Tag: hobbies (Page 2 of 2)

Time Is Flying

July 11, 2012 / DB

What a busy few days. Let’s see if I can cram some of what’s happened, and is about to happen, into a post of reasonable length.

We spent last weekend enjoying a fine Indiana freshwater recreation site with some good friends and family. The weather continued to be ridiculously hot, but being in the water was a fine way to cool off. The girls learned how to jump off a dock, pedal a paddle boat (or is it pedalboat?), and were lucky enough to watch fireworks from the water thanks to some friends. A pretty solid weekend.

For some reason I decided to schedule a playdate for C. on Monday. I don’t recommend inviting two six year olds over after you’ve spent three days someplace else. Then M. had her own playdate Tuesday. Fortunately S. just began a run of several days off, so I wasn’t solely responsible for entertaining the girls and their friends.

In fact, Tuesday I took the first step in my newest hobby. I brewed up a batch of beer. I’ve been toying with the idea for a while, and a buddy pushed me over the edge when he started brewing earlier this summer. I visited the local speciality brewery store a couple weeks ago, picked up some tips and a book which I’ve been reading. Monday I drove down and got my supplies and first kit. I took a bunch of notes Monday night, made a script I would work off of, and got to work after lunch Tuesday. Three hours later, my brown ale was sealed into the fermenter where it will sit and, hopefully ferment, for the next two weeks. Then I’ll prime and bottle, let it sit for another couple weeks, and right around the time M. and C. are going back to school, I’ll be able to sample the first run of B. Brown.

The process seemed to go smoothly today. I avoided the dreaded boilovers. I didn’t spill anything or make any mistakes in the order I added the ingredients. And when I dumped the brewing kettle, there wasn’t a huge mess of malt extract and hops stuck to the bottom. I’m not saying the process was flawless: there are a couple things I’m worried about, but I don’t think they’ll be catastrophic. The thing that held be back from trying this before was my concern that between the time investment and the final yield, this can be a frustrating hobby if you make a mistake. I don’t want to pour out two cases of beer if I didn’t sanitize my fermenter properly, or didn’t let the malts boil long enough before adding the first round of hops. And it will be a bummer to spend parts of a couple days brewing and bottling, and then a month waiting for it to be ready, only to be disappointed by the final product.

But I think this is easier to do than it used to be, provided you do some research and follow the instructions. I’m already thinking about what my next batch will consist of.

The downside is our house kind of stinks, which I don’t mind but S. isn’t loving.

Then, of course, there are the MLB All-Star activities in Kansas City I’ve been following closely. I’ll write more about those later.

The final large item on our agenda is a trip to Denver that begins this Friday. We’re heading out to visit our family members who live there, including the girls’ newest cousin. I’ll also be going to a Rockies game with my brother-in-law, eating at the restaurant my sister-in-law manages, and meeting up with some old KC friends who have relocated to Colorado. That’s all cool stuff, but the girls might be most excited about flying on a plane. M. and C. haven’t flown since our last visit to Denver, over four years ago. And L. was just a tiny fetus we weren’t yet aware of on that trip, so she obviously doesn’t recall it.

Like I said, busy times.

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NaNoWriMo Wrap Up

November 30, 2010 / DB

As promised, and I’m sure you are all nervous with anticipation, some general thoughts and reflections and musings on my NaNoWriMo experience.

First off, the 50,000 words came quite easily. I stuck close to the suggested daily word count, which worked for my rather open-ended story idea and daily schedule, but each time I sat down and focused on my story, I could pretty easily get 1000-1500 words knocked out in 30-45 minutes. One or two more brief sessions got me to the magic 1600-2000 word level for the day. It helped, of course, that I only had a basic idea for a story, wasn’t adhering to some rigid outline, and that my idea was loosely biographical. On the rare day when the words were tough to come by, I could just recall to another event that happened to me and turn that into a fictional scene. Basically they were fictionalized blog posts on those days.

I tried not to sweat the details. I had characters who I called different names at different parts in the story. I made illogical jumps in time and space. I began threads that I discarded and did not return to. My focus each time I sat down at the keyboard was to keep the cursor moving to the right with a wake of text behind it.¹

I worried going in that this loose idea I had been playing around with for nearly a year would peter out at some point, and I’d find myself sitting at 23,000 words and having no idea how to progress. I didn’t come close to having that problem. In fact, had my focus been pushing forward with a legitimate first draft rather than just hitting my daily target, I can see this easily stretching to at least another 25,000 words. In a way, that’s heartening. The big stumbling block to writing a book for me has always been the idea of getting all those words out. In a 30-day exercise, I proved that I can do that.

Of course, what I wrote isn’t truly a novel. It’s an arbitrary number of words in an arbitrary number of days. There’s a big jump from that to getting something that I could confidently send it off to whoever it is that helps you get published. It does feel like I cleared a mental hurdle, though.

I have a couple friends who are novelists. One has been published once and has been working on a second novel for some time. Another has produced a couple decent manuscripts, at least decent enough to get an agent, but hasn’t had any luck getting picked up by a publisher. Both of them told me the key was to get the idea out. Don’t look back while you’re writing, just move forward. Take notes about a change you want to make to chapter one, but if you’re in chapter 13, stay there. When I first got that advice, it made a lot of sense but seemed unwieldy in practice. After going through this, though, it seems like the best path towards successfully putting together a first draft.

And that’s what I have: a clumsy first draft. Could I get to the end and then go back and clean it up? I suppose. If what I produced over the last month has a kernel within it could become a successful story, I think it would take a total restart, more planning ahead of time, and a better idea of where I wanted to go. It’s one thing to take a bunch of disparate memories from grade and middle school and write a story about a kid’s summer. It’s another to make that story coherent.

But I’m not sweating those details now. I just cranked out 50,000 words in a month and while I won’t compare the output to something a real author would do, I am pretty pleased with myself for getting through the process. If nothing else, I’ve learned that a modest investment in time and a little commitment can result in a large piece of text.

And no, you can’t read it. Sorry. I promise all my loyal blog readers will get a discounted copy of my first novel.

One famous person, at least in geek circles, likes to call this making the clackity noise. But my modern keyboard is nearly silent, so as much as I like that description, it doesn’t quite fit my process. ↩

Planning Ahead

October 31, 2010 / DB

I’m going to try something new for the next 30 days. It’s actually something I wanted to do a year ago, but I got sidetracked in my three-month journey that was reading Infinite Jest. I’m finally going to give National Novel Writing Month (Or NaNoWriMo to the kids) a shot.

The idea behind NaNoWriMo is that anyone can write a novel, you just need a strict plan and lots of encouragement. Their plan is simple: write 50,000 words over 30 days. Good words, bad words, in between words. Doesn’t matter, just write. If you can pour out 1667 words per day, at the end of the month you might not have the next great American novel, but you can call yourself a novelist.

I don’t enter this endeavor with great expectations. I have a very rough idea of what I’d like to write about. But I don’t have outlines, character sketches, or even a real idea of how to get from A-to-Z. The idea is loosely based on things that have happened to me, a combination of events from different parts of my life brought together to one time period for literary purposes. If I’m lucky enough to get to 50,000 words and have a decent ending, I still don’t expect it to be some great work of art, though.

This is all about going through the process, getting those words on the page (or into the text file), and learning about what it takes to put a long piece of writing together. I’d love to write a book of some kind at some point. Whether it’s fiction or non-fiction I don’t know right now. Going beyond a few thousand words seems like a monumental task. If nothing else comes from this, I would love to get to December 1 and have a better understanding of the preparation, commitment, and effort it takes to write a book.

If I get really lucky, what I write won’t completely suck, and somewhere inside is a nugget that I can use to write something I might try to get published. But that’s the absolute high end of my goals for this, and not something I’m expecting. I just want start and complete the project so I can say that I did it.

“Will I get to read any of this?” I can hear some of you asking. Probably not. Since it is based, at least for now, on some things from my life, I don’t know that I want to share them with the world. At least not yet. However, I expect the project to jog some interesting memories, and if any of those feel like they could be a blog post as well, I will certainly post them here. I just don’t plan on uploading the entire file at the end of the month and letting everyone read it.

So that’s what I’m going to be up to for the next month. When you break it down to 1667 words per day, it sounds within reach. I can write a couple thousand words a day easy when I put my mind to it. The challenge is connecting those words to each other each day for a month. Thinking about that is when my confidence begins to fail me.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

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Loserville

August 31, 2009 / DB

I’m not what you would call a gamer. Sure, I owned an Atari 2600 and spent countless hours playing Pole Position, Q*Bert, Pitfall, etc. I wasted most of my freshman year of college playing Nintendo until all hours. Madden and NHL 93-95 were staples on the Sega my roommates and I shared in the mid-90s. And I did own a Playstation for a few years, although when I put it in my sister-in-law’s yard sale last year, I didn’t remember playing about half the games I had purchased.

(20 years ago this week!)

Still, that’s a fairly limited history compared to some people. I have friends who have been sucked into the various on-line role playing games and spend hours on one quest or another. I like to laugh at them and tell them they should get a life.

I do have a dirty secret, though. I was once addicted to a computer game. And I’ve recently discovered an iPhone version that has me on a nasty gaming bender.

Back in the summer of ‘96 I picked up Sid Meier’s Civilization II, a turn-based game in which you attempt to build a civilization and defeat other developing nations through force, economic power, or by building a spaceship and getting to Alpha Centauri first. I didn’t have a lot going on in my life at the time – I had just, finally finished college and was using my poli sci degree working the second shift at a distribution warehouse – so I was a prime candidate to get sucked in.

I normally got home between 10:30 PM and 12:30 AM, depending on if we worked overtime or not. I would wash up, grab a snack, and sit down in front of the computer, telling myself I would only play for 30-40 minutes or so. There were far too many times that I finally turned the computer off and collapsed into bed as the sun was coming up. One especially bad night I got home, played all night, then went back into work for a four-hour morning shift. Given that I operated some large power equipment at work, it probably wasn’t the safest thing in the world for me to stay awake for 30 straight hours and then start driving forklifts around.

My sickness reached the point where I owned multiple books on how to “beat” Civ II, an expansion disk that added all kinds of cool* options, and would read various forums looking for ways to improve my play.

(Cool being a subjective term.)

Fortunately, after about two months of this, I burned out and packed the books and disks away. Periodically I’ll consider picking up the latest version of Civ, but I’ve always resisted temptation, knowing I can’t stay awake all night playing computer games anymore and would rather read a book anyway.

Then I found the iPhone version a couple weeks back, Civilization Revolution. I’m totally hooked. When the girls are driving me crazy, I fire it up for “15 minutes or so,” which quickly becomes a 30-minute session. The game is true to the original version (and current, I imagine), although it is a bit simplified to make game play faster and easier. I never, ever won a game in Civ II. I’ve won with four different civilizations in four different ways over the past week.* It’s kind of like crack; I can’t stop playing. I even completely drained the battery on my phone one day.

(You select one of several civilizations when you begin a game, and take on the persona of that civ’s leader. For example, if you select the Americans, you’re Abe Lincoln; the Russians, Catherine the Great; the British, Winston Churchill; etc. I’ll admit it felt a little extra good when, while playing as the Indians, I developed atomic weapons and dropped a bomb on an opponent’s capital. That’s right, I had Gandhi drop a nuke!)

I’m sure this will all pass. But I’ve already played Civ Rev more than all the other games I’ve bought from the App Store combined. It’s worth every one of the 499 pennies I spent on it.

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