I usually find myself writing these entries in the morning whilst sipping a fresh cup of tea and listening to music on my headphones. I've long held the opinion that the piece of the puzzle that Virginia Woolf was missing in "A Room of One's Own" was noise canceling headphones. I spent the weekend out of town and as a result had a very very hard time finding the headphones this morning, and I have to admit that I felt kind of lost. If anyone out there is looking to become a writer, headphones rank right up there on my list of necessities: a good tea cup, a good go-everywhere notebook and pen, a computer with good quality editing software, and a supportive desk chair. In case you were wondering.
Last Friday's post was a bit angst. I'll admit it, I need to find co-editors to make TealArt more viable in the long term. In the shorter term I think I'm in pretty good shape. I spent some time thinking about the kinds of features that I could work on that might make writing easier. Over the summer I'd sort of let my focus of discrete projects/series spin out, and so rather than having a set framework of ongoing posts that I could approach not as "I need to write 5 posts for this week," but rather, "I need to write one of these posts this week," I think was much easier on the brain.
This isn't to say that I've fixed the problem, if anyone wants to be a blog editor, or do some blog merging, or whatever, I am totally still up for that. So contact me.
As for what's happening this week? This is my first week of unemployment, which means job searching, something I am so not looking forward to, but alas it has to be done. In any case, for at least a little while this means that I'll get plenty of extra time to work on some writing projects, and some website/internet projects. This is a good thing.
My novella is progressing nicely. I'm a bit less than half way done with chapter three, and it's going really well. I did a bit less than 75% of my goal for the weekend, but it's a long weekend so I'm going to stretch that out into today. I have a good action sequence to work on today, and I'm kind of happy about doing that. That's pretty much how I feel about this project: it's just working, and I'm having a great deal of fun with it.
A few weeks ago, I started writing a short story that's sort of derived similarly from that novel that I wrote several years ago. I got a bunch of notes and about 300 words written, before I realized that it wasn't going to work out; so, I put it in the back burner. Then as I was driving this weekend I came upon a good way to make it work, so scribbled something down as we were filling up the car, and so I'm going to put some time into that this week.
But you're probably at least a little interested in what's happening on TealArt this week, and not so much what I'm working on behind the scenes. I'm going to post the first couple of essays that I wrote last weekend about open-source software, knitting collaboration, and how I thought the two were connected. In retrospect, it's also related to the posts that I put up last week about making money from art. So I'm quite excited about that, Also, while I haven't, unfortunately, been paying much attention to Station Keeping, there's going to be some SK goodness this week, not a new story, but defiantly some reflection.
Stay tuned, and again if you're interested in doing some editoral-type work around here, be sure to be in touch (tycho@tealart.com). I'll see you again throughout the week, and I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Cheers, tycho