Monthly Archives: February 2014

The snow day that wasn’t…

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I’m smart enough to understand that what I know about meteorology wouldn’t take the first day of class to teach at a halfway responsible university. Being a simple man, I try to leave the prognostication to the professionals and satisfy myself that whatever it’s doing when I take the dogs outside in the morning is a reasonably good indicator of what it’s going to be like for the next 8 hours or so. Being a complex system, of course, the weather doesn’t always cooperate with that assessment. That’s why keeping an umbrella and a dry pair of socks in the truck is always a good idea.

I rely on my simple approach to weather because I don’t have a multi-billion dollar array of radar stations, geosynchronous satellites, supercomputer powered models, and highly trained meteorologists pouring over data moment by moment. The good news is apparently you don’t need any of those things to make a go of it… because using that wide array of resources, you’re just as apt to get it as wrong as I am by simply sticking my head outside to see if it gets wet.

Still, if you can convince an entire metropolitan area that you know what you’re doing and make a damned good living while getting it sort of right and sort of wrong, well, then my hat is off to you. All I wanted was a damned snow day today. I’d have settled for a few hours early release. But no. That was a bridge too far, because here between Philly and Baltimore, it was the snow day that wasn’t. I think from now on I’ll just stick with the personal observation method and maybe pick up a barometer at the next flea market I visit. Then I’d say my predictions should be about on par with the professionals.

It will be…

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It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve finally built up a sufficient head of steam that I feel comfortable saying a few words about a current work in progress. As I’m writing, it feels like a short story in waiting. As of last night it’s 2904 words and will most likely offend those with deep religious convictions. Being an offensive douche wasn’t really where this all started out (and it’s still not my intent), but any time you so much as touch on Christianity and are anything but strictly differential to the Almighty, there’s a certain subset of the population who will get their knickers in a twist. That’s ok. They’re entitled. As I’ve said before, opinions are like certain anatomical orifices – everybody’s got one and needs to use it often.

The fun (and admittedly frustrating) part of this whole effort is that after tinkering around for a couple of weeks, I actually have no idea where it’s going, how it will end, or what the point of the whole exercise is. There’s no outline. No concept map. Every day I sit down, re-read what I wrote the day before, and then have a little exercise in free writing. I’d like to bring the draft in around 10,000 words, but I’d be happy with anything from 8,000 to 12,000. Really, the plan is to just keep plugging away until it feels like something close enough to done to justify pasting it with the “first draft” label and chunking it over into my version of the editorial process. I’m not bold enough to even suggest a date when that might happen, though. It’s just going to take as long as it takes.

I’m not going to sit here on a sunday morning with a few thousand words on the page and guess whether it will be good or bad. At best, I can promise that it will be. That may not sound like much, but for a guy who’s been taking about trying his hand at fiction since high school, it’s a pretty big deal.

Adverts…

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WordPress makes it mercifully easy to keep a mosty respectable blog up and running without forcing you to master all the behind the scenes nonsense. I’ve long since given up on ever wanting to be by own webmaster. It would just be one more thing that I don’t have time to do right and would result in doing a half-assed job that would, in turn, make me crazy.

There are a few things, that WordPress lets you tweak without forcing you into managing your own page. This morning, while I was renewing my lease on adfreebannerhttp://www.jeffreytharp.com and making sure it mapped over to WordPress, I picked up one of these extra options.

Starting today, you should be reading this and every other post completely ad free. If I’m going to spend time making sure you have daily updates, pour ridiculous amounts of time into other projects, and make a half-hearted effort at marketing it, the only ads I want you to see are the ones that put cash in my own pocket. I guess we’ll find out this time next year if the return on investment pays off. Even if it doesn’t in a purely dollars and cents terms, running ad free gives the place a much cleaner look. That by itself is probably worth eating a little extra cost.

The next time you see an advert featured here, you can buy with confidence that you are helping to subsidize my writing habit, rather than putting money in the cold hands of a faceless corporation. With that in mind, why don’t you go ahead and check out the Retail Partners list to the left of this post and find yourself something to read?