Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?  I started this blog as a way to post flash fiction. That lasted for two posts. The question I have rolling around in my brain is what to do with it now? Does it become a personal blog? A blog about writing? Maybe a bit of all that?

Here's the thing: all of the blogs/journals I've had on the Internet have been places to vent frustration about the world around me. This is true of my personal offline journals as well. The time when I feel the urge to write things down is when the world has gotten me down. As much as I've tried to write about the good things that have gone on (and there have been a few of those over the years) but it doesn't last. I suppose I'm too happy at the time and writing about it doesn't occur to me.

But I'm going to try. I'm going to try to make a point of writing the good things and the bad things that happen.

Life


Dad spent Christmas in the hospital with pneumonia and a blood clot in his lungs. (Pneumonia in one and the clot in the other.) Got the pneumonia cleared up but had to wait over a week for the anticoagulant to build up enough so they could send him home.  (Quick background:  Dad had a tumor in his lung two years ago, went through radiation and chemotherapy and that tumor is gone, then they found another one at the beginning of last year and a procedure called Gamma Knife Radiation (essentially a extremely focused beam to cut out the tumor). That tumor is also now gone, or at least very hard to find when they do the PET scans they've been doing.

Work is work. I work at Target primarily as the Key Team Member for Signing. I prepare the silly little signs for every weeks Sunday Circular. If I'm lucky I work on the salesfloor one or two days a week. Some weeks I actually get enough hours that I can almost pay my bills. As New Year starts I may or may not have to go back on partial Unemployment to make ends meet. We'll see.

Writing


I put the current Work In Progress on the back burner during the holidays. Mostly because the holidays in retail are Hell x 100.  I intend to get back to it fairly soon. Probably in the next week or so. I'm at a good stopping point, though, so getting back in won't be a problem. I'm hoping to have the first draft done by maybe March or April depending on how much time I have. Then revision time begins. If I'm lucky I'll get the whole thing done and done by June or July.

Other Stuff


Behind the scenes I'm also a gamer. Right now I'm playing Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. It's an impressive game, fully voice-acted with lots and lots of story stuff. There's still a lot of the "Kill x of y" quests, but they come as bonus missions along with the main quest.  Bioware, it seems, realized that the player is going to kill those guys anyway so there didn't need to be a large number of that type of quest.

I've also started playing the new Elder Scrolls game Skyrim. Like the other games in the series it's a open world game where you can go just about anywhere and do anything you want.  I've only played about two hours of it, but I'll get back in to it at some point.

I also play quite a few games on my iPod Touch and right now I'm addicted to the new Bejeweled and it's Diamond Mine mode.  A different challenge and it's actually a lot of fun.

I don't read much anymore.  I do listen to quite a few audiobooks, though.  It's a different way of consuming both ficiton and non-fiction and it allows me to do other things while I'm listening.  I may sometimes have to listen to a book more than once to get everything out of it, but I do that with movies and music, too.  At the moment I'm listening to Star Wars books based on the Old Republic game.  They're fun and have some interesting ideas in them.  The reader has a bad habit of mispronouncing words to an annoying degree (this, to me, is a problem that can be solved by a good director) but the overall stories are fun and not too heavy.

So, that's that. I'll try to post updates at least once a week. No promises. Have a good week!