Happy New Year

Friends, Romans, distinguished guests, I come not to bury 2020 but acknowledge that 2021 is going to be a tough year itself. That being said, boy oh boy am I not glad to see that last year go by in the rear-view mirror. (BTW, don’t let the classy paraphrased Shakespeare quote fool you, I just spent way too much brain energy on pointless memorization exercises in school.)

I’m also not going to make any new resolutions, as I’m still working on a lot of the old ones. As well as dealing with the same generally crazy situation as most of you out there. That being said, if you (the hypothetical Reader) have a destination or goal in mind for your year, you go ahead and make that resolution. Even if it’s something as simple as “getting excited about going to a restaurant again.”

I don’t think I’ll touch the Xmas tree until around about the 5th, or whenever I decide that the previous year has been saluted enough. The upside of having an artificial tree is that they tend not to rot whenever you tend not to get around to taking it down until… later in the year (I’m both proud and not-proud of my personal record, which I might disclose at some point down the line.)

Anyway, I mainly posted to salute the year to come, because I do think that it’s important to hold on to some form of routine. Here’s to a better 2021, everybody. Stay safe!

Friday Feelings

Remembering to blog is a schedule in and of itself, damn it! It’s not like I waited until next year!

And forming habits is a good thing when they are good habits like writing in a blog and not bad habits like going back and re-writing the same twenty words over and over again!

I found some green tea and hot chocolate pods for the pod-using coffee device, which is basically like having a beverage-based wire mother. But since I don’t want to go out in all of this (she says as she does a sweeping motion in some vague direction with her arm,) I’m drinking it anyway. The green tea is fairly good when you’ve got honey or milk on hand…

And I discovered that Spotify actually has a pretty good podcasts selection, so whether I write any “serious” words tonight or not, I’m listening to some podcasts while I do it.

Monday Mood

Confession time: A lot of my blogs failed over the years because I became a little too attached to the idea of “regular updates.”

And that wasn’t necessarily because I didn’t have anything to say, it was possibly just because I had a certain idea in my mind as to what “content” actually was. I like to think that I know a little bit better now, which is why I’m putting down some thoughts instead of trying to turn a brief hiatus (Netflix, Plex, gaming, staying the hell indoors) into a crisis.

So while I’m not going to make a habit of posting the entire text of old stories up on my blog, I’ll just give you a brief note on some of my thought processes that generally go into my story writing.

“Social Engineering” was originally supposed to be part of a larger story about an embittered security robot who had once discovered that the world outside of being a department store Smart Mannequin was worse than anything she had ever been told. But when I looked back on it with a different perspective, the bit that I had finished worked well on its own as a little tale about how one’s perceptions change the way they see the world around them. Or at least it does in my mind, which is where my stories tend to live before I write them down.

So then when I posted it here, thinking that I would do it as an experiment, or for content, I gave it some TLC anyway. And then at the last minute, I looked at the ending that I had originally written, and then I threw it out. The ending it has now is a bit sillier, and a bit more cynical, but maybe it’s also bittersweet.

I never stopped writing before, and I will not stop writing for the foreseeable future. If you are reading this right now, thank you for reading.