UPDATE: I decided I needed a new personal pic. No more tongues, even if I do look decidely un-crotchety…
WooHoo! I actually wrote (am writing) my 100th blog entry.
When it became obvious a couple of weeks ago that I was actually going to have to write something profound about having reached this milestone, I eventually hit on the idea of offering up ‘100 somethings’ to commemorate the event. So far I’ve only managed to gather up about 25 or so, and I can’t afford to spend the entire day working on a single blog entry, so it looks like that’s out.
I was also hoping that I’d have a very interesting phot essay ready to go up, but the pictures won’t get taken until later today (one of the reasons I can’t spend all day on a blog entry), so you’ll all just have to spend a few minutes reading something unprofound.
My friend Joe reminded me last night that up until a few months ago I was vehemently decrying blogs; I just didn’t get it, I couldn’t see wasting a second of my precious time on someone elses’ lamentations on life and thought the whole thing was a waste of time.
On that last point I still think I’m correct. Blogs ARE a waste of time, for both the reader and the writer. A monumental loss of productivity and a procrastinator’s wet dream. Blogs let you do something without doing anything.
As someone with completion issues, a deep and abiding faith that MY time is more important than anything else in the world and a deep committment to personal ego-boosting, I’ve found the Holy Grail.
I get to produce without really working. Sometimes people respond or link, which means they thought what I had to say was important or interesting enough to waste their own time on. And it is always a work-in-progress. This quiets my ‘completion issue’. Something deep down inside me believes completion equals loss of control. (Control is a big issue with me – but I’ve got control over it.) Or maybe its just hyperperfectionism. (I’ve got a thing with perfection also, but its counterbalanced by a very strong sense of ‘good-enough-for-government-workism’, so that’s under control too.) I know that perfection can never be obtained, but it doesn’t hurt to try now, does it?
I’m getting off on a tangent here, so I’ll wrap it up. I started the blog as a way to insure that I “wrote something every day”. I decided to do that because I’m making s serious effort to break out of non-fiction writing into fiction and, having dropped my primary non-fiction market, I needed a place to scribble and some place to go when the fiction wasn’t flowing. I’m not writing nearly as much fiction as I ‘ought’ to be (maybe two hours a day), but it is getting easier to sustain the pace and I’ve actually completed three stories while working on a novel length piece.
So I guess I’ve proved my original points about blogs then, haven’t I? Just don’t tell anyone, ok?
Here’s the start of that list of 100 somethings, just in case you were wondering:
1. I love my wife
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The photo essay I mentioned earlier concerns antique televisions and radios. I’m working on a re-do of the Classic Science Fiction Channel’s website (I’m hoping to let viewers diddle the dials instead of just clicking) and I’ll have a set of pics of said hardware up here that’s going to rival anything I’ve found on the web.
I look younger than you, neh, neh, neh.