This is awesome: I have a list.

Last night my wife sat me down and asked me to brainstorm what it is I wish to achieve, my short-term goals and responsibilities.  I pulled out a datebook and allotted hours to these tasks.

Now I have a schedule to fulfill, and I'm elated.  I kn ow I work well off of lists--I work best with lists--but I didn't even have the discipline to create one for myself.  I would have needed a list to set up a time to form a separate list.  That's just how I am.

i worked well in the military.  I didn't do so well on my own.  With too much time on my hands, being left to my own devices, all those cliches, I got nothing done.

But now, before I catch the bus to go to class tonight, I'm going to have applied for a couple jobs, submitted two queries to local newspapers, written up a Hallowe'en-appropriate short story for a contest, read three chapters from my textbooks, played with the cats and cleaned up the kitchen, brainstormed an op-ed and a new article, and updated twelve blogs.

I am very, very excited.  I always achieve when I have a list.  I may not knock out every single item on the list, but I always accomplish at least half of the items.  At the end of the day I feel proud for a day of accomplishment, when I was using a list.  This bodes very well.

I think it's good to get out of the house once in a while.  Sounds patently obvious, but it can be hard to put into practice.

Today it was easy: I had to bring the Prius in for maintenance.  I warmed up with half an hour of yoga on Wii Fit, washed, dressed, and drove down to Burnsville.  The Toyota dealership has decent recliners in the waiting room, and I only took two chocolate chip cookies and a cup of coffee as I stretched out and listened to some Penny Arcade podcasts.  They're not producing any more podcasts, unfortunately: only they and Ricky Gervais have ever made me laugh out loud.

I got a couple ideas for short stories so I foraged around for a business reply card and scrawled them out in my backhanded automatic writing script.  You would never guess I practiced calligraphy for a year.  i'll develop these ideas soon, I'm excited to get new story ideas.  For my Creative Writing classes I've been plundering the stacks of dilapidated notebooks I've been hauling around from apartment to apartment.  When I was in college, and before my depression was diagnosed, I used to write down manic, wild story ideas that wouldn't stop coming.  Rarely fleshed them out but that's what I'm doing now: stealing from myself.

Currently I'm writing from my apartment, and I'm only picking and choosing which blogs I'll update.  That's my writing exercise, you see, updating a dozen blogs. It forces me to approach the same topic from several perspectives or come up with a dozen unique ideas.  But when I'm at the cafe, I'm more inclined to fill them all out: it feels like a special treat to go out and sit in a wi-fi cafe, hacking copy out like an updated William S. Burroughs in Morocco or something.  (I do have a travel typewriter, as a matter of fact.)  And to fully indulge in this special treat, I'll write in them all, but I don't feel the same impulse when I'm at home.  It feels like I only need to write in the important blogs and can let the rest slide.

I'm not going anywhere with this.  I just noticed it and had to remark upon it.

Ha!  Leapt out of the gate and fell on my face.  Why was I in such a hurry to not post anything?

Today I'm sitting in Urban Bean and catching up on all of my blogs.  Yes, i haven't written in such a long time that there are few blogs I feel it's okay to skip.  Those would be the eBay blog (none of my merchandise sold, the auctions expired, why should I go back?), Orkut (they don't even have a blog, just a kind of Scrapbook thing), and Yahoo 360 (the code there is wonky--it never shows my updates to me).

Everything else, I'll update.  No one reads my WordPress blog, but I updated it with a writing exercise from Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down the Bones, where I focused on environmental detail.  I hacked out a short story that's been lurking around in the back of my mind.  It was good fun, turning the scene over in my head to focus on each of... aw, crap.  I never mentioned temperature or scents.  How stupid!  I could have described the temperature of the room and the smell of the confections, totally overlooked that.

No one reads my Friendster blog (does anyone even use Friendster anymore?  Didn't think so) but it's useful to keep updating it as a writing exercise.  All I did was complain about not having blogged lately and not having submitted any queries to publications.  I complained similarly in Blogger and Open Salon, as well.

I don't know what to say.  I was afforded three months to stay at home and take a stab at writing freelance, and it blew up in my face.  I haven't achieved anything useful, I've squandered this time completely.  Who could ever have any faith in me as a writer after the past 90 days?  I submitted three queries to three video game magazines and they can't be arsed to respond.  I have a couple interviews/profiles to submit to some local publications, but I'm a nobody in this scene, in any scene.  Why would they be interested in anything I have to say?  I'm partially insane, too, so what's interesting to me is completely lost on anyone else.  I completely ruined a first date with a lovely girl by going too deeply into the sociological lesson gained from an escaped plague program that ran rampant within World of Warcraft.  Her eyes literally glazed over and everything.

So what makes me think I have anything useful to say here?

Awesome: yet another blog for me to update nearly every day!

I run about eight others, currently.  One's on eBay, one's hosted with a Korean video game system, WordPress and Friendster both use WordPress's program, &c.  I like the writing exercises but I wonder if it's actually going anywhere.  Well, exercise just has to be exercise, I suppose.

And now there's one here!  Excellent, I'll tack this onto my list, add it into Bookmarks, and tune in regularly.  I look forward to perusing what other writers have to offer, as well!  A community online, with literacy and publication in common.  I'm very excited about this.