mīdeas

Nobody Reads this, Hah!

2011-07-07T22:28:00.000-07:00

For two weeks, my family (near and scattered) has been 'fasting' from electronic entertainment. Electronics in general are still fine, of course. I, for one, have gotten a lot out of it.

I've been addicted to reddit. A month or two ago, they had a 48 hour outage. I was surprised how much it hit me. I think that, since then, I'm a lot better about it. Haven't had a problem at all, and I'm not missing the site as much as I did at the start of the fast. Of course that's not to say there's not plenty I want to get back to when the time's up on Monday. What is nice is that the impending end isn't that big a deal, compared to all the self improvement and control I've palpably gained.

I've been finding various things to do that aren't technically 'entertainment'. Vim is a wonderful text editor, famous among programmers and the like, that I've been learning rather a lot about. Its being extremely customizable, I've been scouring for all the best plugins, and tweaking the color scheme more than I have any right to. Best of all, I'm gaining mountains of knowledge applicable just about anywhere in programming, what with all the scripting in a new language and jazz. I'm even wondering what it'd be like writing extensions in ruby.

Vim's not the only thing that's held my attention. I've been creating a game, using my knowledge of c++ and DirectX.

But I'll speak of that in another post. My point right now is that I haven't really been into social media in the past. I'm fairly introverted. But Reading and re-reading news (that is, tech news) for the last couple weeks has gotten me excited about google+. And ironically, that has piqued my interest in other social media. For an introvert, that just means, so far, that I've done lonely posts in Facebook, Twitter, and this blog. It's hard to stay motivated blogging when I know no-one reads this.

So now I'm starting to see the structure of social networking. Facebook is still a wishy-washy miasma (can't wait for google+), but reading blogs about Vim puts me in mind of the little discoveries I've made and could post about. At first I thought I had nothing to contribute, and was wary of spitting out redigested blogmatter, but there are new things I've done. Just a couple small things so far, but I could see myself actually contributing to Vim plugin projects and posting about it. Gundo, for one, is a wonderful plugin, but is missing out on a lot of its potential, and is still quirky in a couple subtle ways.

So this blog may be geared for the wrong audience. Have you ever tried starting a conversation with someone, but they don't hear you and walk away? (maybe that's just an introvert thing). Right now, this blog has an audience of no-one. It's not so much that I can say whatever I want. Rather, I say what I think is interesting, seeing if it will stick with someone. I don't advertise this blog's existence, so it's not likely that's even possible. What I'm hoping for is that, as I progress in my game, ZigZag Dungeon, people will want to know more about it (I'm posting about it in Reddit, you see). Perhaps I could start sticking the url for this blog in my e-mail sig and wherever I post comments. Still not likely to get many readers--I'll really have to make sure my game is what I envision it to be. One redditor, when I told him the inspiration for my game came from ZZT, among other things, said that, if I do it right, he'd "found a religion to worship me."

Bit drastic, I know. Thing is, the game I have in mind, if made by someone else, would instill similar sentiments in me (though maybe not sacreligious). I'm making exactly the kind of game I've always wanted to play. As much as I want to be what the world calls 'realistic', I can't imagine this game not doing well. Well okay, I can, but at the very least I can't imagine it not having a small group of extremely devoted player. Might be niche. Hope not. But if so, I could live with a small group of people as enthusiastic about it as I am. And I'm learning a lot on the way that could help me get a career in the real world.

So who is this blog for? Right now, just me. There's a couple things I might want to take off if I start getting readers. Things of a vaguely, slightly personal nature that wouldn't make sense to have on this kind of blog. I'm sure the articles in question would still hang around in various archives on the internet. If people want to find them, and want to go through that much trouble, ehh. I did write them to be read. I'm just deciding they've been up long enough now.

So will I blog regularly now? I dunno. Would people want to read my blog? It seems the blogs I've enjoyed lately have been purely informational. So I myself probably wouldn't have enjoyed this post here if someone else had written it. I'll try to be more informative in the future. Perhaps thinking about this project will force me to learn, so that I actually have things to post.

On Track!

2010-01-20T19:11:00.001-08:00

So I'm doing well on my writing mission. It seems all I needed was a concrete goal to reach for. I would have never thought something like that would work, but the way I have it set up is very forgiving of missed days.

By the way, that little blip for the 20th on the top chart is just what I've done so far today. Like I said, I've been writing in the evenings.

So I was thinking what I ought to write here. I was also thinking that I ought to be more careful what I promise. I suggested I might write about a spiffy program called FreeMind today. Well maybe I'd rather spend what's left of the day writing my book. I'm really good at procrastinating. We'll see what happens tomorrow.

For now, I might say a little about writer's block. I'm sure it comes in many forms, but for me it rears its ugly head as distraction and procrastination. If I feel I can't get into the mood at the moment, I believe myself and can't start. But what I've found works is to steep myself in the book, the outline and the draft, and I add to my FreeMind outline what I think is going to happen next (more on that in the near future ;) ). For the last week, this is what I have managed to finally do at around 10pm each writing night.

I guess I'll make it my goal this week to see how early in the day I can get myself to do that. If I can do that, I might well have more time to actually write, and I'll get more done!

Are the graphs too much? I know nobody reads this, but I thought I might ask anyway. I gotta admit, I haven't made this blog very interesting.

If you come across this blog, and you're not a writer yourself but know one, maybe you could tell them about it. They won't find it interesting either, except they'll know there's someone else out there who's working hard, and isn't assuming they'll be an instant bestseller when they've completed their current brainchild. If they're stuck, and maybe they have been for years, they'll know there's someone else who finally had enough and was able to set a realistic goal that let him finish his novel.

I'd better stop now and get writing.

To Finish My Novel in 6 Weeks

2010-01-14T18:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday morning I decided I'd had enough with all this on-and-off writing. I started my novel in early 2002, and have worked in spurts. Of course, it is wonderful to have had this much time to brainstorm and refine my story, but 8 years is ridiculous.

So, as I was saying, I've had enough. On the morning of January 13th, I was at 69,214 words. I'm thinking my novel will be somewhere around 90,000 words. I have made it my mission to write an average of 500 words a day for the next 42 days (including yesterday). I'll be skipping Sundays, so this will actually be about 583 words a day. I've set the sub-goal of being absolutely-caught-up-no-matter-what each Wednesday, and I'll be posting my word-count in twitter each day.

I've even got a really spiffy excel spreadsheet to keep track. Maybe I'll post graphs on here each week. They show my word-count for the day, and how far ahead/behind I am toward reaching my goal.

As an aside, I love Office 2007. The ribbon makes it incredibly easy to use elegant features I never knew were there before. In Word, I steer clear of directly changing font and format, and use styles instead. It makes it easier to change the format of the entire document simultaneously, and automatically organizes everything hierarchically. But if you don't like or just don't want to use Word, your word processor most likely has styles hidden in a menu. Consider using them, you writers.

I'll write about Freemind next, and maybe I'll provide pictures.

I've only written 29 words so far today. I'd better get cracking.

Clarification on the space colony design.

2009-11-28T17:47:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm not a very good artist, but I consider myself spatially oriented. So I've come up with this clarifying drawing of my space colony design.

There are a couple differences from my last diagram, even aside from the 3D perspective on this one. Notice that the skylights (the inward-curved areas of the cylinder) take up much less than half of the cylinder area.

The three rectangles over the skylights are giant fresnel lenses. They might be a series of many mirrors 'simulating' a lens, or they might actually be glass fresnel lenses (glass is easy/is a byproduct of using lunar regolith for building materials). So the images on the rectangles are my humble attempt at a distorted view of the skylights through these lenses.

The six curved 'wings' are paraboloid mirrors redistributing sunlight evenly all the way around the skylights. I didn't even want to attempt drawing a distorted view of the colony through these mirrors.

These wing mirrors, you'll notice, are curved inward. This is because they must gather enough sunlight onto the smaller skylights to illuminate the larger area dedicated to living surface.

The giant rectangle is the radiator, deep in the shadow of the colony. The ball is a non-rotating, general purpose weightless area. It's mainly for shuttle/ship docking, but also for recreation and science experiments, etc.

The vaugery at the other end is non-descript large-scale space construction, probably related to the construction of orbital solar power satellites, or perhaps another colony.

I hope this clears things up a little.

A Better Design

2009-11-19T20:42:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite books is "Colonies in Space" by T.A. Heppenheimer. It reads like the hardest science fiction, but actually details the elaborate space colonization plans that were actually to be followed beginning in the late 70's/early 80's. The book, of course, is mute on the subject of why they did not occur. Suffice to say, despite the pragmatism brought to the endeavor through the planned construction of solar power satellites (projected to solve all the world's energy problems), the budget for the program was not as projected. I have recently read that, more or less, launch costs were not brought down to where they needed to be. I have also recently learned that this wonderful book is available for free in an online edition here. Read it!

In any case, I have one major problem with the book. The Stanford torus design (the one that looks like a mile wide bicycle tire) is fine-not a problem. Plotted to house 10,000 people in an 'open air,' full-g centrifuge arrangement, I find it brilliant that, through the use of mirrors, the colony can rotate on the same axis as its orbit around the sun. Built from lunar regolith materials to avoid the cost of launching materials from earth, unused or even not-yet-used material is placed in a non-rotating shell around the spinning main 'donut' for radiation shielding. If the shield shell were for some reason required to spin with the colony, the material strength requirements would skyrocket.

I don't know how clear I'm being. Read the book, and you'll get it.

The problem I have with the book is the O'Neill cylinder. This, of course, is no fault of the book's. The book only recounts. But the book is the most detailed source with which I am familiar, at least in terms of the advantages of the Stanford torus, and referring to it is the best way I can communicate what I mean.

My purpose here is not to detail the O'Neill design, and indeed I don't know a whole lot about it. Please read perhaps the Wikipedia entry. I want to make this short. The O'Neill cylinder's axis always faces the sun (by coming in counter-rotating pairs to counteract gyroscopic effects). It uses enormous moving mirrors to let light in, but these mirrors must suffer forces significantly stronger than one gravity (depending on how much length you want to give it, the mirrors may have to suffer several g's). Finally, fully one half of the inner surface must be dedicated to sun windows.

As for something I don't know for sure (maybe I ought to read The High Frontier), if the O'Neill cylinder were to use the same style of lunar-regolith-leftover shielding as the Stanford torus, all that mass would have to spin with the colony in its artificial gravity spin. It would be hard to support. The Wikipedia entry on O'Neill cylinders seems to indicate that just the hull and atmosphere at the scales involved is enough shielding, but that might just be Wikipedia.

But I've thought of a design, an arrangement of skylights and mirrors, that allows the colony to spin on its orbital axis, requires zero moving mirrors, zero spinning mirrors and shielding, and can use rather more than half its inner surface for habitable area.

This is the point I've been trying to arrive at for the last 500 words, but I don't expect everyone reading this to have intimate knowledge of hypothetical spacecraft design.

To be terse, my design is to have circumferential skylights taking one half or less of the inner surface. Curved, stationary mirrors will reflect sunlight onto these with an even distribution of brightness, and (non-rotating) mirrors/shields (see the end of chapter 12 of the book, search the page for 'chevron shield') will distribute the light onto the inner living area.

Please excuse the crudity of this illustration. I didn't have time to ink it or color it.

Also, my scanner sucks.

Anyways, this illustrates the simplest version of my design. The skylights take half the inner surface area, and each separate skylight region has its own mirror infrastructure outside. The central '1d' length construct is a sort of fresnal lens made of mirrors. The curved 'wings.' distribute light evenly and orderly for further distribution inside the colony.

If smaller skylights are wanted, the mirror structures are curved 'inward.' That is, their curvature is no longer equivalent to a curve in 2d space extrapolated along the axis of the colony. They form 'channels' akin to a waterslide. The main limit to this is how much heat this will generate locally, from the windows and mirror components to the air just above the skylight surface. To battle convection winds, the skylights may be elevated from the rest of the colony floor, either on 'hilltops' or at the top of a wall. This would also help reduce the amount of floating dust around the windows, which would otherwise absorb much of the wanted light and heat, and would likely create an 'eternal sunset' effect of always ruddy light.

Now, of course, the 'wings' themselves can be 'fresneled,' greatly reducing materials needed for support infrastructure. With line of sight, two separate fresnel parts would be necessary for each side, or some additional mirrors. Really, it all depends. 'Support infrastructure' in microgravity might be minimal. Fresneling may also reduce necessary mirror surface area, but then mirrors may be as cheap as thin thin mylar (that's cheap, right?). The basic design has an enormous number of adjustable variables to suit whatever economic needs actual builders would have. material cost ratios would set the final shape of the mirror wings.

Inside, the effect would be a little strange, but less strange than a cloudy day, for there would be full sunlight. Looking up, the land would consist of an arbitrary number of rings along the colony axis. There would even be the possibility of adding more rings in the future. Sunlight would come from the nearest skylight, or the nearest two skylights, from as directly overhead as its/their position(s) would allow. Over the course of the colony's rotational period, the shape of the visible sun would deform (I think), creating a subconscious effect similar to that of clouds moving about and briefly blocking the sun.

Night could be simulated a number of ways. Mirrors could be moved, perhaps to point to solar panels, or shades (outside of course, plausibly consisting of solar panels) could rotate to block the light once a day. I like the idea of using gradual 'dawn dusk' filters for their psychological effect.

That's about it. Please note that 'non-rotating' above really means 'rotating once per solar orbit,' to track the sun. It was easier to write that way.

As an endnote, I came across another interesting document that I'll try reading. It's called Space Settlements: a Design Study. We'll see what that's like.

If anyone wants me to elaborate on any point of the design, or perhaps wants more illustrations, I'll probably/happily provide them. I hope this hasn't been too dense.

Zunes

2009-09-10T23:11:00.000-07:00

My zune isn't by any means a large part of my life. I like it and find it useful. That said, I recently posted what more or less amounts to a blog post in the comments section of an article about zunes (vs ipod). Since it says a little something about me, I thought I would post the contents of the post here:

I buy a new mp3 player about once every three years. In 2002 (or was it 2001?) I bought a little flash thing that held something like 256 megs. More or less, I knew mp3 players were the future and I wanted a piece of the action. Pathetic storage (but not for the time), but the sound was absolutely amazing. In 2005, I made sure to do my homework. I hunted down feature lists and prioritized my preferences. The Creative Zen Touch 30gb had excellent battery life, so I bought it. And it still works!
By 2008, I'd been keeping my eye on the maturing Zune. The first generation was slightly less then what I'd hoped for, so I held off. The next gen, I had no money ;). By the 3rd generation, it was everything I could hope for. I had already fallen in love with subscription services via Rhapsody, and had even started putting subscription music on my Zen. So I bought a Zune 120, easily duplicated my old Rhapsody library in my Zune library, and am currently a happy camper.
All in all, what I'm trying to say is I'm proud to consider myself an intelligent consumer. I've always taken into consideration my long term appreciation for a product. When I was younger, I was never able to explore music. Now I can listen to anything I want. I don't watch tv, and I remember with embarrassment my childhood days when I would drool over commercial-hyped toys that always turned out to be nothing more than cheap plastic.
Zunes are for people who want to 'think different.'
Sorry for the meandering rant. I really just need to blog more, I guess.

posted from http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/178776.asp

Organizing my notes

2009-08-12T01:58:00.001-07:00

I've been out of a job for a while, and to be honest, I'm not looking for a new one as hard as I should.
I'm organizing the notes for my book. Freemind is a wonderful program that I'm starting to use more fully than I have in the past. Each chapter is now getting a branching plot summary of around 50 to 100 words, and each chapter is scrutinized for the justification of its existence. I include, now, notes on location, time, and dramatis personae. You see, I've been lately on one of my several-month-off periods as regards writing, and I feel I just need a better way to keep track of everything that's going on in my work. I need to write down the awesome 'of-courses' that pop into my head and make the plot actually possible. There's still a couple places where I'm wondering how something is going to happen, but I've had plenty in the past that have resolved themselves elegantly through slow free-time daydreaming -- and inspiration, of course.
There's supposed to be a meteor shower tonight, but it's cloudy :(.
Fallbrook CA (the "census-designated place" where I live) is getting a new, really nice library. RFID tag checkout and everything. Double the size of the old one, and possesing the largest meeting place auditorium-thingy in a library in the county. Maybe It'll be good for a book signing ;). I just hope the air conditioning in the new building is as good as in the old, the floor vents are heaven if your pants are baggy enough, or your shirt loose.

Writing again

2009-03-28T12:53:00.000-07:00

One thing you'll learn about me is that I have ADD, at least according to one psychiatrist. I'll be intensely interested in something, making it seem that perhaps it is my life's calling, almost. A couple months later, not so much.
But writing, for me, is truly different. I do only write on and off, but I am happiest on days that I write. I'm upset when I only write a couple hundred words on a given day. The weeks that I write, my emotions are keener. I read back on what I have read, and cannot deny the viability of my most polished passages. True, a book by me is going to be particularly suited to reading by someone like myself, but even if I'm the only one who ever reads my work, it will be worth it.

Blogs

2008-09-27T00:24:00.000-07:00

Wow. I never really got blogs before, but lately I've been reading Miss Snark (unfortunately no longer maintained), which in turn referred me to The Chronicles of the Garden Variety Writers, which I've read in its entirety. Though I'm not interested in writers' groups, it was still fascinating.
Miss Snark is full of Agently wisdom, so it's good that I read it, but I really ought to stop so I can work on my book.
As for blogs, I guess I just had to find the right ones to engage my interest. I may update mine more, now, but it still won't be very often.
I suppose that I ought to mention that, in turn, I was referred to Miss Snark through 101 Reasons to Stop Writing, which blog I won't let get me down. Though I do seem to remember briefly tripping upon Miss Snark while she was still going, around three years ago (I recognized a couple of the features and an entry).

60,000 Words!

2008-09-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

60,000 Words! I'm about 2/3 of the way through my novel. It seems it will be somewhere around 95,000.
Guitar is still awesome. I don't play it as much as when I started, but I still play. No way I'm buying anything expensive soon (like that doubleneck I talked about), cause I've been paying for the repairs of my car's spontaneous engine failure in March. That's right, because I only work part time in a near-minimum-wage job, I've been paying for a replacement engine for the past 6 months. Even when I have money again, I'll be wanting to create a money buffer of a couple thousand dollars so I'm safe from annoyances like that. And when I can afford it, I'll probably get a scooter to save on gas, and because a new scooter is bound to be more reliable than an old car.
I'm deep into the swing of working on my book every day, and have been for the last couple weeks. This is a change for me, I've been writing it on and off since early 2002, but not between December '02 and December '04--I was serving a mission for my church in Calgary, Canada. I had a good streak right before my mission, and am now having about the same progress as then, if not better.
I might write some more soon. Remind me to put some links to some awesome writing-tip sites. Writing tips are good, but only if you make sure you only follow the tips you want to. Never take any advise too seriously if it doesn't match your thinking. It would defeat the purpose of writing to not be able to be yourself. On the other hand, just realize that stubbornly following your own path can lead to your being the only one who appreciates your work, which, to a certain degree, also defeats the purpose of writing.

Guitar

2008-03-29T23:20:00.000-07:00

It was two weeks ago today (so March 15th) that I started to learn to play guitar. It is my obsession. I play nonstop and have nice calluses. I'm going to be getting a double neck electric, probably in September.
This is a short and bare entry, but it's late, and I've been meaning to write this since I started playing. So you might say this is a landmark in time, of sorts. A matter of keeping record.
It's an interesting story. For some reason, growing up, I never had the interest to learn, though my dad has played since before I was born. Then, once, on my mission, I heard a track from the soundtrack to "Last of the Mohicans" which features a 12 string acoustic. I loved the sound, and had the thought that if I ever did learn, I'd want to play the 12 string. The first vagueries of interest were planted, but only vagueries.
Then a few months ago, I was in a Radio Shack. They had a black electric guitar with white pick guard, probably a strat copy. I'd never known how awesome looking a guitar could look in real life. Even its smaller-than-they-seem-from-videos-and-such-ness stirred something inside me. But it was definite that, were I to buy a guitar, it was going to be from a guitar store, certainly not Radio Shack. The idea of owning a guitar had suddenly gained appeal.
So I'd thought about it. I figured, maybe at the end of the year, or whenever I've finished my novel, I'll get a guitar and learn to play. I didn't want an acoustic, there's enough of them around here (my dad has 3 1/2 and my brother has 1 2/2), and there are things I'd never be able to do on one. Vaguely, I thought I might, at some future point, get a 12 string electric.
So I asked my dad if he wanted to go to Guitar Center with me, just to look. Of course, he suggested I take a lesson from him first. That was reasonable, but I had a quiet, slight grudge against it. I clipped my left fingernails, as he suggested (and my right, because I wasn't so serious), and he taught me the G chord first.
I never knew how hard it was to get your fingers to bend into a chord. Of course, G is easy now.
Then he asked me if there were any songs I wanted to learn. It was important, he said, to play something you like, or you wouldn't stick with it.
I picked "After the Gold Rush." It's a song my father has played since as long as I can remember, and I love it. He taught me D major, C major, and E minor. With those four chords, I could play one of my favorite songs. Instant gratification.
I haven't stopped since. I found some good free internet courses, and will be taking a beginners class at Palomar College this summer. I know a couple good riffs, and I'm progressing rapidly.
So this post is turning out longer than I thought it would. These things are important. I can't wait to become better, so that the guitar can truly become a part of my life.

The Importance of Perseverance

2008-03-04T00:26:00.000-08:00

I had a certain dream sometime last year. I finally know what it means.
A young couple lay basking in the sun in a beautiful green meadow. The boy was a vampire. Vampires (in the world of this dream) could venture into the sun, but would be given away by the dazzling sparkle off their skin. His skin was cold, and the girl stroked her finger on his arm. I remember specifically that he told her not to stop, and that she had no idea how good that felt: his flesh was cold, and he hardly ever felt warmth in his long life. The chill was as uncomfortable for him as it would be for anyone.
They spoke, though I only vaguely remember what they said. It's possible he told her that at the same time he felt love for her, he felt an instinctual urge to drink her blood.
I don't remember the transition, but it may be because the vampire could move so fast. He demonstrated his superhuman abilities to her by running around the forest meadow almost instantly, and I might remember him tearing a branch off a tree and throwing it faster than the eye can see. He came back to her.
It was a good dream. One of those that almost makes you wish you could dream all day. When I awoke, I knew it was book worthy, but I was already writing a book, and I doubted my ability to write something in which the primary thrust was romance.
Some months later, I read Twilight. A week or two after, I read about Stephenie Meyer's dream, and remembered my own.
And the dream means the most frightening thing imaginable.
It means that the Source of All Inspiration can and does inspire multiple people with the same dream. It means that if I don't write my book, someone else just might. Personally, I feel that my book is too diverse in its multiple premises and sub-premises for chance copying, but Twilight is also of multiple premises.
It's a really good book. I highly recommend it.

edit: Yes, I acknowledge that my memory may just have been playing tricks on me, and as the memory of the incident fades, that seems all the more likely. But I also remember that it seemed so unlikely at the time, how my mind brought it all back. I remembered specific details that seem to indicate otherwise.
Have you ever had that suspicion, when you remember a long forgotten dream, that perhaps you'd actually just had the dream the previous night? This isn't one of those cases, I remember sitting up on my bed, thinking about the dream afterward. Though I don't believe in the occult (as described in popular and even less popular culture), I am religious, and can only conclude that the incident is possible, though less than likely, except I remember it.

A fevery oven is the Beeth oven.

2008-02-25T10:13:00.000-08:00

Don't you almost feel you can type Beethoven's music? If you could capture the emotion of the seventh symphony in words, you would be a writer indeed. The only way to do that is to create the literal hallucination of music in the reader's mind. That'd just be freaky and wrong.

It can be freaky, to be a writer. Please don't look at the post time.

2008-01-19T03:41:00.000-08:00

You're not going to believe this (all zero of you, my readers), but my book has been writing itself lately. I'll have no idea what I'm going to write next, and then details and 'of courses' pop out of nowhere. They are the only correct choices, and require only a little editing. Chances are, when I perform a more objective rewrite after long absence from the work, I'll realize much of it is crap, or needs refactoring or cold deletion.
So, I wrote a poem today (technically yesterday, but my sleep cycle has been going out of whack from recent, frequent midnight shifts and the intrinsic excitement of writing). I'm not obsessed with my cat or anything. In fact, the cat (which I simply call 'kitty,' but is technically named 'tailless wonder') is usually pretty starved for attention, hence the poem's title:

The Cat Who Craves Attention

Kitty, don't lick my hair please.
You eat dead animals
raw,
and lick unknown things.
It's gross.

She tries to lick my hair frequently, and this is actually what I said to her word for word on her last attempt.

2008-01-14T04:21:00.000-08:00

So, this is my first post to my first ever blog. I thought I'd keep this first one short and pointless, 'cause I really ought to be asleep right now.
I'm an aspiring novelist half way through the rough draft of my first novel. Lately, I've been doing well in writing every day, which is a change, seeing as how I started the thing in early '02. I really just needed to get into the groove again, and I believe that has happened. With luck and determination, the draft will be done in a couple months, and the novel will be complete in its final form by the summer.