9.18.02

Sorry folks – no political articles this week. I tell ya, I’m just too damn busy to come up with anything right now. Between my AutoCAD class two nights a week (for three hours at a time!), writing and squeezing in the occasional movie, I just haven’t had a lot of time to sit around and come up with anything worth writing about. So, this’ll be just another one of those diary entries if that’s okay with you.

As I said, getting a lot of writing done. Pretty much every night I’m either working on an actual story or kicking around ideas. Like I mentioned a while back, I need to start concentrating on short stories if I want to get published, so I’ve been working on new ideas for those mainly, whenever I’m not writing on a story I’ve already started. It’s slow going, but, again, I’m incredibly busy, so I’m not getting as much time as I’d like devoted to it. But, the class ends in a few weeks and then I’ll be back at it closer to full-time.

Things are looking up in the career department. Starting (hopefully) Thursday, I’ll be doing some more GIS work now - and not just the “whenever I have time”. They’re actually scheduling time for me to work on stuff two days out of the week! Basically I’m doing it on a purely volunteer basis for now (meaning no extra cash), but hopefully we can convince the folks upstairs that there needs to be another GIS position for 2003 and I’ll be able to step into it. And if the job isn’t created, well, this will look better on a resume than no experience at all. So, wish me luck.

Have an interesting weekend planned. Going down to Festus, MO for a STL Mustangs cookout and keg party on Saturday. I just hope it doesn’t rain despite the 80% chance of it. Might be able to go check out David Lynch’s classic film, Blue Velvet on the big screen as well. Just depends on how the schedule works out. I’d really like to get some writing in this weekend, but that might have to wait until Sunday. We’ll see.

I’m getting into detective/crime stories as of late. Picked up a few classic books – The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep and The Gaston Case, Hard Case – as well as had a mini-noir film festival last weekend with, The Maltese Falcon, and The Third Man. I’ve started writing a story that’s in that vein and I have to say it’s really fitting me well. The first person perspective (I did this, I did that) is very popular in detective novels and it’s something I feel very comfortable using. So that’s just one of my three stories that I’m actively working on right now! I told ya…not a lot of time lately.

And with that in mind, I think I’m going to head out for now. I’d like to get a little writing in tonight before I hit the sack. So, have a good weekend and I’ll see you next week, hopefully with a little more to talk about.

Space Monkey X