Happy (Belated) Epiphany Day!

I usually start the new year sharing a list of resolutions and goals with folks that stumble across this blog. Why do this? I'm not really sure. Apparently, one of my hobbies is to advertise my shortcomings, insecurities, hopes, and dreams to as broad of an audience as possible because, hey, saying out loud that you'll do something is just as good as actually doing it, right?

Umm... Right?

Sigh. Fine. I figured you'd be that way. You used to be cool, man.

Well, then, this year my main resolution is to stop lying to myself. Yep, it's a logic bomb powerful enough to disable any number of evil/misguided Star Trek AIs, but there it is. You don't like it, hey, that's on you, brother.  I ain't gonna learn Chinese, I ain't gonna completely master Pour Some Sugar On Me on the guitar, and I ain't gonna try out for the Duke basketball team.  I mean, of course I could totally succeed at any of these things if I really wanted to... It's just that those grapes are probably really, really sour anyway, so, you know, why bother?

What am I going to do? Pfft.  Who knows?  I guess while I have the time and energy to do so, I continue the filtration of stuff that I have found useful to collect in my skull over the decades into two piles: Useful Things and Trivia.  It's harder and more time-consuming than you might think - after all, my Trivia pile is about 1,000 times bigger than the other one.

Yours is, too…

You know, I’m going to stop this post right here and now.  Although you can’t see them, right now I am staring at three more paragraphs of borderline pretentious garbage festering right below this sentence.  I am not happy with them. I worked hard to get them ready for yesterday’s “deadline” but no matter how much I polished, it still felt like I was going to circle the runway for another 500 words before my point finally congealed anti-climactically somewhere in the middle of the seventh paragraph.

Negative?  Not at all! You see, appropriate to yesterday’s holiday I have had an epiphany: I can take one of these ill-formed paragraphs and massage them into a short book that should basically write itself.  

Books don’t write themselves, however, so I am forced to take a short leave to get this idea out of my head and onto “paper”. It might lead nowhere, it might lead somewhere, but I have to find out and I need time to do that.  A week to ten days should be enough to figure out if I can press on with it, shelve it for later, or simply shrug it off and just circular file the whole thing.  I told my editor in December I would have something for her by the end of this month.  I hope this counts.

So that’s it for a while.  I’ll post if interesting stuff crops up between now and a week or ten days from now - puzzle solutions, Rook travel bug updates, that medium-sized asteroid headed this way is finally detected by backyard astron… Ah… Yes… Ahem… Perhaps I’ve said too much…

Anyway, I don’t want to take my short hiatus without leaving with something so here it is: Yesterday, I discovered I had just earned my 2,000-day badge as “dad”.  How’s that for an epiphany?

More later.