Japanse New-Girl Monkey Network
And the Beat Goes On
Right now I'm in about five hundred directions. This is not a bad thing, but it makes it hard to write a focused, coherent blog entry, so I'm just going to ramble.
I think I want to try to publish some work. Like, real publishing, in a magazine or a chapbook or something. I bought my online subscription to Writer's Market and I'm surfing around for opportunities. I'll start small and see what happens. I know this may be more evidence that I'm secretly a masochist, but since I'm not dependent on doing this for a living, I figured I ought to go ahead and try to get it out of my system now, while I'm young.
I also found this blog, Crafty Bitch, and I gotta say I love the name. The weather's going to turn soon, and I will have many hours where I'll want to be on the couch under a blanket with the radiators turned up (since it looks like I'm not going south of the Equator anytime soon, dammit-- not that I'm bitter). In order to feel less usesless, I often fill this time with either crocheting or knitting projects (usually crochet, because my knitting tends go pretty slowly). So with this in mind, I suddenly decided I needed to learn how to knit socks (hopefully my book should be arriving in the next few days). And then I decided that it would be fun to learn how to make homespun yarn with a drop spindle. What ensued was a pathetic chunk of wasted time searching on the web about yarns and fibers and handspinning and knitting. Keep in mind I'm not interested in the domestic aspects of these activities. I just like to keep busy and and make stuff (and in the case of socks, I'm always losing one, it seems). And when I make stuff I always like to know how to make it from scratch. I think I have this horrific fantasy in the back of my mind, of some apocalyptic event that will seriously detriment modern society, and I will feel all superior and justified because I'll know how to do everything myself and live in relative luxury.
I think I'm just excited about the publishing challenge. It's been a while since I've focused on writing; even if the publishing angle leads nowhere, it's more important that it brings me back to creativity. It seems to turn on the other parts of my brain when this happens. For example, to balance out all the right-brained randomness, I've really started to kick some butt on my rewrite of my Python blogging scripts. I think when I've finished, I might post my code. It's nothing mind-blowing, but it shows what I've learned about Python. I noticed, too, that on the Crafty Bitch site, she's got a little button that says "Powered by my own code." Rock on, sister.
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