Wow. 2009. How did that sneak up on me? I would feel guiltier right now, but posts like this one alleviate that. I figure I’ve been doing my part to make your catch-up period that much easier.

Now, I bet you’re wondering what a guy with a blog called “Fictional Discipline” has been doing, if not blogging. Well! I’ll tell you what. As I mentioned before, I finished the first draft of the novel. That was exciting. It is now officially simmering, and I may season it periodically with notes about how to approach draft number two. I’ve also begun dusting off some of the short stories that have been floating in various states of completion for… too long. We’ll see what happens with those.

Obviously I’ll be blogging as well, so stick around and we’ll have some good times.

So, I cleared my first Nano. I’m not even going to try to be modest: I rocked. I rocked so hard it knocked Michael J. Fox off his feet and he was late to class, forcing a confrontation with Mr. Strickland. Then he went back in time…

The downside, though, is that it feels like a semester just ended, and my first instinct is to slack off. I did just enough work on the novel last week to keep it from completely slipping off my radar. Bad Stan!

This week about getting back on track and learning to be accountable to myself, rather than an outside influence. Last month I learned that I have enough free time to write all kinds of words if I sit down and do it. This month I need to learn how to do it without leaning on something else. I kind of have to, if I want to make a career out of this. It’s not that software testing doesn’t have its own special charm, but it’s not what I had in mind when I sat through a bunch of boring lit classes.

One thing I have decided is that I definitely want to keep putting fiction out on this blog. My brain tackles it differently than when I’m pounding away at OpenOffice, and sometimes the results make me very happy. I’m going to shoot for once a week, at least for now, with one or two other updates throughout the week. Maybe I’ll even make fancy PDFs out of the fiction to make it look more professional-like. Yeah. That sounds doable. Meanwhile, I’ll keep chipping away at the novel.

Sound good? Good.

Prior to this month, I thought I had no free time. Well, not literally zero free time, but it felt pretty small and weak. I said it was hard to find time to do anything other than sit around. Then I found myself in the throes of NaNo.

I think everyone should participate in NaNo. Not because I think everyone should be forced to do something they may or may not want to do, but because of what it shows you. I discovered that I have all kinds of free time if I’m not wasting it on video games.

The reason? Video games pass the time very quickly. An hour is microscopic unit of time when you’re busy being awesome. What shocked me was that nothing else is really like that. An hour of writing feels long. A half hour on the treadmill feels really long. Suddenly I feel like I can do more than one thing on a given night and not have to rush through any of it.

Does that mean I’m swearing off the games? Not likely. I’ve got a stack I need to get through, and I’m sure several on the way from Mr. Claus, so I’m not on the verge of quitting. But I realized the main thing holding me back from everything I want to do is the gaming, and not a lack of time to pursue other interests.

forgot to blog. heh. no work done yesterday. too busy hanging out. rocked mediocre the night before. will rock so hard today. hopefully still have time and energy to watch life on mars.

This week features “mandatory overtime”, which can also be known as “the testing department officially becoming the only department at the company with a sense of accountability.” It’s good to be a part of positive change; it sucks to be the forerunners of positive change.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have time to write, though, but for today I’m going to be reading. I picked up a copy of Asimov’s over the weekend, and I’m dying to take a peek at it. I listen to a podcast every week that I am always raving about, and I noticed that one of the guys has a story in this issue. I’ve never read anything of his, but since I started listening, I’ve been dying to see if he is as good of a writer as he is a writing coach. Also, I hear he’s kind of a big deal. So, there you have it.

Are any of you familiar with Brandon Sanderson’s work?