Category: In Process

Stuff I commented on before finishing.

Reading “The War of Art”

I picked up Stephen Pressfield‘s The War of Art yesterday. It’s a short book, but I’ve not had any extended time to dedicate to reading, so it may take me a few days. The book has been on my radar for some time. When I saw it come up again over at 43 Folders I decided to buy it. I mean, I had been meaning to check out The Merlin Show after hearing Merlin Mann on TWiT, and I’d recently been introduced to the music of Jonathan Coulton, so seeing them together with a mention of the book seemed like some sort of sign. Adding extra weight to this, my wife had also recently discovered Jonathan Coulton’s music independently of me. That guy gets great word of mouth.

Anyhow, I grabbed the book at lunch Friday. I’m not sure if that qualifies it as an impulse buy or not, but who cares?

I finished the first of the books three parts this morning. While there are a few parts I don’t agree with, it really seems to hit the nail on the head 97% of the time. I’ll hold back on giving my final recommendation until I finish it, but so far, real good.

Quiet around here…

You may have noticed that I got really quiet after posting almost every day. Well, I was participating in the “March Madness” writing marathon over at Forward Motion. If you’ve been keeping an eye on my progress bar at the top of the site, you may have noticed it moving quite a bit. My goal was to write 1000 words a day for 7 days, and I pulled it off! That means I pretty much doubled my daily output, and didn’t miss a single day for seven days. That’s including working about 50 hours this week, and spending 2+ hours a day cleaning the house. Phew! I hope to keep it up, but I’m giving myself a lower goal for this weekend as it’s a bit crazy.

I hope to have more detailed reviews, but in case I don’t get to it I finished a few books since my last post. First, I finished The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time . Wow. It was an amazing book filled with surprises of various kinds.

More recently I finished listening to Ender’s Game: Special 20th Anniversary Edition by Orson Scott Card. I’ve always wanted to read this, and my friend Matt had recommended it. When I realized that Audible had the majority of the series available unabridged I decided to give it a try. I really enjoyed it. I’ve read some of Card’s books on writing, but this is the first novel of his that I’ve read. It’s the story of a young boy being schooled in the art of warfare to fight a war against an alien race he has only seen on propaganda films. Ender’s story is filled with interesting and fully realized characters. I thought I saw the ending coming, and while the events I suspected did happen, it was not the ending at all. Great stuff!

Half way through Ender’s Game I knew I’d want more, so I already had Speaker for the Dead on my iPod and started it after taking some time to digest the ending of Game.

More soon, unless I’m busy, then more later.

Writing, Hurting, Filing, Reading, etc.

I’m doing my best to do some writing on the novel every single day. I’m not going to make my original goal for finishing the first draft of the novel by the end of April, but it should be close (I hope). The back is getting better, but it still bothers me, especially when I sit at the computer for too long. I started going back to Kung-Fu class last week, which is good and bad. I got used to having more time, but I really need to go. I enjoy it immensely, and I need the exercise.

Denise and I are going through all our paperwork in an attempt to organize the filing cabinet, safe, and boxes of papers marked “Important“. A lot of them aren’t, or at least not anymore. We burned out our last shredder and bought a new one. It was cheap but I hope it’ll at least last a year.

I started reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and I’m really enjoying it. Thanks to Del for mentioning it recently.