6MS: The Many (Fatal) Loves of Sal

I’m about to start my writing for the day, so I whipped out a 6 minute story. I kept an eye too close to the time, and so the program stopped letting me type with one word to go (and a typo in the final sentence.)

I considered fixing it before posting it here, but I’m confident that my readers can work out what I was trying to say. (or maybe not! There are two possible endings, now that I think about it. Which one I meant will never be known.)

Prompt:

Story:

Sal was in love.

A part of her felt that she’d always been in love, and almost each time with a different man. But this time she knew it was real. For this man, she’d been in love with twice.

Sal had first met Harold two years ago, when he was about to be hit by a falling piano. That was when she’d known it was love most true, love most divine.

If Sal possessed anything close to an introspective nature, she may have realised that each and every time she fell in love, it was with someone on the brink of tragedy, most often death.

There was Timothy, who had been diagnosed with cancer mere seconds before Sal had realised that their love was true and eternal. There was Michael, who had just found out that the mob had a hit out on him, and when he’d told Sal, she’d almost fallen to her knees and wept at the power of their love.

And now, when she saw Harold unwittingly walk into the path of a runaway train, she’d realised that this was love most tender, most pure. She’d realised that she wanted to spend the rest of her life with Harold (or at least the rest of his life) – she wanted to be with him always, and share their deepest innermost thoughts and desires.

Sal’s hand went into her pocket, where the ring sat. She’d bought it on a whim, almost a decade ago, when she’d heard about a natural disaster taking out half of a city. Her heart had pined, she’d vowed to make sure that she always followed the path of love, and she’d walked into the nearest jewellers and purchased an engagement ring.

Now, at last, the opportunity to use it had come. Now, at last, she could enter into that most sacred covenant, pure bliss, the most holy of ceremonies.

Now, at last, she could get married.

She stepped forward to propose to Harold, who she hadn’t seen in so many years. She stepped forward to profess her love.

But bvefore she could, a train hit h

Read it on the site.

Dreams About Dreams

I’m running behind (mostly due to sleep-in) so just a quickie today: I’m going to talk about dreams a little more.

I don’t know how common dreams about dreams are, but every now and again I have a dream in which I wake up and write the dream down.

In real life, of course, I love recording my dreams. Whenever I’m sorting through old files, I repost anything interesting to my Tumblr before deleting them. Last week I discovered this gem:

Really cool dream about female ninja sent to assassinate everyone at hotel. Starts in a room with husband and wife – kill wife before husband wakes up. Then both husband and wife, then a room with heaps of people. Big, fat, American turns out to be robot.

(I have no idea how the last sentence relates to the rest of the dream, but I thought it was worth sharing.)

It can get a bit confusing when I’ve been awake (real awake) for a few minutes and want to read over the notes I made, only to discover that the note-taking was a part of the dream itself.

Last night I dreamt that I was at a dinner party with three celebrities, made a faux pas, and then woke up (within the dream) and wrote down the details to blog about later.

Have you ever tried to write inside a dream? It messes with your head. If you have any kind of control over what you dream, here’s a challenge for you: next time you’re asleep, try to dream about writing something down and then reading it back more than once.

The dream quickly turned into a confusing mess of me trying to read over my notes to see which celebrities were there, to the point that even though it was crystal clear within the actual dream, I now can’t remember who I was subconsciously hob-nobbing with.

What’s the point of celebrity cameos in your dreams if you can’t name-drop them later?

Fortunately, before it got too frustrating, my dream then turned into an amusing half-hour animated sitcom about taking over the world. Much more fun.

I’ll end today’s post with a picture: Shortly after writing yesterday’s post on Going Digital, Sarah Jane and I moved our bookcases from our bedroom into our office. Before I put my books back on the shelf, I want to sort them in some way. Until then…

I don’t know why it’s turned sideways, but this is the entirety of my book-collection, currently taking over my spare bed. Also the big robot puppet from my kid’s show Help!

I tell you, going digital grows more and more tempting every day…

Going Digital

When I was a kid, I was a non-stop reader. As a young child, it was Enid Blyton – Mum had almost every book that Enid Blyton ever wrote (upwards of 800 books) and I’m sure that I’ve read all of them multiple times.

My other favourites were the Jennings books – not Paul Jennings, Australian children’s author (though I did get into him at a later date) but Anthony Buckeridge’s series about a boy’s boarding school, in which the impulsive main character’s surname was Jennings. (they’re still hilarious, ten years after I first read them and 60+ years since they were first written.)

As I grew older, I got heavily into Agatha Christie and a romance author called Mary Burchell (again, through my mother’s collections.) It was rare for me to exist without a book in my hands – I remember reading in class, in school assemblies, during plays…

One time my family were driving to Canberra (or somewhere equally fascinating) and I was sitting in the back seat reading. My Dad, unaware that I was preoccupied, was describing everything we passed. He’d been talking for at least half an hour before he realised that I hadn’t listened to a word he’d said, and I remember him getting mad at me for living in the world of fiction (and a book that I’d read a dozen times, at that) instead of learning about the real world.

The line between reality and fiction has always been a bit vague to me. I think that’s why I enjoy writing so much.

My reading choices have always been determined by author rather than by individual book – the most important thing for me is finding an writer whose “voice” that I like. Authors I discovered outside of my Mum’s collections include Ben Elton, Terry Pratchett (though it took me about 3 or 4 dips into the world of Discworld before I really started enjoying it) and the works of Dave Gorman and Danny Wallace.

Nowadays, however, I don’t read much. The last author I discovered was Lisa Lutz, author of the Spellman books, and that was in late 2010, almost two years ago. I rarely get that urge to read, and for the last few months my bag has contained the latest Dave Gorman book (in which he travels the world playing various board and computer games against strangers) – it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of writing, I’ve just never felt inspired to pull it out and get past the second chapter.

Part of the reason for my declining interest in the written word is simply the expense and inconvenience of finding new books to read. When I find a tale that grips me, I don’t put the book down until I’m done, but that’s been happening less and less and that’s what brings me to the point of my post:

I’m considering going digital.

I publish eBooks for (one of my) livings these days, and so most of my time is spent on writer’s forums, talking about our target audience of Kindle-owners. Constant exposure to this kind of conversation takes its toll, and so I’m considering shelling out the sheckles and picking up an eBook-reader of my very own.

If I could carry every book I want with me, I’m sure I’d be tempted to read more – I’m still only on the third Spellman book, because I never picked up a copy of the fourth. If I had a bookstore in my pocket, I’d be much more likely to grab a copy.

I haven’t done the research of cost vs battery-life vs book-price etc, mainly because I can’t actually afford to buy one at the moment, but once I do I’m sure I’ll be grabbing a Kobo/Kindle/Google book-reader/whichever I determine is the best for me.

I have two issues with going digital:

  1. As anyone who has seen my DVD collection will know, I like owning stuff. You can lend it, you can browse your collection, they just look good on the shelves. My DVDs mostly fill this niche for me, so in terms of books it’s not a huge worry, but I think it warrants mentioning.
  2. Bruce Willis considers suing Apple for ownership of his iTunes collection. (although the story is completely unsourced, the issues it brings up are interesting)

Now, this may be resolved when I do a google search for my preferred eReader and discover that hey, I can own my collection after all, but I want to have a general discussion about the concept anyway and it’s my blog so fuck you.

I like my DVD collection because after giving the money to JB Hi-Fi (or my DVD-purchasing store of choice) then I can walk out of the store with the DVD and its mine to do what I like with. Technically there are limitations, but they’re yet to come into my house and take the DVDs away from me for format-shifting.

If Amazon goes bankrupt, or Apple loses all their money in a series of bad decisions, and my entire collection of books/songs/movies is stored on the cloud…what happens? The main appeal of the cloud is that I don’t have storage space for everything that I want to own.

To readers of the future, I may sound like a crazy man keeping his money under the mattress because he doesn’t want the gubermint to take it (or the banks to lose it) but here and now, it’s a valid concern.

Shamus Young, one of my favourite bloggers (blogs! That’s what I read instead of books these days…) refuses to buy anything that requires online activation, because he wants to play favourite games in twenty years time, when the servers that activate them have inevitably collapsed. He’s still playing games from the late 80s that he enjoyed, which would be impossible with many of today’s games.

I’m seriously considering giving up on CDs and using iTunes to buy all my music from now on. (especially since I got iTunes Match and an AppleTV.) CD cases are nasty and take up too much space.

Books aren’t nasty, but I miss reading, and being able to carry every book I own with me would be a nice way of getting back into it.

I buy a lot of DVDs  – partially because I want to work in that industry and like supporting it, and largely because I like having a physical library to reference. If I’m writing, I like being able to pull down season 1 of Just Shoot Me and put it on in the background, without having to wait half an hour for download time or to find a torrent that works.

When I got my AppleTV, a friend said that it wouldn’t be long before I started making the move to getting all my TV and movie needs through iTunes. I laughed at the time, but since then I’ve noticed that my second-favourite TV show, Breaking Bad, is available as-it-comes-out through an iTunes season pass. Thus far I’ve managed to avoid all spoilers, but it would be so easy to get the season pass and be kept completely up-to-date on the show as it’s released…

It’s a slippery slope.

(my favourite thing about iTunes Match, incidentally, is that it reads your physical CDs and adds them to the cloud for you, instead of trying to make me buy all my movies twice. If AppleTV did that for DVDs, I would pay serious cash for the service. Part of the appeal of the cloud is being able to watch stuff on my iPhone/iPad/Macbook, without having to download and convert each individual movie/show I want to watch)

Comments are open if you have opinions on all this jazz – I know my sister reads my blog, and I’m curious to hear what her thoughts on the world of Kindle are. The pro’s of staying physical include the knowledge that you own something, and that you can’t just be locked out of your entire library. Cons include the amount of space they take up and the risk of losing or breaking them. (I have several movies that I’ve bought three or more times.)

Fortunately I’m broke at the moment, so I can’t go out and make any immediate purchases anyway, but it’s interesting to think about.

Physical vs electronic? Am I foolishly resisting the trends (like those people who refuse to get a smartphone or Facebook) or am I being smart and waiting for the laws to settle before putting thousands of my currently non-existent dollars into a platform that could go under at any moment?

(and if you are here from the future, how crazy does this post read?)

Assorted thoughts about sleep

When I was little, I used to hate sleep. It was such a waste of precious time, and I hated the fact that if we didn’t have to spend eight-plus hours laying down with our eyes closed each night, we’d be able to get so much more done!

In grade 11 (the second-final year of high school in Australia) I tried very hard in all my subjects (something that stopped as soon as grade 12 came long) and as a result got very little sleep. Since then, I’ve had a much stronger appreciation for no longer being awake – when I’m tired, it’s rare for me to choose anything over sleep. Absence makes the heart grow sleepier and all that.

Another new-found joy: naps. I truly love to nap.

I actually see this as a good thing – if we’re going to spend a third of our lives sleeping, I’d rather enjoy it, and since I embraced sleep and started doing more of it, I’ve been much more productive during my waking hours.

One of the purposes of dreams is your subconscious sorting out information that your conscious mind hasn’t had a chance to deal with yet, according to some site I read once. That’s why you’ll dream about whatever’s happening in your life at the moment, and it’s the reason I try not to go to sleep when I’m angry or stressed; I don’t want to spend all night dreaming about whatever it is that’s making me feel that way.

That fact might be true, or (more likely) my brain might just be extremely suggestible, but ever since I heard it my dreams have contained little tidbits of information that I’ve picked up over the previous few days. I learned that New Zealanders emigrate to Australia at a startling rate, and that featured in a dream the next night.

Reddit.com/r/todayilearned is pretty much a dream-generator for me.

About two weeks before we film each episode of We Should Know Better, I dream that it’s show-night, all the guests are there, the audience are filing in…and we’ve forgotten to write the questions. If you’ve ever seen an episode, it may or may not be obvious how much time we spend on the questions, but it ranges from “hours” to “days”. I don’t know why my subconscious insists on routinely freaking me out like that, but it does serve as an incentive to get the questions finished as early as possible.

Last time, I also dreamt that I forgot half of the guests’ names, and that the audience refused to sit where they could see the stage (which was in a giant football field, of course) because it didn’t have sufficient wheelchair access. I think Friday Night Lights is partially to blame for that one.

My brain adores many things, with “story structure” right near the top of the list. All my life, my brain has taken the random collection of images that come to you when you’re sleeping, and turned them into a structured story, with beginning, middle and end. Sometimes it has to fudge it a little, but the beauty of dreams is that you can retroactively add information in. Getting to the end of the dream and need a twist to have been set up from the beginning? Done. Dream-style.

The best description for it that I can think of is “a Peter-specific movie, each and every night.” I’ve written more than a few of them down, and the last TV pilot I filmed actually came directly from one of these well-structured dreams. (though it turned from a sitcom starring me as the sidekick into a drama featuring Laura Jane Turner in the role my brain wrote for me. I’ll forgive her some day.)

Sleep, if you can’t tell, is a delight for me, and even if it wasn’t mandatory, I’d still probably indulge from time to time. Waking up, not so much.

My absolute favourite way to wake up is to someone I love bringing me a cup of tea. My girlfriend is now the one who sleeps in, but when I used to work nights, she’d wake up and want to hang out with me. The deal we struck was that she could wake me up any time after 10, as long as she was holding a cup of tea.

Since I started working from home and getting up at a more reasonable hour, I’ve set four alarms on my phone, for 8:00am, 8:05am, 8:10am and 9:00am. On mornings when I’m springing out of bed at the sound of the first alarm, the rest are superfluous, and mainly serve to remind me to actually start working when it hits 9. On mornings when I desperately need more sleep (ie: Monday mornings), I wake up at 8, turn the next two alarms off, and allow myself an hour of extra sleep.

(the 8:05 and 8:10 are because I’ve been known to wake up, turn the alarm off, and then go straight back to sleep. The threat of two more alarms generally makes me tense enough to avoid drifting off again, though there have been times in my life when I’ve woken up, turned all three alarms off, and then slept through whatever important event I’d set them for. Most recently: the surgery I’d been waiting more than three months for.)

(they took me even though I was three hours late. I was overwhelmingly grateful, and before important appointments I now set even more alarms, and put my phone somewhere that I can’t reach from the bed.)

As of today, I’m setting one more daily alarm – 8:30pm. Before I started living the 9-5 lifestyle, my bed-time would range from midnight to 2am. If I do that while trying to get up early and do a full day’s work, the following morning ends up consisting mainly of me staring into the screen and making endless cups of tea. The 8:30 alarm is to tell me to start wrapping up what I’m doing, and get ready for bed. Not go to bed, but to at least stop staring at screens until the next morning.

We had people around for dinner last night, and afterwards chatted for several hours, and then watched TV for a few hours more. It was a great night, and I still dragged myself out of bed at 9am this morning, but it’s just hit 11:15 and I’m only just now finishing my first-thing-in-the-morning blog post.

I make sure to structure my Mondays so I don’t have to do anything wildly creative. Today, for example, I am going to watch over some speeches, find some snappy stand-alone quotes, and assemble a rough cut of a trailer for a client. I may also do some photoshopping. My brain is too fuzzy to do anything that requires any more skill than that.

Writing? That’s Tuesday work.

What are your unusual sleep-based habits? Do you use alarms, or wake up organically? What are your dreams like? Tell me your weird sleep stories, because I actually find these things interesting.

Strawberries and Cream, WSKB Episode 1, The Worst Argument in the World

A picture, a video and a link for Sunday:

I’m genuinely amazed that throughout my entire childhood, no one ever referenced the fact that these look like breasts.

Not a lot like breasts, true, but people were using pencils as penis-substitutes; the standards were hardly high.

This week’s video is the first (filmed) episode of We Should Know Better, a quiz show that I produce and present. You should watch it, and then send it to your friends, and then leave a comment letting me know what you think. In that order.

Link: The Worst Argument in the World.

See you all tomorrow morning!

Comparisons: “Base 10” and “Reclaiming”

This is the first in what I plan to be a series of posts called “Comparisons”, when I have the same issues or thoughts on two completely unrelated topics. Today: the mathematical concept of Base 10, and the social issue of reclaiming a word.

I have the same problem with both of these topics, and it's a simple one. But first, let me explain:

Base 10, for anyone who didn't learn this in math (and I'm always genuinely surprised how many people didn't) is what we use to count. As I sincerely hope you're aware, our numbers go like this:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

You'll notice that once we get to a certain number (“9”) we run out of digits, and have to start using more than one in combination. The point at which we switch to double digits (at number “ten” for us) is what the base is named after, so your standard 1-9 -> 10-99 -> 100-999 etc is called “base 10”.

What you may not know is that you can create bases around any number you like. Let's say you hate the number 9, and never want to see it again. Then you can just use base 9, which goes like this:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12…

It's not just skipping the number you don't like, it's a different way of notating numbers. When base 9 (so called because “9” is the number where we go to double-digits) gets a lot larger, it goes like this:

80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 100, 101…

It's as if the digit “9” doesn't exist. We've wiped it out of existence, and so we have to go straight to adding more digits.

Another example: 6, you may have noticed, looks a lot like 9. So let's use Base 6, and cut 6 out entirely. Counting in base 6 goes like this:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 30…and when we get a big larger, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 100.

It doesn't stop there – in base 6, we go straight from 555 to 1000, and from 5555 to 10000. But if you have “20” in base 6, you have what we would refer to as “12” in base 10. If you have “100” in base 6, you would have “144” in base 10. Numbers have different meanings in different bases.

I could talk about bases all day, but I'll just give you two more examples. One of the most common uses of different bases is in computer code, and it's called base 2, or “binary”. Counting in binary goes like this:

0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110, 111, 1000…

Because base 2 can never reach actually use the number “2”, as soon as it hits 1, it has to move straight on to “10”. You can read thousands of words about binary in other places on the web, and if this kind of stuff is interesting to you, I genuinely recommend you do.

Each base has its own neat little tricks: you probably know a few for base 10: If a number is divisible by 9, all of its digits add up to 9; if a number is divisible by 3, all of its digits add up to 3; if a number is divisible by 4, its last two digits are divisible by 4; etc etc.

The easiest and most useful trick in base 10 is that “if the last digit is even, the number is even” – it blew my mind when I realised that's not true for other bases. Trippy.

Binary's trick? From right to left, the digits represent doubles of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc. If there's a 1 in that slot, add the double, if there's a 0, add 0. If you look at the number 1001110, you can quickly add it up by using that trick. From right to left: 0 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 0 + 0 + 64 = 78. Type “78 in binary” into google if you want to check my maths. (I did.)

Lastly: all of the examples I've given have been numbers smaller than 10. But you can go larger as well – base 16 is also known as hexadecimal (hex meaning six, decimal meaning base 10. “a” meaning “plus”, I guess.)

How does it work? Instead of going to double-digits after reaching “9”, hexadecimal goes to double digits after “15”. But 15 is double digits, so we have to make up some digits to put in when we run out of normal ones.

Fortunately, we have plenty of digit-equivalents lying around – you're reading a blog post made up of them. Hexadecimal goes like this:

0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f, 10, 11…right up to f0, f1, f2, f3, f4, f5, f6, f7, f8, f9, fa, fb, fc…

It's a big weird at first, seeing letters used as numbers, but you get used to it. You'll have already seen it if you've ever used colors in an graphics program or in HTML. #000000 is black, #ffffff is white. Now you know how it works – it's split into red, green and blue, like so: #RRGGBB. Each pair of digits counts from 1 to ff, the last hexadecimal number before 100; black is a complete lack of colour, and white is each colour turned up to the max. Try #ff00000 and you'll see that it's pure red. Knowledge: attained.

(homework assignment: find out what happens when we run out of letters to use.)

We use base 10 for an obvious reason – we have ten fingers. (go on, count them. I'll wait.) Other civilisations have used other bases for various purposes – base 60 is a popular one, because of how easily everything divides into it (the number of days in a year probably plays into that as well.)

Base 10 makes sense; it's simple, manageable, and has some pretty handy rules that make our lives a lot easier (there are easy-to-learn rules for which numbers divide by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, and 9.) So what's my issue with it?

Well, first of all, let's talk (much more briefly) about reclaiming.

The idea of reclaiming is simple: instead of allowing words such as “nigger”, “cunt”, “slut”, “queer”, “gay” etc to purely exist as insults, some movements believe that the words should be used positively by the people they insult. There's a piece of art in the room that I'm writing this, a huge pink banner that reads “CUNTASTIC”, which I assume relates to reclaiming the word. (I've never actually checked.)

As an idea, I'm not so crazy about reclaiming words – I think that while you can definitely be successful (see: “geek”, “Jesus freak”, and even “gay”) you run the risk of only people within the minority being able to use the reclaimed word without causing offense (“nigger” is the most obvious example, but I've been told on multiple occasions that men are not allowed to use the word “cunt”.)

Personally, I think that anything which further segregates two groups (group x can use this word but group y cannot!) is a step in the wrong direction, but I don't profess to be an expert on it, and I can definitely see what they're going for. Rather than potentially misinform you any further, I'll leave you with the Wikipedia link, and you can read up about it yourself.

(16 paragraphs on math, 3 paragraphs on important social issues. Some things are just more fun to explain.)

So what's my issue with both Base 10 and Word Reclamation?

The name.

Base 2 is called base 2 because it never actually reaches 2. Base 6 goes to 5 and then skips into double digits.

Base 10? That makes absolutely no fucking sense. Every base is base 10. “10” appears in bases 2 through infinity. It could hardly have a less descriptive name if they'd tried.

I can see how it got the name that it did, but in mathematical terms, it's the height of arrogance. Base 10 pre-supposes that people know which base we're already using. Which, y'know, we do, but it's not elegant. The concept of mathematical elegance is one of my favourite things about the subject, and I think it's a little sad that such an important concept has such an inelegant name.

Reclaiming, in quite a different way, makes absolutely no sense either. To reclaim something is to take back what was once yours; historically, the words “nigger”, “slut”, “geek”, “queer” and “cunt” never belonged to the people they described. I notice that the Wikipedia page promotes the term “re-appropriating”; I wonder if someone else had the same problem as I did and this is their attempt to fix it.

I once tried to debate the issue in a large group of radical feminists. It did not go well.

Language is important. Names are important. If base 10 was named “base A” (as it should be), people would ask questions with interesting answers, and if you do nothing else in life, try to make people ask questions with interesting answers.

This long blog-post has been partially an excuse to explain bases (it's surprisingly hard to find reasons to bring it up in everyday conversation) but mostly a way to get some thoughts out that have sat in my head for many years now.

So write to your senator, bring it up in your next math class. Base 10 should rightfully be called “base A”, and “re-appropriating” is a much more suitable term. Together, we can fix the world, one minor issue at a time.

6MS: Passport Problems

SixMinuteStory.com gives you a piece of creative commons stimulus and six minutes to write a story. No revisions are allowed; you have six minutes, and then you’re done.


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This picture is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic License.

I looked at the passport, and then back up at the woman standing in front of me.

“Are you serious?” I asked, a puzzled look on my face.

She looked sad.

“What is to be funny?” she said, her broken English somehow endearing.

“I don’t know how they do things in…” I turned her passport over, and looked at the country name listed. It took up three lines, and many of the letters just looked like squiggles to me. “…your home country, but over here we do things differently.”

“Is me!” she smiled, and I felt my tough exterior melting slightly. “Is me, is true! I swear it to be!”

“Excuse me, sir.” Turning to the man behind her, I borrowed his passport to use as an example. “You see, your typical passport will have a photo like this in it. Yours…well for one, it looks hand-drawn.”

“Yes, yes!” she cried excitedly. “Is hand-drawn by Duke of Yoggolomoniantia! He best drawn hand in world. Passport is good, yes?”

“No, I…”

I sighed.

“Listen, I’m afraid that I can’t let you in. Not with this…I mean, for heaven’s sake, one of your tit is showing!”

“Is good tit!” she said, and started to remove her top to show me. “Is best tit in all of Hagroniantominialopskell! You like?”

I stared at her tit briefly, and then looked down at the passport.

“Oh,” I said. “I suppose it is you.”

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This story is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.

New Routine

I work from home these days, and so I’m always meddling with my routine, trying to get more work done without burning out. I’ve recently started listening to the podcast Home Work, which is chock full of suggestions on how to become more efficient and all that jazz, and so I thought I’d try something new.

I’m going to start each day with a blog post. (I’ve been wanting to get back into blogging for literally years now, so this is a great way to accomplish double avian homicide using minimal rubble.) Some days they’ll be long, some days they’ll be short, but I’m hoping that if I start each day with a concrete accomplishment, it’ll help give the rest of my time a bit more structure.

I’m also going to do a Six Minute Story before I start writing each day, and I’ll post them over here as well. Each blog post will be redrafted twice, and in the spirit of flash fiction, each 6MS will be redrafted zero times.

What does this mean for you, my currently-nonexistent readers? It means you can expect at least one blog-post each weekday; two, on days when I’ve also got writing to do. I’m not giving myself any rules about what the blog-posts can be about, which means they’ll be anything from “what I’m working on” to “reviews” to “here is a thought I had which doesn’t quite make sense but I’m going to share it anyway.”

Of course, given my track record of keeping things updated, this may fizzle out in less than a week. We’ll see!

Today’s a writing day, so you can expect a 6MS to come up straight after this entry. If there’s anything you particularly want me to blog about, leave a comment. I’m not promising anything (I have a big backlist of topics I’ve wanted to talk about for a while) but I’ll see what I can do.

I’m also going to use this blog to store any other writing projects I do, like Kiandacorp. And if I ever get back into vlogging (something else I’ve been wanting to start up again for years now) you’ll see those popping up here as well!