A Thousand Days
Jan 28th
(If you’re wondering what I’m on about, read the first entry about the 1000 Day project, or take a look at the archive.)
So, this is it.
Day One Thousand (and, by extension, my thirtieth birthday) has come and gone. I’m still trying to sort things out – I’ve started writing this entry I don’t know how many times, and given up because I don’t know what to say.
I still don’t know what to say, but I’ve put this off too long already.
I’ll start small-scale, with what I managed in the last 100 days.
Mostly, I worked on the writing group. It’s taken an incredible amount of work – figuring out the technical aspects (it’s web-based, rather than in-person), putting it together, and trying to get it off the ground. I’m still working on it, but I’m feeling a lot more optimistic about it than I was. I think I might actually be able to make it work.
That took up at least 85 of the last 100 days. I did some other stuff – still building a grown-up wardrobe, still working on getting budgeting and writing and studying and everything in some sort of order – but mostly, it was the writing group.
And that’s good. It’s something solid, that actually makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, even if it’s still a work in progress.
Now. About the entire project.
When I started it, I had a number of (somewhat ill-defined) goals. I wanted to change things. That was basically it. I was freaking out because it felt like my thirtieth birthday was just around the corner, and… I wasn’t looking forward to it. Not even a little bit. My whole plan with this 1000 Days project was to break the inertia, and not completely dread my birthday.
Did I change my life? No, not entirely. Definitely not as dramatically as I’d hoped. I’m still trying to figure things out, still trying to move in the right direction.
But I didn’t dread turning thirty. I almost had a panic attack a day or two after my birthday, of the how-can-I-be-thirty-I’m-still-a-child variety, but it didn’t quite manage to take, and, really, I don’t expect those little episodes to disappear entirely. My birthday itself was good. I actually kind of enjoyed it.
That right there? That is progress.
In the past one thousand days, I’ve started to figure out what I really want to be doing. I’ve started embracing this whole ‘being a grown-up’ thing, or at least not hating the idea. I’ve picked up a bunch of new skills, and tried all kinds of things that hadn’t even occurred to me before. Some of them have failed miserably, but a lot of them haven’t. I’ve been doing things, rather than just thinking about them, or wondering if it’s even possible to change them.
And I know what I’m doing next.
I might not be out of my rut entirely, but I’m a million times better than I was three years ago. It’s kind of like my year in review. 2009 was good simply because it wasn’t as bad as 2008. I did more in the 1000 Days project than I’d even considered in the years prior.
I guess that means it worked.
Now that that’s out of the way.
Dec 31st
My sense of time has gone all screwy the last few weeks. I’ve been getting everything that needs to be done out of the way hours (or sometimes days) ahead of schedule, and I’ve spent far too much time convinced I was forgetting about something, but at the same time, I really don’t feel like it’s the last day of the year. I still feel like it’s sometime back in September.
But it isn’t. It’s December 31, and suddenly I feel like I should be evaluating things, or making plans, or both. (Maybe that’s what I forgot to do?)
2009 was… pretty good, actually. It was better than 2008, but that’s not saying much. (I really hate to consider how bad things would have to get to be worse than 2008, which started with a funeral on my birthday, and went downhill from there.) I didn’t manage to do everything that I’d hoped, but I did some of it, and there were no great tragedies, unless you count the loss of 70,000 words (which I still kind of do).
Actually, my biggest accomplishment of the year came just within the last few weeks.
I’ve started a writing group.
I’m still trying to get it off the ground–starting something like this just before the holidays probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could have done–but I have a good feeling about it. I’ve got a good group of people, and they all seem to be pretty enthusiastic about it. Once it really gets going, I think it’s going to be incredible. (And, yes: this is what was keeping me so busy earlier.)
Aside from that, I’ve already done a year-in-review thing over at 43 Things. I don’t need to go over it all again.
So, what are my plans for 2010?
I am going to do something with my writing, finally.
That’s it. Everything else I’ve been thinking about, everything else I want to do, is just a part of that.
See you next year.
Unpacking
Dec 15th
I’m back, finally.
Things are still a bit of a mess–importing from Movable Type into WordPress isn’t nearly as easy as it should be. Some of that was my fault–I got a bit impatient and started doing stuff before I did all the research–but not all of it. I’m still a bit impatient: I have to go back through the archives and clean everything up, but I wanted to open things up again now. (It’s probably best if you don’t dig too deep; there are broken links and missing tags and missing paragraph breaks everywhere.)
I’ve got a longer entry coming up soon; I’ve been busy while I’ve been gone, but I’m not quite ready to talk about it yet. A few days, maybe a week.
In the meantime, I’m going to try to get things cleaned up. (For once, I’m glad I don’t say much around here. Less to do.)
Oops again.
Dec 5th
Just noticed that some parts of the site–most parts of the site, actually–are still broken after that experimentation I was doing back in the summer.
I know what the problem is. I’ll patch it up in a moment, and fix it properly later this week.
EDIT: … ok, that didn’t work. For now, things are hopelessly broken. I’ll fix it properly as soon as I can (which probably means Monday or Tuesday.)
Damage Control
Dec 1st
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but it bears repeating: my computer is old–practically an antique at this point–and incredibly unreliable. It’s been upgraded over the years, but I’ve long since passed the point where it’s worth the effort and money to keep trying. I keep meaning to get a new machine, but it gets pushed aside by other things.
It crashes several times a day, and pretty much every crash corrupts something. I’ve learned to live with it. I backup obsessively, and I’ve become very, very good at restoring preferences. Anything important exists in at least two locations.
And today, it wasn’t enough.
Today, I managed to lose both the draft I was working on–all 70,000 words of it–and the backup. Both files now sit at 0KB.
I’m trying to remember why I stopped backing up each day’s work as a separate file. It probably felt like overkill; I’d been doing it for a couple of years, and never needed to go back to an old version. If I lost work, it was usually only the work I’d done that day; anything older was still safe. It sucked, but it was never more than 3,000 words.
I’m kicking myself pretty hard right now.
I’m trying to look on the bright side. I didn’t lose all the work–I’ve been keeping pretty good notes about the changes I’ve been making–and I knew I wanted to go back and do another full draft before I showed it to anyone, but it isn’t easy.
So. What now?
I’m torn. I was waffling about writing through December anyway–it’s always a busy month for me–but I was determined to get the draft done by the end of the year. That’s clearly not going to happen anymore. I feel like I should jump right back into it, try to regain at least a little of my lost ground, but it feels a bit hopeless.
I could go over the old draft, and the notes I’ve been taking while working on this one, and figure out what changes need to be made. Build the next draft on a more solid foundation–a proper third draft, rather than just the second second draft.
Right now, though, I think I’m going to start pricing out new computers.
