Two retirements and a deadline.
My 2009 tag is retiring. All the fond memories of the past year captured forever in these online journals...
I'm finally retiring my Zune. It is the first model, which was released in 2005, making it almost five years old. It's a black brick of an mp3 player, an echo of the early iPods, and has been the most reliable mp3 player I ever owned. It flunked out on me only once, at the end of the leap year, and it was able to accept all Zune updates and upgrades; the only thing it can't do now is go online. It started freaking out on me the night before I left for Mammoth, and it hasn't been the same since. I had to watch two crap movies on the bus ride back to Los Angeles because I couldn't listen to Owl City and company. Thank god even the bus's DVD player hated Meet Dave.
I'm going to buy a Zune HD, because five years is long enough in technological terms; it's time for me to upgrade big time. Too bad this means dipping into the money I'm collecting to replace my crap of a Fujitsu laptop.
I set a goal: write 100K or finish the NaNo before 2010. I'm nowhere near done, but I am approximately 10K from 100K. I have one night to do this. Holy. Shit.
I watched Julie & Julia today, and came away with two things:
1) Everyone has meltdowns in the middle of crazy projects. I'm still going through mine. Battling back the horrible doubts is exhausting.
2) I never heard my mom say, "You can finish this." It's always, "Why do you always write? Why don't you write something original? Why can't you write tomorrow? Why can't you tell me what you're writing? You're writing that again?"
I found the book I bought for my creative writing class last winter. It's Writing Fiction: A Guide to the Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, the seventh edition. I'm going to go through it thoroughly this time, and study all the short stories, excerpts, and essays that end each section.
The most powerful of them for me was from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I hated Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates.
I'm finally retiring my Zune. It is the first model, which was released in 2005, making it almost five years old. It's a black brick of an mp3 player, an echo of the early iPods, and has been the most reliable mp3 player I ever owned. It flunked out on me only once, at the end of the leap year, and it was able to accept all Zune updates and upgrades; the only thing it can't do now is go online. It started freaking out on me the night before I left for Mammoth, and it hasn't been the same since. I had to watch two crap movies on the bus ride back to Los Angeles because I couldn't listen to Owl City and company. Thank god even the bus's DVD player hated Meet Dave.
I'm going to buy a Zune HD, because five years is long enough in technological terms; it's time for me to upgrade big time. Too bad this means dipping into the money I'm collecting to replace my crap of a Fujitsu laptop.
I set a goal: write 100K or finish the NaNo before 2010. I'm nowhere near done, but I am approximately 10K from 100K. I have one night to do this. Holy. Shit.
I watched Julie & Julia today, and came away with two things:
1) Everyone has meltdowns in the middle of crazy projects. I'm still going through mine. Battling back the horrible doubts is exhausting.
2) I never heard my mom say, "You can finish this." It's always, "Why do you always write? Why don't you write something original? Why can't you write tomorrow? Why can't you tell me what you're writing? You're writing that again?"
I found the book I bought for my creative writing class last winter. It's Writing Fiction: A Guide to the Narrative Craft by Janet Burroway and Elizabeth Stuckey-French, the seventh edition. I'm going to go through it thoroughly this time, and study all the short stories, excerpts, and essays that end each section.
The most powerful of them for me was from The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. I hated Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates.