I think I’m going to commit to this NaNoWriMo thing for November. Really, I’ve always had a problem with producing large volumes of material, and a pointless challenge is as good a way as any for me to confront and hopeably overcome that particular problem.

Really, the main thing in upping my productivity to the required 1,600 words per day average, is to sleep less. I love sleep. I think that probably the most successful people in the world are the people who don’t love sleep nearly as much as I do. Or maybe they have a love-hate relationship with sleep. They’re all like, “Hey sleep, I’ve missed you” and spend one beautiful night together in catatonic rest, and then never call again for a month. I need my sleep all of the time. Sleep is starting to feel smothered.

I’ve been practicing, by sleeping less. For the last week, I’ve been getting up at 6:30, when I generally wouldn’t need to be up for work before 8:15 or so. This is me getting ready for the big race. I’m already feeling it, after barely a week. I am tired all of the time. I was expecting this to subside; in fact, the whole reason I started getting up early last week, was to make sure that I was adjusted to my new sleep schedule in time for the big game. Instead, I suspect that I will spend the month of November in a zombie state, shuffling from place to place, bashing out voluminous trash on my keyboard. I’ll get more sleep in December, when I’m editing. The real trick with a first draft of anything, really, is to finish it.

For those who say you can’t polish a turd, remember this:

the trick is not to polish a turd, but to cover it in foil and paint it gold.

One of my favourite things to do, is take a new picture that Bigham has sent me for constructive criticism, add something to it in PhotoShop, and send it back as a magnificent improvement.

At least it wasn’t lens flares this time.

I’m not particularly good at this blogging thing. That this blog is meant to be an official blog, with real names attached to it, makes matters worse. I rarely have much to announce, and Ham and I made a pact to never allow this blog to turn into an everything/nothing chronicle of what we ate for breakfast, how we are feeling emotionally, and what song we want people to believe that we were listening to as we were typing our posts. If this were the kind of blog I used to chronicle my misbehaviours, it would be more populous. This is not to say that in my own life, by seconds and minutes, times of rowdy misbehaviour outnumber moments of gentleness and sensitivity; but rather, misbehaviour is considerably more interesting.

This is also not the place for it.

The trick is to write things up here that are both not personally damaging, and not phenomenally boring. I have yet to figure out how to do this frequently.

I had a LiveJournal, some time ago. I’m really glad that my real name wasn’t attached to that one. I was going through a strange grumpy-and-angry-all-the-damned-time period. I also swore unnecessarily in my writing. Constantly. Go through this post, and find a way to add one “fuck” for every occurrence of “the”. It becomes excessive. Not being angry-all-the time hurts productivity and interestingness as well. Lately, I’m barely angry enough to qualify as being angry-some-of-the-time.
I sprained my ankle last week. Having a sprained ankle is like being angry all of the time, I guess, except, instead of being angry, I’m in a modest but manageable amount of pain. There is a lump on the top of my foot, near the ankle, as big as an egg. I keep poking it. Poking it is probably not helping matters, but it’s a lump the size of an egg on my foot and it’s a wildly different colour from my usual pasty whiteness. I have to poke it. All the time. I suppose, lately, I’m not-behaving-in-a-manner-conducive-to-the-healing-of-injuries-all-the-time.

Which is, in its own way, a kind of misbehaviour.

Andrew says:
http://movies.aol.com/movie/alvin-and-the-chipmunks/28897/main

Bigham says:
do… do i have to watch it in hd?

Andrew says:
YES!

Bigham says:
god fucking damn son.

Andrew says:
Did you just watch it?

Bigham says:
its loading

Bigham says:
oh christ.

Bigham says:
at least it was a short trailer

Andrew says:
Did you just watch a computer animated squirrel eat another computer animated squirrel’s shit? Seriously. Seriously seriously. Before we even get ordinary CG porno, we’ve got the really wierd animal shit eating stuff.

Bigham says:
fantastic.

Bigham says:
you’ve been waiting to say that haven’t you

Writing group meets in person today, as opposed to the usual MSN Messenger thing. This happens every couple of months or so. I prefer the in person meetings for two reasons. The first is that we almost always manage to get more accomplished; all communication seems to become a little clearer (even for writers, sometimes instant messaging just doesn’t cut it). The second and most important reason is that near where we meet there is a coffee shop that sells enourmous slices of a very high quality carrot cake with real cream cheese icing at an affordable price. Delicious. And filling.

One might argue that “filling” is not necessarily a desirable quality in a dessert. In this particular case, I disagree.