maybe just refill my coffee cup, it’s still early.

written by Alex \\ tags: life, moleskine, writing