On Christmas and writing my website

On Christmas

I went Christmas shopping last night. That was an experience. I haven't done that in ages, and man it feels so hypocritical. I don't like it when people buy me stuff. It's awesome when my friends drop by or call me up to do stuff. I even enjoy it when a friend treats me to a burger on the rare occasion. But when it comes to possessions, if I want it, I'll buy it. I wouldn't want any of my friends wandering around a shopping center like some sort of adventure explorer, vainly searching for that one reasonably priced object that I might actually like. Perhaps that's why I'm not a terribly big fan of doing the shopping myself.

And who are you supposed to get gifts for? Everyone? That's a lot of money and time that I don't have. Nobody? Tempting . . . . but I'm trying to adapt to social conventions. I already spit on too many of them. Some people? Who do I pick? Is this like being picked for a sports team in elementary school? I always got picked last. I guess that means no presents for me. No random object gifts to fill the overflowing corners of my apartment. I win?

Of course, if you have already gotten me a present, I'm very grateful. As long as it's cool. And lasers are always cool. Hint. Hint.

Seriously, though. Next year, I'm going for the simple solution: bread or dinner, you choose. Choose bread and I'll make you a Christmas loaf. It's a variation of the Christmas bread that my grandmother made, and its damn tasty. If you don't want the bread, you're invited to dinner. Everyone makes the dinner and a good time is had by all. That's what Christmas will be next year, bread or dinner.

On website writing

For those of you who are considering making your own website, learn from my mistakes. If you don't know how already, don't just jump into it. Use one of the millions of services to make your website for you. Find that friend who can do the work and butter them up. Import some monkey servants and get them to learn this crap. It's a lot of work and Murphy's law kicks into overdrive.

Yesterday was a pretty prime example. I had to restart the project for the third time which was exactly as motivating as it sounds. It's a short sprint forward and a rapid bungee ride back. The only thing that can be done is to pick yourself up and ask what you have learned from this experience. So far, I've learned that anyone involved in writing computer code and script must be AWESOME at "Where's Waldo". Seriously, you have to go through this stuff with a fine tooth comb. After a couple of hours of staring at lines of HTML, they start melting together in a manner that Dali would envy.

Hopefully, I'll have this thing completed by this evening. Otherwise I'm reverting to my more primal instincts and setting fire to something.

Writing a website

What started as a simple school project has become an all-consuming problem. The original assignment was to make a website. The teacher assumed that we would use something like Dreamweaver or Frontpage to do the bulk of the work. That would be the easy way. That would be the way of the rational person. That would not be my way.

So I've started learning how HTML, and CSS, and Javascript work. These are the scripting languages that make webpages so shiny today. I remember back in the days of yore when webpages were basically just a bunch of text and links that were jumbled together. None of this fancy-pantsy graphics stuff. It was brute information and long loading times. Now it's all about design, layout, menu tabs, pretty pictures, and advertisements that you can't shut up.

Such is the price of progress I suppose.

Learning this stuff is a pain. I content myself with the hope that I'm learning something that I'll be able to apply in the future. The internet is not going away, so the more comfortable I become with the parts of it, the better. It is, however, a headache and far less tempting that going out and playing in the snow.

Right, back to work.
Progress will be posted when it is achieved!

A new start!

I greatly enjoy writing. As long as I can remember, I've enjoyed telling stories and am blessed with an imagination that is much more colourful than the world around me. I've always had a desire to put my ideas down on paper and to develop them more fully. Unfortunately, my desire to write has always been two steps behind my ability to procrastinate and be utterly unproductive. Generally, my university papers are written in a flurry of last minute activity that starts 11 o'clock in the evening before my paper is due and ends five minutes after I need to hand in my work. I know this is not the recommended way of completing a university paper (though it seems to be the most popular way), and I've tried to change my ways but with little success as of yet. I've examined the problem a number of times and have concluded that one needs three things to write.

1)Time to write.

2)An clear idea of what you are going to write about.

3)A lack of distractions that would prevent productivity.

In general, I have no shortage of the first thing and I generally fake the second. The problem tends to be the third criteria, as have the attention span of a gnat on a sugar rush. I can't count the number of times I've said to myself, “alright, you will work from now until dinner time on such and such a project” and ended up reading page after page of material that has less than no relevance to the work at hand. Personally, I blame the internet. It's such a diverse source of utterly random information! And stupid internet games! To hell with solitaire, people publish all sorts of games for free that keep me amused and productivity free for hours! Unfortunately, I generally need the internet for general research and all the useful bits of the internet are just two clicks away from the utterly useless. I feel like a magpie rooting through a junkyard, there is plenty of usable material but so many shiny objects to peck at!

And here I am, throwing yet another thing out onto the internet and possibly helping other people procrastinate. The circle is complete.

All that rambling to introduce my newest project. I am starting this blog as my writing blog, though it's not actually about writing. It will be a practice space where I can work on developing my writing skills; this will be my studio. I will practice and hopefully master the art of writing in a way that entertains and informs. It's a good excuse to spend a little more time looking at what goes on in the world around me. Which means looking things up on the internet. Well, I suppose I can forward to wasting many a happy moment being sidetracked.

. . .

Sorry about that. I wanted to look up something about penguins.

Anyway, this is going to be my pet writing project. I realize that normally people spend a great deal of time and effort to make sure that only their best work becomes available to the public. In fact, many authors hide behind a pen name when they are writing something that they feel is below their usual standard. Not everything an artist creates successfully fulfils its creators hopes, but this doesn't worry me. I actually feel that I'm writing something quite private since, well, this is just one more blog on the internet. Like Poe's purloined letter, my writing will be hidden in plain sight, and hopefully, those who do read it will be to some extent entertained, informed, and only minimally offended.

My plan is to write daily, in both English and French. I will be putting it through all the steps, planning, revising, etc. Hopefully with practice this will become quality writing. My goal is to write a minimum of 500 words in English and then translate it into French the next day. If I miss a day, I have to do both parts on the next. If everything works out, I'll be writing over 3000 words a week, in my spare time. I understand that this ambitious but I like to set high goals, fail, lower them a touch, succeed and jump right back up crush my original goals. It's a loft ideal, but if I want to become writer, I shall have to write.

Translating all of this into French will be the largest challenge. I've never actually translated into written French and this will hopefully help me improve my French composition skills. In general, it takes me twice as long to compose something in French from scratch, so my hopes are that this will help me speed things up. The advantage in this is that since I'm the original author of the English text, I don't have to worry about not understanding some point of the work to be translated. While the works will remain analogous, I'm hoping that eventually I'll be able to taking more liberties in the French versions. My final goal will be to be able to become as comfortable in written French as I am in spoken French.

I will also be posting my short works of fiction. This is fairly important since this is the form and style that I like best and dream of eventually mastering. As poor Vero can attest, I have many collections of short fiction and love to read them to both study the style and enjoy the work. With time, I hope to be able to put more and more stories out so that they are no longer just cobbled together constructions hiding in the recesses of my laptop's hard-drive. I will take these stories, cut out the bits I don't like, polish the bits that work, and add anything that is missing until they become striking examples of the genre.

What more can be said about this? Nothing! This is only the introduction after all, so there is no point in dragging it out needlessly. Which may or may not be what I have already done.

Onwards!