Daily Persistence: Last 4 Days, starting October 3, 2008

Daily Persistence is

Finding Fault
October 3, 2008
x:xx a.m.

    Yes, I suppose it’s about $700B of corporate greed. And yes, I agree it’s not a good idea to reward bad decisions by paying off the big-wigs who made them. But I think that’as all missing the point.
    I was talking to a co-worker the other day and I said: You know, I really don’t care how we get out of it. I just know we need to do something, and it needs to work. But what I want to know is this: who in the government is responsible? Is this really Bush thing? Did it start with congress? If so, tell me which congress folks. Are the culprits appointed? Who are these overseers and what were they doing?
    We agreed that it would be nice to know these things.
    All the fingers seem to be pointing to Bush–a lame duck president who isn’t well-liked at present, and for some pretty good reasons. But is he at fault here? Is it his administration?
    I wanted to know, and neither one of us could really answer the question. So we agreed we were basically just angry.
    Then Lisa sent me this: this.
    I’m sure there will be more, but this makes me take some of the things the Dems have been saying with a few more grains of salt than usual.
    I am, by the way, a currently undecided voter who is watching this race with quite a bit of spectator interest.
    #
    Have a great day.

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Finished
December 25, 2008
x:xx a.m.

    Galmour of the God-Touched is finally done and comes in weighing just over 92K words.
    It feels pretty good to get a book-length work to the point I feel good about it again. The rust is falling off, slowly but surely.
    #
    Have a great day.

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A Week Off
July 31, 2009
x:xx a.m.

    Geez–it’s been awhile, hasn’t it?
    So, what’s up, you ask? Or, I guess, seeing that it’s just me and me here, I must be the one asking.
    The good news, though, is that I’ve been vacationing this week–but not really vacationing. You see, due to the discrepancy in our jobs Lisa has a bit less time off than I do, so I took this week off by myself.
    What, you might ask, have I been up to in this vast amount of free time?
    Well, let’s see. First I’ve been sleeping until at least 8:00 every morning. This is quite literally a miracle, as it just doesn’t happen in the regular flow of life around here. If nothing else, the cat will see to it that I’m up earlier–but now that Lisa’s up to go to work, the cat gets fed and I’m free to sleep until, as a co-worker of mine has said, “God wakes me up.”
    Then each day has been structured so that I spend the morning writing, the afternoon working outside, and the evening doing some sports junk I do as well as piddling around on the business side of things. This is really pretty good. Along the way I’ve finished off a story or two I had been working on, but the big deal is that I’ve finally, finally got a direction on a novel I’ve been fiddling with for…well…it seems like forever.
    This is a big deal, I think.
    I started it for the first time about two years ago, but it puttered out. It just felt too ambitious. What it was, in reality, was just poorly formed–too ambiguous. I h ad about 50 pages done, but I just didn’t like it. It wasn’t my best, and more important, I felt like I wasn’t up to it–that I wasn’t good enough. Needless to say, that’s not a particularly fun feeling. But it’s bugged me at times since I put it down. With some serious time at my disposal this week, I pulled it out again and spent a couple hours on it Tuesday and Wednesday. Then, yesterday an idea kind of caught up to me, and my first thought was “wow, that sounds like it would be fun.”
    So I fiddled with it today.
    I’ll need to dump well over half of what I had completed, and I’ve got a bit of restructuring to do with it. But for the first time in awhile, the idea itself is interesting and I’m enjoying the process of simply thinking about the work.
    Wonder if I can take another week, eh?
    #
    Have a great day.

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Circling
August 17, 2009
x:xx a.m.

"All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I'm fine."

Jeff Spicoli

    I feel like I’m circling around the heart of the book. It feels good, really. I’ve got some 30 or 40 pages put back together, but it’s obviously not started in exactly the right place. I feel like I’m out in the ocean, riding small waves into shore as a trial while the rest of the storm brews. I can feel their strength building, though.
    This morning an idea came along to me and leveraged several more. This afternoon it was all I could do to not drop the day-job stuff and work out the rough edges of the idea.
    It was a tasty wave.
    #
    Have a great day.

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