Sunday to Sunday

"The electric white of the computer screen causes me great pain - when switched to black, the glowing reds feel like needles, slipping just under my eyes, throbbing with each heartbeat. The access it affords me is unprecedented, but I fear, more often than not, I'm stretching my perceptions in ways they were not meant to be... I think that we are absorbing information in a manner our bodies never expected. That we are committed now, pragmatically, to going in through the out door, the arrows on the floor all pointing us in the opposite direction in which we move. It's crowded; we will bump and crash into each other. It will damage us - if we're lucky."

--William Kurdt (May, 2007)

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A whole week after promising to post more. Ridiculous.

I blame the Blogger outage at least partially, though I will admit to finding some perverse glee in what a state it seemed to put so many people in. We are remarkably sensible about the internet when it's working, but when something goes wrong I think our dependence shows a little. And I kind of think that's great.

The work on the TCustomz project is going really well. I've already gotten first drafts of about 2/3rds of the copy done, and that was sent to Travis today, a full 24 hours ahead of the deadline we set. I wanted to get one of the larger chunks of copy that wasn't scheduled for tomorrow done as well, that other third of the work, but it's just occurred to me that I'm going to need several more days to polish it off, and since I'd originally said that's how long it would take, I just had to admit to myself that I was on schedule. And that was okay.

It's funny that I sweat being on time more than being ahead or behind.

I also got feedback from Kyle this week on "The Tagalong," a pleasant surprise which will come in real handy once I have some time to get back to working on it. Right now I'm a little swamped, and paying work almost always takes precedence with me, less out of a great commitment to the almighty dollar, and more because I have a tendency of letting my projects take over my life. It's counterintuitive to deadlines to work on something unrelated for days until you pass out in a stupor, only to sleep said stupor off until you've made an acceptable dent in the sleep debt you've accumulated. It can get out of hand.

Discipline.

Since I haven't written anything I can really share, I'm going to link Amy Klein's recent blog post on the passing of Poly Styrene. Or maybe just prompted by her passing. It's called "Poly Styrene Takes Her Place in History" and like most things Amy writes, it has a lot more going on than just it's obvious topic. Which means even if you're not a Poly Styrene fan [and what's wrong with you if you're not?], you should probably read it anyway. I said this already on Twitter, but when Amy Klein blogs, I realize just how much I need to up my game as a writer.

I also got to read to someone this week. Joan Didion - not who I read to, but what I read to someone. I hadn't really read to anyone, hadn't really read out loud, in such a long time. And that was really nice too.