Except I’m not a little red-haired girl, and there’s more swearing. Christ, allergies? Really? It’s still snowing, for fuck’s sake.

Ah, March in Colorado.

Anyway.

So, although I’ve technically been laid off, I’ve got a couple projects going on that make it seem a whole lot like I’m gainfully employed.

My assignment is simple.

The first and foremost is a deal where I’m creating a bunch of online courses for my old job. I’m churning out about one interactive course every four days or so, which looks impossibly fast until you know that the material has already been tidily assembled, and all I need to do is write the script, voice it, assemble imagery to go with it, and code all the quizzes and final tests.

Then it just looks almost-impossibly fast.

It does provide a nice pattern, though, which has helped me with my aforementioned “when do I know I’m done for the day?” problem. On day one, I write the script. On day two, I voice it. On day three, layout, animation, and whatnot. One day four, quizzes. When I’m done with the stuff needed for that day, I stop. Voila.

That gives me time to work on the other project, which… well, it takes me back.

Mini-storytime
The first website I ever made was (it should surprise no one) for a game I was playing at the time. Like most things on the internet, even back then (this would have been around… 1992), I wasn’t the person who built it — I was just the guy who was asked to go in and fix it.

I’d never touched html before. I had to figure it all out as I went, and of course I didn’t have a manual or anything. Hell, I didn’t even have Google. I’d just poke around at stuff and figure out what I wanted to do, then horribly break something, figure out how to fix it, learn, and move on.

That website (and that game) disappeared into the mist of internet death a long long time ago; my first forays into web coding are mercifully lost in time, but that marked the beginning of my presence on the internet, and the start of my ongoing relationship with building websites. 18 years and counting. bears-cave. average-bear. random-average. Raw html in notepad. Frontpage. Blogger. Movable type. Wordpress. mysql. Wikis. Forum installs, apache, php, bbcode, and god knows what else.

For me, it’s like math: I don’t know very much of it — I don’t carry the knowledge around, close at hand, the way I do knowledge of other things — but give me a few hours to refresh my memory and I can figure out a surprising amount.

Poke around random-average.com or this site or fireflywiki.org, and you might be under the impression I know what I’m doing. Or ktliterary.com, which marked something of a high point in both web design and wordpress kung-fu for me.

Until now.

One of Kate’s clients, who also happens to be a dear friend who spoke at great and hilarious length at our wedding, has this website. It’s beautifully and professionally designed, and the one time I ever looked at the code (while I was helping her set up a Ning site for her fans — Nings: did I forget to mention nings? Nings are cool), it scared the shit out of me. The layout was accomplished entirely through tables — tables nested four and five levels deep in some cases — positively labyrinthine. A sort of massive, intricate structure composed of nothing but pixie-stix filled with nitroglycerin: do so much as sneeze and the whole damned thing would explode in your face. Intimidating, is the word.

Turns out, Maureen felt pretty much the same way. As a result, with the exception of the (blogger hosted) blog, nothing really got updated on the site because it was too damned easy to break something. Badly.

So a little while ago, Maureen guest-blogged on someone else’s site and got a taste of Wordpress.

You can see where this is going.

It didn’t take long before she decided she wanted some of that wordpress goodness on her own site, and she asked me if I could take the blogger template, make a wordpress equivalent, port the whole thing over to be hosted on her actual website – where all those delicate, explodey static pages were – and… you know… make it all work.

I said sure, because… well, Maureen’s a little crazy, and sometimes crazy rubs off.

This little story is getting long, so let me sum up: I didn’t port over the blogger site.

Well, I didn’t just port it over. In order to make use of the the nice widget sidebars, modular headers and footers, and really everything else that embodies Wordpress Cool, I had to take apart that scary nitro-pixie-code and rebuild it in neat little parcels.

… and when I was done with that, well… it really wasn’t THAT much more work to port in all those static pages as wordpress pages, make them less explodey, and put them where they could be, you know, updated.

… and get the flash-laden front page working as part of all that…

And… you know… just port the whole damned site into wordpress, where MJ could actually have a site she could touch without losing a finger.

So I did that. It’s over here. Yeah, I know it’s pink. I know it’s not “me”. (It is Maureen, though, which is rather the point.)

It’s not my design – I’m honestly not much of a designer – but if Mordin Solis has taught me only one thing, it’s this: it’s just as hard to modify an existing Deadly Thing without fucking it up as it is to create the thing from scratch in the first place.

So I’m pretty proud of it. You should see the “Edit Pages” display; it’s tidy. I learned a LOT of cool Wordpress stuff.

Best of all, MJ seems happy with it.

And I don’t know if I’d have found the time to do this much work on it if I hadn’t been in my current weird employment situation.

So, there you go: bright spot.

Now then: back to work.

So… how’s it going?

This joke, it turns out, is not beneath me.

Yeah… not so much.

I’m actually kinda busy.

See, at my “final meeting”, I was offered a contract job to complete some long-term projects that my now-former employer really needed to see finished, but which they couldn’t retain me as a regular employee to work on. I took that offer for a number of fiduciary reasons (and the simple fact that, as a card-carrying Compulsive, I wanted to see the projects completed as well). The effect is that I’m working from home, collecting a reasonable check every time I wrap up one of these ten projects and (perhaps best of all) continuing to enjoy the company’s excellent benefits until I’m done. It’s not as-good-as, but as weaning processes go I have a vanishingly small amount of space in which to complain.

But… yeah, I’m busy. I’ve got eight weeks to finish up these ten projects. Also, a website transplant (”bring my blogger blog into wordpress, so I can host it on my site, and make it look exactly like all these other pages I have on the site… which were all built professionally… with lots of tables”) for another author.

And, of course, looking for another regular dayjob, which in my experience is probably the hardest job I’ve ever done or will ever do.[2]

So all of those things combine to create a kind of weird situation where I should (theoretically) be footloose and fancy free, and I’m not.

I’ve been on the internet less

You’d think (or at least I would), that working from home would provide ample time for idle browsing, twittering, Google Readering, and so forth, but that hasn’t been the case. I’ve been so wrapped up in my own little maelstrom of crap that I didn’t even realize I hadn’t updated the blog until someone else mentioned it. Looking over my twitter page for the last four days is… illuminating. And quiet.

I need to fix that, but first I need to remember how to “do” this kind of work, which is different from other kinds of work. There’s a lot to do, and the gestalt is hard to fully grasp.

Plus, there’s all the Mass Effect 2 to play. I mean, c’MON.

How is Work Done?

Certainly my non-day-job of writing requires working from home, but that’s different — I do that when I get home — essentially I use my play-time on more, different, work. What I’m doing now is different, and I’m not sure I remember how I should go about it.

When does the work day start?

When does it end? (That’s a big one: I find the line between “I didn’t do enough today to avoid guilt.” and “I think I’m burning myself out on work.” to be one so fine as to be nigh-invisible.)

What I’m saying is that I had my patterns and rules of measurement that let me judge how well things were going in a given day, and all those measuring sticks have been cast aside – I need new ones.

Those of you (and I know there are more than a few) reading this from the comfort of a work-at-home situation, please: share your insight and suggestions in the comments. [4]

I need your pajama-clad wisdom.

Once I get properly settled (or once the first project is wrapped up), I have thoughts to share on writing and the Mass Effect 2 pause button. [5]

2 – Which isn’t to say I’m not good at it. I worked for several years as a contract-to-hire guy, leaving a string of pleased and better-educated customers in my wake, so I know how to get work.[3]

3 – But it wearies me.

4 – Those of you reading this from the comfort of your regular-work-place, feel free to recommend me the next time your company needs to hire someone in training and education.

5 – I also need to schedule a post to publish one year from now, apologizing for all the Mass Effect babble I spewed back in 2010.

Storytime

It’s August. It’s South Dakota. It’s hot. I’m headed back to college, driving the Brown Beater. The Brown Beater is a real piece of crap; it overheats if you idle in one place for too long, it overheats if you drive it too slow (not that that ever comes up for me), it overheats if drive it too fast, it’s ugly as hell, it’s missing the front grill (my fault), and it has no air conditioning.

So this is me: driving down the interstate on the way back to school, maintaining my speed somewhere in the high 70s, both windows rolled down, trying to figure out how and where I’m going get gas (because there’s no way the Beater is going to get me 210 miles on a single tank, but if I stop, I’ll overheat and need a half hour before I can open the radiator cap).

And the highway patrol pulls me over.

Now, let me put this in perspective: we are not talking about the enlightened interstates of the twenty-first century. Yes, even today 78 would be speeding in most states, but it’s not as much speeding as it was at that time, because back then the speed limit on the interstate was 55.

55.

78.

Pretty big ticket.

So the guy pulls me over. He’s probably having a pretty good weekend, because I am in no way the only guy driving back to school.  This is all pretty routine for him:

“Do you know how faster you were going? No, more than that. No, higher. No… come on, you’re not even trying.”

He gets my registration (which has my sister’s and dad’s name on it; short-but-uninteresting story) and driver’s license, writes down the plate number, and moseys back to his car.

I don’t know what was said on the radio when he called it back in, but I assume it was pretty routine. In any case, he came back up to the Beater with the ticket half-written, and hands me my DL and registration.

“I need to verify the VIN for the ticket,” he says.

“Whats a VIN?” I reply, sincerely, because at that time in my life, I’m totally that guy.

“It’s a…” he shakes his head. “It’s a number on a plate that identifies your car.”

I don’t point out that that also describes the licence plate, because I can demonstrate learning behavior.

Most of you probably know this, but the VIN number for most cars is located in a spot that’s pretty easy to see (by design) but pretty hard to get to (also by design) — usually under your windshield, way down in the bottom corner on the driver’s side, on a small plate that’s kind of bolted to the dashboard … really, to the part of the car that your dashboard is affixed to.

The guy steps around to look at the VIN.

He can’t see it.

Now, the Brown Beater was so-called because it was brown, not because it was dirty; the reason he couldn’t see the number wasn’t a filthy windshield, it was because something was in the way.

Or, as he put it, “there is a piece of paper obscuring the VIN.”  I thought it sounded a lot more ominous when he said it that way.

What had happened was that I’d put something up on the dash — probably months before — and it had slid down into that tiny little slot of space between the windshield and the dash, right over top of the VIN plate. This wouldn’t normally be a problem, except it was something like a business card. It was small.

It was im-fucking-possible to remove.

You’d have thought the guy had found Jimmy Hoffa in my trunk. Calls to dispatch were made to request advice. He inquired as to the availability of backup. He came back and tried to get that damned piece of paper out no less than three times, between these calls.

In his mind, that piece of paper was Hiding Something. See, the VIN was written down already. It was on the vehicle registration — he didn’t need to record it; he just wanted to make sure the two numbers matched.

But a VIN he couldn’t see? An obscured VIN? Suddenly all kinds of scenarios presented themselves. He reconsidered the condition of the vehicle. The fact that my name wasn’t on the registration. He even came back and asked me where my first name was “from” at one point. I heard him ask a couple times to verify that the car matched no stolen vehicle reports from ANY state, and “are you sure?”

I just kind of sat there, being bemused. I didn’t really see what the bid deal was; since I knew I hadn’t stolen the car, it never occured to me that he might think I had — I mean, who the fuck would steal this car, willingly? (Also, I knew I had another couple minutes of sitting by the side of the road before the Beater would cool down enough to start anyway. No rush, dude… no rush.)

But the fourth time he came back to the car, I got interested, because he told me that he’d “give it one more try” and, if he couldn’t get the “obscuring item” (dude, it’s paper) out of the way, he was going to call in and have the car towed.

Yes, seriously.

I had to act.

By which I mean I reached into the back seat, grabbed a piece of notebook paper, folded it in half lengthwise, and scooped the card out of the way. Took about a minute.

He just kind of stared. I handed him the registration again, and he stared at that too. Then he compared the two, saw that they matched, checked again, and handed the registration back.

He mustered what remaining authority hadn’t been bled away in the heat and interstate noise, admonished me against allowing “foreign objects” to slide where they shouldn’t (only moderately useful advice, that), told me to drive safe, and went back to his vehicle.

I waited.

He started his cruiser up and took off.

I… still… waited.

Then I started the Beater up and got moving again, with a pretty goofy grin on my face.

Because he’d forgotten to finish writing the speeding ticket.

Which had been the whole point in the first place.

Stay on target...

It’s kind of easy to get distracted, sometimes; to lose track of The Thing This Is About because of the flashing, noisy Thing This Is Not About.

Let’s say you’re working on a story, and it’s at that point where you’re sending it out to people and getting feedback and (maybe) making appropriate changes based on that feedback. Maybe it’s your agent. Maybe it’s your publisher. Maybe it’s your reading group. Maybe it’s your mom. Doesn’t matter.

And that first round of feedback comes back and someone says:

“You know, I like it, but what I’d love to see fleshed out a little more is the relationship between the main character and the dog. The dog isn’t a big part of the story right now, but it used to be really important to her, so… I dunno, it just seems like adding some more stuff with them would add some nice depth to the MC, you know?”

And all that? That’s a good idea — one of those headslappingly good ideas that immediately presents you with about five ideas for what to write. Good stuff.

Then the second round of revisions happens, and you send it out again, and the feedback this time is something like:

“Loved it. I can really see the main character better. I saw you did some more stuff with the dog, and I liked it, but it seems like it isn’t quite clicking, you know? Maybe just a little more, to really get make that relationship crystal clear.”

And… okay, yeah, you can see where they’re coming from… and you can probably figure out a way to punch that up some. Okay…

Another round of revisions.

“Man, you are so close with that dog relationship, man. SO close. Two or three more scenes, and I think you’ve got it. Maybe something at the lake, in the summer…”

There are two things you can do at this point.

1. Write a scene with the dog at the lake.
2. Remember that the story isn’t about the fucking dog. Or even about the MC and the dog. The dog isn’t even a Character as much as Color.

If you chose option 1, you have lost track of what you were originally there to do.

Stay on target!

We all see this. We all do this. We get hung up on one little stick-up nail, spending so much time time trying to bang that sucker down that the end of the day comes and we realize “shit, I never finished building the house.”

Arguments about whose turn it is to take the dogs for a walk, when the whole point of the day was to spend some time together, outside.

Long debates about the best way to administer a meeting instead of solving the problem that you called the meeting about.

Worrying more about whether The Thing You’re Writing is going to be Marketable, instead of whether or not it’s True.

Badgering your agent about which publishers they should submit your next project to, instead of FINISHING it.

Stay on... DAMMIT, Porkins!

This weekend, take a step back and look at what you’re doing. Think about where your head needs to be, and put it there.

Be wholly within the space you need to occupy.

It’ll feel pretty great.

Someone called it “the softest hard sci-fi game out there”, and I agree.

Anyway, that post is kinda long, so let me tell you about my character give you the short version, because it makes me kinda happy.

The players all (and I mean ALL) have prioritized skills related to space combat. They’re flying a former pirate ship that you need military training to pilot. If there is a method in which a ship can engage in offensive action, they by-god have such method spot-welded to the hull.

I have clearly, CLEARLY been given the high-sign to start the game off with a space battle.

I do prep work: stat out the ships and the crew for the bad guys, and read and re-read the space combat rules til I’ve got em DOWN.

We start play and I foreshadow the shit out of the coming fight; I whisper the promise of attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, or something.

We get to the point where the beam weapons shall, verily, hit the fan. Bad Guys! In ships! With guns! Prepare to be boarded!

And my players basically force the situation into a Social Combat.

Which I’m totally unprepared for. Totally.

So… we do that. The opening volley of the exchange is fired via piña colada.

And it’s awesome. One of the enemy pirate captains flew away from the confrontation, put his ship in dry dock, sold it (at a loss), and took up farming on a world with carnivorous plant life… and he considers himself better off.

It was a good game, and a fine night.

*satisfied sigh*

Okay, I’m done.

Tomorrow I’ll write about staying focused. As one does, right after a tangent.

I originally wrote it as part of a fundraiser for prostate cancer research, which was the goblin Dad was fighting at the time. The prognosis was bad, but the end result was a full remission.

Since then, he’s fought another tribe of the little bastards, this time involving surgery around his mouth. He won that one, too.

He turns 60 today. We have the same birthday, actually.

Strong connections. Better than a silver needle in the collarbone any day.

So, on his birthday, I’ll say the same thing I said to him when I wrote the first draft of this silly, simple little story:

“You keep swinging, old man, and I’ll keep handing you the big sticks.”

It’s also for Chuck, who reminded me of the goblin/cancer connection a few months ago.

Here’s a list of links to each part of the story, in order.

• The Call
• The Road
• The Cage
• The Talk
• The Quest
• The Needles
• The Fight
• The Fall
• The End

… and with that, I’m taking the day off.

Happy Birthday, Dad.

How do I end a story like this?

We got home with the sun coming up.  By the clock in the kitchen, my part in the whole thing had been only about twenty-four hours.

It seemed longer.

Dad was, if not ‘all right’, at least ‘alright’ in the stoic, bull-headed parlance of the Midwest. He’d survived, he wasn’t talking about it much, and I suppose I understood why as well as anyone – maybe a little bit better.

We’d made it through, and that was it. Tomorrow might be better.

Might be worse, too. Life rarely works out the way a story would, and almost never like a fairy tale.

We don’t usually get a Happily Ever After.

But we don’t have to settle for The End, either.