My Writing Output

Limping Along

“It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay…”

I wrote that 2 years ago and since that time I have had significant changes to my life and my writing has completely changed in output and type since then.  I got a career in September 2017 working for my hometown’s city hall and that dominates my time.

While I do not consider my job especially difficult, once you get passed learning how to navigate the bureaucracy it is only a needlessly complicated series of checklists and meetings that could be emails.  However, the job is so time consuming and so lacks creative elements that I find myself unable to write for my own benefit.  Sure, there are exceptions and I have pressed myself to write at least one entry on this blog each month, but it is a side effect of such gainful employment that I do not have the creative spark while working there.

What I do have is a small but regular trickle of work that allows me to write in a professional environment.  It does not stretch my abilities, it is not mentally rewarding, but it is required and has consequences.  I have check what I am writing to make sure I am not breaking the law; while at the same time having no metric to follow; and having to interpret what I am told so as to tell it to other people.

Playing “telephone” via email is its own sort of writing exercise.

Not this Year

            Last year I didn’t bother to give an update on my goal of writing 1,000,000 words, nor did I give an update on my goal of writing a blog for everyday of the calendar year.  I have certainly tried to advance each and have made progress.  I only have 16 days of the year without an entry, and I have crossed the 750,000-word goal.

 

October and November, why are they my weakest months for output?

My writing has never been stronger (at least according to standardized testing, something everyone should question the validity of) as last October I retook the GRE and scored a 5, putting me in the 92 percentile on the writing portion of the exam.  I took the test in order to apply to Doctorate programs and am pleased with the results. (I will be writing more about my decision to do that and the results in the days/weeks to come.)  And let’s be clear, I don’t ever want to take the GRE again.  Two is two too many.

I have had plenty of ideas for what to write, and have a folder of “Draft Zeroes” with ideas for short stories or novels and have written out an outline for a book that is only a couple thousand words but represents something I haven’t done before, a plotted out story with a beginning, middle, and end.  There is even a rough set of chapter breaks along the way for all the shenanigans that I might want to slide in.

New ticks and quirks have emerged, with my tendency to use, “So, …” to start off paragraphs and sentences.  A reliance on evidence, citations, and stating my suppositions causing me to preface everything and then explain my point.  Trying to mix this up with the occasional, “It follows then…” or a “Taking that as a starting point…” could make my writing stronger, but that also makes it more verbose.  SO, I am unsure as to how to tackle that habit.

There are other issues I have that I have never been able to overcome.  My inability to name things is perhaps my biggest weakness when playing Dungeons and Dragons (which yes, I do credit as part of my writing.  While DnD is a game, there is tons of creative work that goes into it and issues from it, just look at the multitude of novels that surround the property).  Names are not my forte and the fact that I made two different recurring characters’ names, “Kevin” shows this sort of wekness.

I like plot and I like setting and I like dialogue, but ask me who is saying things, the name of where they are saying them, or what they call the events they are talking about… and I just don’t know what to say.  Often falling back on the blandest of proper nouns or portentous uninformative claptrap (like “Destiny” a game I dislike specifically because it does something I see as my biggest weakness).

Maybe you all see some other aspects of my writing that need improvement, be it a matter of style, content, or just that I have a number of typos in everything.  I have no editor.  I do my best… or as I mentioned at the start, I do what I can.

The Future

            My writing will continue to mutate.  I hardly ever do movie reviews anymore, not because I stopped watching and having opinions on movies, but because I did movie reviews originally in order to further an aspect of my writing.  And I see my abilities in movie reviewing as sort of complete.  Movies were something I could trust a certain number of people have seen and have tastes in, they have a language that can be understood, deconstructed, and evaluated based on a criteria of both personal taste and technical acumen.

            Essentially, movies are something I could pull apart in multiple ways and in doing so practice my ability to pull ideas apart.  I could teach myself to recognize foreshadowing, metaphor, and visual presentations of information.  I can look at a movie like “Hereditary” and see how the movie planted ideas in the mind of the audience and how well those ideas were capitalized later in the narrative.

            Being able to catch those turns and flourishes is something I think I have down well enough that I am just no longer all that interested in picking them out.  Sure, from time to time, and if I had the time and creative spark, I am sure I would have just written movie reviews for the sake of a creative outlet, but in my current state of not having the time or drive they just do not have that pull on me.

            Honestly, what I want to pull apart more than anything is the old opinions I have on this blog.  My personal world view has changed so much in the last 10 years that I feel the need to write the rebuttal to my younger self.  I feel like I did not become an adult till I was 27 and even then, I was not informed enough to hold a real substantive opinion.

Now that I have degrees, work experience, and have just had to stand by while the world around me became various flavors of strange or hostile, I am a changed man and having the young me’s writing out there informing other people’s opinions of who I am now… it is misleading to them.

SO, it is likely that this blog will have a few dozen entries where I look back on who I was and how I thought at the time and just take myself to task.  Hopefully, I am not just so how much better I am now, but the act of doing this makes me better still.  Maybe I can even show other people why I felt the way I did at the time, why I changed, and why the change is for the better.  Help them change for the better too.

For Those Reading This

            I cannot emphasize enough how important writing is to who I am.  How important it is to my growth as a person.  I cannot recommend it enough to everyone out there.

            Find something you care about and write about it.  Don’t just write for yourself either.  You have to put it out there.  Even if no one reads it.  Even if those who do call you a talentless asshole.  All of that is part of it.

            Writing something that no one but you will read is masturbatory and does not help you grow, and it does not temper your skills.  You have to have some standard that exists outside yourself that you are trying to meet and surpass, even if it is the imagined judgment of potential readers.

            Write.

            Please.

            Trust me, it is worth it.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

A Blog For All Time, End of Year 1

            Last year at this time I decided on the nebulous goal of making sure I had a blog entry for every date on the calendar.  That way when my Facebook feed came around to stroke my ego via the “Memories” feature I would always have a sample of my own writing to crack out and post up.

            At this point I typically don’t repost my older stuff, as my old writing is mostly shit.  I apparently had a long-term relationship with run on sentences, and cheated on those with incomplete sentences.  Sometimes, when I write while drinking I go back to those relationships.

            What I am saying is, my old stuff is exactly what it was supposed to be, the junk I had to get out of my system to reach my current level of proficiency.  Almost like that was my stated goal when starting this blog and all subsequent writing projects I have done.  My spelling still hasn’t improved, but that I can blame on technology.

            Having something for everyday of the year is maybe not the best reason for why to write, but when you are trying to bang out a ton of words as an exercise in and of itself, you need motivation (any old excuse) to put fingers to keyboard.  Often that motivation amounts to “a day on the calendar must be made orange”.  I don’t know why I chose orange.

            Let’s take a look at the old calendar.

            Big empty spaces in October and December; somewhat empty spaces for March, July, and November; and just too many little holes all over the rest of the place.  No real rhyme or reason for this scatter shot.  Just several years of random activity layered on top of one another.

            Now let’s look at the new one.

 

I also switched from using the paint can to just drawing orange boxes over the day, allowing for a much cleaner fill.

            I feel I have made good progress on my goal.  Aside from months that were previously so empty that filling them would have required a plan of attack, I still turned a lot of the temporal map orange.

            117 open spaces has been reduced to 30.  Just 30.  I know few people reading this have a lot of writing experience and maybe if you do that sounds like just another year of your life, but for me that amount of writing is legendary.  Now that I have a full-time job there is no way I will ever have the time necessary to put down that many words in a year ever again.

            How did I do this?  I think the clearest thing I can point to is Dungeons and Dragons.  I have written about it more this year than any other year of my life, and if you were to mash all of the blogs I wrote together they would easily be the length of a book.  I have played around in Dungeons and Dragons since I was 15 but this was the first time I really hammered out entry after entry and put those entries out for people to read and absorb.

            For others to read, absorb, and criticize.

            I hope a few of them think I did well.

            Earlier this year I wrote my 400th blog on this site, on the 6^th anniversary of starting this blog.  This entry today is my 500^th blog.

            On the 26^th of April in 2013 I set a goal of writing 1,000,000 words.  As of right now, I am closing in on 600,000. 
            Between this day last year and now I wrote 216,302 words.  That is madness.

            One year ago today, I set out to fill my calendar.  While I have let numerous days pass by without getting an entry (1 of which because I thought a Hurricane was going to destroy my home town, luckily it did not), having an entry for everyday of the year is too easy a goal now.  I am too close to finishing it.

            I have to think of something else.

            I am just going to have to keep writing.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter (click that link to follow me), Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

1,000,000 Words, Year 4

Course correction from previous year

            April 26^th is the anniversary of when I first started keeping track of how much I write and really aiming to say more with my writing.  I embraced the adage, “The first 1,000,000 words are practice and began keeping a journal as to how many words I wrote each day (quickly shifting to just logging the number of words and writing down the date).

            I logged college papers, memos, journals, emails, and more often than not these blogs.  Because so much of my writing was tied up with school and the nature of the assignments I was participating in was shifting and dropping off toward the end of things I also noticed a drop off in the amount I was writing.

            It may shock you to hear this, but just sitting down and writing can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a topic already in mind, especially-especially if you are not required to do it for grades or pay.  Writing as a means of self-improvement is like the mental equivalent of working out, except it doesn’t make you look more enticing to people which is a motivator all its own.

            Writing can be tiring and daunting and when you have been keeping a steady measure of your writing like I have you start to understand the size of the goal I have set.  This is the 4^th year of this project and I am still just short of 500,000 words.  But this last year was an improvement.

            2016 had the most blog entries of any year I have been on Blogger.  It was a rather productive year of writing.  Not counting this entry, I have written 162,749 words in the last 12 months.  That I have logged anyway, there is some old trash that I wrote down as half thoughts and never hammered into anything workable.  That is 445.9 words a day.  The year prior only averaged 128.1.  I managed 3.5 times as much.  Good for me.

A Change in Perspective

            It is kind of silly to talk about this so short after talking about the 6th year anniversary of the blog as a whole just two months ago.  Which I coincided with the 400^th entry overall.  This is the 419^th entry… That is not a milestone.  It is not even a mildly funny number like 420.

            I have made some changes since then.  For instance, I have started using Google analytics.  Boy, is it a confidence boost.  According to them more people have been to the moon than have stayed on my page long enough to read an entire entry.  I could be putting anything on here and no one would read it.  Maybe the fat that I do put so much disparate stuff on here is why no one is reading it?  Whatever.

            I should have put analytics on this blog years ago and I have no idea why I chose now of all times to do so.  It makes more sense when I look back on my management of this blog.  I added the "Please like and share..." to the end of things in February 2015.  I didn't start using "+1" and Twitter until May 2014.

            I guess it is a good thing that I am not in charge of online communication for any political campaigns, my guy's online presence would be thin on the digital ground, in spite of it all being well written.  Maybe I should have written all of this into my 400th entry. Once again, my writing about something causes me to become introspective enough to find out what the topic of the thing should have been.

Projects for Scope and Benchmarks

            I have been writing about Dungeons and Dragons near weekly.  I have been doing more 30-day blog challenges (and plan to do another one in October).  And I have been trying to write a blog entry for everyday on the calendar, which has been going well, I will update on that project’s progress on the anniversary of starting it, November 22^nd.

Some Old Tripe

            Sometimes I start writing about a particular movie or show and it just doesn’t grab me as a topic.  I figured, for a change, I would just throw some of these half-thoughts onto this thing to give an example of what my typical starting points look like.  So here are things for “The Purge”, “50 Shades of Grey”, and “Hail, Caesar!”.

            My thoughts on “Freddy vs Jason” were destined for here, but I somehow made them just enough more to be their own thing.

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“The Purge” Franchise

            The movies are all about how "It's my right!" to commit violence and to destroy each other is an idea sold by the rich to the poor so that once a year the poor slaughter each other.  So, in real life when you hear someone say, "It's my right to smoke/drink/own-guns/be-a-dickhead" you can realize that it is all a part of having poor people take pride in being poor.

            You can take the movie in a completely literal and skin deep reading, which provides ZERO insight.  Or, you can float the idea that the movie is pointing to how small legal transgressions that people claim as "rights" are propagating a system in which the poor are killing each other and the rich prey on the poor.

            If you ever find yourself justifying what you are doing by saying, "I can" instead of "I should" or "I must" then you are most likely doing something bad or at the very least unproductive, even if it is only destructive to you, it is still a bad thing. All of those movies are about people justifying their bad behavior with "it's my right".

            HAPPY CONFEDERATE MEMORIAL DAY! Remember it's about "states' rights" and "heritage".

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“50 Shades of Grey”

            I saw this movie on an invitation from a woman I would have liked to sleep with.  That is why this writing exists.  I actually saw this in the theater I might as well talk about it, even though the woman who I went with got bored and played on her phone the entire time, fun evening that went nowhere.

            It is clear that everyone working on this movie knew that it would be on their resume whether they wanted it to be or not, so they tried their damnedest to get this shit together.  They did not entirely fail.

            Unfortunately, only Rumpelstiltskin has displayed an ability to spin straw into gold, and since King Midas is dead this movie had to do without their assistance.  Danny Elfman, mysterious creature from the universe where music comes as naturally as speech can only do so much.

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“Hail, Caesar!”

            So here is a quick review of a movie I disliked by writers/directors I respect, the Cohens, and a bunch of actors I like, in a setting I find interesting, and with a plot that should be great.  The thing was a boring slog.

            “Hail, Ceasar” is nominally a comedy but I only laughed in one scene that in retrospect wasn’t all that great.  The whole thing feels like several episodes of a hypothetical TV show (like “Mad Men”) that were pushed together to make one movie that would appeal to a particular type of person.  That type of person can be summed up with the phrase, “works in Hollywood”.

            I think that "Hail, Ceasar" might be the first Cohen Bros movie that would have been better if it were directed by someone else.  Shane Black would have made it funnier, David Lynch would have made it stranger, and Nolan would have made it more mysterious.  As is, the thing falls into a strangely dull middle ground.  It is boring.

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The Beg for Attention

            If you do read my blogs, thank you.  I hope you continue to do so and hopefully I sometimes write something good enough for you to share with others.

            I would also encourage others to do similar self-improvement projects akin my writing.  Try new recipes.  Walk to new places.  Go to the gym.  Read more.  Practice playing an instrument.  Try to be better at the things that you want to be better at.

            Even if you can’t make money doing it.  Try to be a better you because it will make you happy.  I’m happier than I was.  Maybe that feeling will hang around.

            Have fun.

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            If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

1,000,000 Words, Year 3

            Three years ago today I started a personal project to write 1,000,000 words.  This was inspired by the adage that, “the first 1,000,000 words is practice”.  Since that time I have logged movie reviews, half-finished novels, random bullshit, and lots of grad school assignments.  I have thru this time kept a log of how many I have written.  Starting at first with a goal of 500 words each day, under the reasoning that some professional authors write as much as 1,800 words each day.  That was optimistic in the extreme.

            I quickly fell behind and even as I banged out huge assignments at school and tried to write down something about more and more of the shows I watched less and less stuff interested me as targets and I personally felt less creative in a lot of ways.

            My first year doing this I logged 139,441 words.  This doesn’t include facebook statuses, tweets, or comments in forums (unless I later turn those into blog entries).  It is work that I either put out into the world to be evaluated via school and this blog, or it was work that I wanted to one day put out in a grander form to be evaluated.  This worked out to 382 words each day.  Close to the 400 words a day I have seen recommended by Neil Gaiman an author whose work I hold in great esteem.

            In the second year I kept up the pace for the most part.  134,511 words.  Much of which came from a single massive assignment to complete my first Master’s degree.  A lot more math was required at this point, with hours of time spent hammering out projections and breakdowns as part of a political evaluation for my degree.  Writing was less a priority and less a part of my day to day functions.  Overall this was a step down, but was still in the same range of 368 words each day.

            This last year has been less a step down and more of a ladder down.  I didn’t feel nearly as creative; most of my school work was doing basic learning in a foreign language or using mathematics, mapping, and design tools; and even the yearly movie reviews I typically do just to drive up my word count… I didn’t feel the drive to put them out there as most of the movies I saw last year fell into the very grey middle for me and hardly required comment (though there have so far been two exceptions).  I was and still kind of am mentally burnt out.  I only wrote 46,886 words in the last year.  A third of what I have done in the past.  128.5 words each day… Except that is wrong, it was only 128.1 because I have to include a leap day.  This is only the 5^th blog I have written in 2016 and it is April.

            Now that isn’t the whole story, I have been writing more in forums, discussion sections, and comments on various websites so that lets out a lot of ideas before they have fully developed.  Maybe those pasts are letting out too much creative energy and I should give up on that talkative aspect of my online self.  Maybe those posts are good enough to consider as real writing effort and I should start counting longer or more in depth posts toward my log.  I will probably compromise and start turning more of them into blogs, the one from yesterday is an example of that.

I have also stopped counting the fiction I write until it is finished, which means that a dozen chapters of a novel that will never get done, those thousands of words go nowhere.  I have also not been sharing or measuring stuff for when I write a setting for Dungeons and Dragons, which can translate to thousands of words.  Maybe I should start putting out lots of stuff related to my Dungeons and Dragons imaginings.  Perhaps my actual word count is not as bad as I think.

            It is not like the exercise is not doing its job.  My writing is much better than it was.  I rarely need a second draft, and aside from the numerous typos I feel that my thoughts are coming thru in clear waves to those who read my stuff.  Heck, before I started logging my word count I was blogging in the note section of my facebook in a deliberate effort just to hammer out more words for fear that I would be too glib for success in graduate school (some of those old entries are on here, upgraded a small amount, artifacts when I only wrote about comic book characters).

            Oh, for the halcyon days when a 1,345 word blog about Black Panther was the longest I had ever written.  Compare that to the 6 part epic I did on the Florida Legislature and the need for a new Parliamentary system to combat Gerrymandering.  Or if you want to stick to comics the 8 part series I did on just making up 3 different teams of DC superheroes to be Justice Leagues.

            What I am saying is, I have most definitely met goals of improving both the verbosity and virtue of my writing.  Though I am sure many of my Professors remain unimpressed.

            I do hope that in the future I get a job that requires regular writing as part of the job’s function.  I feel that prodding is important, and being paid for writing is the right sort of positive association that will keep me writing recreationally.  And maybe this next year I will be able to push myself to write something with enough substance that even if it is not great in volume it will be greater in quality.

            For now I will just have to keep writing.  And get thru this patch.

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Tracking My Writing, Year 2

            Two years ago I decided that I would keep a journal of all the stuff I wrote in order to reach 1,000,000 words.  I do not end up posting everything I write and frequently I end up with word documents with titles like “5 movies on Topic” and then just listing five movies, with the intention of coming back to write a lot more.  Other times I will go on 1,000 word diatribes about some topic that is ultimately… not enough to hold my interest for the 4,000 words it would take to explain everything.  Or things I wrote a year ago turn out to be really wrong, or totally right, or I have changed my mind completely, regardless the value of a blog titled, “My predictions for ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’” which I never finished is quite nil.

            That being said I still wrote a lot of this with the intention of putting out to be read… Well, not the ones that were just lists of titles that I might write something for.  Regardless, I put some effort into these and they just went nowhere.  So I went thru and counted up all the words from the hanging documents I had… and then deleted the documents.  7,149 words that I added to the count that had previously been left out in the dark, and a fresh start on a lot of topics that I had previously only had a vague thing started.

            Overall I think my writing has improved some.  A lot of it has been oriented toward technical documents for my current graduate work, not a lot of short stories or speeches, and it takes a lot of effort to be creative, I hit a lot of walls regardless of how much I want to tell a story, or how well I see particular scenes in my mind.  Maybe one day I will actually get something published, but until then I will just keep hammering out material in hopes of pushing out the edges of my skills.

726,409 words to go.  Average of 374.78 words each day (A little short of the 500 each day I originally shot for).

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If you like or hate this please take the time to comment, +1, share on Twitter or Facebook, and otherwise distribute my opinion to the world.  I would appreciate it.

Theater Going Experience

            I re-watched "Django Unchained" last night at my college's movie theater, it was the last movie they would be showing for the semester, it is the last weekend before undergrad finals begin, the movie is a huge success, the showing is free to students, all of these factors contributed to the place being packed.  And I would like to say that I have a sort of complaint: people laugh at weird times.

            I read an article by a black movie critic about the "Django Moment" when a black audience member will hear a white audience member laugh at some point, and get mad about there being nothing funny on screen.  I have a similar complaint, but it isn't a black/white thing, it is a smart/dumb thing.  Stupid people laugh at things that they are made nervous by.  Stupid people laugh at things that make them uncomfortable.  Stupid people need to stop going to theaters cause this shit is annoying.

            At one point the protagonist shoots a man with what amounts to a 1850's sniper rifle.  The man getting shot is helping his son plow a field.  The kid watches his father fall to the ground and die.  It is a sad scene that is referenced later as an important moment in Django's growth as a gunfighter in a hard world.  People laughed.

            At one point three slave traders are transporting a cage filled with three men and have to move dynamite from a pack horse to the cage, they throw the dynamite in and the slaves are scared.  It is an illustration of cruelty.  People laughed.

            A character is about to be castrated.  It is a dreadfully scary scene.  People laughed.

            There are funny things in the movie.  It is hysterical at various points, there are little things that happen even in the most explosively violent parts that elicit a chuckle.  But none of these things are in that camp, these things are supposed to be watched and felt on a different wavelength.  If you are laughing at these parts, then you are watching the movie wrong.

            What is more this is the sort of crap that falls into the "theater experience" people claim is part of movie viewing.  Presumably the other parts are sticky floors, burnt popcorn  ambient body odor, people checking their cell phones (something will provoke me to murder one day) and the film reel randomly failing in the middle of a presentation.  Theaters are kind of shit when you get down to it and I am wondering more and more why we hold them up so much.  Why did I re-watch a movie specifically to take advantage of it still being in a theater?  Seriously, why?  I could have rented the thing for 50 cents and had a lot more control over my viewing.  Could have bought it and been able to see a lot more of the features.

Seriously, can't they just shut the fuck up?

            This will probably not answer the question but I keep thinking of it.  I recall a science fiction show called "Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex".  "Ghost" primarily deals with cyber terrorism in the near future through the eyes of a group of talented counter terrorism and computer specialists.  In one episode a series of mysterious deaths prompts them to investigate, they discover that the deaths all had to do with people just plugging into a particular server, and then never leaving, eventually their bodies just starved.  So the lead investigator goes into the server to see what is the issue.  Turns out the server is the brain of a great movie director, the director was so sick of compromising his vision of his perfect film he decided to just turn his brain into a virtual reality theater to show the movie on a loop.  The people who died were so enraptured by the film they just watched it over and over until they died (kind of like those morons who killed themselves after watching "Avatar").  What is funny is that the inside of the server actually does take the form of a theater.  It's not that people are watching the movie in a private room, people are together in a massive room and can hear the murmur of each other's reactions, they can hear each other cry and laugh and experience art.

            So in a show entirely about the future  and technologies impact on the human experience, people still will get together to watch movies collectively in a dark room.  Not to discuss them afterward (because they never stop watching it) but because they feel that being a part of an audience is inherently part of watching a movie.

This show tends to be a good mix of the Cerebral and the Action.

FSU, Billing and Loans

            I am going to complain a bit about the way I see money being distributed and collected by my college, Florida State University, and also loans from the government.

            I am going to Law school, which is incredibly expensive, though if you look at the statistics of education costs to projected earnings after graduation Law School does seem less likely to leave you a cashier at Taco Bell than an advanced degree in Foreign literature.  Regardless I have to take out loans, and this is done in an odd way.

            Basically they tell me how much I am allowed to borrow, I then ask to borrow it, and then they send me most of what they said they would give me.  Let's say I need $10,000, and they say, "Okay, we'll give you $10,000."  They will then send me a check for $9,000 and a receipt for me having paid them $1,000 for the use of their service.  Why do that?  That doesn't make any sense.

            One problem: it is incredibly hard to plan around.  If I need X dollars, and ask for that much, and they then tell me that I will get X dollars, students are not going to know that X dollars is not X dollars.  It is a rug getting pulled out from under them.  Why not just charge a higher interest rate?  Why not send them X dollars and just tell them that an additional charge of some smaller amount will be tacked on to account for processing, but won't be charged interest like the loan money?

            This is the sort of bureaucratic crap that people claim is what is wrong with government in general but is never fixed.  There has to be thousands of parents who discover this every year putting kids through college.  And these parents are the type who have money and vote, you can tell because they are sending their kid to college instead of having him work.  So why is this not an issue to get ironed out?

            Then there is the issue of bill collecting.  I had a pinched or irritated nerve in the left part of my rib cage so they took X-rays to be sure nothing serious was there, since they have not bothered to contact me except for a bill I guess I can rest easy.  And while medical care is another bag of worms (charging as much as they do to use a machine is kind of fine, but not telling me how much it costs before doing it is not, and even if they did tell me I am in no position to refuse preventative care because I have a pain in my rib that I can't identify and that puts you in a mindset to spend more money than you otherwise would... Because this country has flooded our heads with medical information that is alarmist in order to get us to both go to the doctor more, and to justify charging more and more for services)... I guess I let a few worms out of the can, but moving on.

            The service was rendered in March, they billed me personally one month later, and then told me of the charge one week later when they decided that enough time had gone by to justify withholding some university services... During finals week.  Aside from the fact that this should have been handled by the insurance, and they bill me if they decide this doctor prescribed treatment wasn't covered, the school shouldn't be billing me directly.  Two, it is all computerized, why did the mistaken billing take a month?  Why was I not notified when it finally happened?  Why was my only notice in the form of a sort of penalty?  Why do they think finals, a time in which people have priorities other than paying the academia pimp, to chose to demand money?  I don't know.

            Then there is the system.  The school charges a $7.75 convenience fee for paying online.  Couple of things, paying online should be the only way to pay, that service is instantaneous, mechanized, and can be done at any time, from nearly anywhere.  The idea of having a room with people sorting written checks is stupid in a modern civilization. 

            Then why charge this fee for every use of the online service?  It is always $7.75 whether you are paying $10,000 in tuition, $250 in med bills, or a $5 library late fee, that is insane and unfair.  They should just have the charge be hidden, slightly increasing the cost of everything to account for that cost.  Wal-Mart does not charge you $5 for paying with a credit card, no one does, that would be insane, and having an all cash business or sorting through all the checks they get would be monstrously time consuming and have huge overhead costs.

            Another solution: charge some flat rate at the beginning of the school year, "Electronic Services: $20" just like they do with "Transportation: $40" that lets FSU student use the Tallahassee bus lines at will.  You get money up front that people see the one time, and can account for.  Either way, you have a billing system that a person can use to pay off the apparently overdue medical bill that is wrongly on his account when he receives the useless email at midnight without feeling like he is getting his/her lunch money taken away as an insult to the injury.

999,500 to Go

            To get good at something requires 10,000 hours of practice.  But it works a little different with creative enterprises, it is counted with words, and they put the target at 1,000,000.  A million words of practice can be done.  I write with a good bit of frequency, and could stand to put out more and more to further this mental cause.  Now rather than count the 5,000 words I wrote on finals tests this week, or my blogs, or really anything else.  I think I need to start now.  Each day I will write 500 words.  Sometimes I will miss a day and make it up later, but I will never have it take more than a week to catch up.

            So only counting the 500 words entries, I discovered how many days that counts out to: 5 years, and then 174 days past that.  So here is how I will regulate my goal.  500 words a day, not always on the same things, but I will push forward when I like it, and edit it when I want to make more of it.  Those edits will count for and against me.  Keep a tab.  And on October 17th 2018, I will consider myself done with practice.  And maybe I will make some art at some point in there.

            Having some ideas.  Though not clear or what to do with them  I feel a creative mist hanging around my skin.

            I was at Barnes and Noble's bookstore the other night for 4-5 hours.  It started out as killing time but it had been a long time since I had been in a book store and I always get an odd vibe.  Like I am literally breathing in the room.  Looking over cover after cover and wondering what that strange ethereal hunger in me is for.  I kept thinking swashbuckling, but I also wanting something dripping with very wet and sticky magic, and then I also wanted something simple and thin and easy to get through to a satisfying end which made me smile for a bit and left me geared up to read something else.

            I remembered that years before I had thought to read some classic science fiction authors to get some perspective on the medium.  And I read "Dune", "Ringworld", and "Ender's Game".  Breaking this up with "The Hunger Games", "MogWorld", and a reread of the 10th anniversary edition of "American Gods" (my favorite book).  I wonder if I should try something similar.  That I find a list of 3-4 classic mystery or horror.  Or I could find straight up pop-literature and read David Baldacci, Clive Custler, James Patterson, and Brad Thor.  It seems unfair for my reading to consist of Sci-fi, Fantasy, comics. and some classic literature.... Maybe I will ask for suggestions from those in my life who want to watch me be unpleased because that is where my best jokes come from.

            This is one more sentence, its intention is to bring this to five hundred.