Busy, busy week at work. Barely had time to work on other projects.

I have decided that I'd better start measuring my various projects. Otherwise, they stay as ignored goals on the walls of my studio.

I'm leery of measurement; we live in an overly analytical world. But I think this sort of measurement is justified. A way of saying, "I'm here, and I want to be there, and if I see the gulf, I'll figure out how to cross it."

I'm four thousand words into a very rough draft of the next Giant Armors novel. I'm trying something different this time.

With my last novel, I wrote progressively longer summaries. I started with notes, then wrote a half-page summary, then a three-page summary, then a twelve-page summary, then the whole novel. I called this my shellac method, of adding flesh to skeletons.

With this one (randomly titled The Green Dawn), I started with notes, then wrote a three-page summary. Now, I'm writing a full-length draft that I plan to completely rewrite. I want to get this down, in detail, even though the details will all change as I identify themes and find apt descriptions. With this, I'm working out implications in real time. I can see a lot more at once, oddly, even though I'm working in the weeds.

This keeps my momentum going. I don't worry about getting every word right; if a phrase bothers me, I add a footnote and forge ahead. So I'm creating a fairly complete body as I go, even though it'll need extensive cosmetic surgery.

Well, I'm four thousand words in, and it's working thus far. I'm about a third of the way through, which means I need to create some subplots in the middle of the book if I want to keep this from being a novella. But I can do that, I think, as I find themes.

The most important thing, I find, is to just keep going. Get in a few hundred words a day. I set a soft goal (an ideal that I measure myself against while knowing I probably won't hit it, to see how close I'll get) of 1,000 words a day this week, and obviously didn't fulfill it. So I'll aim for 500 words a day this week.

Ah yes. I have a blog. Forgot about that for a while.

Just been busy with other things. Who has time for a blog when there's food to cook, novels to write, animations to draw, and books to read?

Books! A few book recommendations:

Temeraire volume 1, by Naomi Novik. Imagine Master and Commander, with the addition of fire-breathing dragons. Novik creates a believable world with fun characters.

By Right of Conquest, or With Cortez in Mexico. A novelization of Cortez's "conquest" of Mexico. I love this bit of history, and this book captures all the high drama in an action-filled story. This book has everything.

The Uncommon Reader, a novella in which the present Queen of England discovers a love of books, late in life. The book deftly explores her unique situation and regrets.

I thank my Amazon Kindle for the capacity for all the above books. I spent a lot on it, and I regret not a penny.

A few bits and pieces:

• Back from a trip to see Brennen in Colorado. A beautiful place, and a great guy to talk with for a weekend. I feel privileged to know him. And I'd love to see that generic document markup language.
• There's a great little article at Gamasutra about the Fun of Super Mario Galaxy (free registration may be required). It mentions the four types of fun: hard fun (beating a challenge), easy fun (exploration, manipulating the environment, etc.), social fun, and what I'll call sense-a-wunder fun (amazement and wonder at abilities, plot twists, etc.). Most games focus only on hard fun; great games include several of them. Super Mario Galaxy has all of them.
• Tried to watch The Godfather last night. An hour into it, I realized that I didn't care about any of the characters, and really didn't want to see any of them succeed or survive. So I popped out the disc.
• Also tried to watch The Triplets of Belleville. The character designs were unappealing and the movie lacked any narrative structure. After about twenty minutes, that came out of the DVD player, and I slipped in and re-enjoyed two episodes of The Critic. Amazing that I still laugh at episodes that I've seen half a dozen times.
• Classes have started again. I'm teaching two courses, and contemplating adding a third. They're only two hours long, Monday and Wednesday nights, for two and a half months, so they feel like side projects instead of part-time jobs at this point. Which is good.
• Hosted a wonderfully successful little dinner party with my parents and a few friends. The menu: Asian orange salad (spinach, mandarin oranges, crunchy Asian noodles, and sweet onion salad dressing), hearty vegetable soup, ciabatta, hearty multi-grain bread, and pumpkin pie. I plan to do a party every month or so, with a different group of four or five friends.
• I'm planning to make a short animated film from scratch. Crazy, I know, but I think it's the only way I can move forward in the animation realm. I have a plot and a high-level storyboard; I'm now drawing the full storyboard.

And that's all I can think of going on at the moment.