Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Interesting weekend...A mix of productiveness and wasted time. Friday I couldn't tell you what I did. Watched a movie or something on TV, made dinner, threw away some miscellaneous junk ... It all fades into a blur. I recollect it was vaguely wife-pleasing. Ed had a buddy sleep over. Saturday, while D was off watching films at a church sponsored film festival, I did a little on the book (VERY little), read some of the semi-crappy Bruce Sterling novel I'm plowing through, read the paper. BTW, D and I are both on something of a news strike. This began when Bush won the election. In the interest of keeping my sense of free-floating rage down, I've given up listening to news on the radio or watching it on TV. Stupid, but it works. I still read the paper every morning but I can scan/skip the most outrageous stuff if I need/want to. After Ed's buddy left, he continued to rag at me to upgrade his memory from 384 meg to 512 meg. This was because Worlds of Warcraft r...

I've discovered I am often at my most creative when my life is hell. My job has been hell of late: like driving ten-penny nails in my forehead. The good news is that I am highly motivated to finish my novel. I've been at around 63,000 words for the last month and a half...just dithering around. This week I sat down one night and worked until way past midnight whipping up an outline of exactly what is going on behind the scenes in my plot. Just so I would know. Woo! I now have an ending (well, more or less). All I have to do is write it. With any luck I will be done with the first draft by Valentine's Day. Then comes the real work: rewriting.

I haven't updated this in a while. Not that I have a vast audience or anything but there is the discipline of writing it to consider. Finally finished reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon . A very good book. I liked it so well I picked up copies of Zodiac and Snow Crash from Half Price Books. In between, I started reading Bruce Sterling's Distraction , which despite the great reviews I'm finding, is not near as good a book. My wife asked me why I was continuing to read it, and I said that I wanted to understand WHY it was not as good a book. Speaking of Sterling, who hails from Austin, Texas, I have also read his Hacker Crackdown , which was a much more interesting book. Go fig. I'm also reading a couple of new Manga books I picked up over the weekend, and in an attempt to better myself, bought a Barnes & Noble edition of Pride and Prejudice. The Novel is continuing slowly. I came up with a plot idea which (I think/I hope) will make things more i...

Still in Wichita on this incredibly snake-bit business trip. Flew in yesterday, everyone bailed out of here because of the freezing rain after lunch, telecommuted the rest of the afternoon from Residence Inn (Free High Speed Wireless! Yes!). The kind folks at the Residence Inn put me on a ground floor so I wouldn't have to go up ice-coated steps. Mid-evening a herd of elephants moved in above me. They must have been Oklahoma Sooners...The OU - USC game was on and everytime OU screwed up they would stomp the floor. With the humiliating defeat OU suffered last night, the elephants had much to stomp about. About midnight, as I sat in bed working on the novel, I learned the elephants were in heat, and noisily amorous. I got up around 6:30, showered and dressed, then grabbed breakfast at the RI Hospitality area. By the time I finished eating it was around 7:30. Since all of my Wichita cohorts live on the westside of town, and the office we work out of is on the southeast corner of town,...

Once again I find myself in Wichita, Kansas, in the service of my employer. One of my co-workers is taking a different position. Since I am taking on a number of his responsibilities the plan since mid-December has been for me to travel here and meet with him. Yesterday it was 75 degrees in Texas (where I live). Current temperature in Wichita is 32 degrees, with freezing rain. I arrived here around 10:30 and at 2:30 was sent "home," which in my case means the Residence Inn, by my Wichita boss. My planned 2 1/2 meeting ended up being around half an hour. So now I'm on a conference call with all my cohorts -- those from Wichita all now at home -- calling from Residence Inn. Halfway through the call, they all lose power (ice on the power lines, no doubt). Inspiring. The high tomorrow is forecast to be 28 degrees, and the low is 8 degrees. Yahoo describes the predicted weather as "winter mix," which means rain, snow and ice. Have I ever mentioned how much I hat...

Well, here it is, the 3rd of January and I am back in my office, once again a prisoner of my desire to eat regularly. Tomorrow I fly to Wichita to freeze my ass off for a few days for the benefit of my employer. Sigh. Here's how well I succeeded in accomplishing the several things I wanted to accomplish: Finish reading Cryptonomicon: Made minor headway; managed to read another 150 (out of 1200) pages. I'll read more on the plane tomorrow Finish writing The Novel: Managed to bump the word count up to 60,000 words and think I know how I'll wrap it up. Mostly I didn't do squat on it. I'll write at the Residence Inn at night while in Wichita. Finish watching the first three seasons of Alias: Er, no. Managed to get to Episode 7 of the Second season. There are 22 episodes a season. Season 4's opener is Wednesday night. Update/redesign my website: Yeah, right. Also, didn't manage to get any Christmas cards mailed. Maybe I'll just call them Martin Lut...