It’s weird that I’m already think­ing about NaNoW­riMo. I’ve tried, on and off, for I don’t know how many years, with vary degrees of suc­cess, none of which have been ter­ri­bly note­wor­thy. I’ve always been par­tic­u­larly inspired by the “one day” nov­el­ist descrip­tion of NaNoW­riMo. As in, “one day, I’ll write a novel.” Writ­ing a 50,000 page novel in a month, with scores of other writ­ers doing the same, is sup­posed to get peo­ple from “one day” to “The End!” Unfor­tu­nately, I never got that far. In fact, I always did rather abysmally. With nei­ther plot nor char­ac­ter, I’d floun­der for the first few days then give up. Not to men­tion I thought my writ­ing was ter­ri­ble, forced and ugly.

Then, there was The Num­ber. Most NaNo vet­er­ans know it by heart. One thou­sand, six hun­dred and sixty-seven. 1,667. The amount of words you have to write, each day of the month, to clear 50,000 by the time mid­night on Novem­ber 30^th comes around. It doesn’t look like much, does it? In fact, that’s the point. Com­pared to 50,000, it’s down­right tiny. Then I look down below this text box I’m typ­ing in now and see my cur­rent word count: 194. That’s just 11.6% of 1,667. I’m not exactly sure how long I’ve been typ­ing but I do know what thing: I have no idea what I’m going to fill the other 88.4% with. And this is just day one! Twenty-nine more days of 1,667 words. That’s impossible!

Well, of course it’s pos­si­ble. 32,178 peo­ple did it in 2009. The web­site is full of forum posts with tips and tricks and what­not. There are writ­ing chal­lenges and word wars (head to head bat­tles to write the most in a given time period). Writ­ing prompts, plots and char­ac­ters that need adop­tion, and more. Every­thing you need to get going. Except for one thing.

The desire to sit down and write.

I really want to do it this year. I don’t know why. (It could have some­thing to do with watch­ing Won­der Boys yes­ter­day. It’s a great movie, I rec­om­mend it.) I couldn’t tell you what’s dif­fer­ent between this year and all the other years I’ve said I was going to do it and fiz­zled out on day three. To get started, I’m going to start writ­ing here more. I’m look­ing at it as train­ing for a run. You can’t expect to hop off the couch and run a 5k with­out risk­ing death or shin splints. So, I’ll start here. Counter is cur­rently up to 393. That’s nearly a quar­ter of the required 1,667. It’ll prob­a­bly be hard to come up with top­ics, and I’m sure I’ll for­get some days since I have a ter­ri­ble mem­ory, but I’m going to try. And this year, I have a net­book I can take with me to places other than my messy room. Per­haps a change of venue will help me churn out the words.

The thing I have to tell myself the most is that even if I type out 50,000 words of crap, it’s still an accom­plish­ment. I will still have wrung 50,000 Eng­lish words, in some con­fig­u­ra­tion, from my brain via my fin­gers. And if they’re any­thing like that last sen­tence, they will be utter crap. What­ever. There’s always NaNoEdMo.

Word count: 514

[Yes, I know it’s been 4 months and 3 days since my last post. Such is my rela­tion­ship with writ­ing and blog­ging and such.]

[Edit: Hee. It would seem this is not the first time I’ve had a 4 month break. Ha, I kill me.]

[I still can’t stand the word “blog”, by the way.]

One of the many ways in which I am a bas­ket case is the para­noia that comes from hav­ing peo­ple hang around behind me when I’m sit­ting at a com­puter. This hap­pens most often at work. I tend not to lis­ten to music at work because it’s hard to hear peo­ple com­ing up behind me. “Get one of those cubi­cal mir­rors,” you’re prob­a­bly say­ing, if you’re the type to speak aloud to blog posts. I prob­a­bly would have by now, except I never remem­ber to get one until I’m at work and get­ting that para­noid feel­ing again. Since there is a dis­tinct lack of mir­rors in the vend­ing machines, I’ve yet to pur­chase one.

The sit­u­a­tion is made worse by the fel­low who sits across the… gap… from me. What do you call the space between two cubi­cles through which peo­ple walk? It’s not a hall or a cor­ri­dor. Pas­sage­way? Walk-thru? I have no idea. Any­way, the guy who is across the way from me. I sit with my back to him. This in itself doesn’t make it worse. Who he is makes him worse.

Now, before I begin this, I want to point out that I’m not ageist. Not any­more than any­one still in their 20s any­way, I guess. But, he’s old. He’s near­ing retire­ment and so doesn’t really do much all day except talk to peo­ple. Peo­ple who stop by his cube. Peo­ple who stand out­side his cube and, there­fore, out­side my cube. They stand there and talk. And, like many old peo­ple, he can con­tinue a con­ver­sa­tion long past when it should have ended. He snorts when he laughs. He kind of stut­ters and speaks in a way that makes it seem as if the mus­cles in his jaw don’t work as well as they used to. It’s actu­ally kind of hard to under­stand him some­times. It’s annoying.

I guess all that does kind of make me sound like a dick. Whatever.

The most recent vis­i­tor had some­thing extra to kick up my social anx­i­ety. She was sell­ing candy bars for her son’s something-or-other. I didn’t hear what. I hate when peo­ple do that in an office. Not because I feel that has no place in an office, but because I feel dick­ish when I turn them down. No, I don’t want to buy a candy bar. Or pop­corn. Or a Christ­mas can­dle. Or any­thing else. Yes, I care that you’re rais­ing money for your kid’s school. (Actu­ally, I don’t really, since I don’t have a kid, in that school or any other, but I don’t think I could come out and say that.) I know it’s my right to turn them down and I shouldn’t feel any­thing for doing it, but it’s just latent “what do peo­ple think of me” worry that I’ve not yet man­aged to let go of.

See, this is why I don’t blog much. I start with a coher­ent sort of out­line and by the time I get a few para­graphs in, I’ve lost it. Fuck it. Here’s a bul­let list:

• twt­lang is no more. Not that any­one really used it. Twit­ter moved away from anony­mous API usage and I didn’t feel like reg­is­ter­ing it.
• twt­dict, how­ever, is still alive. In fact, twt­dict won big in Wordnik’s 2010 Devel­oper Chal­lenge. I scooped up best in pro­duc­tiv­ity and best in show. See, ideas thought up in a bar can turn into good things.
• One of the things I pur­chased with my prize money is a Nikon D3000. Because of that, I’ve been using my Flickr account more. Go take a look, if you’re of the mind to do so.
• I have no idea why this photo has 111 views. There are no com­ments. No tags. No descrip­tion. Not even a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing title. I am some­what baffled.
• I recently bought a scooter, too. It is fun. You should get one.

I guess that’s brings us up to date, in a jar­ring, half-assed sort of way. I can­not say that it won’t be another 4 months and 3 days before I post again. Only time will tell. Only time will tell.

Nigh on four months since the last time I updated this thing. Can’t say I’m sur­prised, really. I’m noto­ri­ous for start­ing a blog then either not really updat­ing it or doing so reg­u­larly at first, then slip­ping into irreg­u­larly, before finally falling to spo­radic to not at all.

I should change this.

I think part of the prob­lem is some­thing I’ve recently come to real­ize about myself: I can only have two hob­bies at once, and one of them is always play­ing gui­tar. Stay with me here.

I’ve been play­ing gui­tar for, oh, 14 or 15 years now. Offi­cially half my life. Clearly, that’s not going to stop any time soon, bar­ring any phys­i­cal rea­son (paral­y­sis, loss of finger/hand/arm in a tragic farm acci­dent, which is unlikely, con­sid­er­ing my cur­rent level of farm activ­ity; which is to say, none). When I went to Iraq, I left my gui­tar and went about 6 months before I just couldn’t take it any­more and ordered an acoustic gui­tar so cheap that ship­ping to the APO was $10 more than the price of the gui­tar itself. I still have that guitar.

So we have gui­tar play­ing. What’s my other hobby, you ask? Well, that varies. Which is part of the prob­lem. See, the whole “only two hob­bies at a time, one of which is gui­tar” rule was decided upon after I noticed this habit in myself. It was not arbi­trar­ily decided upon to help with my per­sonal time man­age­ment (which sucks, by the way). One day, I just noticed that my inter­ests change peri­od­i­cally and I only do that one thing for a period of time. Then, for no appar­ent rea­son, that activ­ity falls out of favor for me, and I move on to some­thing else or just start watch­ing a lot of movies.

Paint­ing, draw­ing, carv­ing wood, pro­gram­ming (in either a lan­guage I know or try­ing to learn a new one), pho­tog­ra­phy, lutherie, writ­ing. All of these are things that I have attempted, with vary­ing degrees of suc­cess, and sub­se­quently aban­doned. I will go back to them peri­od­i­cally and pick them back up, but so far noth­ing has even come close to touch­ing the tenure of play­ing guitar.

Cur­rently I’m think­ing of going back to writ­ing. I’m not sure I have enough patience for a novel, but short sto­ries might be doable. My prob­lem is sit­ting down and actu­ally doing it. We shall see how it goes.

The only other news is that I’m work­ing on a ser­vice that allows you to tweet a word and get the def­i­n­i­tion sent to you. I real­ized how this might be use­ful when I was read­ing at the bar and came across an unfa­mil­iar word. Not to toot my wordy horn, but that doesn’t hap­pen too often. At the time, though, I didn’t have a way to look up the def­i­n­i­tion. So I thought, “What if there was a way that I can tweet the word and have it sent to me in a direct mes­sage?” The direct mes­sage is impor­tant because I don’t have one of those fancy smart phones and I do every­thing via text mes­sage. My Twit­ter account (@hallowdmachine, if you’re inter­ested) is set so DMs are sent to my phone in a text mes­sage. So, I’m work­ing on that. I hope it will work like I want it to. The details are for another post. As is my expe­ri­ence last night see­ing Lucero at the Jew­ish Mother.

I was plan­ning on try­ing National Novel Writ­ing Month (NaNoW­riMo) this year. Again. I’ve tried sev­eral times but never made what you might call a suc­cess­ful — or even noble — attempt. I gear up to start off nice and strong on Novem­ber 1^st but it never goes any­where. I for­get to make time to sit down and write, or I do remem­ber but have no moti­va­tion to actu­ally get it done. Stuff like work or sleep or drink­ing or watch­ing a movie always gets in the way.

I thought this was the year, too. I was mak­ing notes. I had ideas, vague as they were. I was going to use this domain to keep track of the writ­ing and have access to it wher­ever and when­ever I had access to the web. I was finally going to write a novel that would be my ticket out of the nine-to-five rou­tine. Oh, I had no illu­sions that my first novel was going to make me a mil­lion­aire. I know that doesn’t hap­pen. I was mainly hop­ing that get­ting that first one out was going to open the flood gates for all the other sto­ries I know are swirling around in my head like gold flakes in a bot­tle of Gold­schläger.

How­ever, I get dis­tracted by inter­webby things, like Twit­ter, as I did just now. Inci­den­tally, Alice in Chains is com­ing to The National in Rich­mond next March, and it’s on a Fri­day. I might have to go.

Also, some­one just fol­lowed me on Twit­ter and most of their posts seem to be about tubal lig­a­tion. What?

Crap. Where was I? Oh yeah, not writ­ing. How appropriate.

I feel like I have lots of sto­ries and Things To Say, but they never really get out. I guess I’m try­ing to cheat it, though. Jump right out of the gate and into first place on the first race. The num­ber one piece of advice for new writ­ers is, cue fan­fare, write. Write write write. Read, and write. Write some more. Don’t for­get to read, but don’t for­get to write, either. Always carry a note­book so you can write any­time some­thing comes to you. I did that for a while. I had my neat black Mole­sk­ine note­book and mechan­i­cal pen­cil (I pre­fer pen­cil to pen mainly for the feel when writ­ing). I think I made a few short notes about a char­ac­ter or bit of a plot but that was it. Things just never seem to go anywhere.

I know the point of NaNoW­riMo is to “just write,” with aban­don and verve, but I’m not sure I can turn off either my inner critic or my inner edi­tor. I can’t even turn my inner edi­tor off when send­ing drunk text mes­sages. They are as gram­mat­i­cally cor­rect, prop­erly punc­tu­ated, and free of spelling mis­takes as they can be, given the cir­cum­stances. I lose the thread of what I’m try­ing to write, end up going nowhere, then look back at what I’ve just writ­ten and say to myself, “Mike, that is ter­ri­ble, what the fuck are you doing.” And yes, it does come across as a dec­la­ra­tion, even though it starts with ‘what’. There is no inflec­tion, no upswing at the end. It is a ques­tion that does not want an answer. It is not a rhetor­i­cal ques­tion, where an answer is not nec­es­sar­ily needed. It sim­ply does not want one because no answer will ever be satisfactory.

I think that now is not the time for me to write a novel. I think I am a fair to good writer. I just don’t think I can force it at this point in my life. Maybe if I can keep this blog (I need to come up with another word for this site. I really don’t like the word ‘blog’, if only because this isn’t a blog in the orig­i­nal sense of the word) going (see para­graph 1, sen­tence 2 of this page) for longer than a few entries. That’s why I’ve been post­ing so fre­quently (rel­a­tive to never, any­way) since I set Word­Press up. I’m try­ing to force myself into writ­ing more and if I tell myself, “You just posted some­thing, save it for tomor­row,” I don’t think I’ll be able to keep it up. Plus, I for­get shit all the time.

Maybe in the course of my binge writ­ing, I’ll get to the point where I’ll get itchy if I don’t write some­thing. And maybe one day, I’ll write a short story that I’m happy with. And maybe I’ll be able to turn that into a full novel. I need to start out in the kid­die pool, rather than jump into the deep end, to use the worn-out swim­ming metaphor. I’m fairly happy with these posts so far. I was going to call them ‘screeds’ but when I looked up the word, it means “[a] long monot­o­nous speech or piece of writ­ing.” I then changed it to ‘small screeds,’ since they weren’t long, but that would be anal­o­gous to ‘jumbo shrimp’ and that just wouldn’t do and I’m just going to stop here.

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Word count: 845 | Sen­tences: 60 | Fog: 8.3 | Kin­caid: 5.3 | Flesch: 82