Reading and Writing and Resolutions

Man, do I need to write something. I’ve been wandering around for ages now thinking I should. But today – now – I’m suddenly compelled. I did a couple of things today. One was to post a snippet of silliness called Giant Rat on an Orkut group called “Hopped Up on Goofballs”. No reason really, […]

Man, do I need to write something.

I’ve been wandering around for ages now thinking I should. But today – now – I’m suddenly compelled.

I did a couple of things today. One was to post a snippet of silliness called Giant Rat on an Orkut group called “Hopped Up on Goofballs”. No reason really, just because.

The other was I talked to someone on IM who I flirted a bit with on another site pre-orkut.

I need an aside here – I’ve been using Apple iChat as my chat client. Now iChat rocks, it’s got a great, easy, good-looking interface and is easy to use. But it’s got some limitations that annoy me. It supports only AIM and .mac accounts, and it will only let me sign in one at a time. Now I of course have AIM accounts (two of them), a .mac account, an ICQ account, and a Yahoo account. So I want one chat app.

Trillian, everyone says, but no — no mac client. So I’ve tried a few others and wasn’t happy with them. That was ok until my group at work decided to start using iChat for business communication. And they wanted my .mac account. So suddenly as far as my friends could see, I was gone. And then I was using yahoo chat and sometimes AIM and iChat all at the same time. So I just found a new client, Adium X which supports all the major protocols, and which I actually like. Not as much as iChat but still, I like it. It’s pretty usable even though the duck theme is annoying.

The upshot is that all my chat accounts are up and logged in at the same time, finally.

This meant that this woman who’s been trying to dig me up on chat for a while finally found me.

We chatted a bit today, started talking about writing and art (she’s both, a pretty good pen and ink artist and a pretty decent poet, at least to my reader’s eye). So we started talking, not really either of us knowing much about each other, and found a common ground talking about writing. I gave her a couple bits of mine to read, she gave me a couple bits of hers. I liked her poetry quite a lot more than I expected to, which was a pleasant surprise.

And I started thinking – damn, why have I stopped?

So why have I? and why do I suddenly need to start?

Orkut’s part of it. No question. I’ve focused a lot of my creativity, in tiny slices, on that universe. Scraps, testimonials, postings, it’s all little bits and pieces of cleverness and witty banter. Each one is a quick thing, but together, they add up to a lot of brain power and attention. Also, my compulsion to be a personality on orkut the way I was on USENET drives me. My compulsion to win the love of the many delightful females, I suppose, is also a factor.

But today – I had one of those “don’t care about it” days. Where I can’t keep up and don’t care if I do. Maybe that’s fatigue, sure. I’m fried. Worn out. But maybe it’s just hit a saturation point for me where I need to do something else.

I have a lotta stories I need to work on. I should maybe post excepts but I can’t stand sharing stuff that’s not done. There’s the Wanton followup, there’s a vaguely Carnivale-inspired story about a mysterious figure who comes to a small farm, there’s a bit of something that starts with two people who meet at a funeral. Several others. There’s something in that stack of stories started or conceptual that I could get traction on, but I need to quit fooling around.

The call of fooling around, though, is strong. Not to mention the call of work. But that’s another entry I wrote that went into the weeds and may never see the light of day.

So here’s my resolution – this weekend I’m not going to fool around on orkut. This weekend I’m going to get out one of the in-process stories and work on it. Maybe only a little but I have to do it before the skills get rusty.

We’ll see how well that holds. I might actually do it. B^)


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