The Wayward Celt

… but…

I WILL be back to blogging once per week in 2012. The latter three months in 2011 became a bit hectic for me which resulted in an emotional depletion of energy, which in turn meant I had no energy left to write. This became overly evident to me in my vain failed attempt to do NaNoWriMo this year. I’d thought that forcing myself to write would jump start me back into the habit, but alas, it just proved too much this time round and I ran out of gas by day 15 without hopes of completion, nor inspiration to continue.

Odd, though, since I HAVE been inspired to blog and write… the muse has been working in my head, just the time and energy seem to have found other venues. Wouldn’t it be nice for the muse to bring her own energy reserves along for the ride, so that when inspiration hits you also have the energy to put the words to paper? Ah, to be so lucky.

That all said, my 2011 goal was to blog once per week, and in general I almost accomplished that… here… If you add in the 3 Drunken Celts blog, and my work blog (in which I posted on average about 3.75 times per week), then I think I actually blew my goal out of the water. But I can’t, in good conscience, claim my work blog as part of the goal since the spirit of it was to blog personally and flex a more creative muscle than I am able to at work. So, I’m maintaining that goal for 2012 as well: one personal blog of some substance, per week, all year, no exceptions, no excuses. If 2012 shapes out to be as interesting as it seems from my present viewpoint, I shouldn’t be worrying about a lack of topics to discuss or experiences to relay.

I am hoping that with some added focus I can make this coming year the year of “Very BIG THINGS” for me, see some of my efforts start to pay off, and possibly become one of those few critical pivotal years in my life…. we shall see.

I’ll leave you with this: one of my recent photographs taken from within my home office on a rather chilly day, the ice had built up a bit overnight on the roof below my window, and then the sun peaked out… perhaps this will also be the year in which I take my photography to a new level as well…

A study in texture:

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 For those who may be asking what this all is, here’s a link to explain it all:  http://nanowrimo.org/en/about/whatisnano

National Novel Writing Month starts today and ends Nov.30th with a goal of a 50k word novel by the end. You can follow my word count updates over at http://nanowrimo.org/en/participants/acdntlpoet

I’ve updated my profile over on NaNoWriMo.org in the hopes that taking baby steps now will give me enough motivation to really dig in and give this another go. I DID participate back in 2007, and even pulled out a ‘win’ by producing over 50k words in under a month, but what I produced wasn’t even worth trying to edit in order to salvage anything….

I’m hopeful that this time around, even if I don’t ‘win’, that I’ll at least produce something a bit more workable. At the very least, I’ll consider this month a win if it gets me writing again. This year I think I am going to take a dramatically different approach and not focus on an overarching novella plot, rather take a decidedly “Joyce-ean” approach ala “Dubliners” and work on vignettes, or simply short stories to string together with a larger concept later on.

I found, after 2007′s attempt, that I don’t do well with larger fiction works. That single lesson is what will be driving this year’s attempt. Not to say it will be non-fiction, but rather I will only be working with short pieces and will see how, or even if, they can be strung together into a novella of sorts during the editing period in December and beyond. For now, however, the focus is JUST on producing the words not ensuring the quality.

Are you participating too? If so, add me as a buddy on the site so we can keep each other honest and motivated Of course, I’ll also likely be blogging here about it too, as I learned I tend to blog more when I am busy writing already. Sometimes writing for different purposes helps drive the creativity even more.

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In an attempt to get my habit back and return to honing my creativity and craft once again, I conjured a few fun tweets. Rather than post them to Twitter and flood that feed as well as FB, I figured I’d be better off just posting here and adding some additional context around them.

- The words in my head, chaotic mess of phrases, unable to focus. #LamentationsOfAWannabeWriter #MetaHaiku

The sad thing about the lines above: total Haiku failure. the last line is 6 syllables not 5. I guess that points out the complete lack of focus and attention to detail I am lamenting. I had actually posted that one out to Twitter and Facebook too. As an apology, I have re-written it below:

• The words in my head, chaotic mess of phrases, nothing stays focused. #LamentationsOfAWannabeWriter #MetaHaiku

And I’ll continue on with the theme… here’s the rest of the haiku I wrote as an exercise which thankfully won’t make it out to twitter; instead are doomed to a silent death here:

• Disparate ideas, priorities shift away, words lost forever.
• Concrete imagery, abandoned for solace in, bursts of self reference.
• Word smithing punkers, provocative blogging trends, words still escape me.
• Ideas of brilliance, words alone changing cultures, please escape my mind.
• Repetitive pain, in my wrist as well as brain, imprisoned by rote.
• To write is to read, live the life you wish to write, to read is to write.
• No Gonzo twitter, Hunter S. Thompson I’m not, just really bad haiku.

Yeah, really bad haiku indeed, I know. I don’t post it here because I think it is anything more than horrible, but rather because I need to post as a motivation to write. You know… it flexes a muscle, one I’ve ignored for too long. Little by little, the more I flex, the more strength it will gain…. and sooner or later I’ll be back at the top of my game; ready to tackle bigger concepts. Ready to unlock the words, phrases, and ideas currently serving time in my head hoping for a reduced sentence for goo behaviour and released back into the world to grow and become productive members of society once again. Right now, though, they still aren’t playing nice together, and as the warden I’m forced to keep them under lock and key until they fall in line and start making some sense.
(how’s that for following bad haiku with an even worse metaphor? Yikes!)

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The good news? I should also have a few new blog posts over on the 3 Drunken Celts website over the next few weeks with tasting notes covering:

• The new Big Bottom Whiskey Portwood finish release compared to the first batch.
• The Bruichladdich 12yr and Hibikki 12yr.
• An update on my Woodinville “Age Your Own” kit now that the distillate has been 16 weeks on oak.
• September’s PDX Whisky tasting event (tomorrow night) with tasting notes on the Auchentoshan 3 Wood, Highland Park 15yr, Douglas Laing double barrel, and the Bowmore 20yr.

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And lest I forget, I should also have some good posts here surrounding the WordCampPDX event I will be attending this weekend.  This is an ‘unconference’ done in the barcamp style, so there’s no set agenda until we show up Saturday morning and make one. Should be an interesting time to learn more about WordPress, blogging, networking, and general best practices etc. I expect to have a write up on it all sometime next week to bring all the new information and ideas into some sort of cohesive collection of thoughts. Stay tuned

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I write the best blog posts ever… in my head… while showering.

But like the grime washing off of me, the words never make it to publication ( and most often not even to the keyboard).

In the past week alone I’ve washed away brilliant revelations on topics like self aggrandizing, the ROI of being awesome, ethics of community management (which actually made it to some Google plus comments instead), and journalistic integrity as a blogger. I had connected words to become sentences, and sentences to be full fledged ideas, only to be washed down the drain.

Of course those words, like the filth of living, come back to me soon enough and the cycle continues only to wash away the words again. One of these days I’ll learn to shower in the morning and let the words build to the afternoon when I can successfully put them to post.

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And no pictures to post this time either. For shame. While I could go on about how work has monopolized my energies these past few weeks, that is only a partial truth. All be told, my muse just isn’t here right now. But I am hopeful. There is light on the horizon.
Whiskies of the World is upon us! Next week I’ll be in flight to my yearly pilgrimage to San Francisco to attend the annual Whiskies of the World expo and sample some of the new drams coming out of my favourite distilleries, as well as learn some more about craft distilling this year in one of the additional classes being presented. I’ve not yet decided if I want to bring my new camera along, as I’m not sure I want that extra concern in the environment, though it would help me document each of the drams I taste and take notes on. We’ll see. I expect a lengthy report to come of this year, just as years past, so look forward to another chapter of “The Gospels according to Seamus” to hit the 3DC website in the week or two after the grand tasting.
I have other things I need to get done as well, like finish my hand crank phone conversion and blog about it, but that’s stalled out for the time being while other priorities take precedence. I also have grand plans to write more, which will hopefully come to fruition as spring descends upon us. I’m fully engulfed by the motorcycle road trip itch again, so likely that will lend to some fun travel blogs as well in the coming months. Just gotta figure out where to go

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A friend recently blogged on ‘disconnecting’ for the weekend and the freedom it gave her to become directly involved in her life, rather than observe through her camera lens and behind a blog.

Her post got me thinking about my own tendencies towards observation and interaction. From day one I have always leaned towards the role of observer. I tend to stand back, take it all in, process what I’m seeing, and record for later use or action. Rarely do I come to a point where direct interaction is appropriate or required. But, sometime in my 20′s I realized that being the observer was a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, in that if I always put myself in the role of the observer, action will never be required. In a journalistic sense, the observer/recorder should never be part of the action/interaction, lest they become part of the story (a taboo in the journalism world).

Once I realized this, I put down the camera  and tried to become more involved, living life rather than observing it. I found that I enjoyed myself much more, but over the years have realized that I missed capturing some of those moments and images. Striking to the heart of this post: as with everything in life, balance is the key.

Now is the time to find that balance. Time for me to be involved, and observant; to walk that tightrope between fully engaged but oblivious, and fully observant but detached and unaffected.

Of course, this isn’t JUST about photography either, the same balance needs to be reflected within my own social networking. Do I pause to tweet, Facebook, or blog so as not to lose the impact of the moment shared, or do I wait until later to share out and run the risk of not sharing at all when the moment begins to fade in importance and impact? There’s no singularly right answer here, as balance is the key again. Sometimes I’ll need to share out RIGHT NOW, other times I’ll need to wait, or to not share at all as I live in the moment for me and my own direct experiences. Each instance is its own choice to make to strike the right balance for me. Something to think on…

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No Time for a real post. But I do have time for this:

50,205 words in the bag.

Yup. I “won”. And by won, they mean I completed 50k+ words in under 30 days to form a fiction novel first rough draft. A VERY rough draft I’ll admit.

This doesn’t mean I am done working on it, rather it means that now I get to -really- dig into to what I actually wrote and massage it to make this fiction novel readable. I honestly am not even the least bit happy with what I created here, so a LOT of editing is in my future. But what I AM happy with is the fact that I was able to produce 50k+ words in under thirty days and keep them all focused on a basic story line.

I promise you all this: when I have a moment, either over the vacation days ahead or possibly into next week, I WILL post the Title, Synopsis, and Excerpt.

For now, just revel in my joy that I’m DONE!

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To try and help pump out my word count this weekend, I opted to push myself even harder with very specific set goals and limits to try and compete with myself. To that end I found Write or Die, a great website that lets you set a number of words and a time clock to countdown. If you stop writing for a few seconds, bad things happen, so you literally have to keep writing until your time is up or you hit your word count. fun stuff!

So, from http://lab.drwicked.com/writeordie.html I give you my latest count set at 1500 in 60 minutes:

	1893
62
lab.drwicked.com

	1618
58
lab.drwicked.com

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Right off the bat, it seems some of my friends are still a bit confused as to what this all is. Let me explain… no, no time to explain, let me summarize:
NaNoWriMo is National Novel Writing Month (www.nanowrimo.org for more details). The concept here is to produce a 50,000 word short fiction novel in the Month of November.

That said, I am now squarely in week 3 of this challenge and am finding that at 31,034 words down I am also encountering those week 3 doubts. I am sure that this novel is utter rubbish that any 3rd grader with a mind for story telling could write. I didn’t believe thejamez when he said I’d get to that point back around the end of week one. I figured that I knew it was bad, but it wouldn’t be the worst thing ever written. Silly me. I am up to my eyeballs in doubt. Luckily, I have done enough reading over the course of this ‘experiment’ that I know this is exactly what –everyone- encounters during week 3, so my hope is not lost.

The words are more difficult to find now in day 18. My daily word counts are still barely making grade, and are taking longer to obtain. I’m sticking with it none-the-less. I’m nothing if not stubborn. Still, I feel like I am reaching to push the story along. I have the deep sense that this first draft, once completed at the end of the month, will have a very short existence in its current form, and will hopefully not resemble anything close to what it is now, once I am able to focus in on editing next month.

I just need to continue trudging through the words and not pay attention to my brain; just build the count so I can move past the doubt and into week 4. Of course this weekend will be the toughest yet. Since I won’t be in a position to put down many words between the 26th and the 30th, I am hoping I can get to 50k by noon on the 26th. But, that means ending 4 days early, when I am already a day or two behind the curve.

All in all, it should be an interesting week between now and next Wednesday.

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This week has been a bit more miss than hit, mainly due to a metricbuttload of work and a night out on the town Tuesday evening. Combine the higher work levels and lower sleep levels, and you get a burnt out Jason. Last night I only managed to pull out 611 words in two hours before tossing it in.

No major revelations about the process yet this week, other than I am starting to another break in the story coming soon since I can’t visualize much of where it is going again. The last few pages have just been building out a scene and characters a bit more but not progressing the story at all. It seems when I start to feel stagnant in the story, as I had started, a major break will be seen in the next day or two. I am hopeful that will happen since I need to play a bit of catch up with my word count after missing last night by well over half, and coming short a few times at the beginning.

The good news is that my count to date is at 19,055 total since Nov. 1st. Not too shabby. Oddly enough, I actually am beginning to expect to build the word count much further past 50k after November when I start editing, since I have a feeling the first 19k here are rushing through some key pieces which need to really be flushed out much further. Who knows, this text may have some legs on it yet.

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