Once again, it has taken a ridiculously long time for me to write another post. Could it be that I feel like I am not accomplishing anything? Maybe. More likely is that I feel like everything is in progress and not ready for release.

I have managed to finish something, though. The graduate school application is finally done and the admissions committee is currently reviewing that. I have no idea when I will hear back. People keep telling me that I will certainly get in, but my current view is to wait and see. If I do not get in for the fall term, I will take a class or two anyway and reapply after I have shown that I have potential.

I know. Not all that exciting and nothing you can really tap your toe to, but it is still an accomplishment.

Well, I think that I shall sit down at the piano for the first time in over a month. It has been that long since the bench has been cleared of math books, but I shifted them the other day in the hopes that I would start practicing and writing again. I have been listening to what is finished of Winter Colors on my iPod the past couple of weeks and I can feel inspiration close at hand.

Tschuess.

Hello once again, dear reader.

I know it has been ages since I last posted. Since you are apparently still checking, I will bring you up to speed on what has happened the past three months.

Act I. Less than a week until Christmas. My boss calls me (and everyone else) in. Sales have been quite bad. The company is going into “hibernation mode.” I am laid off. Effective immediately. There is a tiny severance package, but nothing that really reflects the decade I spent at a particularly boring job that was not putting my skills and talents to good use. I am freaked out, but I know that it is just the kick I need to find a job that suits me better.

Act II. Job hunting. There are some jobs around that are a good fit. I apply. There are other jobs that I wish were a good fit, but that means having a PhD. I start talking about finally returning to school to earn a doctorate (this time, in Mathematics) after dropping out of a Computer Science PhD program (ABD) ten years ago. Stress levels are high at home. Interviews are taking forever to set up. In late January/early February, I finally interview at a couple of places.

Act III. Mid-February. Colorado State University offers me a job developing disease spread modeling software (NAADSM). After some agonizing, I decide that it is where I should be. I can bike to work, take classes, and work on something that I believe is making the world a better place. In general, I can get back to my core values.

Epilogue. Tomorrow I start my new job. It has been an anxiety-filled few months, but now I can relax and get back to productive work. I can also wrap up my admissions essay, contact my references, and re-take the GRE (What?! The one I rocked 15 years ago is no longer valid?) in the next week.

In the meantime, I have been directing some of my stress energy into writing new songs. None of them are completed yet, but they are definitely moving forward. I am not certain what sort of project these will be released under, but I do think that they are going to be released sometime. I have decided that I must finish up and release my currently pending projects before I begin school in August. That is roughly what my release schedule looked like anyway, but now it feels like even more of a must. Hopefully having a real deadline will push me more than wishful thinking has the past couple of years.

Tschuess.

I just looked at when my last post was. 23 October?! Yikes!

So what have I been up to? Well, it was November, so my long time readers know exactly what that means for me: National Novel Writing Month. It managed to successfully eat my life pretty much all month, and now I am 70,060 words towards a first draft of a gothic horror/thriller novel. And I think that I might have found what I should be writing. Of course there is still a ton to do before this story ever sees the light of day, especially since the first draft isn’t even finished yet.

Still, I had some massive writing days (in excess of 6,000 words) and I sat down and pounded out a few thousand nearly every day. I hit 50,000 words (the NaNoWriMo “finish line”) at the end of the 14th. There were only a few days where I didn’t sit down and write something.

As always, this year was a bit of an experiment. In addition to writing in a different genre (yet again), I also used a different writing tool. It was still my trusty MacBook, but rather than using a word processor, I used Journler. Each day I started a new entry and tagged it as part of NaNoWriMo 2008. I had a smart folder that collected all of those entries so that I could spit the whole thing out as a single file. But each day I sat down to a blank page. At the bottom it gave me the word count for that entry, which meant that I knew immediately whether I had met my daily goal or not. And because I could not easily go back and reread work from previous days, it kept me from continually checking what I had previously written. While it might not work for some projects, for NaNoWriMo it was perfection (or close to it).

In addition to being Novel Writing Month, November is also National Solo Album Month. The goal is to write and record roughly a half hour of music during November with no outside help. I had heard about it a few years ago and have been wanting to give it a try. I thought that it might be a good excuse to finally write that goth album I have wanted to write for the past twenty or more years. In the end, though, I ended up with about 20-25 minutes of sketches and demos which will mostly wind up on the second Maniac Art Pond album, once I have reworked them. I know that I have still to wrap up Winter Colors, but these fit the theme that I had been planning on for the second album. I am hoping to make significant progress on both over the next two months. It would be fantastic to be able to release them both next autumn.

I think that this might be the last year for both NaNoWriMo and NaSoAlMo for me, at least for a few years. I have so much raw material to go through and polish that I think I could use with a break. There are a few other challenges that I would like to do, though. Feburary Album Writing Month, with the goal of writing fourteen songs in twenty-eight days is, not so surprisingly, in February. April is now Script Frenzy, and I think that it might work out well for me now that they have significantly reworked the rules. Of course, I may simply sit down and work on the scripts that have been on the back burner for the past few years without the help of the challenge.

First comes the holidays, though, and all of the work leading up to those. My stomach knots just thinking everything that I want to have done before I see my family again.

Tschuess.