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By Tgreen, June 3, 2010 12:31 am

More doodling with Brushes. Not much time to do anything more these days.

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By Tgreen, May 13, 2010 11:52 pm

Somehow I knew, even if I didn’t want to admit it, that everything was gonna go off the rails the minute I hit all my writing goals in April. And sure enough, I finished my 100 script pages, submitted my story to The First Line, picked up an iPad while traveling through New Jersey to get a sandwich, and my work ethic fell off the face of the earth. Partly this was because of the iPad, a crazy fun time sink that I’ll be writing about in more detail shortly, and partly because that final scramble to hit deadlines kind of kicked my ass. I still have about 30 or so script pages to write, of which I’ve finished maybe 4, and several stories to edit, but how can that compete with getting Apps and videos on my iPad?

The slow return of late work hours isn’t helping, of course. I have it on good authority that tomorrow will be one of those days where the only way to survive will be to do the work of 2 people as quickly and gracefully as possible. It’s been a few months since one of those days, so I don’t know for sure if I can still do it, but I’ll give it a shot.

Before work got bad again, I was trying to figure out how to format my NANOWRIMO novel to get my free proof copy. Back in December I dutifully bought a binder and printed out a copy so I could do a first pass edit on the thing before I had it made into a book just so the book would be better than first draft quality. I had all the time in the world, too, because the free proof copy offer is good until the end of June. And yet my editing never got past reading about 3/4ths of the book before petering out. Which is why I’m now trying to format that first draft to get my free proof. First draft proof is better than no proof at all.

The editing didn’t die out so much because the writing sucked or the story was a nightmare. Maybe it was only a little of that. A major issue was that after writing the thing in a mad rush in November, a story title lurked in the back of my head. I didn’t know why, or what it meant, but the name lingered and came to the forefront every now and then and eventually I had to fire up the Google and see what the deal was. What I learned wasn’t pretty.

You see, the title, which I will not be sharing here, was of a pretty famous short story that was turned into a big movie starring a huge Hollywood star. And this story shared a couple of not-minor concepts with the book I wrote last year. I never read the story, but I did see the movie. My book more resembled the story than the movie, because they changed a lot for the movie. But still, troubling and it made me wonder if it was worth doing anything more with this thing. I still wanted my free book, but I figured that might be it.

Then, this week, I was reading something on a message board and someone wrote how life would be so cool if only “idea X” existed. And guess what? “Idea X” was what my book is about. “Idea X” is nowhere to be found in this short story or movie, but it’s all over my book. So maybe the thing isn’t a lost cause. Who knows? I’ll have to figure it out after I get the proof book.

And what does this have to do with anything? Not much, but at this point I’ll do almost anything to avoid going to sleep right now, because to go to sleep means I’ll have to wake up and go to work Friday, and I sure as he’ll don’t want to do that.

But for now, all the writing has gone completely off the rails. Now it’s time to grab hold and get things working again, before I get sucked into that Netflix app. Stupid sexy iPad.

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By Tgreen, May 12, 2010 12:45 am

Loosely based on some guy on tonight’s D train. Drawn in Brushes on the iPad.

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By Tgreen, April 1, 2010 10:19 pm

The company I work for uses GMail for our office email, which was not something I was used to but I got into it pretty quickly. It was nice for a change to be able to access work emails from anywhere. Not that I’m desperate to come home every night and see if anything interesting has happened at the office since I left, but it’s let me work from home without hassle, update my boss on some info from two states away, and at least once explain to a bunch of people at once why the A train was making me very late. So after a couple of years of this, I can safely say that GMail = cool.

Recently, though, something unexpected happened that has me wondering if it’s time to rethink my relationship with GMail. As I often do in my job, I had to take a screen shot to send to someone as a way to explain what was wrong with the page I was testing. So as I wrote my notes, I included a little aside that said see attached after I explained the issue in question. As I also often do in my job, when it came time to send the email, I’d forgotten to actually attach the screen shot. Whenever this happened in the past, it would lead to an exchange much like this one:

Programmer: Where’s the screen shot?
Me: D’oh!

Not this week. No, this week, I wrote my test notes and forgot my attachment and sent the email out to maybe half a dozen people when suddenly Gmail itself stopped me with a message that said, you wrote “see attached” but you did not attach anything; do you want to send this email? It was at this point where I wondered if GMail = kinda stalkerish.

So I added my attachment and sent my email and Gmail looked at me with a smug expression that said, yeah, I covered for you this time, but if you continue to slack off like this eventually even I won’t be able to keep your sorry ass employed. And this made me wonder how closely GMail was reading my emails, and if there were any other ways for it to help me out. I mean, I deal with some confidential stuff, so am I supposed to be comfortable with the fact that my confidential email is being shared between me, some coworkers, and GMail? Or should I trust that confidential or not, most of these emails are so boring that they’d put even a computer to sleep? Either way, this just drilled home the point that someone’s always watching us. At least this time it was watching and was willing to help. So maybe ultimately GMail = my new best friend.

Which is why my coworkers are already sick of seeing every one of my emails this week ending with the sentence I really, really want an iPad.