found_drama

I don’t really remember how this one popped on my radar.  An Amazon.com “plog” entry?  Recommendation?  GoodReads stream?  All of those?  Something else?

Anyway, Jeremy Shipp’s Vacation popped up sometime late last year and it made it onto my to-read list.  I’m positive that if my local library had it, I’d have read it already — Shipp seems to be getting a lot of good write-ups from a lot of literary names: Jeff VanderMeer & Piers Anthony, for instance.  I’m certainly intrigued.

And now he’s offering signed copies of his novel through his website.  Very nice.

Since last year’s resolutions goals were such a success, I figured that I would do it again this time. Turning these “New Year’s resolutions” into goals and then making them measurable seems to be the way to go. Plus, all that measurability really lets the Inner Geek shine through with all that obsessive tracking and all those pretty graphs. So here goes the list for 2008:

1. Write for at least 2 hours every week. Stick with writing; make it a priority; the #1 priority. I did alright in the writing department during 2007 but I feel like I could do better. This year I will take the focus off of the word count and put it on the number of hours dedicated to writing-type activities. Under this umbrella, it will be easier to include relevant activities like outlining, research & brainstorming, revising, proofreading, and (of course) “writing proper”. That said, I would still like to target an average of 2,000 words per week.
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. In other words: “Keep it up.” We’ll see how this one pans out. If ‘08 is anything like ‘07, I’ll do real well in the summer but not so well in those cooler winter months. No shame in that though. Not really? If nothing else, I would like to at least have this goal “hit” a minimum of 6 of the 12 months — especially since I only hit it five times in 2007.
3. Hike 10 new trails. An echo from last year’s list. In ‘07, I was one shy of the full ten — bummer. I really think I can get in the full 10 during 2008. And to up the ante, I’ll add the following caveat: make at least two of those trails go up mountains that are over 4,000 feet.
4. Go climbing (or bouldering) at least once per week. I signed up for that rock gym membership; now to get my monthly EFT’s worth. I figure that I need to get over there at least three times per month to break even; fit in a few more visits to really make it worth my while. But it’s not about that; it’s about the exercise and the climbing.
5. Read at least 24 new books in 2008. I did so well on this one in 2007; “read 12 new books” was last year’s goal, which I managed to overshoot by more than double. So if “double” is our new baseline, let’s just come right out and start there — 24 new titles in 2008. But let’s add a twist. I tend to read fiction almost exclusively; so to get over that, in 2008 I will pledge to make at least 6 of those 24 target titles non-fiction of some kind.

There… Five goals seems about right. No use going crazy with it and over-committing or anything like that. Any other semi-arbitrary auxiliary or supplementary goals? Learn to brew my own beer? Try ten new restaurants? Limit myself to 2 hours per week of Civ IV? Get ambulothanatophobia formally¹ recognized?

1. Where by “formally”, I mean “not deleted from Wikipedia”.[↩]

Personal goals for 2007: after last quarter, let’s see where we landed for 2007 overall:

1. Write approx. 80,000 40,000 new words of fiction. This goal morphed so many times over the year. First it was focused on 80k words in my novel project; then it was 80k new words on any project; then 40k new words and even some alternate calculations based on “hours spent”… No matter how I twisted the specifics of it, the heart of the goal remained the same: I needed to get myself to adopt some better writing habits. And to some extent it worked; I had a few good runs of outline building, a few good runs of novel drafting, I cooked up some drafts of a couple short stories (and other “starters”) and I got involved in a writing group. Certainly this was more the case toward the end of the year than at the beginning. But I’m pleased with this year’s output overall — if not with respect to quantity then at least with respect to quality¹:
   
   Total words written: 56,119. Average words per month: 4,677. Fewest words written in a month: 0 (January²). Most words written in a month: 19,396 (October).
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. In short? Did well in the warmer months and tended to flake out a bit during the colder months. And who was I kidding about running? I hate running. I did (however) discover that I enjoy rock climbing. So if the heart of the goal was to go for an increase in exercise then I hit that one. Overall:
   
   Total miles: 549.09 miles. Average miles per month: 45.17 miles. Fewest miles in a month: 19.4 miles (November). Most miles in a month: 80.65 miles (September).
3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. One trail shy of the goal. Nine trails counted as “new” this year; some of them were pretty challenging, some were easy ones “snuck in” to get credit.
   
4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. Well… It was worth trying:
   
   I meant to mix more, I really did. There’s always next year?³
5. Read 12 new books this year. Perhaps I set the bar too low; 30 completed books:
   
   Enumerated: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon; three Dashiell Hammett mysteries⁴; Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners collection; David Brin’s The Postman; Siddhartha and Demian, both by Hermann Hesse; The No Asshole Rule by Robert I. Sutton; Peter Watts’ Blindsight; John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War; the Italo Calvino classic, Invisible Cities; River of Gods by Ian McDonald; Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake and Cat’s Eye; Christopher Moore’s A Dirty Job; Year’s Best Science Fiction (17th edition), compiled and edited by Gardner Dozois; two Raymond Chandler mysteries⁵; a Douglas Coupland triple-threat consisting of Generation X, Microserfs, and All Families Are Psychotic; The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont; Davy Rothbart’s short story collection, The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas; Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers; J. Kelly Beatty’s The Solar System (for National Geographic); Accelerando by Charlie Stross; Slant by Greg Bear; Warren Ellis’ twisted Crooked Little Vein; a Penguin collection of H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories; Rock Climbing by Don Mellor; and Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You). Plus a couple partials: Sussman, Fitzpatrick, & Pilato’s Version Control with Subversion; Shooting Digital by Mikkel Aaland; Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; and a collection of Hemingway short stories. And one (and only one) re-read: Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.
6. Master CSS. Never was able to quantify this one. But I did devote quite a bit of fruitful energy to digging into some of its more esoteric subject matter. That was good enough for me.

Up next?  2008’s Resolutions Goals!

1. Not to mention some (shall we say?) risks taken.[↩]
2. Shame![↩]
3. There’s always admitting to yourself that you’re “just a casual DJ” as well.[↩]
4. In one binding, so we’ll count them as one book.[↩]
5. Another “bound as one so we’ll count as one” read.[↩]