Tag: life

When I was thinking up my goals for 2016, I couldn’t help but notice how similar the goals were to my 2015 goal list. This is partly intentional: I want to continue reading and writing and running and who knows what else. While these are all admirable goals, one thing that crossed my mind was whether I was stuck in a rut.

The case for it is clear. My typical day looks like this: get up, eat breakfast, do work, grab lunch, more work, eat dinner, do whatever for the evening, shower, bed. Almost the same thing, day after day, with little variation during the week. Occasionally I go to a write-in during NaNo or a board game group or an evening run when the weather isn’t miserable. The weekends are reserved for recuperating from the week of work: more focused writing, catching up on reading, cleaning, and whatever else comes up, then getting bored on Sunday night because how can I relax even more. It’s easy to do this, week in, week out.

Keeping up the same weekly routine makes getting stuck in a rut even easier, doing the same things over and over until they become second nature and then, well, not do much else. Even between jobs, I maintained a routine similar to the one mentioned above, but more than that, I’ve been making habits out of some things. I’ve been making reading a habit over the past couple of years, and considering I read zero books in 2013 (yes, zero), this is one habit I’m rather proud of now. I’m trying, time and time again, to make writing a habit that I don’t have to think about before doing. And now I’m trying to make running a habit, although this habit may not stick through the winter.

But now what? I find myself thinking on a regular basis. I pride myself on being interested in many things, and even though that interest list isn’t quite as extensive as some people I know, there’s still a decent amount of variety. There are also many other things I’d love to dabble in but haven’t for one reason or another: knitting (although I’ve probably forgotten how to knit), programming, exploring new places, traveling, dabbling in various historical eras and civilizations, watching the many well-known movies I’ve never watched, expanding my social circles,… and the list goes on and on.

While some of these things are dependencies (can’t travel without the money to do so, for instance), I can do many of these items on their own. I don’t need any extra resources beyond time and energy to improve my programming skills, nor do I need to spend much money to get back into knitting. Unfortunately, none of these things can be combined as an attempt at multitasking. (Knitting and movies can in theory, but I’ve tried. I stopped knitting ten minutes into the movie.)

In the grand scheme of the universe, my life isn’t even a blip on the radar. Life is short, so I’m going to get out of this rut and make the most of it. Let’s do more.

Look at that, a week and a half into 2015 and I’ve already broken my weekly blogging resolutions. Fortunately resolutions are often bigger things to work toward as opposed to falling off the wagon at the first sign of failure.

Books: I thought it was a good idea to start the year off with several books that would make good doorstops. I also thought it was a good idea to request holds on several ebooks while reading more ebooks, all while my physical book holds came in. The two of these combined mean I’m scrambling to read all the books currently in my possession. I’m making decent progress so far with four books read in 2015, but thank goodness for my library’s four-week checkout period on most books. There should be a book review post up around the end of the month, so look for that.

Writing: Remember all those books I mentioned? I haven’t worked on Wikiwrimo much at all since NaNo ended thanks to reading all the books. I haven’t been writing much anywhere–on here, or my paper journal, or fiction. Time to get back on that boat.

Assorted personal stuff: The holidays and my birthday have come and gone, and that leaves us with a cold, miserable winter standing between us and spring. Did I mention I hate winter? It’s cold, we don’t get snow here, and the lack of sunlight and going outside regularly makes me want to crawl into a hole until spring. At least cold weather gives me an excuse to drink lots of tea, as if I needed a reason.

I’m also still open for freelance/full-time gigs, so get in touch if you want me to write a thing. Or social media a thing. Or do lots of other things.

“Hey Sushi, what has been going on with you lately?” someone asks every now and then. And considering I’ve barely updated this site outside of Legends of Wrimonia updates in quite some time, this is a valid question. Of course, you can follow me on Twitter for almost immediate updates, but that doesn’t give you a big picture version of one’s life.

So let’s do that. The answer turns out to be “pretty damn awesome”.

Work and other per-fe-shu-nal pursuits

Remember a really long time ago when I wrote about wanting a photo host that doesn’t suck and people had a hard-on for Flickr even though I specifically outlined my issues with Flickr?

Then Trovebox (then OpenPhoto) came along and solved just about everything, including the part about not wanting to store everything on my webhost because that would eat the crap out of my current pay as you go hosting bill. It even included a way to store just the photos elsewhere, a huge plus.

So I hopped aboard, backing the project in its humble Kickstarter beginning and even volunteering on the open source project as a non-code person. I was already using the site, knew a ton about it, and had some time on my hands, so why not?

And then this transitioned into really working on the project, and now I’m living the dream: working in a pants optional environment.

Want to see this for yourself? Here’s my Trovebox site.

Friends (not food) and loooooooove

Yes, Ma, I have a social life! In fact, I’m writing this post from a coffee shop playing 80s music with friends I met from NaNo.

Oh, you were here for the love part, weren’t you?

I dated a guy from NaNo for a few months during and after NaNo. We broke up. While getting over the breakup I was poking around OkCupid for giggles and messaged a guy who sounded interesting. This guy and I wound up exchanging a few very long messages before moving to GChat and talking for five and a half hours on an evening where I had to be up early the next day, then meeting in person that Thursday since he was off work. That Thursday also happened to be the second day of Lupercalia. Oh, and Valentine’s Day.

We hit it off in person and he is the person fully responsible for my love of Futurama (and my sadness when it was cancelled… again). If you follow me on Twitter, this person is the one I refer to as Boyperson now.

Writing, Editing, Blogging

I would say I haven’t been doing too much of this, but that’s a lie. I’ve been doing bursts of journal writing but not much fiction writing or editing. I’m still figuring out the world and science behind one novel, and another is going to simmer for awhile.

As for blog posts here, I’m going to get on a more regular schedule for big posts while writing more personal blog-esque posts as well and taking advantage of the aside feature in WordPress. At the very least I’m going to try to write something once a week. With all my friends writing and blogging I’m the slacker here! That’s positive peer pressure, right?

Import ALL the posts!

As part of my “everything in one place” efforts, I’ve been trying to figure out how to import all my old blog posts to WordPress for quite some time. There was one catch: I wanted all those posts to import as private posts.

I finally achieved this a few months ago. How, you ask? That’s going to be a separate post since it’s pretty involved.

Night of Writing Dangerously

Fundraising pages for this year’s NaNoWriMo Night of Writing Dangerously went up recently, and thanks to a couple of very generous people I’m already at the $200 early bird special for admission, meaning I’m going to San Francisco in November. (Eeeee!) But that doesn’t mean I’m done fundraising yet.

See, I have very long hair, and with long hair that gets everywhere comes people wanting to see it cut off. So for every $100 raised on my fundraising page I’ll cut an inch of hair. Seriously. Right now my page is sitting at $240, which means two inches of hair get to go bye-bye. All the hair will go away in one fell swoop.

If you don’t care about the hair or think it’s too pretty to go away, then consider this: if my fundraising page is one of the top three fundraising pages, I’ll write and perform a NaNo parody and put it on Youtube for all to see. That’s right, public humiliation as a motivator.

And of course there are the same prizes as last time: personal and character cameos, pep talks, and the top donor getting to choose a novel for me to write. It’s going for $200 so far, so if you really want it, get donating. Those rewards stack!

Did I mention all this money is going straight to NaNo (and it’s tax-deductible for those who care about that sort of thing)? I don’t see a single cent of that money.

Here’s my fundraising page if you’re so inclined. Thank you!

That’s it!

That’s my life as of late: good but busy. How about you?