12.31.07

Three Sixty Five

Posted in Rants, Site News at 8:14 am

First, a note. With this post, boys and girls, I have done it. I have made at least one blog post every day in 2007. My most visible resolution from last year is now complete. I’m still amazed that I managed to get it all taken care of; that despite having 72 Bailout days, there was something new up every day. I guess this makes me an official blogger or something.

(Xbox Live Dead Update: It’s good and busted now. I’m not the only one having trouble with their gamercard, and thus I feel both that this is a problem that will get fixed, and schadenfreude. Mostly schadenfreude.)

Anyway, we’ll save the navel-gazing for later. Right now I want to detail the plan for 2008. I’m not going to be doing too much more coding on the site, really; I do enough of that at work. Now, that said, I’ll probably get struck with inspiration sometime this year and work on a programming project or something. But don’t expect the Dynamic Toys of years gone by; I’m not that kind of a nerd anymore. I’ll stick with tweaked Wordpress and SMF, thank you very much.

What is going to change is the content. I’m going to continue with daily updates (sort of), but they’re going to be staggered between blog.TFO and my LiveJournal. I went Permanent on the LJ back in the summer and promptly forgot about it; during the fall, however, I started doing weekly updates. So, I’m going to alternate days and weeks on a MWF/TuTh schedule. This week is special due to the holiday, so tomorrow we’ll see posts on both sites, but the remainder of the week sees TFO.net ascendant with the three-day schedule. The LJ will get the two-day setup this week. Next week, LJ gets three days while TFO.net gets two, and vice-versa. Weekends will be silent on both fronts from now on; I think I’ve earned that conceit. If you’re confused, don’t be; I’ll have reminder posts on TFO.net through January to point you in the right direction. I’m still working on a way to integrate both sides on the front page, but we’ll see how or if that works out.

Why would I divide my content? It’s mostly the same ol’ crap, right? Well, that’s the thing. I’m going to try to keep things from bleeding over as badly as they have before. What’s going to happen now is that TFO.net’s posts will be general life stuff as well as writing, while the LJ posts will be mostly gaming and anime related. This keeps everyone largely happy. I’m a little worried that this is going to change some of the dynamic around here, as comments will also be divided, but you win some and you lose some. Also, this is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. By defining days and locations specifically for certain topics, I should be able to cut down on the amount of Bailout used. (It failed with my “Link Wednesday” trial at the beginning of 2007 because Link Wednesdays are actually a lot more work than I initially thought them to be.) There might be some events which take up an entire week on one side or another– like Essay Week, or an upcoming game/anime project I’m mulling over– but those will be announced pretty far in advance.

Overall, I think this is a good way to improve the overall quality of the writing on the site. Bailout is a vice, and I hate writing short, curt excuse-posts. I really do enjoy just blasting out long entries (like this one, as a matter of fact) and I’m going to try to make sure that what you see on both sides is worth reading. That’s the big resolution– to improve as a writer by actually writing.

Let’s do that navel-gazing, hm? I tallied up all of the words written in the blog for 2007, counting this entry, and found the results to be quite fascinating. August was my most prolific month, with Essay Week pushing me into the range of 16,400 words; conversely, the runup to and exhaustion of Otakon in July produced only 6779 words. I only had five months where I came in under 10,000 words, and most of those were in the beginning. Overall, through the course of one year’s events, delights, and disasters, I wrote a grand total of 125,000 words on this site (counting this entry). That number, of course, completely disregards additional writing I did, including Netjak reviews, forum posts, and other miscellaney. It also puts into perspective the fiction writing I did– let’s say 30,000 words for Inconsequential, the 114,000 of Harvesting Blueberries (plus 20,000 more in character sketches prior to November), 10,000 for Metal Rogue (which I really must restart sometime), and maybe 5,000 in miscellaneous other fiction here and there. I wrote what basically amounts to two and a half books this year. Frightening that I can be so freaking wordy, isn’t it?

Enough self-congratulations, I suppose. I wish you all a Happy New Year’s, and hope that you all party as much as I want to. Catch you all in Election Year.

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