Fox Life

So Sarah just finished taking the Bar (!!) and I finished the draft of the novel. I'm not adding more exclamation points onto my accomplishment because, in all likelihood, that's not the last time that I'll be making changes to the book. But it still feels good to have taken the piece to a place where I'd feel comfortable leaving it and moving onto the next thing. Which makes me wonder what the next thing is. Suggestions? Also:

So, paying myself in fake money only slightly worked. What's turning out to be impressively effective is to hold my Internet hostage every morning. I turn off my wifi, work for an hour, and then I can waste as much time as I want. Which, after the initial rush, isn't as much as it might be. Learning from my past failures, I also set up some consequences. I told Sarah that if I used the Internet before my hour of work was up, I'd give her $100 to spend on something that I hated. (I don't know what we'd do with 112 cans of baby corn, but I'd just as soon never find out.) Fear of tiny vegetables was more than enough to motivate me to complete my hour of work in record time (one hour). Drunk on my success, I pledge to work 1.25 hours tomorrow, a substantial increase over the previous day's workload.

If you ever wanted to know how Tiny Tim would fare in the modern world, I've got a game review you should read... (Originally printed at Out of the Storm News) In these uncertain times of recessions, depressions, and Mayan Armageddons, it’s of the utmost importance that children know how to save money. That’s why Visa created “ Money Metropolis ,” a game whose tag line “Saving for a goal is a world of fun” brings to mind a very dull world indeed. You play a child who is trying to make money and save towards a big goal that costs between $200 and $400. You make money by doing odd jobs around the town and try to avoid spending anything on frivolous items. As a gamer, my background is in role playing games, so I know the importance of character creation. It helps to model your avatar after established fictional characters, so I try to think of what famous children could use better financial advice. I come up with Tiny Tim Cratchit from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I conside

I would call this first week a mixed success. Some wrenches were thrown into various gears when Sarah and I jetted off to Atlanta for our good friend Anna's wedding. As a result less writing was done than would be optimal. On the plus side, I ate a lot of delicious grits, got to hang out with friends, and had an awesome time at the wedding. I'm going to count it as a win. My new strategy for time management is to give myself an hourly wage that I would pay myself if I had the money. Writing a novel is basically investing in myself in the hopes that it'll pay off, so I'm just trying to track my future accumulation of wealth. It's much more fun to work with big numbers than small numbers, so I'm going to say I'm worth $1 million dollars a year. If I worked 40 hours a week, that'd be $500 an hour. My goal for this week is to net $5,000 with $500 an hour as my hourly wage. To make it tougher, I'll keep track of non-productive browsing also. Let's say

Dear Blog world, How's it going? You guys look great. Really. New browser? It shows. So, I haven't written too much this year. Or rather, I have, but very little of it has been on this site. Some has been at Out of the Storm News . Some of it has been for Pheon , a Facebook game. Some of it has been for Precipitate and guest blogs . And of course, most of it has been on my humble novel about the end of all time. But I like this blog. And I like how I feel when I write it. You, Internet, you don't judge me. Or if you do, you don't tell me about. Or if you do, your comments get flagged as spam and I don't read them. So I thank you for that. The summer is halfway gone, and I need to set some goals. Moreover, I need to put the goals out in the world so that someone can hold me accountable, even if it's just the thought of other people (and commenting Spam Bots ) that I'm accountable to. Actually, it's a short list this time. Goals: 1. Finish the novel. End

So I completed one of my life goals by getting hired to write a computer game review. Originally posted on Out of the Storm News, here is the review in full: “ Have You Considered the Benefits of Life Insurance ” is a computer game about life insurance, which automatically makes it the best computer game about life insurance, because the competition is just that thin.   The plot is simple enough: you are an ugly life insurance salesman with a trophy wife. You need to buy your wife gifts (a fish, a bottle of wine, something I thought was an asthma inhaler but now believe to be a blender) so that she stays with you. You make money by selling life insurance policies to pixelated people who will pay you $1 a second until they fall into a hole and die, at which point you pay them $100. (Since that’s the only way anyone dies, I’d probably have a “falling down holes exemption clause” in the policy, but that’s just me.) If you so choose, you can plug up holes at $20 a pop.