This Is Not a Real Blog Post (Ponderings and Plans)

The Mars “face” featured in the X-Files episode “Space”

My kids just got back from camp, and while they were gone, I enjoyed myself. (See, all last week, you didn’t even realize, because I hid it so well.)

I watched a whole bunch of Netflix! Including episodes of Star Trek and The Dick Van Dyke Show and Get Smart and Roswell.

On the evening after the Curiosity landing, I celebrated with the X-Files episode “Space,” in which an alien possesses a NASA director in order to sabotage US space exploration (thus explaining certain NASA disasters and embarrassments). In my opinion, those early episodes of The X-Files are truly creepy, suspenseful in a way that I wish I could reproduce (and maybe I will learn to someday). I followed that up with Mythbusters “NASA Moon Landing” myths, all of which are silly but entertaining. More fascinating to me as a character author are the reasons why anyone would be that skeptical that man has stepped foot on the moon. I mean, I’m a sorta skeptical sort myself, but the “moon landing is a hoax” position represents an extreme that I see no logical reason to adopt.

I (re)watched many episodes of Frasier, which will probably result in my next “drinking game” post. (Unless it turns out to be an X-Files or Star Trek post instead.) And I discovered an unknown humorous film by Allan Funt (of Candid Camera fame), Money Talks, all about money and our attitudes toward money, whose inspiration is going to make a great upcoming post.

But mostly I thought about the next step in my writing career. I need to do two things on an ongoing basis: get more involved with other writers and write more fiction. So I’ve begun spending less time blogging, sometimes blogging more haphazardly (which is why this post is so late), but still blogging every day. I also plan to post at least one significant post each week, a post that I can later include in a book release. In other words, this blog serves as an experimental platform on which I can test out material for future books. (And part of that will be talking about the meaning I’ve found in other authors’ indie novels.)

I’ve also begun hanging out at WritingForums.com, again, after years of inactivity. So many years, in fact, that all my old posts have drained out of the bit bucket, which makes me officially a newbie there… a newbie with a join date of February 18, 2004. And I’m already acutely realizing how much my views about writing have developed since then, and how far they’ve diverged from the mainstream (which IMO is full of silly myths), and how ripe now is the time to push push push on that front. Almost everything I post there will probably turn into an article on Be the Story.

And next week, God willing, I hope to begin writing in earnest, that is, regularly (again) on the next Ardor Point novel (which will probably be entitled A Reason to Live). My goal is to have it in print by the winter holidays, but the first (next) step is to recalculate the project’s development schedule— so many words per day for so many days over the next N months yadda yadda yadda. That’s the only way to measure progress on a project any larger than a short story.

So the trick with all of this will be to ramp up progress on the new components of the plan, while not losing progress on other components of the plan.

Onward and upward…

-TimK