Hiddennode

Coming August 1st, FlashWriMo, an event I’ll be doing to get a most of my flash fiction project out of the way before Labor Day.

Yeah I know, I’ve been absent from doing as much Flash publishing for the second half of July after a strong start in the end of June. The good news is that this isn’t because I’m not writing, it’s because I’m working on another project (or three). The biggest project will be finished by the weekend coming up. The other projects are on going but will take a back seat once August crests the month line.

So what is FlashWriMo to me? FlashWriMo is taking the rules of NaNoWriMo and applying it to writing a ton of flash fiction. That’s 51,667 words in 31 days (NaNo is 50K is 30 days, do the math). At under 500 words a story, that will be at minimum 103 pieces of flash fiction to create in 31 days. Since my plan was 104 pieces of flash fiction this year (two a week), this will meet my quota for the year, my quota for the special post year project, and allow me to possibly twice to posting three stories a week. If that happens that I work on 156 pieces for the year, I’ll up the special project at the end of the year to 200 pieces of fiction. If you’re counting still, that’ll be 100,000 words. Hrm, that sounds familiar… like it’s the length of something else you’d put in book form.

If FlashWriMo works out, maybe I’ll do a repeat come NaNoWriMo time and just get the first half of the stories done for 2011 ready. What? Did you think I was only doing the flash project for a year? Oh no, this is a lifetime project. So long as I can still interact with the written word, you’ll always find flash fiction on my writing site. Flash fiction is fun, and even if my writing career never really picks up, I’ll continue writing the micro pieces.

I… just would prefer… you know… if it did take off.

Okay, so expect new fiction starting August 1st (or technically the 3rd, since that’s Tuesday). There’s a post highlighting this on the fiction site if you want details on knowing which stories started in FlashWriMo.

nulloperations

So, right, the desk. These are a little old, but see previous posts for why they weren’t posted yet.

Let me start off by showing what my desk used to look like.

Note that I used to have a back panel on the desk. Still weird seeing that back wall now.

Okay, so the new desk. I ordered an Ameriwood Work Center-L desk from Amazon back in April. Not too expensive, but I was a little hesitant about ordering from a company I didn’t know. I would come to find out, my instincts were right. (see multiple angry tweets about not getting my instructions… that’s another story).

Fast forward to two weeks later. I have my instructions, and I’ve moved Trish’s desk where mine once was. This first shot is a few steps in and the top is still upside down.

So I start building higher and higher, getting more parts together and keeping cats from grabbing the tiny bits and screws.

Look! It’s standing! I’m so proud.

One wing done.

(Look, a cat distraction!)

And here’s the left wing. FYI, this step is recommended for two people. The manual is not lying. This was a pain in the ass crawling behind and attaching that wing. (Also, I got the top up too)

So, that’s the desk done. It’s a few weeks later and now here’s the current desk:

If you can name a few dozen geeky things in that picture, a cookie for you.

So, desk images delivered. Are you happy now Dakota?

nulloperations

The last two weeks I’ve been busy with managing  to get work started on several projects.

Starting with my fiction, I’m currently working on a piece of for the Escape Artists Flash contest. While I can’t provide any details for the story as that would be against the contest rules,  I will say that I’m really enjoying the piece I’ve put together. You’ll get to see the piece on the writing site regardless if I win or not. The story has been trimmed down I just have to give it one last editing sweep before submitting it tonight.

The year of Flash continues with my Tuesday/Thursday posts. Still going strong, and now I’m all caught up except for three remaining posts in January. I should have that corrected by the end of this week which will let me move onto the next phase of the project: Getting ahead of schedule. In order for me to have the book ready by the end of the year, I have to have the fiction written long before December. Ideally, I’d like to be a month ahead of schedule by the end of April or May, two months by the end of June/July, and be finished with the year by the end of August/September. This would let me work October through December preparing the book while getting ahead of schedule for the next year.

Finally, I’m working on a short story based on a writing assignment from the March FWA meeting. The outline is complete and I just need to put meat on those bones. The goal is to have a final draft edited by the end of April, and then have a finished copy ready to go for submissions by the end of May.

Outside of fiction writing, I’m back at working on an RPG system. This one is very similar to one I worked on years ago with one of my best friends. She had wanted something akin to an Alice In Wonderland rpg, so it had to be based on cards instead of dice. I’m now further into the new development on the project than when I was working on it ten years ago. The current timeframe is to be able to run play tests by this weekend. Going to hijack my wife into playing the game with me for a bit. Ideally I can have something ready by the end of Spring.

Moving on from writing, the recording of TDC3 is tonight. I’m sorry that the second episode isn’t up yet, but hopefully things can get rolling soon. Haven’t had much chance to talk to Andrew over the past two weeks, so I’m assuming he’s been very busy with work. Happens I guess. I’m still debating starting my own show, but I don’t have the editing expertise Andrew has. We’ll see how this tonight goes.

I’m happy to see that productivity is abound. I see 2010 as a great year for my projects and while there have been set backs (see my posts about the post-apocalyptic Shadowrun project earlier this year), one thing I’ve learned from that project is that I can’t get too hyped up about the project until I’m certain it’s something I know I will love.

We’ll see just how well that goes with the current cooking pots.

nulloperations

The following is a meta post regarding the blog and the status of the blog. Frankly if you aren’t too concerned regarding the details of this blog, don’t worry about this post. It’s skippable. If you’re interested in how I view and manage this site, keep going for some insight and don’t forget to ask questions at the end.

Last week there was a lot of work done on the blog. In terms of content, design, and usability, hiddennode.com has undergone a great deal of change. The new theme and plug-ins I’ve selected have turned this from a project that looked like I did care about it into something that has a little push behind it. The new content I’ve managed to post on a fairly reliable schedule has also increased traffic and hey, we had a few comments show up (hi folks and thanks!).

With all this effort put in it is time to continue my activity here. I’m going to attempt something of a schedule for posting here and on jsamueldiehl.com. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday will be the days you’re going to see posts here on hiddennode.com. Tuesday, Thursday, and occasionally Saturday will be the days that you’ll see new flash fiction on jsamueldiehl.com. Sundays I’m taking off.

The occasional Saturday posts lie on the fact I’d like for Saturdays to become days I post longer pieces of fiction, not just flash fiction. Because of that, I might just post every other week on Saturday so the content quality will be better. That is until I’m a better writer and know I can do more in a shorter time than I can now.

There’s no perfection to this system. I will miss days. I might even miss a week if things are tight. It’ll happen but once whatever is keeping me from posting is resolved I’ll be back and ready to go.

Going out on a note on the future; in the coming weeks you can expect a review of Star Trek Online (it goes live next week), might actually get to hear a podcast I take part of (if we ever record), and hear about my plans for Dragon*Con (bought my ticket yesterday). I’m looking forward to sharing these with you and hearing your comments.

nulloperations

Slow week, but with the holiday coming up I’m not surprised.

The only major change I can report on is my return to Second Life. That’s right, after about a year (or two) away from the realm, I’m back into Linden Land. I caught the bug Saturday night after my last post. Logged in, looked around, and decided to just start working on the project Raven wanted me to do for her build space. Two hours later I’m sitting inside of a very pretty gigantic floating sphere. I even nabbed Dakota into jumping in and it turns out some of the Ventrlio regulars play as well.

I’ve taken to it like a fish to water as if I’ve never stopped. I’m also quickly picking up some of the newer techniques that developed over the last year or two. Interestingly, I’ve found a number of builds using sculpties where in the past you could easily solve with one or two prims cut the right way. I can’t say I blame the builders for this method, but at the same time I almost feel as if it’s an unneeded short cut. Maybe I’ve just got an “Old Guard” mentality when it comes to my SL design work. Then again, sculpties often (although not always) tend to have a more “organic” look, which is contrary to my more simplistic modern style.

What can I say? I like straight lines that match perfectly every time. Do I use sculpties? Of course, but as a rarity.

Now Mega prims, that’s a different story.

So today’s question: Are you a Second Life player? Have you played before or are you interested in playing it again? Let me know, maybe we can meet virtually in game. If you’re new maybe I can also help you get started.

Extra Credit: If you do play Second Life, are you a builder? What’s your opinions on sculpties? I know they’ve been around for quite some time (late 2006 I believe), but it’s always possible to review something from a different light.

nulloperations

Things the last few weeks have been interesting. There’s been a lot of good change in my life in the last few months with most of them focused on the last three weeks. Between my new attitude about my domestic life, my creative and inventive projects, and my desire to just get things done, I really feel like my life has moved into another slot in the wheel and grinded forward a dozen steps.

In the past quarter, I’ve managed to start a new job with an old company, begun working on projects I’ve dreamt of for years, and lay out plans for domestic projects that both needed to be done and wanted to be done.

Domestically speaking, there are a couple of projects I’ve started that I’m proud of. I’m making moves every Sunday evening to clear out some of the boxes left over from the move four years ago. This mostly involves purging items in the garage and organizing what’s left behind. It’s cost some money to buy the shelving but it’s really worked out. I’ve been at this three weeks in a row and I’ve found the simple pleasure of working with my hands.

Additionally, I’ve ordered parts for a project I’ve been planning for years. A friend pointed me to monoprice.com, an inexpensive site for computer, A/V, and network wiring. For under $50.00 I’ll be able to hook up the old media PC to my TV and Stereo in the living room. I’ll be able to sign up for things like Netflix or make purchases on iTunes and watch them on the much larger screen. Not to mention Hulu and my music I’ve bought. Parts should be in by this Monday or Tuesday (they were on their way to Jacksonville around 12:06 AM Friday).

Day job professionally speaking, the new job I started in September is going great. I’m with a company I used to work for a year ago. It feels great being back and the work, while challenging, is enjoyable. I enjoy my coworkers and I think they enjoy being around me.  Generally speaking, being a permanent employee at a company that acknowledges me for my achievements is a great change of pace. Hoping this time the job lasts longer than a year.

Night job professionally speaking, I am lacking in the book production mindset. I’ve been writing but I haven’t been doing as much as I intended. I did start NaNoWriMo this year, but starting is just about all I did. A million excuses but basically I’ve been lazy about it. I am slowly getting back on the horse but it’s not as fast as I’d like it to be.

Speaking of creative measures, after three years of listening to podcasts and wishing to start one, things have come to pass. My friend Dakota, myself, and Andrew, a new friend who has audio engineering experience with podcasts are starting up a weekly or bi-weekly project. The name is tentative until episode one goes up in December, but so far we’re happy with Trans-Dimensional Cafe. The show is going to be a forum for discussion about geeky interests, writing, gaming, and lifestyle. We’re recording several episode zeroes to get into the swing of a format as well as raising out comfort level with speaking into the recording stream. I believe by mid December we’ll do fine with recording and releasing episode one. Episode 0-2 was recorded tonight and compared to how the first recording went, we were great. Thirty minutes to record with most of the audio actually useable. I’m very pleased.

Finally, tech speaking, I’ve reformatted my computer for the first time in two years. It’s about time frankly, but it’s come at a cost. Namely, I’ve lost all my contact details in terms of email addresses as well as archived mail items. Ugh. If you are someone who’s had email correspondence with me, please email me at jdiehl AT hiddennode.com so I can get your latest contact address.

The reformat has fixed a number of annoying bugs, and I have nearly all of my old programs reinstalled. I’ve limited the number of games I have installed, as well as the number of programs I can have installed at once. Basically I’ve formatted my drive into two partitions and only allocated about 50gb’s to my XP installation. When I do install 7 sometime next year, I’ll probably just buy a new drive to put it on.

That’s my current life activities in a nut shell. Future plans include the entertainment project, writing more, and Dragon*Con next year (more on that later). For now, I’m getting in gear.

What about you? Are you keeping busy? How goes your projects? Let me know if the busy bug has bitten you too.

Take care all,

nulloperations

Just a quickie.

I am participating in NaNoWriMo this year. Going to use the drive of NaNo to kick start the reboot of my novel. Work will start this evening once Trish and I are home from our outing. I need to finish up draft one of the outline then get to work on chapter 1.

If anyone is interested in becoming writer buddies with me, my profile is here.

For those who don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, here’s a description from their site:

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

For a full description, click here.

Okay, that said, I’m off.

nulloperations

The last two weeks have been… fun. Spent time with 1) the flu, 2) bronchitis, 3) a bruised rib. This all started as soon as I begun an exercise walking schedule. Going to restart that in November once the rib is healed. In the midst of this, I’ve been trying to kick start my writing again.

I’m (obviously) started to blog again, looking at focusing on thegreyfedora.com site again, and I’m trying to focus more on my novel. I actually printed up the 30K words this weekend in order to read it and kick start my interest. There’s a lot of

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> message begins

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>>> [ CONTENT OVERRIDE CEASES ::: DATABASE STATUS: RECOVERING ] <<<

work to do actually. It starts in the wrong spot, the focus isn’t on the right character, and generally I need to recreate the foundation. What I’ve written so far isn’t wasted, but it’s also not fully useful in its current format.

Let me put it into simple terms. I’m effectively reseting again but using what I’ve written as the new writer’s bible. At this rate, this being reset three on this novel, I’ll reach 60K words before reseting again. And then, after reset four, I’ll reach 120k words, effectively letting me finish the novel. Yay?

Okay, so post’s over for now. I’m going to try to do this weekly again.

Yeah I know, I say that every time.

Jdiehl

Getting into further development of myself, I’m about to embark in a new process. I’ve started to think along the ideology that my personal self and my writer self are two separate people. By that I mean who I am as my web persona, nulloperations, is a different being than the brand I present for J. Samuel Diehl, my writer self. Both are me, yet at the same time not. Nulloperations is about expressing my interests, my joys, and my fun. J. Samuel Diehl is about presenting a specific part of that life: my writing, the business around my writing, and the brand that is my author name.

That said, I’m going to start separating the two entities going forward; at least here on the site. I’m setting up jsamueldiehl.com and justindiehl.com (same site, different URL’s). Hiddennode.com will not be going away. In fact, it will pretty much remain the same (although expect a visual change sometime in the future). Jsamueldiehl.com will just become where my writing home is located. You’ll find information about my current projects, past projects, links to where you can find my writing, and any part of that which is my brand. Hiddennode.com will remain home to my personal blog, with maybe a few tidbits of my writing ending up here.

I’m promising myself that I will have the other site at least functional as a blog with some plug-ins within the next 30 days. The graphical upgrade should arrive later this year. Jsamueldiehl.com won’t be fully functional for several months as I’m not where I need to be to take full advantage of the site. This time next year that will be a different story.

nulloperations

So a year or so ago, back when this blog originally saw the light of day, I had wanted to take the time to post about some things I enjoyed. I wanted to post about podcasts, software, games, books, everything I was enjoying I wanted to share. I did manage a few back then. Looking at the old locked up archive posts, I see I posted about just those things. Did a decent job of reviewing them (at least that’s what I’ll claim and you’ll never know without breaking into my admin panel). Quickly though, they subsided as I just got tired of posting daily too quickly. A while after that, I just gave up, slapped together a rather poorly generated podcasts page and dropped it at the top of the website and said screw it. Occasionally I dropped a game review every now and then, but mostly I just let it slide.

Well, it’s time to bring back that good old spirit of writing about the things I enjoy; Only this time, I’m not going to be so heavy handed in getting posts out daily. I’ll just create them as they come to me, and as they come to exist, I’ll also add them to the Interests Page at the top of this blog. Even better, I’ll have the interests page link the brief descriptions I post there back to the big descriptions that appear in the blog.

Good idea right?

Okay, I admit, it’ll take some extra work and that might put me off, but hear me out. I think it’ll actually work for keeping me doing that sharing the love thing for things I enjoy. Trust me. It’ll come to pass. You’ll see.

jdiehl