Author: Teel

Author, artist, romantic, insomniac, exorcist, creative visionary, lover, and all-around-crazy-person.

power, wealth, fame, the achievement of personal goals, a family of your own, or maybe just making it through one more day?

What are your success conditions for life? That is, what conditions need to be met for you to consider your life successful?

I mean, for other things, for specific goals, I can see it. If my goal is “write a novel” then when I’ve written a novel I’ve succeeded. If my goal is “don’t worry, be happy” than as long as I’m happy and worry-free, I’ve met the conditions of the goal.

I’ve currently got the goal of creating a complete, playable video game by the end of the summer, preferably with a version compiled for the GBA platform. I’ll know I’ve met it if, before the end of the summer, I’ve got a complete, playable video game. The fact that I have a playable version of it with all the features I considered to be ‘core features’ already working is a good step. Getting to the further goal of creating a working version on the GBA is a challenge I haven’t begun to face, but I don’t consider that to be a success condition of the overall goal, more of an additional goal.

I also have the goal of writing, editing, and putting in print the third book in the Untrue Tales series before the end of the summer. I haven’t started that yet, but … depending on other factors, I may be able to achieve that goal in a weekend.

I also have the goal of getting a literary agent to represent me by the end of the year, and the sub-goal of compiling a list of 50 agents I would like to query, agents I would like to represent me, and begin sending out query letters before my birthday in September at the very latest.

And if I finish the video game, heck- even finish it for the GBA, before the end of the summer… And if I finish book three in the same period… And if I not only get a very quick and positive response back from one of more of the agents I send query letters to, but actually sign with an agent before the year is out… If I do all these things, meet all these success conditions, am I successful? Is my life successful?

Continue reading power, wealth, fame, the achievement of personal goals, a family of your own, or maybe just making it through one more day?

today, I babble about money and housing. enjoy.

((update: I discovered that due to an oversight on one of my spreadsheet calculations, my income was not correctly represented. I have updated figures below, marking them bold if they have been changed. If some of this doesn’t make sense, it is because the text was written about different numbers.))

After discussing it last night with my father, it has been clearly stated that (barring unforseeable financial changes that make anything I could possibly calculate now meaningless) my father is ‘kicking me out’ of the house in or around January 2006, about 6 months from now. Financially, this creates some challenges for me. The following is my own rambling, basically for my own benefit, on the subject.

Feel free to skip it entirely.

Continue reading today, I babble about money and housing. enjoy.

who designed these wrists anyway?

Based on the direction of my personal health specialist, I have begun using a new product. In my first weekend I have made several discoveries about my new uhhh… time management tool… though as my body becomes used to it, apparently my findings may change. We’ll see.

The most pressing and interesting finding right now is that if I work on my computer for 35 to 50 hours in a continuous 60-hour period, the repetitive motion makes my wrists hurt. Around when the sun came up this morning (after I’d been awake about 43 hours) I began to really notice the pain. It’s still here, but I’ve been doing what I can to reduce it.

Apparently there’s something about working on a computer all day, most of the next day (I took a few hours off to help a friend move some furniture and appliances), all that night, then most of the next day and all the next night that … sortof puts a strain on the wrists… apparently there’s some sort of ‘repetitive strain’ involved in all that work. Huh.

(( side note, Strange But True: I am very careful about re-sealing my re-sealable packages of dried fruit because I don’t want my dried fruit to dry out. ))

More on my experiences this weekend follow:

Continue reading who designed these wrists anyway?