found_drama

Personal goals for 2007: let’s see where we are after Q3:

1. Write approx. 80,000 new words of fiction. …with at least 40,000 words of “totally new” fiction. As I updated this goal once already this year, I won’t bother updating it again. That would seem like cheating. That said, I think I may have picked the wrong scale for my measure. Counting words alone and I’ve hardly made any progress. But I put in dozens of hours of work this quarter on the outline for The Project, making significant headway toward revisions. So we’ll graph the hours instead of the words written (because how do you count “words written” for a story outline?):
   
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. I continue to do well here; well ahead of pace:
   
3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. Significant progress this quarter but still behind pace; as you can see, I’ve got three more to go:
   
4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. Nary a record remembered as mixed. I suck. Won’t even bother with the data visualization.
5. Read 12 new books this year. 24 new-to-me books¹ read since January. Reading FTW!
   
6. Lastly: Master CSS. Still don’t know how to quantify that one. But still reasonably satisfied with this one here.

1. The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Complete Dashiell Hammett (a five-in-one binding, three of which I read), Magic for Beginners, The Postman, Hesse’s Siddhartha and Demian, The No Asshole Rule, Blindsight, Old Man’s War, Invisible Cities, River of Gods, Oryx & Crake, A Dirty Job, 17th annual Year’s Best Science Fiction edited by Dozois, Cat’s Eye, a three-in-one binding of Raymond Chandler novels, a Coupland trifecta with Generation X and Microserfs and All Families Are Psychotic, The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril, The Lone Surfer of Montana Kansas, Galatea 2.2, a National Geographic book about the solar system, and most recently Accelerado. Not counting the technical text of Version Control With Subversion.[↩]

Personal goals for 2007: doing pretty well last quarter; let’s see where we are now:

1. Write approx. 80,000 new words of fiction. This is updated from “write another 80,000 word draft of my novel”. Good news, re-writing the goal helped me get motivated. As if to say “all of my writing counts”. Bad news, I’m still about 48% of the target pace:
   
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. Though we were a little behind in the winter (i.e., not walking to work in 0 degree temps, thanks) we’re ahead of pace here in the spring:
   
   …at 233.19 miles total walked/ran thus far.
3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. No new progress. Hopefully notch one today and add it on…
4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. Erm… My gig in April helped skew the average in my favor but overall this has not worked out to be a reality:
   
5. Read 12 new books this year. Let us enumerate them: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, three Dashiell Hammett mysteries (which we’ll count as one), Magic for Beginners, The Postman, Siddhartha & Demian, The No Asshole Rule, Blindsight, Old Man’s War, Invisible Cities, River of Goods, Oryx & Crake (which I had been convinced that I had previously read but upon reading discovered I had not), A Dirty Job, Year’s Best Science Fiction (17th edition), Cat’s Eye, and two Raymond Chandler mysteries (which we’ll count as one). My graph looks like this:
   
6. Master CSS. Uh… Still don’t know how to quantify that one. I feel pretty comfortable saying I’ve reasonably accomplished this. A satisfactory mastery, if you will.

Back in January, we put forth a few personal goals for 2007. Let’s see where we stand, eh?

1. Write another draft of my novel. We’d written this up as “another draft of at least 80,000 words with at least 40,000 words worth of new material.” To date, I’ve written 6,475 words. Maybe 3,500 of those are new. So the proportions are right. But I’m about 13,526 words behind pace:
   
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. Mostly motivated by a desire to stay committed to my “walk to work and back”, I’d thrown this one on there. I’m surprised at how this hasn’t fully worked out thus far. I blame the cold for this one; it’s tough to get out there on foot when the air temperature is -3 (and feels like -17). The good news is that on days where I am walking, I’m averaging about 2.25 miles. The bad news is that I’m missing the overall mark:
   
3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. Ahead of schedule here. Didn’t really expect to do any of these until the spring came. But we managed to hit Rattlesnake Point on snowshoes. We’ll take that for one:
   
4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. Dodgy, this one is. January was definitely on. February, not so much. March, we’re back for the month’s total — though that whole “every week” part may/not be wholly accurate:
   
5. Read 12 new books this year. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, 3 novels by Dashiell Hammett (bound as one, so we’ll count as one), Magic for Beginners, The Postman, Siddhartha, Demian, and The No Asshole Rule. Oh yeah:
   
6. Master CSS. Still vague and still unable to quantify. I suppose we could call Ortho the first real evidence that I’m working toward this. (Since rolling your own variation on Mike Davidson’s MySpace hack probably doesn’t count.)

Where to from here? We’ll have to see what happens with the novel-writing. Fitting all that in this year so far has been tough; priorities seem to be elsewhere and my heart hasn’t been fully in that story when I have sat down with it. So we’ll just have to see. Otherwise I feel on track. It’s getting warmer, so it’ll be easier to get my walking/running goals back on track and we’re doing fine with the “hiking new trails” bit thus far. Regardless of if it’s actually “1 hour every week” or not, I’m mixing more than I have in years. And did I mention I’m way ahead of pace for the reading goal?

Perhaps I should add in a new challenge or two…

Inspired by Mike’s post, I feel it appropriate to put my own resolutions goals up for 2007. I’ll stick with calling them “goals” because “resolutions” sounds so corny and uncommitted. Hopefully, we can even have these be measurable…

1. Write another draft of my novel. I’m shooting for another draft of at least 80,000 words with at least 40,000 words worth of new material. Complete overhaul. Progress so far? Well, I’ve got most of a revised outline as of 06-Jan…
2. Run or walk at least 10 miles every week. Considering it’s a mile walk to work and a mile walk home, I think that this is reasonable, suitable and proper. Just make good on my committment to walk to work every day. And treadmill it on the days when I do not. And to go along with that:
3. Hike 10 new trails/mountains in 2007. I did pretty good last spring and summer and probably hiked about 4 or 5 new trails (mostly mountains) — but I think that I can do much better. Not sure if I want to include the mileage from these in the #2 goal. That seems unfair.
4. Mix at least 1 hour every week. My old Numark mixer is dying; the crossfader is toast, the output from each channel is uneven and staticky, the monitor/cue control is touch-and-go… I want a new one. But I could hardly justify that if I’m not even mixing in my living room once in a while. After all, I had so much fun last week, didn’t I?
5. Read 12 new books this year. I re-read a lot of books. A. makes fun of me for it. And really, she’s right. I should expand my horizons. One a month seems reasonable. First stop? The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay…
6. And lastly… Master CSS. Maybe a bit of a long shot and certainly difficult to quantify. One of the least satisfying parts of my work right now is how “out” of the code I am from a day-to-day basis. It’s a bit stymieing, more than a bit frustrating, and sometimes out-and-out maddening. That said, if I content (to myself) that if I set my sights on CSS mastery, the rest will follow…

I don’t know if this has full-blown “meme” status but I tag… Pete?