38

It’s my birthday. And I’m not really one of those people who are on the other side of 30 and have decided that they don’t like their birthdays.

We age one second at a time, not one year at a time, so I didn’t all of a sudden gain a year because today is my birthday. I think these days are good for self-reflection and deciding where to go next. You know, like what everybody says New Year’s Eve is for but no one ever does it.

That’s what I did today: thought about my past and future.

Quick Post

Quickly walked outside today. I haven’t been out of the house in days and wanted to clear my head. Probably need to put that back on the daily to do list.

Making maps

I’ve been making maps this entire day and lost track of time. Almost didn’t make a post today. It’s been raining here all day and it’s really only been good for thinking about some other world and making a map for it.

I’m not usually this kind of guy, but I’ve been enjoying the new Inkarnate interface and I can finally make it do what I want it to do.

So that’s good.

Cleaning the office, Day 4

So it should come as no shock to anyone that I organize my life as a series of book cases, and sitting on top of this one was pile of cardboard pawns that I use for Dungeons and Dragons. Again, I had to wreck the room to get all of these either back in the boxes they go in or into a plastic bin that I used while I’m DM’ing for quick reveal.

This took longer than I hoped but not a long as I thought. And now we have this:

You’d think I’d be done, but this may never end.

30 Days plus one

I jumped into the SiteLeaf account to write about running this site for a month and posting every day. Turns out that was yesterday.

That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about how things have been going, but it’s my blog damn it and I can be a long winded as I want.

Posting every day really hasn’t been that big of a deal and I’ve found that I’ve been able to fold it into my time fairly easily. When I go to write, I don’t dread it as I’ve done with other “blogging challenges.”

I put that in quotes because back in the day I used to give my self challenges to write every day for a month. I would make a big deal of it and I would write a review of each week during the challenge. And it was always a slog. In fact, I only finished one of those challenges once.

I thought the reason for this was that I was lazy. Turns out that was wrong. The fact that I wouldn’t write much on the blog was that I was building it up in my mind too much. It had to be too perfect. On my old blog, I was writing what I hoped were full articles and not simple posts. (These are very different in my mind. One is much more formal while the other is a simple update that you could see on any social media service.)

What I’m trying to do with this site is a simple sketch pad for me be play with ideas in a public space and to be a signaling system for what I’m working on each day. That every simple mission statement takes a lot of pressure off of me to be perfect and allows be the freedom to just get on with it.

I look forward to updating this site and have done some multiple times in a day, which was unthinkable on my last blog. This, to me, is the purest expression of what blogging is: personal updates about what’s happening in a persons life right now. Writing online should be about freedom and not a dreaded chore.

Because of that, I think I’ve actually written a few posts that are of some interest and would have had a place at my old blog, but I have been posting them at a higher frequency than I ever did on my other site.

This all said, I’ve written enough of these self-congratulatory posts to fear what comes next: the months long silence followed by the “it’s been a while” post. Somehow I don’t think I’ll have to worry about that this time, but we’ll see. All I can do is open this window again, sooner rather than later, and start typing. No pressure.

Cleaning the office, Day 3 Part 2

Operation: Oh-Shit-I-Need-To-Clean-The-Floor seems to have gone well. The comics are now in storage and I have a lot more space in the office closet. For what? Fuck knows, that’s not my job right now.

I’m just trying to clean up this space so it isn’t depressing to be in here and do some actual work. More on the actual work at a later date.

Cleaning the office, Day 2

I’ve reached the stage where I’ve moved a lot of the standing clutter out but it looks like I’ve changed nothing because it was all in out of the way places. In fact, there are a few boxes floating around here that weren’t here before. Moral is low, and enthusiasm is starting to run out.

Will have to move onto shear willpower from here on out. We’ll see how this plays out. Pretty tired right now, and my back is starting to bother me. Probably going to throw on some youtube and see if I can start taking care of the Warhammer 40k and arts and crafts shelf. (Yes, I know those two things probably shouldn’t be lumped together, but you now see why I had to go through this exercise.

Blank sheets of paper

Finally broke down and cleaned the desk for the first time in a while. Now it’s a blank sheet of paper waiting for me to mess up again.

I’ll take some pictures of it once I consider it to be finished. But we aren’t there yet. I’m thinking about moving some of the desk furniture around because – well – I do have the time.

Opened the screaming depression factory that is Facebook and regretted it immediately. To be fair, this isn’t a recent development on that site. I believe it turned into a place where we communicate to each other over how helpless we feel long ago.

So what I’m saying is that opening it is on me at this point. I should know better.

3.22.20

Can’t seem to draw anything into focus today. I’ve tried doing so coding and can’t seem to concentrate. This normally means that I have some fiction in coming.

But for now, the computer is closed.