For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain.
The problem, at this point, is that I have no idea how I’m going to get many of these books out of the house. Some I suspect will be claimed by friends (particularly the gaming material and fantasy books) and I expect the rest will go to charity of some kind, although the logistics of carting a box of this size to a salvo bit could be a bit of a problem.
Still, the cull is done, and when I originally wrote “get rid of 200 books” on my to-do list I seriously thought it was the thing least likely to get done. Getting rid of books is hard work for me, but I kinda found a rhythm for it at the end.
Between this and the submission of the Cold Cases draft, I’ve now completed 11.25% of the 80-point-plan for an Awesome year I wrote back in July, meaning my year has finally stepped into double-digits. I bring this up because I suspect the plan is going to be due for a quick revision over the next couple of weeks, since there are some points on it that are now more-or-less impossible* (relying, as they did, on having the computer that died in September rather than my laptop) or irrelevant (focused on options that have been cut off for various reasons).
*technically, this doesn’t make them impossible so much as really difficult and more time consuming, but given their primary role in the plan that’s effectively renders them null.
So here’s something I realised during my week off: I’m tired of not being awesome.
The 80 Point Plan as presented by my spokesbear, Fudge
Lets forestall the inevitable reassurances that tend to follow when you post stuff like that – I’m aware that I am, occasionally, capable of awesome (although it is very un-Australian to admit it, and it is said here with a modicum of irony). There have been the occasional flashes of external validation that remind me of this, plus there’s the posse of folks who make up my friends list. I mean, lets face it: Jason Fischer? Awesome; Angela Slatter? Awesome; My Call of Cthulhu peeps? Awesome; the variousfolkswho have published my fiction? Yep, they’re awesome too. They may have their occasional moments of self-doubt in this regard, since recognising awesomeness in others is easier than recognising your own internal awesomeness, but as a blanket rule I think they all score big points on the awesomometer. As are many other folks (my DnD peeps, my family, etc) who aren’t readily linkable online. I figure that if you can find a collection of awesome folks who are willing to stay in contact and help you out, then there has to be the potential for latent awesomeness in you somewhere to justify that.
So I’m not denying the fact that I’ve done some big things in the last couple of years. Things worth being proud of. Things I can look back on and say “that, that was awesome.”
Basically, what I’m saying here is that my life is occasionally awesome. There are things that I’m good at, but they’re the kind of things that lots of people are good at. I want to achieve more than good. I want total awesome, slathered with awesome-sauce, with a side order of awesome fries. I want to be able to end the year and think “wow, that was a bloody good year” rather than “yeah, some good stuff happened, but the last year primarily sucked.” I want to kick back after finishing my yearly goal-check next July and say “I fuckin’ rock” with total confidence. I kinda managed that this year – my primary goal was getting my writing back on track and finishing a novel draft, both of which I managed – but lots of other things fell by the wayside. It seems like things have been falling by the wayside for years now, primarily because they’ve been dubbed too hard, too scary, or simply too expensive to achieve without putting in some hard work.
Call it a contact high from a week of productivity porn, but I’m pretty sick of those three excuses floating around in my world.
So this year I’m setting them aside. Between now and June 30th, 2010, I’m going to strive for awesomeness. And to keep me on track, I’ve created victory conditions – an 80-point list of goals that I can mark off as they’re achieved. Some of it is a sensible and reasonable continuation of stuff I’m already doing (redraft and polish Black Candy, get some novellas written, get a whole bunch of stories written), some of it is about rebuilding parts of my life that have slipped by the wayside (pretty much any goal that isn’t writing based), and some are about rebuilding my life so it resembles the life I’d like to be living (reading 104 books in the coming year, getting myself down to a healthier weight). It may be a purely personal metric, but I figure that if I can achieve a high proportion of the things on said list (I’m aiming for 90%) then my year will have been pretty damn awesome.
Part of this is going to involve rethinking the way I blog, since I’ve strayed a long way from my goals when I originally migrated over to my personal website rather than simply livejournaling. In fact, it’s turned into the one thing I’d promised myself it wouldn’t turn into – a place where I log wordcounts and engage in random acts of self-promotion. Part of this comes down from thinking about the blogging process the wrong way, getting caught up in the goal of blogging for its own sake. I’m still not entirely sure how it’ll change, although I’ll be aiming to post both more regularly and less often.
Allow me to introduce you to the great redundancy in my flat:
The redundancy, for the curious, comes in couch form (and possibly the desk in the lower foreground since I’ve already got two others, but the desk is awesome and thus excused from such considerations). My lounge room can seat six or seven people, yet it’s rare that I’ll ever have that many people in my place. I’m a little weird about letting people into my space at the best of times, and I’ve filled all three couches only twice in a two-year period (and that was for gaming purposes, the one exception to my I don’t invite people around weirdness). Therefore the primary purpose of having three couches is so I can do horrible things to my back while falling asleep in front of the TV – swapping between the two-seat couch and the three-seat couch on a daily basis keeps the kinks from settling in one part.
I’ve spent a large portion of today wandering around my flat and wondering why I really have things. Realistically I could move my TV into the bedroom and replace the couches with a nice dining room table without any real loss of functionability (in fact, the dining room table would see more use, being more convenient for eating and table-top gaming than the couch/coffee table combo).
And yet I remain oddly attached to the couches. It’d feel odd not to have them around.
But the other part of me wants to embrace the simplicity and pay attention to the things that I actually use.
For those who may be wondering, allow me to clarify what exactly it is you’re looking at in the accompanying photograph. That, my dear peeps, is a photograph of victory in action. Or a pile of 205 books that are ready to leave my house forever and never return, thus clearing shelf-space and giving me tacit permission to buy new books should I ever find myself in possession of discretionary cash ever gain.
