Gone Puddin’
I know, we haven’t talked in a while. It’s, like, I haven’t been around for the past few days or something.
Well, actually, it’s not like that at all. It’s exactly that. I haven’t been. Around, that is. I’ve been in Connecticut. Yes, that state in New England. Because I had to do [redacted].
Truth be told, I’ll probably be playing catch-up with pretty much everything for the rest of the week. Because that’s what happens when you go spend 2+ days somewhere else doing the stuff you don’t usually do.
In a perfect world, of course, there’d be, I dunno, stuff elves that came out when you were gone to take care of the stuff you couldn’t take care of like usual. You know, like the Grimm Brothers’ Cobbler Elves from that fairy tale, but more modern. They’d maybe write a blog post for you, keep you up to date on facebook and twitter, post a few Instagrams (no selfies, duh) , and make sure your daily workload gets done for you while you’re away. File your Status and TPS Reports and whatnot, maybe fill out your timecard. What-have-you.
Then again, it seems like I just described a muggle version of a “house elf” from Harry Potter. No one wants to make poor Dobby tweet for them. And the last thing I want is Dobby trying to keep my daily writing quota caught up for OTHER THING. The whole book would be about socks.
Which is fine, I guess, if you’re into socks. But maybe not this book.
Weekend Debate: Ranch vs Blue Cheese (Buffalo Wing Edition)
Posted by Jason in Blog, Food, Humor, Weekend Debate on April 26, 2013
Last November when I did NaNo, I temporarily put the wildly mildly popular “Weekend Debate” feature here on the blog on hiatus. Because, well, time, you know? The thing is – and this will likely come as a surprise – it’s actually more difficult to fit in my daily writing quota during the weekends than it is during the week. I suppose that’s because we, at least, tend to push most things that need doing and aren’t four-alarm, hide-yo-children-hide-yo-wife, get-out-the-rain-slicks-and-the-rowboat-type of emergency events back onto the calendar days labeled Saturday and Sunday.
Case in point, I’ll likely be up earlier tomorrow morning than I usually am during the work week. There’s mulching and lawn work and…and…and, well, trust me, you don’t want to hear all the gory details. It’ll just make you tired. And headachey. And probably hateful. At least, that’s what it does to me.
Suffice it to say that I have much to do this weekend. And by checking out the rest of April and May, the next next five weeks are booked solid already and will only get solid-ier.
Which, you know, isn’t really a word, but I’m going with it.
Starting a new novel: Standing On the Edge of a Cliff
So long, farewell,
Auf Weidersehen, goodbye!
Why in the name of the seven known worlds* would I begin a post with the lyrics to a song from The Sound of Music, you ask? Why, especially, would I pick lyrics so heavy with the threat of a looming separation? Am I quitting this whole blogging thing? Hanging it up? Throwing in the towel? Taking my football and going home, or packing up my stuff in to checkered cloth, tying it to a pole and throwing it over my back, mid-century hobo-style?
No, my friends, have no fear. I’m not sure I could do that, even if I wanted to.
I am, however, about to become a little less prolific around these here parts, if only temporarily.
Because, as I mentioned, the time has come to write another novel.
Brownies: The New Cupcake
While I was off pretending that I can play hockey Sunday night, the Puddinette, for no reason other than because She. Is. Awesome, made a pan of brownies from scratch.
I’m going to say that again, because it’s important, she made brownies from scratch.
Which means they had actual cocoa and actual eggs and actual flour as opposed to some heavily processed equivalents and a health dose of the magic of modern chemistry.
Getting to work (What I’ve already learned from having an agent)
Posted by Jason in Blog, Opinions, Publishing, Writing on April 22, 2013
When I left work on Friday, I had hopes of spending my weekend in a sort of lazy, bachelor-style fugue. That kind of shiftless, laying-about that would, of course, include hours and hours on a couch with a movie marathon or a baseball spree, the consumption of a whole host of terrible, processed, microwaveable meals, and the accumulation of so much sloth that my story would become a cautionary tale to frighten children lacking the appropriate industry.
But then I remembered I’m an adult with children of my own and responsibilities. So instead of spending the weekend in holey sweats adding some buffer to my BMI, I did yard work, got my season’s first pinkish hue watching the Puddinpop at baseball practice, and spent a good deal of time thinking about my next writing task.
I suppose it turned out better this way. After all, you know, high BMI is apparently bad or whatever. Plus, I don’t really care for processed, nuked food. Kinda makes me think of soylent green.
Also, and more seriously, I’ve got a good chunk of work to do this year. It’s time to get to it.
A movie in 100 words or less: Dark Shadows
To be completely and totally honest with you—and really, isn’t that both what we want in this relationship?—Tuesday’s Big. Exciting. News! wasn’t really “new” news anymore by the time it posted on Tuesday. Because, in fact, I’d gotten The Call, (yes, one of those calls all writers dream about as they toil the long, late hours in the obscurity of their writerly caves, grumbling and nit-picking their work like a curmudgeonly might make over his never-going-to-be-quite-perfect-lawn) a week ago today.
Trust me, no one had a harder time not saying anything for the whole weekend than I did. But often times in publishing, there are things, breathtaking, pulse-quickening things, that simply Cannot Be Spoken Of Yet. Henceforth, we’ll call them Temporarily Secret Things, and with luck there will be more on the horizon.
Anyway, the point is that Thursday, April 11th, was kind of a special night for me and the family.
But Thursday is a school night, and I had a hockey game, so it wasn’t quite the perfect time for a little in-home celebrating.
Friday, though, I had every intention of getting out the mirror ball, spinning up some records, and going full-blown wild.
A haiku contest for National Haiku Day
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Little did I know when I woke up this morning that today is National Haiku Day! I’ll be honest, I had planned to give you poor people a break, which I thought would be well-deserved after foisting yesterday’s ridiculously long post on you.
(Not to mention that I’m still mostly too giddy about the whole signing-with-Foreword Lit thing to write a post that would make any kind of rational sense. But that’s neither here nor there.)
Anyway, clearly, I couldn’t possibly allow National Haiku Day to slip past without, you know, a haiku. So, here you go:
No post planned today
But! National Haiku Day!
Like this haiku, please?
Hey, I didn’t say it’d be good, did I?
Fine, hotshot, think you can do better? Let’s hear it. Yeah, that’s right, time to bring out your haiku best. Let’s see what you’ve got. Tweet it, post it on facebook, or leave it in the comments. We want to read your National Haiku Day haiku.
And just for fun—because let’s face it, I’ve got nothing to give away as a prize but old, wired PC keyboards missing letters—on the off chance I get more than three entries, I’ll pick my favorites and post them tomorrow.
Sure, it’s not exactly the lottery, but your odds of winning are a helluva lot better, I’m guessing. So get ‘em in!
Pud’n
Fortune Favors the Foolish
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According to the internet (and really, if we can’t trust the interwebs, who can we trust!?), Chinese philospher Lao-tzu wrote, “A journey of a thousand leagues begins beneath one’s feet.” The common paraphrase for that, of course, is, “A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.”
A journey of my own, one I’d been simultaneously preparing for and putting off my entire life, started more than three years ago with the single, not-terribly-kind sentence, “I have come to the conclusion that I am not a very good writer.”
With that sentence, I set about proving to myself that either I could be a writer or, well, just couldn’t. One way or another, though, I was bound and determined to find out.
In the course of the year that followed, I did, much to my delight, in fact, demonstrate to myself that I could write regularly if I put my mind to it. Even more importantly, what I wrote entertained my wife—sometimes to the point of laughing through tears—and that meant everything to me. Better still, not only did I write blog posts for Puddintopia that served as much-needed exercise for my atrophied writing muscles, but I also ended up with a complete novel, too. Oh, sure, I always hoped I’d end up with a novel, at some point, but I had no idea if it might take me half a decade to get there.
Turns out it didn’t.
A haiku for a terrible day
Our thoughts for Boston
Unspeakable tragedy
Stay safe, with loved ones
No rambling today. I’m following Scalzi’s lead and going with pet pictures instead.
Pud’n
