Bhagwan @ Large

Two Months is a long time #fb

I’m not even going to try and summarize. Added categories which should catch just about everything to this post.

So I guess I should talk about two things in particular. TiVO and weight loss. Or rather, the lack of both since January.

The TiVO situation is a customer service nightmare, one which seems to have resolved, but not necessarily in my favor. There is a working box here in my home, which connects to the internet and/or the cable service as it chooses. If there is a Seattle local who would like to take TiVO for a test drive, I’m just about done with it. My contract expires in October, and two months without it has retrained my brain.

Two working Dvrs attached to my televison sounded like a great plan. Especially since they both have dual tuners, use different remotes and operating systems, and have about the same capacity.

But when I turn the television on, I’m checking out the cable first. The service that Lindsey is more comfortable with by far. The one I can cancel at will. The one that doesn’t make financial decisions on my behalf, against my express instructions.

The one that works.

In just a few days/weeks, there will be a media PC attached to this same television. It will do everything that TIVO does, and be even harder to use as a dvr. But we own that machine outright, can upgrade it at will, and also do more with it.

The case against TiVO mounts daily. At present, it’s the dvr that will allow us to save programs off and then burn them to DVDs. We are not doing that at present. It was part of my grand techno-plan, but that plan was concieved a while ago.

Two months is a long time.

I’m not sure what the plan is anymore. I needed a new computer at the end of January, after wanting one for sone time. I’ve been doing a lot of ‘need v want’ calculations of late, and needs that are really just wants happen to be free.

My computer was not free. It could have cost me much less than it did by far. Machines that could do the job I’m asking for would have come in at 2/3 the price, even without the customer service hassles I battled through to get it. But then I added a heaping helping of WANT on top, and the overall price of a rig I can use to work on for the next couple years doubled.

And I’m not entirely sure it’s finished.

Attention spans (including mine) are flagging, so I’ll leave you with this. A very wise man once said, “in time, you will find that having is not so great a thing as wanting.”

I’m looking at my half-finished system, with a giant stack of media as yet unwatched alongside, and I’m convinced that green blooded, inhuman sophist was right. What’s worse, I’m not really sure I wanted it in the first place. Maybe I just like shopping, and putting things together.

More later.

Monday, Monkey Monday

Perhaps not as much monkey as we were led to beleive. So much the better.

Today is the first day in a very long time that I actually have something to do that is not sit/lie on the couch watching television before playing video games. Correspondingly, here I an awake at 3 AM, and then writing on this newly redesigned and resurrected web page.

On my couch, of course. iPod ownership continues to pay fantastic dividends.

I am this close to being tired enough to sleep. Then my stomach started growling a fair pace, which actually bodes well for the rest of the day. If I can maintain that “lean edge” throughout the rest of the day, that old creative fervor may kick in.

It was going in spades yesterday, as I migrated the main site over to a new, more 21st century format. Oddly enough, it’s very much like what I wanted to do back in 2002 when I first started working on bhagwanx.com. Just better, and not designed by me.

I do take no small amount of pride in saying that my original ‘02 pages still hold up well. Almost all of the 04/05 non-blog content will need editing and revision, but the foundation on which my online empire is made is still strong.

So much so that those pages and their solid internal structure are proving remarkably stubborn to update to the spiffy new, looser and enhanced format. I may just cobble together a new style sheet for the legacy stuff with a nav bar similar to the site’s theme, and be done with it.

But that’s a project for much later. Before the digression into me, I was going to write about my characters, and their inability to let me be. Thinking about the new novel and the transitons taking place in the next 5k words or so is not very sleep friendly.

I blame my success for my failure. During November’s writing spree, I was writing sequentially through some pretty tight action when I realized that something was about to happen to one of the cast.

Something important. Something so big, in fact, that it ties together all the other stories into one blanketing whole. A completely unexpected plot element which not only gives me a good hook into the next book (this one is set in a science fiction universe in which I have written another treatment), but redefines and enhances all I’ve written in this one.

So I had to jump ahead. I needed to write the revelation, and in doing so, lost my focus on the action. Now knowing in more concrete terms–rather than my nebulous story point outline–where things are heading, I found it difficult to fill in the lines.

So much so that I in fact wrote the first chapters of an entirely different universe and book instead.

Four times. Each time I did so, the characters told me more and more about themselves, until I was left with something very much like my original story nugget, but far more compelling and publishable. Taking ten days off from one book to write another does not help the first one along.

Especially when the story for that one has been percolating since the final edit of the book currently out for consideration. The very same story that kept me from substantive progress on the sequel/second book/ continuation of that soon to be rejected masterpiece this last summer.

I managed to come back to it while traveling in December, but it’s slow going at present. And the reason is very apparent to me.

Shiny things are shiny. Like rice in a gourd, they can trap a poor monkey writer unwilling to let the grains out of his grasp.

Time to shake things up a little. Perhaps the morsels will fall free from the wrist-sized hole, once my authorial fist no longer blocks it.

Plus, it’s 5 AM. Time for bed.