In Pursuit of Rabbits

I have been doing some pondering lately, mostly about five-years plans and ‘perfect’ days, and I think I may be chasing the wrong rabbit.

Society has convinced us that we’re meant to run in circles chasing a prize agreed upon as ‘sufficiently rabbit-like’ and we spend our formative years in anticipation of running that race. Once we’re let loose on the track we do our best to run the way we’ve been taught. If we succeed or fail… we just line up and do it all over again.

So why don’t more of us start chasing the real rabbits when given the chance? (Only one of the dogs in the photo swapped targets).

Because no one else does.

We are all individuals, unique little snowflakes in a blizzard of humanity, but most of us aren’t mean to live individually. We survive and thrive because of the people around us (and sometimes in spite of them), but it’s finding acceptance in a group that really motivates our little lizard brains. We chase the fake rabbits because the crowd only cheers when we’re running in circles.

Think of the last time you were really proud of an accomplishment at work, or school, or in your personal life. Were your friends also proud? Your family? There’s a good bet that someone you value was doing the happy dance right along with you.

Now think of how you would have felt if no one else was cheering.

Sure, we’re told we should only please ourselves and that living our lives to please others will only end in Doom, but do you know anyone who has managed to please themselves without pleasing others? (We’re not including sociopaths here, for obvious reasons.)

That’s why experts tell you to exercise with a buddy and to surround yourself with positive people, to find friends that emulate the traits you’d like to have. They’re the kind of people who will celebrate your shared milestones, because pleasing yourself isn’t enough.

Maybe I don’t need to focus on finding just the right rabbit– maybe I need to focus on finding people who have already found theirs.

Finding a New Story to Tell

It has been a bit of a crazy month and my latest Novel_in_90 fell by the wayside much more rapidly than I feared.

SilverwitchThe main fault, I think, was starting with an established storyline. I spent a good bit of time cat-waxing over trying to get everything to match up well with what had gone before. (Sadly an even larger chunk of time was spent trying to track down all of the files in which ‘what had come before’ were saved.)

So this time I’m going to start with a blank page and slightly more organized intentions.

I’ve plotted out an hour each morning in which to get the 750 words done, and a bit of time in the evening to format it properly for posting. This attempt will be a bit more linear and thus an entertaining read (I hope) for anyone who wants to follow the madness.

Now I’m off to setup the treadmill-laptop for the first of the four 15 minute writing sessions I hope to get done today. We’ll see how the wordcounts roll…

20 Minutes of Something

seilF emiT

seilF emiT

At my workplace we are allowed two 10 minute breaks in addition to lunch, workload permitting. I’ve very rarely ever taken these breaks since a) I had too much work, b) I don’t smoke and c) my friends take theirs at times that don’t match up with my own work habits.

But as things have slowed down a bit, I’m now at the point where taking the two breaks would not impact my job performance. Since I’m not going to take up smoking and my friends won’t be there, I’m rather stumped about what to do with them. I have the feeling I should be doing Something, since the point of them is to give us a bit of downtime in which to recoup.

Sadly, the only thing I can think of doing as a break from a workday in which I stare at the computer all day… is to stare at the computer some more.

I’m not sure if we are allowed to access blogs from work on our breaks… but I wonder if it could hurt to ask. *ponders* 10 minutes isn’t much, but having polished my Word Sprinting skills last NaNoWriMo, I can get out a decent volume in uber-rough draft.

If I roughed out one post per break, that would give me two posts to polish once I got home. It’s much easier to sit down and edit after a workday of Left-brain heavy work than to start something new. Plus I have plenty of things that need drafting! (I’ve been making a list of things I’d like to write about for each of the blogs, but I’ve never gotten around to doing much more that the titles.)

If they say no, I’ll have to think of something else… which may involve sketchbooks and art supplies.

Or interpretive dance.

All Together Now (or: From Many, One.)

Blog Cascade

Blog Cascade

My husband made a very good point earlier today that has had me breaking out the note-cards and playing around with possibilities. He mentioned that he thought it would make more sense if I just combined everything into one blog instead of splitting things out into separate blogs.

Having one blog would mean less logging in and out of the various WordPress Dashboards. Less password and username forgetfulness. Less fiddling with the nine thousand email addresses. Less addon and theme updates to install. Less backups to store. Less tracking tools to manage. Basically, less headaches in general.

It would allow me to have one website, one email address, and one core identity online, instead of the rather fractured one I have now.

Hobby Disconnect

Hobby Disconnect

Originally I had split out my blogs because my interests/hobbies/topics have very little overlap (Model Horses vs World of Warcraft). I did the same thing on my LiveJournal with filters, but I’m serious thinking of declaring a do-over in both locations. Simplification is a key focus in my life at the moment and it’s interesting to consider what the negatives would be from falling back into a ‘all Martha, all the time’ setting.

The main negative I can think of would be a lack of focus, since the topics do have very little overlap. A loss of focus might mean a loss of readers, but I have very little traffic to the various blogs that doesn’t come in through a search engine to start with. Those few places that do link to the old pages can be handled with a simple redirect setup with my hosting provider.

(Speaking of which, I’ll have to reset all of the Google analytics and AdSense settings, and make sure the redirection and reposting doesn’t get me blacklisted by accident (eek!).)

Camera Angles

Comics Sans Away!

Another negative would be a loss of the visual distinctiveness that each blog currently has. The only website that really requires a separate WordPress theme is the comic strip (Camera Angles), so although they all have very different looks there isn’t anything forcing the differentiation. Having them separated is nice, but I’m not sure if the trade-off is worth it in the time an energy it takes me to maintain them all.

Something that’s not so much a negative as a massive undertaking would be having to sort out the best way to reorganize the Categories and Tags, but I didn’t put much thought into them to start with, so I suppose it couldn’t hurt to sit down and plan things out for once.

I’ll be poking about in the settings and trying out some ideas, so don’t panic if things look a little different (i.e. ‘broken’)… I’m just experimenting.

Tuesday Blues

There’s nothing quite like realizing you have forgotten it is garbage day (again) to make one feel like an accomplished adult.

After all, it’s not as if the garbage truck is some sort of stealth vehicle that nips in and out on random mornings and steals your trash like an anti-Santa. They are not chaotic beings pulled along by strange attractors, that may or may not pass by my house on any given morning. They are not quantum units that only sometimes exist in Euclidean space (ah Wikipedia, I should know better than to start playing in thee) or ghosts of garbage trucks past that collect only memories…

Nope, they come every Tuesday morning at roughly 8:30, baring holidays or hurricanes.

They have done this for the entire seven years we have lived in this house.

I’m going to go curl up in a corner, sip my coffee, and pretend that I was well aware of this fact prior to opening my front door and seeing that my neighbors are all actual adults and not just pretending.

Sip.

Leveling Guides (or: How to Learn From My Mistakes)

Foursome of DOOM

The Foursome of DOOM

I was taking stock of the blog this week and realized I’ve wandered off a bit from where I wanted to be with it. While I had planned on the various ‘what I learned today’ posts from my own leveling, I meant to focus more on helpful content for other folks just beginning to dual-box themselves. When I started out I had a hard time finding good guides on how to play and what skills and talents were more effective than others.

Which is not to say there aren’t good guides out there… I just couldn’t find them. Most of the multi-boxing websites focus on five man teams, which are amazing to watch, but I just don’t have that kind of bankroll. $30 a month is more or less my limit for money I’m willing to spend (unless I can find a way to make the hobby pay for itself! *daydreams*)

Home Sweet Home

Home Sweet Home

In order to keep myself more on track for what topics I should be covering, I’ve started dual-boxing leveling guides for each of the different pairs. They are listed under the Pages drop-down, but I may move that around later. For now I’m mostly just linking to the posts I’ve already written, but I’ll be working on expanding them to be as useful as possible. (If you have any requests or questions, just let me know!)

I’ve been going about this randomly so far and looking back there are places where I’ll need to level alts just to get the screenshots and whatnot that I need. Which is annoying, but I can always use more alts, so it’s not horrible either. Heck, anything under 20 is just for fun anyway.

So, I’ve got the Hunter – Hunter leveling guide roughed out and I will be working primarily on that guide this weekend.

Although I do have some ideas for new pairs to try…

Lament and Fallow

Lament and Fallow

Finding Solitude (or: Chasing Internet Squirrels)

I’ve started to wonder recently if the idea that a writer needs to seek out a quiet place to work is a personal fallacy. I’ve held it to be true for– well, nigh on forever at this point, but when I think back across the years it has rarely ever been true.

Maine “I write best up at the cabin in Maine.”

We went up to my grandparents cabin in Maine every summer when I was a kid. For a month or two we’d spend time playing on the rocky seashore, fishing, and enjoying our break from ‘real life’. (Which included running water, telephones, but thankfully not electricity.)

We read books, wrote books, played boardgames with the assembled extended family and went garage sale-ing on the weekends. We reveled in all the things that there wasn’t time for at home and it was pure unadulterated bliss.

It’s true that I wrote the most (and the most freely) in Maine, but it was rarely ever alone. I had grand fun co-authoring stories with my brother as well as writing while a thousand other things were going on in the background. It could be just as true to say ‘I write best with family.’ Which makes me miss Maine and family something fierce… Someday I will find a job that gives me ample vacation time, or allows two month sabbaticals every few years. *sighs*

Follow Your Muse‘I write best alone in the quiet.”

Hah. I can’t actually think of a time where this was ever true. Even now, having moved my computer into my own little office area, I’m pausing to have conversations with my husband, pet the dogs and listen to dissertations on ‘why monkeys suck’ from the cat (who is annoyed I am petting the dogs and not her). This is not quiet, nor alone in any stretch of the definition. Add to that the fact that my most prolific writing for NaNoWriMo came in the form of weekly Write-ins and I really can’t pin down when I started thinking this was a personal truth.

Now I’ll admit to the same cat-waxing tendencies as anyone else. Looking for the perfect secluded place to write, away from distractions and temptation is an acceptable method of avoiding putting words on a page… but for me, it might be worse if I actually found what I was looking for.

So maybe it’s time I redefined solitude. *skritches the Fluffy!Puppy head* Maybe it has more to do with surrounding myself with things that encourage writing (like NaNo or siblings) rather than trying to reduce the things that don’t (the internet in general). While I love spending my time chasing internet squirrels (Stumble, Farmville, Etsy), there are a thousand things offline that also ‘need doing’ so I can’t every really escape the chance for procrastination.

But darned if I’m not going to miss Maine anyways. *sighs*

Novel_in_90 Reboot (Redux?)

Novel_in_90 I’ve started playing in the Novel_in_90 LiveJournal community again, thanks to a post on Friday asking when the next round was starting. (There aren’t rounds, as such, it’s a ‘jump in at any time’ setup in which you are aiming for a personal 90 day run.)

I’d been looking at ways to get back into the daily writing rhythms and the community slipped my mind for some reason. Amusingly I had even started fiddling without outlines for this year’s NaNoWriMo and was chomping at the bit to get started. I hadn’t really forgotten about the comm, but it hadn’t been on the top of my mind either. It’s one of those ‘sounds like a good idea!’ that you routinely forget exists until you stumble over it again.

The comm has been relatively quiet recently, so I’m taking the opportunity to psych myself up and be at least mildly entertaining to the other folks who are coming to play. I’ve made the 750 word count two days in a row and if I can just keep that momentum rolling through the work week, I should be set. I’m thinking of devoting time in the morning to writing, which would be a nice change from my routine of mindlessly surfing the interwebs. (Chasing Internet Squirrels, FTW!)

So if anyone else is interested, come on by Novel_in_90 and join in the fun!