An update

I thought it might be high time to update the old blog with recent events, but before I do that...

Hello to all my new subscribers!

It seems a bit odd to me that the number of people who subscribe to my blog should quadruple in the three weeks I don't post anything, but it is what it is. I hope you enjoy what you find here and that you make your presence felt in the comments.

Now, on to the news which consists mostly of;

• I finally finished the short story I've been working on. Again.
• I'm modifying my vision for the blog slightly. Again.
• We (the Baby, the Wife, and I) are off to Canada in 10 days for a visit. For the first time. 

The Short Story

First, the short story. I wrote a short story almost a month ago. I was very pleased with it, especially with the second half of it which I wrote in an hours-long cathartic burst of creative YARGH! Two or three days later I copied the document from my tablet to my desktop so I could start editing. I write on both machines, so when it popped up saying there was already a file by that name I thought nothing of it. "Copy over that one," I said.

So I lost the last half of my short story. The part where the language flowed like burgundy and dripped like liquid gold. The part where the characters came right off the page and burrowed into your brain and built a nest there. The part where the awesome happened. I'd forgotten that I'd written the last part of the story on the desktop, not on the tablet. I actually wept.

This is in large part why I haven't been very active with the blog for a few weeks. I haven't actually been writing anything - nothing creative anyway. I've been active on twitter (active for me, anyway). I've been very active on Google+ (you should sign up, if you haven't). I've even been active on Facebook. What I haven't been doing, however, is writing. I couldn't.

The loss of those few pages of writing crippled me a little. I was intimidated by myself, I guess. The section of writing I lost was good. Really good. The thought of trying to recreate it made me feel nauseous. So I didn't try.

Finally, yesterday, I looked myself right in the brain and said, "So are you a f**king writer, or aren't you?" It turns out the answer is yes. I didn't recreate the section I'd lost, but I did write it again. It isn't as good now as I remember the first version being, but at least now it exists in some form. More importantly, I feel as though I've passed a hurdle. The burden I felt slide from me as I hit save is indescribable (and I'm reasonably proficient at describing stuff).

So I'm back to writing again. Onward and Upward.


The Blog

This one is pretty simple, really. I realized that while I'm interested in technology, I'm not interested enough to write about it regularly. So I won't.

Likewise, I don't listen to enough new music to write about music regularly. So I won't.

I watch the same two or three TV shows and usually not until several days after they air. If I were to write about TV it would be quite repetitive and not at all timely. So I won't.

I will continue to write about China. I enjoy that, and I've gotten the impression that my readers do as well.

I will also write about writing, at least writing from my point of view. As I travel along this road of becoming a professional storyteller, I'll share the bumps and snags and pitfalls I encounter and the ways I find to cope with them. For example, yesterday I learned that swearing at your own brain helps you stop refreshing social networking sites and makes you finish a story.

I will also post some things about music and technology from time to time, but only when I feel like it. I am also getting back into photography again these days, so I may share some of what I'm learning in that arena as well. It tends to tie in with my China posts because, after all, I'm mostly taking pictures of things in China.

As I continue to change and evolve, so too will my blog. This plan is only in effect until the next plan takes over. :)


The Trip


So. We leave in 10 days. It's a 24 hour journey - 16 hours on a plane, 3 hours in an airport, another couple of hours on a smaller plane and voila! We're there. Doing this with an 18 month wiggleworm is going to be... interesting. I have plans for that (they involve Teletubbies and Shaun the Sheep on my tablet, mostly) so we'll see how that works.

This trip is the other reason I haven't been present around here much of late. We will be gone for two and a half weeks, and we don't have enough time between when we get back and the end of the term to make up all the classes we'll have missed while we're gone, so we've been working overtime to make up the classes before we go.

I've only been back to Canada once in the past 8 years, and this will be the first time my wife or son have been there at all, so to say we're excited doesn't really cover it. Current plans include a weekend in the Canadian Rockies, a number of BBQs, a fishing trip to northern Saskatchewan, a weekend in Calgary with a couple of the best people in the world (and probably a trip to the zoo), and a bunch of relaxing with my family. Heck, I checked out of here mentally two weeks ago.

Umm, yeah.

So, that's what's been up with me. What about you?

For my new subscribers in particular, but also for anyone who happens to be reading this, tell us a bit about yourself in the comments. Who are you and what do you like to do? Do you have a blog? A website? A google+ profile? Can we add you on twitter? Do you raise purebred dalmatians for fire houses? Inquiring minds want to know, and blogger only tells me how many of you there are, not who you are. Unless you say something down below I have no way of getting to know you.

Cheers,

Mike

Writing Friday: How Useful is deviantArt?

The Beginning Part

Last September I made a decision to seriously pursue my dream of becoming a professional writer. One of the things I thought would be helpful was to find an online writing community to take part in. My reasoning was that I'd been away from writing for quite some time and it would be good to get feedback from people who had no vested interest in making me feel good about myself. Also, given that I live in a city of about 1 million people where fewer than 30 or 40 people are fluent in the English language and only 2 of us can claim it as our native tongue, maybe I wasn't as fantabulous with the verbiage as I thought I was. As my ability in French attests, language skills atrophy with disuse.

So, off I went to the internet, in search of a critique group. Google provided me with the names and addresses of several, and I ended up joining deviantArt. This turned out to be a reasonably good choice, although not a permanent one. While deviantArt has some qualities that are invaluable for a beginning writer, the site was not originally designed for writers, it's focus has never been and never will be writers, and eventually anyone who is serious about writing professionally will find it outlives its usefulness relatively quickly. 

Out of the short list of candidates, I chose deviantArt for two main reasons; it is free, and it seemed friendly. Also, while most of the other groups I found dealt solely with novel length works, deviantArt is more suited for shorter pieces, and I didnt want to get involved with a novel just yet. You don't want to start off your first swim in a years with a cliff dive and a trek across the English Channel, no matter how good a swimmer you think you used to be.

As I mentioned above, there are a number of great things about deviantArt. It is free although you can pay for additional features that, while somewhat useful, are not actually necessary. Also, it really is friendly. Possibly as a result of feeling marginalized by the visual art folks, the writing community on deviantArt is one of the most open groups of writers I've ever met. The level of snark is so low, in fact, that I was tempted to check for a pulse on several occasions.

The Middle Part

The main reason for joining a writing group is, of course, to get feedback on your writing. There are a number of groups on dA that encourage their members to critique each other's work; The Written Revolution, and litPlease come to mind as standout examples. There is also a fully functional "critique" system that allows you to critique someone's work in a separate section from the general comments as well as assigning ratings to various aspects of the work. This used to be a premium function, but I believe it is currently available to everyone. Even when it wasn't, critiques can be left in the comment section without too much difficulty.

The writing community, in addition to being almost snarkless, is also fairly active. There are always contests and prompts and chat events and any number of other activities going on. At least, it seems that way. Once you start to dig a little deeper, though, you notice that most of the activity is being generated by the same 10-15 people week after week, with varying degrees of engagement from the rest of the members. And this is where we come to the negative side of dA as a writing group; outside of the small handful of stalwarts the rest of the members are pretty useless.

At first I was quite excited by the sheer volume of content being posted to the more active groups. As a reader, I was thrilled by the chance to sample so many up and coming writers. After the first few weeks I'd completely changed my tune. The vast, vast majority of the writing posted to deviantArts writing groups is poetry; angsty, poorly written, adjective laden, free verse poetry. The remainder is mostly fan fiction (again, mostly of poor quality) with the occasional gem of an original work of prose buried in the dross.

Given the quality of the writing going on there, I shouldn't have been surprised by the quality of the critiquing. It is awful. I would frequently write critiques 2 or 3 times as long as the piece I was critiquing; analysing line by line and making suggestions for word choice, structure, pacing, character, dialogue, and in some cases very basic things like how punctuation works and the difference between they're, their, and there. The critiques I got were mostly along the lines of "This is really good! :P :D lol" and if the piece was longer than 500 words or so I was lucky to get even that as very few people will actually read anything that long. This brings us to the other downside to deviantArt as it pertains to the serious writer; age.

I think the average age of the users on dA is about 15 with the fat part of the bell curve resting snugly between 13 and 17. I don't know about you, but I'm 37 years old. The things I have in common with most of the dA writing community are mostly of the "we're both bipedal, carbon-based life forms" variety. The vast majority of the time I felt like I was teaching a high-school English class only, instead of it being normal students with one or two hippy-dippy, reality impared cornflakes, the whole class was hippy-dippy, reality impared cornflakes. The kind of students who say things like, "No one can define art." and "I write free verse poetry because I don't believe in rules. Shakespeare didn't follow rules.", and "You can't critique my poem because it's about how I feel.", and "Who cares about spelling? Stop being a grammer natzi." Sigh.

The End Part

In spite of the bad poetry and the lack of meaningful critique, I truly did enjoy my dA experience. I say did because I've more or less withdrawn completely from my involvement there. I just don't have the extra time to spend on something that won't move me closer to being a professional writer, and I've accomplished everything on dA that I'm going to accomplish. I met a handful of wonderful people, some of whom I'll remain in contact with outside of dA. I confirmed that I'm at least a better writer than the vast majority of high-school students, and I developed a few story ideas that might even turn into readable novels some day.

The take away from all this is that if you are a writing hobbyist, or you just aren't quite ready to make your play for publication, deviantArt is awesome. It's a friendly, safe environment to give your writing chops a workout and practice your craft. There are groups that provide writing prompts and contests and a sense of community. If you are serious about writing and have professional aspirations, however, you might want to look elsewhere. Where, I haven't quite figured out yet.

My deviantArt profile is here, but you can only read my "deviations" if you're a member; first rights and so forth. 


Do you have any experience with online writing communities, either paid or free? Any suggestions for sites to avoid, or recommendations for places to go? Give the world a heads up and let us know in the comments below.


Ps. In case you were wondering, someone told me I should have headings if I want people to read my blog because no-one likes a "wall of text" (except people who read books, I suppose), so I put in some headings. Do you like them? They also said I should have a bullet list, but I didn't have anything I wanted to shoot at and I wasn't feeling list-y.

My first post about writing... mostly.

Like most people with a creative bent, I am frequently plagued by consistently low self-esteem and crippling bouts of self-doubt. This often causes me to question both the wisdom and the motivation behind many of my decisions, although not usually until long after it is possible to make a different decision. This is why I'm dedicating my first writing post to answering the same question every other writing blogger has answered for their first post since time immemorial; "why do I want to be a writer", or more specifically, "why do I want to be a professional writer of fiction?"

I won't lie to you and say that people often ask me why I want to be a writer. They don't. The only writing related questions anyone ever asks me are, "when will your novel be finished" and "can I read it?" I won't be addressing those questions here though, as they are too easily answered ("eventually", and "only if you are willing to either buy it or edit it" respectively), and don't provide me with adequate space to be witty and charming on a blog that no-one few people read.

Sheepish grin, begin again.

The two months of silence following my last post may have clued you in, but allow me to confirm what you may have already suspected: this year's NaNoWriMo attempt was, again, a complete failure.

Well, perhaps I should qualify that. I finished up the month of November at a word count of 5155 words - somewhat short of my (admittedly hubristic) goal of approximately 200,000 words. I failed to complete the first chapter, never mind two novels. I didn't even come close to achieving my goals, so in that respect I failed. I did, however, learn an incredible amount about myself, the writing process, and how the one fits with the other. 

You may have noticed, in my last post, that I referred to my plans in terms of how many hours I had available. I ended up setting my writing goals that way - in terms of time spent. This was a mistake. "Butt in chair" is a vital concept for someone who wants to be a writer, but it is a prerequisite, not a goal. I will forever more set writing goals in terms of words on the page, because that is the only metric that means anything. 4,000 words is 4,000 words but 3 hours of buttchair time could be anything from several thousand words to none (psst, it was none more often than not). The goal is to put words on paper, not to sit in front of a computer for a certain length of time.

Goals were an important aspect of my learning experience in this year's NaNo. I learned that I had set crappy ones. The goals I set for myself in November were concrete goals, so I didn't fall into that trap, but they weren't the goals I really wanted to achieve. On the day to day side of things, I didn't want to spend a certain amount of time in front of the computer, I wanted to write a certain number of words. With my goals for the month, I came to realise that what I truly wanted to accomplish was not so much the writing of a novel, but the publishing of a novel. While the writing of a novel is a necessary (and thoroughly enjoyable) step in achieving that goal, it isn't necessarily the best first step.

One of the reasons jumping right into the writing of a novel was a bad first step for me is that I lack endurance. A novel takes a very long time to write. Weeks and months of grinding away at something without getting any meaningful feedback from anyone but yourself. It seems impossible for me to maintain the self-belief necessary to keep plodding away in the absence of feedback. The doubt begins to creep in: I've never published anything. Why would I invest this much time and effort into something without a reasonable expectation of success? Keeping in mind that my end goal for writing a NaNo novel was always to get it published, and also keeping in mind how difficult this is to achieve, these doubts had the not inconsiderable heft of truth and reason behind them.

Luckily for me I was, at one time in my life, a high-performance athlete. I know how to build endurance. I know how to build it safely, efficiently, and (most important of all) how to maintain it once you've built it up. You don't build endurance by going as hard as you can for as long as you can, until you drop from exhaustion. You build endurance by going as hard as you can, for short periods of time, as often as you can. As the time required for recovery decreases the time you perform for increases until you can go as hard as you want for as long as you want and still go out dancing that night. Mind out of the gutter, people.

With that strategy in mind, and with my newly refined writing goals in hand, I have embarked on a new journey.

TaDaaaaaaaa!

I am signing up for "Write 1 Sub 1". The idea is that you write one piece of fiction (of any length) every week and submit one piece of fiction (not necessarily the same one) for publication every week for a year. As the first week of January is pretty much over now, I'll be writing two next week and then at least one a week after that. I've got my market listings ready to go, I've got duotrope bookmarked, and I've got a list of story ideas a quarter of a mile long. I'm locked and loaded. Time to build some endurance.

The writing part is under my control. I will write a minimum of 52 pieces of short fiction this year. Submitting is likewise under my control. I will submit a minimum of 52 pieces of short fiction this year. I'm hoping to publish at least one of those pieces, but that is less under my control than the others so I'm not going to state it as a goal (just a hope). Write and submit, this I can do.

Now who's with me?

NaNo minus 13 (hours)

As of right now I have exactly 13 hours before I am allowed to start hammering out my NaNoWriMo novels. I am nowhere near ready. I have yet to finish my scene list, or most of my characters for that matter. I do, however, have about 6 free hours today in which to sort out those piffling details and get the jet pack (metaphorically) strapped on. I thought I'd take this calm before the storm to fill everyone in on my plans for this November; what software I'll be using, what strategies I'll be employing, what goals I'll be setting, and all that sort of thing.

I have been using, and will continue to use, yWriter for my planning and desktop based writing. I like the way it deals with scenes and chapters. I also like that it's free, and that I already know how to use it. I will not be using Scrivener. It's not that I dislike Scrivener, it's just that I am already familiar with how yWriter works and I'd rather spend time planning my novels (and blogging about it) than learning a new software package.

In addition, I will be using Evernote and Dropbox. Evernote is where I keep bits of ideas that occur to me when I'm not actually writing, and links to resources I might find useful while writing. Dropbox is where I keep my yWriter project file. This means I can access my WIP from either home or work with equal ease. Dropbox rocks my world.

I also just ordered my new toy tool. I should be receiving my brand new, shiny Asus Eee pad (Transformer - TF101) either this evening or sometime tomorrow (tomorrow is more likely, but I remain hopeful for this evening). I am likewise hopeful that I will be able to do the majority of my writing on this bad boy and sync up to the desktop via Dropbox or Evernote. I will resist the siren call of Angry Birds until December, I promise.

So. I will be writing my novels primarily on an android tablet and compiling on a windows desktop using a combination of Evernote, Dropbox, and yWriter. I have a brand new 5kg (11 lbs for you disadvantaged Americans) bag of raw coffee beans ready for roasting. I am good to go.

The observant among you  may have noticed I've been pluralizing the word novel in this blog post. There is a good reason for this. I will be pluralizing my NaNovel this November. Rather than settling for the 50,000 word goal, I've set myself a slightly different goal. It is my intention to complete the first draft of not one, but two novels this November (the second is sequel to the first). I am not setting a specific word count goal, but I wouldn't be surprised if the two novels together clock in at over 200K. My best guess estimate tells me that I need to average about 7,000 - 8,000 words a day to do this, but I already write 3,000-4,000 words a day just with emails, blog posts, Google+ comments, comments on other people's blogs, comments and critiques on deviantArt deviations and so forth. If I forgo the majority of that and concentrate my attention on my novels, I am already halfway there.

So. I will be using my new Eee pad, Dropbox, Evernote, and yWriter to write two novels in 30 days. As if that weren't enough, I will also posting the first of my novels online as I write it. If you want to read along, you will be able to find it at my deviantArt group. You'll have to be a deviantArt member to read it, but membership is free. I may or may not post the last few chapters, though I haven't decided yet. I intend to publish it down the road and I'm leery of giving the ending away.

What about you? What software are you using for NaNo? Where will you do most of your writing? Have you set yourself any additional goals*, or are you happy with 50k? Do you have enough coffee? Yak back in the comments below!



* I have created a circle on Google+ for NaNoVerAchievers (more than 50k or faster than 30 days). If you fit that mould, let me know and I'll add you to the circle.

Writer's Unblock

So there I was, more than half way through NaNoPlaMo (National Novel Planning Month - otherwise known as October). I'd gotten my main plot arc figured out, and a couple of characters - including my main character. Then I hit my first wall. It was one doozy of a wall. It almost killed my story.

No matter how I approached the story, I couldn't get a handhold on it. It was like glass; mocking, sarcastic glass. The story that had seemed so promising just yesterday was rapidly drifting away from me, and I wasn't even sure why. I'd spent hours and hours sitting at the keyboard trying to get some supporting characters on paper. They wouldn't come out of their shadows. I fiddled around with some setting concepts, but nothing really felt right. It was all too generic. About the only productive thing I accomplished in two or three days of "planning" were some really impressive trick shots in Peggle Nights. Productive...

Then, in my real life, I had one of those pathetic, deus ex machina, "and then suddenly the problem was solved" plot twists that we writers are supposed to avoid like the plague. The solution to my problem popped fully formed, like a Greek god, right into my head. The characters wouldn't form up because I didn't have anywhere to put them - I needed my setting first. The settings I'd been trying on weren't satisfying to me because I already had a better one in mind. The story was going to take place, was meant to take place, couldn't take place anywhere else but

Aedon (the world in the picture of the map is called "Aedon").

This was a world I'd created for my attempted NaNovel last year. (It's a good thing I took these pictures of it, actually, because when we moved this past February I forgot to take it down from the wall in the old apartment. It might well still sit there, confusing the lovely Chinese couple who probably live there now.) Last year's story was a very different animal from this year's papery beast, of course, but they both fit perfectly in the same world. Perfectly.

Last year's novel was set in Ergess. Nominally a constitutional monarchy, Ergess is actually ruled by a very politically active, polytheistic "state religion". A very expansionist state religion. This is in stark contrast to Olam.

Olam is ruled by a council of merchant princes. The political intrigue, byplay, infighting and actual details of their various power bases are incomprehensible to outsiders. Luckily for us, they are also more or less irrelevant to outsiders (and us). My story does not deal with them.

My story does deal with an always feared and generally shunned religious order of assassins (they do thievery, spying and a number of other nasty things as well, but they are really famous for the assassinating). What better place to plop down their main temple than a city-state where the only truly important questions are "How much?" and "When can you deliver?" It is a perfect fit.

I am going to have to change Olam from a large country to a smaller (and more easily defended) city-state. I am also going to have to move it from where it is now, staring across the river at the Viking Krallish capital to the tip of that northern horn. I was going to have to make those changes anyway, mind you, I just hadn't realized it until I actually went to use the place. It's still perfect.

Now that I think about it, though, I may want to make some cultural adjustments to the vikings Krallish and the Native Americans Horse Lords Furlanese as well. They are both just a wee bit... over done. This year's story will also have to take place at least a hundred years before the events of last year's story. Last year's story involves some major plot events that change the entire world in fundamental and irrevocable ways, so there can't really be any overlap. Aside from that, the world is totally perfect for this story.

What actually does make this world perfect for my story is that it is a world that I've already built. The heavy lifting is already done. Realizing this gave me some very useful insight into myself as a writer. In particular, I learned two things:

1. I am the kind of writer that needs to have a whole world built before he can get to know his characters or flesh out a plot.
2. I am lazy.

I am too lazy to go around building a whole world for every story I feel like writing, anyway. It took me weeks of late nights and early mornings to plan Aedon last year. It was the thought of doing that again this year that was pushing me into the arms of Bjorn the Unicorn. Now that I know where the action is going to go down, now that I have the context for my story, the glass doesn't look so smooth any more. I can see handholds all over the place, in fact, and I can't wait to get my hands dirty. Is it November 1^st yet? Rawr, and so forth!

(If you don't know what NaNoWriMo is, go to www.nanowrimo.org/ and find out)

NaNoWriMo: A November to Remember

Judging by the weather (and also the calendar) November is just around the corner. That means it’s almost time for… NaNoWriMo!

Just in case you’ve never heard of it, NaNoWriMo stands for “National Novel Writing Month”. They can be found at http://www.nanowrimo.org/, and November is the time when NanoWriMo’ers gather together online and attempt to do the improbable – write 50,000+ words of a novel in 30 days (that's 1667 words a day). Last year I participated and failed, but this year I intend to win! To help both myself and anyone else who is thinking about taking part, I have compiled a list of dos and don’ts. It’s mostly don’ts – having failed I have more experience on that side of things.

Do
1) Write every day
2) Plan your novel ahead of time

Don’t
1) Give up
2) Get too far behind
3) Edit as you go
4) Care if what you write is crap (you can fix it later)
5) Have a baby in November

Not to point fingers, but it was entirely my infant son’s fault that I didn’t finish last year. I was on pace the first 5 days of November, and then my wife went into labor. Tyler was born on the 7th, and I got hardly any writing at all done after that. I’ve double checked with my wife, and she assures me that there is virtually no chance of another baby this November, so I should be all set to win. Winning, by the way, simply means successfully writing more than 50,000 words in the time frame – you compete only with yourself.

I’m The Allergen at http://www.nanowrimo.org/ so go ahead and add me as a writing buddy. You are going to take part, aren't you?

I'll continue to blog about various things throughout November, but there will likely be a noticeable NaNoWriMo bias to my blog posts. I consider this a good thing.

On the Importance of Creating

I had a conversation, a while back, with an old friend of mine. This friend was in the throes of the sort of existential angst that is so familiar to my generation. The kind where you ask yourself questions like, “What am I supposed to be doing with my life?”, “What do I want to do with my life?”, and “What the fuck is the point?” I offered what support I could, gave what advice seemed appropriate, and life went on. The whole thing stuck with me, however, in the back of my mind.

While reading the blog post of another friend (http://www.craigmelhoff.com/journal/2011/9/18/interface-to-face.html) dealing with the role of our generation in bridging the technological gap between the old guard and the new one, it occurred to me that this particular brand of depression seems almost entirely constrained to people my own age and younger. The image of my father, head in hands, wondering what to do with his life just doesn’t compute. That’s not to say that my parents have never felt a bit lost, or depressed about the turns their lives have taken but, and correct me if I’m wrong Mom and Dad, they’ve always had a pretty good idea about where they were going with their lives and why. I can’t always say the same about myself, or most of my friends.

Some days later I was watching the first installment of the wonderful series “Fry’s Planet Word” (viewable here to those in the UK. If you aren’t in the UK just... find other means.) and was struck by the distinction drawn between language use in chimps who can be taught sign language, and humans. The chimps, it turns out, don’t initiate conversation and don’t use language with each other. They are not linguistic creators. Humans are.

That’s when it occurred to me. The biggest difference between my parents’ generation and my own is how we spend free time.  My parents’ generation is much, much more likely to spend their free time in creative, productive pursuits than my own. They build things, make things, cook things, and grow things. We watch TV, play video games, and socially network about the things we watch and play. They impose their will on their environment (not to be melodramatic) while we do not. They create while we sit passively back and consume.

I worked, for a period of about 4 years, in a call center. That job almost killed me. I would walk in at the beginning of my shift and log into my phone, and that was the last act of volition I would perform for the next eight hours. We didn’t even answer the phone manually. You would hear a beep in your headset, and you’d be talking to someone. The complete and utter lack of self-determined action drove me into a depression so deep that I bear the scars to this day. For a period of two or three years after I was fired from that job I couldn’t bring myself to answer the phone. I got call display so I could phone people back, instead. I still suffer anxiety when forced to answer a phone, and am prone to not answer unless I absolutely have to.

These days my free time is spent in much more creative pursuits. I cook (as opposed to heating up food). I play music. I write speculative fiction. I also passively watch TV and play video games, of course, but in a much healthier proportion than I used to.

This is why creative, constructive activities are so important. They allow us to impose our wills on our environment. They allow us to express ourselves and, in doing so, force us to decide who our selves are.

What about you? What hobbies do you have that allow you to express yourself? What creative pursuits fill your time? How do you stay sane? Weigh-in in the comments below.

Introductions Are In Order

It's odd, isn't it?

This is the my first post on my shiny, new blog, I have no readers at the time of this writing, and yet still I feel the need to introduce myself. The process is further complicated by the fact that I really don't have any clear idea to whom I am making the introduction. I have some ideas about the purpose and direction of my little corner of the internet, but nothing firm, and certainly nothing set in stone. So, I really have no idea who you are, future reader.

As you might have seen in the brief bio I've included in my profile information, I have numerous hobbies, and have had several very different career paths over the years. As often as possible, the two areas overlap. I've been teaching English in mainland China since 2004, I've appeared in several Chinese television shows (some of which even aired), my wife and I ran our own (delivery-only) bakery/restaurant for a year and change, and we have just recently opened our own English training school. I expect I'll be using this blog to write about some of those experiences from time to time.

In addition to starting the new school, I am also trying my hand at becoming a professional writer of fiction. I'm elbows deep in the creation of one novel and a collection of short stories at the moment, and hope to self-publish both of them as e-books before the end of the year. I will likely be using this blog (and as many other channels as I can find) as a promotional tool for my writing, and as a way of (hopefully) building a fan base. I would love nothing more than to be able to make a living by writing novels.

Finally, I will be using this space to talk about some of my hobbies, and some of the things I've learned to do in order to make life in China livable. In the past seven years I've had to learn how to make a lot of things from scratch, simply because they aren't available here (or are very hard to come by). I'll likely be sharing some of that know-how for those who are interested.

I've titled this blog My Lived-in Life, because that is what I strive to have, and what I plan to share with you - a life that, like the old family homestead, has been thoroughly lived-in.

Mike