Vielfrass.se

Cough. Hmm? What’s that? Did I promise you something for last week? Oh, lookit that. Haha. *sheepish smile*

Ahem. Oops.

Weekly Report, Week 15

So no delivery on that post that I promised. It suffered something of a feature creep, which caused the delay that you all must now suffer from. It’s a terrible blow, I know, but please, you guys! Hang in there! I’ll try for this week instead. I kept coming up with ideas on how to improve it and it all got a little out of hand. I’ve reined myself in a bit now, though, so a publication this week should be within the realm of possibility. Then again, there are books to read, games to play and TV to watch. Sigh.

Better luck on the writing front though. I’ve been getting some real work done there. Listed a dozen or so conflicts that are inherent to the setting, and which, I am sure, will help provide a more lively backdrop. Also did a bit of work on the characters, some of which are beginning to flesh out quite nicely. And! And, you guys, I wrote a few hundred words of actual story. So that’s nice. I’m feeling inordinately pleased with the opening sentence. It introduces character and conflict, and has wee bit of setting too.

Goals for Week 16

Goal #1: Again, get that post out. Hope I’m not raising your expectations too much here. It’s not really all that special. Just something I did for fun a while back. Please don’t be all disappointed later.

Goal #2: Continue with the writing. Don’t let the pace slacken. In fact, pick it up a little bit more. Keep at it with the characters, keep writing the story, and keep building the world. Find the time to work on this.

Haven’t updated for about ten days now, so I thought I’d throw this up there. Assuming the same goals for last week as the week before that, I’d say I managed pretty good. I got my writing done, and I managed to throw some general creativity in there, too.

So that’s good.

But not good enough. I need to step up my writing goals if I want to actually get somewhere with this project. So far all I’ve got is background info, and I feel like there’s a lot more ground to cover in that area. World-building. That’s a dangerous path for me. Easy to get stuck and just focus on the setting, while forgetting the other parts that make up a story. The setting is obviously important, perhaps more so in a fantasy story than in a more realistic work, but no novel gets far without characters or plot. No one wants to buy an encyclopedia covering a made-up world. Well, maybe they do, but not from an unpublished author.

So, anywho. That’s something that will need to happen. I have just enough of the world figured out that I should be able to start writing something at least. There’s a lot more to map here, but most of that can come later.

GOAL #1: Write at least 500 words of actual story, and at least 500 words of world-building and/or character description and/or plot synopsis. This won’t be enough if I expect to ever finish this project and start writing a new book, but hey: Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

I also have another post in the works. A little thing I made, well, a damn good while ago actually, that I thought I might update a little, tweak just a tad, and subject you all to, my dear, dear readers.

Thus we have GOAL #2: Put up that, uh, thing. It’s not that easily classified, to be honest. It’s a silly thing, and I thought it fairly amusing at the time. Still do, I suppose.

Well. Take care now. Do something good.

As promised, here are most of the ideas I went through before finally settling on what you now have before you. Did I pick the right one? Maybe. I’m not sure. There are some that I really like here, and some that are, well, pretty bad actually. So I don’t know. You be the judge. This one has something to it in that it looks fairly pretty and that it allows the content to take center stage, which, really, is what I wanted from the theme.

Tell me what you think.

By the way, the order here is completely random and does not reflect any sort of chronology or method. Also, I’ve only tried to do one of these gallery posts locally before, so we’ll see if this works. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll fix that tomorrow. It’s late enough as it is, and I need my sleep. Let’s just keep our fingers crossed.

UPDATE: Well, that was disappointing. Crap. Well. I’ll just disable the gallery part for now. Enjoy imagining the gallery that would be here if things worked. I’ll fix it up tomorrow.

UPDATE 2: I’ll be trying some thing to get this working now, so if you happen to visit the site during this time (not very likely, I suppose), expect things to look not quite right.

UPDATE 3: Ok, it all seems to be working. Silly mistake, really, but it’s all taken care of. Enjoy, people.

I‘m going to try to get one of these posts out each week, even if I don’t publish anything else. Part of the purpose of this blog is to keep me working on things, and these little goals and confessionals are a means to that end. Feel free to skip over these posts as you see fit. They’re basically just here for my own sake.

Weekly Report, Week 12

Right. Turns out I’m a bit of an optimist when it comes to estimating the amount of free time I’ll have on the weekend of my wife’s 25^th birthday. In other words, the success rate of last week’s goals wasn’t exactly stellar. I got some writing done, though. Just background stuff that I jotted down on the bus home from work. Not sure about the exact number (doing word count on longhand is time-consuming and boring), but I daresay it was a bit more than 500. So I suppose that’s good.

As for the promised post, well, that obviously didn’t happen. I made a few preparations, cutting out flattened images from Photoshop files, and so on, so I’ll see about getting it up later tonight or tomorrow.

As for my third goal, well, I did sit for quite a while re-organizing some of my photos, which I suppose could be construed of as at least tangentially a creative endeavour.

Maybe.

No? No, I don’t really buy that either, but I’m going to let myself off the hook this time. I’ll try harder this week, I promise. I feel a veritable truckload of good ideas besetting me even now, so prepare to be dazzled.

Goals for Week 13

1. Get the rejected design proposals post out. Ahem.
2. Do a bit of writing, say somewhere between 500 and 1000 words. Did quite a bit today, so the week is off to a good start.
3. Let’s see. What else? Create a little, get some ideas off the ground, put a little effort into some things. Maybe post something – anything, really. If not something new, then something old. Got a few things lying around that I’ve kept mostly to myself.

That’s it, people. Go create something.

I think this whole posting goals thing is good for me, so without further ado, here’s my first such post.

So. What, then, do I want to accomplish this week? Let’s kick it off easy, with just a few things:

1. Write at least 500 words of backstory or actual story on my current novel project.
2. Put up the gallery I mentioned in the previous post — the one with all my rejected design proposals.
3. Put in at least an hour or two into any other creative endeavor.

I’m going to stop there for now, keeping it nice and simple, real loose for this first week. Let’s see how this works out. There’ll be adjustments to this format later on, no doubt.

With that, I take my leave for now. Tune back in later this week for that update, and if you haven’t already, why don’t you check out the archives for some old stuff to keep you amused (or not) in the meantime?

Below follows a rather uninteresting tale in five parts about how I came to first abandon and later find again the pleasure of keeping this blog. How foolish a creature is man, that he would postpone until the next day (and the next (and the next again)) doing the things he loves? Verily, I am a procrastinating and silly specimen of humanity.

Part I: Self-Ridicule

The beginning, I hope, of a more productive phase in my creative life.

Hah! Pfft. Balderdash!

I believe that the pressure of actually trying to publish something here on a regular basis will go a long way towards me getting down to actually write some of the things I have running around my brain.

Bah! Humbug!

I think that writing something, or publishing something, anything, once or twice a week should not be a wholly unrealistic ambition.

What naïveté! What absurdness! Ah, the guilelessness of youth! That I ever could have convinced my sorry self to believe such a silly notion is, to be frank, quite laughable. The brutal failure that was to come from my asinine suppositions was, in a word, inevitable.

But that’s enough of that.

Part II: A New Hope

Why I stopped posting things here, I don’t know. I didn’t stop creating things, I just, well… I didn’t find the time to either finish them, or write about them. Or I didn’t take the time. Whichever it was, nothing happened. Suddenly I realized that it had gone over two months since the last post, and that just made me feel discouraged, which in turn caused me to further put off posting something new. Eventually, I guess I realized that I really wanted this blog/site thing, and wanted to start writing again. But by then it felt wrong to go back and pretend like it was just on a hiatus or something, so I decided to just redesign the whole thing and give it a fresh start.

The last post was on June 18, 2008. That was almost two years ago. I’m giving this blog another shot, but I think I’m a different person now. I’ve made some realizations about my creativity, about my priorities, about routines and discipline. About, well, life. I’ve learned things. I’m going into this with a few new ideas about how to keep content coming.

Part III: The New Design

I have decided to call the current theme “Decisivemess”, because that captures pretty well the essence of the process leading up to the final version.

The really short story is that this is probably somewhere around the twentieth version of the redesign.

The slightly longer story is that I was focusing on the wrong thing, putting all my effort into the presentation layer, rather than just taking a step back and looking at the content I had produced to see what format would be appropriate. What I realized was that first, I couldn’t really have a typical form of content with only seven posts, and second, that I didn’t necessarily need a featured post thingamajig, I didn’t need thumbnails for every single post, and I didn’t need infinite nesting of comments.

This said, coming up with a design still wasn’t easy. In fact, even now I’m not sure that this is how I want the site to look. Trying to find a middle ground between all my disparate interests, and what is trendy, and what is classic, and so on, was (and will be again) a difficult task. So no, I’m not entirely satisfied with this version, but at some point I just have to call it done and get to actually doing something worthwhile. I already have a lot of ideas about where I want to take the next version of the site (use HTML5, for example, and experiment a bit with CSS3), but all of that will have to wait at least a little while longer. For now, this is Vielfrass, even though it might be a bit unspectacular.

Someday soon I’ll post a gallery of all the design ideas I had before finally settling on this one. Some of them are pretty good, others not so much.

A note on browsers: I haven’t checked to see how the page is rendered in any version of Internet Explorer, and I’m not going to. Making sure a site is IE-compatible for a paying client is one thing – after all, a lot of people still use Internet Explorer – but here I do as I wish. This is not paying work, and it’s not a web design portfolio either, so suck it, IE.

In all seriousness, though, if you’re using Internet Explorer I recommend you to change to a safer, more reliable and simply better browser. Chrome is currently my browser of choice, but Firefox is a classic. Safari or Opera will also serve you well. They’re all better. So do yourself, the world-wide community of web designers, and the internet in general a favour, and change.

Part IV: A Fresh Commitment

So why do I think that this time is different? That this time, things will work out better? Well, I’ve set down a few rules to help me. A few guidelines to live by. Some mantras to repeat to myself in the wee hours of the night.

Make the necessary sacrifices

This must always be the first thing to do, and will probably always be the hardest. There are only 24 hours in a day, and if I’m going to squeeze in writing, something else is going to have to go, be it TV, games or sleep. This is the simple, cruel reality of it, the ultimate test of how serious I really am about this.

Set manageable goals

For me, having a list of goals to strive towards makes it that much easier to get things done. These goals can be short-term (write 500 words this week, spend an hour doing PHP programming for Project Whatever) or long-term (write that novel, make that game, get filthy rich). It doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that I write them down somewhere and make them concrete. Preferably, I should write them down somewhere I can’t help but see them all the time, like my desktop, or here on the blog, or my fore-head.

Find the routine

Some people would say that routine kills creative thought, and to some extent I might agree with that, but the point of this mantra is not idea generation, but the actual work of turning the ideas into reality. To get somewhere with any of the projects I have going, i have to stop treating them like hobbies that I can work on only when inspiration srikes, and start treating them like work. Because if I hope to someday, somehow make any money from any of this, work is exactly what it is.

Better done than perfect

Meaning that instead of endlessly working on something in a desire to achieve some sort of perfection, I will strive to get to a point where I can simply call it done. Finishing one project will make the next one stronger. Toiling away at the same one indefinitely will not do much good for anyone, least of all me. This mantra is about finishing things, and posting them here.

So there.

Following these guidelines will not only make me a better writer designer painter programmer whateverer, but a more productive one, too. The four rules are also repeated in one version or another on Mur Lafferty’s excellent writing podcast I Should Be Writing, so I must be on to something. If you’re an aspiring writer, and have time to listen to a podcast now and then, you should definitely check it out.

I’m not going to say much about topics or publication rates. The former should be the same as before, and as for the latter, I’ll probably try to keep it weekly. Maybe I can post my short-term goals and present my failure to accomplish them to public ridicule. I don’t know. I’m going to start out trying for weekly and just see how that works out.

Part V: A Note to End on

Rounding this overly long and rant-like re-introduction off, I just want to encourage anyone who happens across this blog to please comment. If anything I post causes some kind of reaction in you, be it admiration, hate, inspiration or abject misery, I would really appreciate if you told me about it. So please do.