I wish there was a good way, in the context of a blog post or some other convenient digital media, to regularly say: "I've done some things, you may be interested in them," and "I'd like to do some things, here are some notes of what I think I'd like to be working on in the next little bit." I've yet to find a good way to get in the habit of writing this kind of post.

My instinct is to have something that I can template and automate pretty strongly so that I can mostly focus on doing things rather than writing blog posts about doing things. Or as is presently the case, blog posts blog posts about doing things. Oy. Ideas and suggestions on this topic would be most appreciated.

So what have I been up to? Well...

  • I got back into writing fiction this week after several weeks away. I was in a difficult part of the story and life got very... full... and I stopped writing regularly. These things happen, but it's good to be back at least some.

    After the work I did just last night, I realize that I'm much closer to the end of this novel than I had thought. Even if things go very slowly for the next few months, I think I'll be able to get this thing done by the end of May. I just have to write about a thousand words to finish Chapter 11, and there are three to four little vignettes in chat per 12 to wrap the whole thing up. And it's going to be awesome.

    I'm super excited to be done with this project and to be able to spend some time cleaning it up and making it an awesome text, but also being able to work on making other things I've written better, and to be able to write new things, with my undivided attention.

  • I've updated the /posts/anti-rodentia and the associated discussion page with some changes that I think make the system work much better.

  • I've upgraded to Firefox 4, which I really like a lot: it's much faster, it's much more minimal (visually) which is great. Also all of my plugins and extensions work without issue. Good job!

  • I went through a blast from my past when I pulled together the queer theories page, which does some--at this point utterly redundant--definitional work about what it means to be queer, and potential limitations on queer identity/politics in the era of a broadly defined queer.

  • I've started adding recurring tasks to keep me on track with writing and posting entries to this post. This means I don't end up posting things months after I write them. As was the case with Mutt Sucks Less, a post I wrote many months ago and posted with some revisions last week.

  • I made a folk page for frequent comm enter and discourse participant Matt Lundin that includes a snippet which makes a list (and RSS feed!) of all pages that link to "madalu" or are tagged with "madalu" (his handle). You can see this by editing the page, and use it when making your own folk pages. Which you should totally do.

Have a good weekend!