The Living Years (or, Surely I Can't Fail at This Assignment, Too)

Happiness writes white.
 - Harvey Danger

There's much more to life than what you see, my friend of misery.
 - Metallica

This blog has been a strange animal.

When I was depressed, there seemed no limit to the topics I'd find for discussion, and no limit to the lengths at which I'd discuss them. In 2007, I posted 237 times, devoting thousands of words to barely-informed political diatribes and ill-temepered, bitter rants against the world at large. One would think this all-consuming depression was the fuel for the fire -- and one would have evidence to support this assumption. After all, the last two years (easily the two best years of my life) have seen little to no blog output whatsoever.

But the six months prior to me suddenly becoming the Happy Evil Genius were an unending parade of awfulness, and that saw even less output. I posted rarely, and when I did post, it would often consist of little more than a YouTube video and a few pithy sentences. So: too depressed means no writing. But no depressed also means no writing.

To be fair, though, I was writing again, and pretty consistently, last year, right up until October. That's when we moved, and we had no internet for a week or so. And my habit of posting -- because that's what it had become, a habit -- was interrupted.

I never got the knack again.

But in the next couple of months, things are changing quite a bit. Our son, Jacob, will be born. (He's due in October, but we get the feeling he's likely to show up whenever he damn well pleases.) This afternoon, I was installing the baby seat in my car, feeling a collision of feelings and memories and emotions, and I thought, I want to write about this.

Trouble is: I'm out of practice.

The parts of my brain that let get the words out is very much like a muscle, and it's out of shape. You can't run a mile without doing some stretches, and you can't run the Boston Marathon without running a whole lot of miles.

So here's the plan: look at this here 30 Day television meme. Each day for thirty days, you answer a prompt. 30 days, 30 posts.

Consider that my training regiment. A month from now, I'll be back in shape and ready to write about important things.

Like this new Arcade Fire record. It's great!

Or, you know, our new son. Whatevs.

Fine tuning

I've spent the last few hours tweaking my blog's look and features, in some ways you can see and others you can't. I moved some of the sidebars around, modified the look of some of them (the labels, you might notice on the right, are a tag cloud instead of a long list). In case you aren't interested in playing Spot the Difference!, here's a rundown:

I didn't mention it, and I don't know how you couldn't have noticed it, but I've started a Twitter feed and planted it top right. You can follow me there, if you'd like.

What I'm Listening To has been moved to the right and redone as a much cleaner, simpler embedded Lala playlist. If you sign up for a Lala account (which is free), you should be able to listen to each song once for free. That playlist will be updated once a week.

Each post now has a ShareThis button, which will allow you spread my gospel posts anywhere on the web you can imagine. Also, each post has a Reactions feature: you can quickly rate the quality of each post as you see fit. Be kind, but honest.

Oh, and if (for some reason) you've been tracking my X-Box Live Gamerscore, you may have noticed it hasn't changed in a while. That's because our 360 Red-Ringed last week. Yay!

And yes, I've been playing Grand Theft Auto IV. A lot. Because it's awesome.

I think that's it. I thought about adding more widgets, but then the thing'll start to look like a damn MySpace page, and that's not what I'm going for. I'm happy to hear suggestions.

Check your head

Hey -- for the first time in years, a new header. Whatcha think? I like it.

And if you can recognize all of those characters, give yourself a cookie.

Never tell me the odds

In writing this blog post, I am taking a short break from putting together my first Saying Story of 2009. This go-round, we're using song lyrics as our inspiration; my story (indeed, all of my stories this year) will concern, thusly, a fictitious totally real rock band. Look, here's the cover of their first album.


It won't be finished until tomorrow, but I thought I'd use this space to remind you that I actually used to write and publish things. No, really, I did. Here, as proof, is a list of my favorite things that I've written. If you think I'm forgetting something, I implore you to remind me.

• That's When I Reach for My Revolver. I like the entire series, and I'm in love with all of my characters, but the popular consensus seems to be that "Halloween" has been the best episode thus far. "The Long and Winding Road" and "Brand New Day" were the most fun to write. And a new episode is coming. No, really. The title (at this very second) is "Sugar, We're Goin' Down."
• "The Storyteller, the Dragon and the Great Decree" -- so far outside of my style that it feels like I'm making fun of someone. Also the story that took me longest to write out of anything I've done: concept to final draft took a couple of years. Some feel the wait was worth it. I know René does.
• "Owl-Stretching Time" -- from last year's Saying Stories. There's not much of a narrative to speak of (unless you count Monty's monologue), but I've never loved writing a story more. Looking back on it a year later, I still like the voice I managed to find to capture Stacy's attitude and worldview. And I said everything I need to say about friendship, I think.
• I used to write cool things on this blog, too. For instance, the guy who "created" Lost is a whiny tool. René and I saw the Tragically Hip at Scout Bar and were the only Americans in the room. Obnoxious pro-lifers kind of irritate me. Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte are fucking assholes (and the Pettitte thing was even before the steroids story broke). I can't stay quiet while watching the Feud. I certainly wasn't surprised when Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip was canceled. Apparent apathy on the part of my paltry audience doomed the project after only one installment, but I'm still proud of my Guns N' Roses dissertation. Before I turned it into an entire writing project of its own, bitching about my pizza delivery job was fun. Stephen got married, and I got sentimental. My sister and I review Cloverfield.

Back to writing now. I need to finish. I will finish.

Anyone taking odds on my success? Not good, are they?

A few notes

I've decided on the name of the next Revolver episode: "Hey Jealousy." It works on a few levels, as you'll see. (Assuming the title remains the same. Which it probably won't. You know how it goes.)

I've also resumed posts at A Great Disservice, if you hadn't noticed.

And now I see that there are new things on each post here: a place to give star ratings for my posts. I didn't ask for this. I don't know why it's there. But it's there. You can rate my posts if you want. I certainly won't mind. If the ratings are good, anyway. Never mind. It's gone now. What the hell?

And then here: watch this.



----------------
Now playing: Gin Blossoms - Hey Jealousy
via FoxyTunes

No shuffle this week

Sorry: Revolver needed the time. I'll get back to it next week.

And how about Luigi, huh? Take that, Mario!

----------------
Now playing: Prince - Darling Nikki
via FoxyTunes

The Regina Spektor motivational public word counter

Goddammit, I need to finish Revolver.

The most effective method of motivation I ever used was a public word counter: I was a writing a short story with a planned length of six thousand words. So every day, I would write my current word count on the dry erase board on our refrigerator (this is when I was living with Tommy). So every day, everyone could see whether or not I'd done any work on it.

The thing was finished in eight days, with a word count somewhere north of eight thousand words. Success!

You can't argue with success, so I bring back that same idea. I still have the dry erase board, but the pen has been lost and some idiot (*cough* FRINAN *cough*) wrote a quote from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it in permanent marker, so it's unusable. Plus, I live alone.

So, instead, I use the dry erase board that is the internet and display my word count on this here blog. Of course, a big reason it worked before was that I could sense the disappointment in those around me when I didn't accomplish anything; I can't see your faces over the internet.

With that in mind, I found someone who, frankly, has a nicer-looking face than you anyway.


With Regina Spektor in tow, I am now prepared to make a serious run at this thing. I mean, who would want to disappoint Regina? Not me.

The goal for this episode -- which is now on its sixth title, "A Long December" -- is 8000 words. How long will it take? You and Regina are going to find out. But if this doesn't work, I am officially out of ideas.

Last year, I made a New Year's resolution to write six episodes; I wrote one. The taste of failure is bitter, friends. I shall not partake of it again.

To victory!

(God, I should get more sleep.)

----------------
Now playing: Regina Spektor - Reading Time With Pickle
via FoxyTunes

You can blame Airfon for this, if you're looking for someone

So I get lots and lots of stupid customers at work, as I may have mentioned one or two thousand times. My manager, Airfon, has told me repeatedly to write them down.

For some reason, I listened to him. So yes, I'm asking you to read more of my crap. Blame him.

As it says over there, I'll update three times a week. If I actually pull that off for a month, I think I should received some sort of prize.

----------------
Now playing: DragonForce - Through the Fire and Flames
via FoxyTunes

The 400 blows

Hey, it's a milestone -- this post you're reading here is number 400. Only took me a little more than four years. Four hundred posts, four and a half years -- about 90 posts a year, which is one every four or five days. Not a bad average, considering there have been a few months-long stretches where I posted nothing at all. (It hasn't been hurt by the last few months, when I've been averaging better that a post a day. Yay for high-speed internet access!)

This easily ranks as my longest-running writing endeavor; every other long-term project has been abandoned well before the four-year mark. Even Revolver is only two years old. (Ten episodes, two years. That average sucks.)

Thank you for reading. And at this rate, I'll be at 500 by Halloween.

(If you'd like to bask in some jwalkernet Greatest Hits nostalgia, you can read these two posts from December of 2005. They're probably my favorites.

Lucky.
Lucky, Conclusion (?): The Ancient Wisdom of the Orient.)

Yay!

Blogger has (rather swiftly) answered my concerns, got into the code, and fixed the problem: comments are now perfectly easy to get to, as you might see at the bottom of this here post. Thanks a million, Blogger tech people -- you guys rock.

Man, with this thing fixed, and last night's Lost finale, and last night's hella-cool Hunter episode (recap coming tomorrow), this has been a bitchin' couple of days. And I'm now off to a midnight show of the new Pirates of the Caribbean. Surely, the trend must continue, yes?

If they had a church, I'd nail my letter to their door

Okay, so it appears that it is possible, after all, to leave me comments. In order to do it, you'll have to go to the post page of whatever post it is you'd like to comment on.

Where do you find the post page? Look at the "Posted by J. Walker at x:xx" text following each post -- click on the time. There you go!

Yes, this is inconvenient as hell, both for you and for me -- I have to sign in and flip through my "Edit Posts" menu to see if I've any comments. But this can work for now, if you want to give it a shot.

I've just sent a e-mail to Blogger. They should be getting back to me anytime now.

*checks watch*

Hmm

Well, the site overhaul looks pretty decent. And it's certainly easier to update the Countdown with the new format.

The only sticking point is the same sticking point I always have when I change formats around: the comments. For some reason, I can't get them to show up. But I'm still working on it.

I'm also working on a new logo. Been a while, hasn't it?

Tinkering

I'm updating my Blogger template to the new Blogger "customizing" format, so things might look a little goofy here for a bit. Watch your step.

Fun with Google Reader

Apparently, changing the labels on my old posts causes Google Reader to think they're new posts and show them as new. So it looks like I wrote ten posts yesterday about things no one remembers from three years ago.

Which isn't all that different from what I actually write. So.