Tag Archives: ideas

Casting around…

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After spending two years milling about with Nobody Told Me… The Cynic’s Guide for New Employees and a few months hashing out What Annoys Jeff this Week: 2012 in Review, it feels a bit odd to be sitting here without a current work in progress. Not a bad odd, just a different one. I should be putting this time to good use on something, but so far I have no earthly idea what that will be at the moment. Of course there will be a 2013 eBook edition of What Annoys Jeff this Week, but with 24 regular weekly installments yet to be written, I’m nowhere near interested in putting the cart so far out in advance of the horse. In the meantime, I’ll just sit here hoping that inspiration strikes in a big way.

For a few weeks there I was tinkering around with the idea of working up a survival guide for new teachers, but that experience is so far in the past, getting somewhere beyond the obvious was a problem. I wish I would have kept better notes of the pitfalls and foibles of my brief brush with the teaching profession. Sadly, I didn’t start keeping detailed book until I shifted careers and realized the true value of documenting most everything. Since fiction doesn’t really feel like my genre and God knows I don’t want to get bogged down into a multi-year long research project, I’ll keep casting around until I land on something that can hold my interest for 20 or 30,000 words.

If anyone has ideas, consider this your opportunity to become part of the process.

Blank page…

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Some days no matter how hard you squeeze, the old brain just doesn’t have anything to give. That’s when you end up with one of these rambling posts that doesn’t seem to say anything and ends without ever coming to a satisfactory conclusion. Maybe it’s not true for every blogger, but for me, I don’t think there’s any greater enemy than the blank page… except maybe when that blank page coincides with a completely empty bucket of ideas. Maybe I should just embrace the nightmare and take a day off every now and then, but I can’t shake the feeling that it would be cheating somehow. Even a habit as deeply engrained in my schedule as blogging every day enjoys a perilous place on my much-valued daily schedule. Miss it for a day, or two, or five and God only knows when I’ll get it back in the lineup. One of the many joys of being a creature of habit, I suppose.

So yeah, there’s plenty going on in the world, but to continue with what seems to be the theme of the week, the worse the news gets, the less I care about the world and the more I care about me and mine. Maybe that’s a character flaw… or maybe it’s a thousand generations of human history screaming that the best any of us can really do is making right by our own circle of family and friends. Then again, I’m just a half-assed blogger so you might want to take that with a grain of salt. I, on the other hand, will be taking it with a cool refreshing rum drink.

Hard work…

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You wouldn’t know if from how well put together this place is, but blogging is hard work. As ever, it’s a finely honed knife’s blade balancing what I want to write about versus what I’m going to say that gets me in trouble at the office, with friends, with family, with society in general, and in the eyes of the law. Other times it’s just the general daunting feeling you get when you sit down and try to make the cursor move across the page. In any case, sometimes there is plenty to say, but none of it seems like quite an appropriate topic. During those times you end up sitting at the keyboard smashing out something that rambles one from point to point without ever getting to a “so what” moment. Sorry about that, but it’s just the way it goes. Sometimes the only thing you can do is sit down and let your fingers do whatever it is they’re going to do and accept the final product as what it is… not exactly you best effort ever, but an effort none the less. For any of you out there who have spent any amount of time writing, you’ll know that occasionally that’s as good as it gets.

Casting call…

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I’ve had the feeling for a while that I’m getting pretty repetitive on this thing… That the font of new blog ideas has been running towards empty. Being a creature of habit, new and interesting stories can get a little tough to find. I’ve got a couple of ideas in the works… like my 2008 presidential endorsement, but those aren’t quite ready for print just yet. Like I said, I just feel like I’m running out of Class A material. So, I’m going to throw open the door and take some requests… If you’ve got something you’d like to see a rant about or even just something I can assert a holier-than-thou position on, let me know and I’ll try to accommodate. Yeah, that ought to be interesting…