That's going to be my new year's resolution for this year. To finish off all the assorted projects I've still got lying around from the last ten years. Basically, anything I've ever started but never finished.
I have a couple of scientific papers that need to go out this year. One is actually my former boss's - so luckily he does most of the work, and there are definite deadlines involved (which is to say, if I don't do my part in it he will either get mad, or submit it when it's still a piece of crap (again), or possibly both). The other one is a short paper from my master's thesis that really needs to go out. The problem with that one is, I'm the sole author, so there's nobody around to shoot me for being slow. :p Slow doesn't begin to describe it, considering that I graduated in 2000 and it's now 2005 and I'm *still* sitting on it. But, if I make it into a race with my former boss's paper - which of us can get done and submit first - then maybe I'll actually get my act together. It's not like there's a whole lot left to do on it. I have to rewrite the introduction and the discussion section, and then get it formatted up proper for the journal I want, and then somehow come up with the printing money. That's about it, really. I'm going to hit up my alma mater for the printing money, since I did do the research while I was a student there, and their name does show up on the paper. Apparently, institutions have their own wars going on for number of research papers that come out of them. So if they want their name on it, they darn well better pay. :p
At the moment however, instead of writing anything whatsoever, I'm doing something a lot more fun. I never finished playing the Starcraft single-player missions. So, that's what I've been doing for the past week. :) The last time I did them, which was like three years ago, I got all the way up to Mission 7 on the Zerg Campaign on Brood War. At that point it got too hard. Or something. Actually I think I got distracted by multiplayer and then just never got back to it.
This time around, I started at the beginning of Brood War just to remind myself what the story was - and wouldn't you know it, it actually makes more sense now than it did before. I know who all the characters are now, and can catch all the subtleties that one doesn't get on a first viewing/reading/play-through of a story. Starcraft is great that way - it's one of the few computer games with a complex story. It has great characters, great plot, great setting. And it's a great game as well, with all the different units balanced well against each other. (At least, by the time of version 1.11, which is the current one last I checked.)
The game itself is a lot easier the second time around too, after I spent a couple years doing multiplayer on Battlenet as part of a good online gaming community. The missions are easy now. I've only had trouble with one of them so far, and the reason I had trouble with it is because I've learned away from playing vs. computers. One of my friends from the gaming community pointed out that I should switch back to comp tactics, and I would do fine. Which makes sense, because the first time around I didn't have this much trouble with that mission, and all I knew was how to play vs. comps. I'll have to play it again to see how it works. I've already failed it three times. :p The third time I just enabled a cheat code to make myself invincible so that I could get the rest of the story and move on. *sheepish look*
Anyway, so that one is coming along nicely. :) Now I'm in the middle of the Zerg campaign again. I don't actually recall much of the story past the point where I am, so it'll be fun. Probably a lot easier too. So far, aside from the one mission I've mentioned, none of them have been all that hard.
Third big thing to tackle on the agenda is my Nano novel from last November. A project that was started up recently, in the sense that I only wrote it last November. However, it actually started two years before that. I came up with the setting, most of the characters, and the basic plot, as well as a whole bunch of other plots involving the same setting and characters, two years ago. At that point I didn't know how to write worth crap. So basically I had all the makings of a series of novels, and none of the ability to actually write them.
Two years of online roleplaying later, and my writing has gotten pretty good. It's a great way to practice and learn things. I call my NaNo novel sort of the final exam on all the stuff I learned through the online roleplay in the past two years. I passed, both in terms of wordcount (50,163 words in 22 days), and in the sense that both of my beta readers who have commented on the first draft thought it was very good and are sitting around looking forward to my second draft while I sit around not writing it and play starcraft instead. ;)
This all leads up to my February Novel Dare. My original plan was to take another one of my plot ideas from that same setting and write it up. Another 50k words in 28 days. However, at this point I'm kind of wondering whether I shouldn't spend that time cranking out the second draft of the first novel instead. A lot of it does still need to be written, though most of it is in the second half. Since I'm writing it in the order it will be read, I have been refusing to skip ahead. However, that means I'm slowed way down because I have to reread all the parts I wrote the first time, and know how bad it was, and I'm trying to edit it. :p Then I get discouraged, figure I really suck, figure the story is really dumb anyhow, and stop.
That's what I mean about starting something and not finishing it. I really need to finish the novel, in terms of having a complete third draft that makes perfect sense from beginning to end. Even if it ends up terrible, at least I'll get the practice of having put it together. That's what I keep telling myself anyhow. Maybe it'll start working soon, so I can actually go do it. :p
... or I can just run away from it and write something completely different in February - yet still of the same setting, so that I can reasonably say it isn't totally new.
Another really huge project that I desperately need to get around to, is unpacking. I've been living in this same apartment for 2.5 years now. I have yet to unpack most of my stuff. :p It's all still sitting in boxes in my second bedroom, where they were deposited when I moved in. (I have a two-bedroom apartment for the express purpose of treating the second bedroom as a very large closet/storage space.) Granted, half of the boxes up front have been opened with stuff stacked everywhere around them as I had to go digging for things ... but it's still, technically, not unpacked.
Partly this is because I used to move a lot. There was one year-span where I had to move 4 times, three of which were to new cities. (Technically the other one was to a new city too but it doesn't really count because it wasn't far enough away to be non-local.) That year sucked overall for a lot of reasons. I eventually got to a point where I figured, why bother unpacking because I might just have to put it all back into the boxes again soon anyway?
Partly it's because I was just very tired of living. It's hard to work up the energy to do much of anything when your spirit is dead, but your body and mind live on. That's the state I was in for the past 5 years. I died in 1999. My current best friend came along and started to pull me out of the abyss I was in when we met in 2002. I started coming back to life last fall. Then Nanowrimo came along, and that was my rite of passage back to being alive. I passed.
Heh. Boy did I pass.
I'm alone, but not lonely now. I'm alive. I've found my way back to my path, and I'm moving forward again. Slowly but surely, everything is coming together the way it was supposed to have been.
Robert made a comment to me a few days ago, about ice floes and icebergs. My iceberg is gonna calve sometime soon, and then I'm going to write up an even longer rant about the state of my life. But this one is long enough, and I'm straying off my original topic. So I'll end here. ;)
Besides which I can't think of any more projects.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment