Weekend sendoff: Plans and schemes

A quick tip of the hat to Akismet, the free comment spam catcher. I got spam-bombed again today — only 44 comments, compared to my previous achievement of 73 — and having played enough whack-a-spam as a Halforums admin, I love how easily Akismet catches those comments for you and lets you nuke them all from orbit with one click of a button. They appear to be coming from the United Arab Emirates. Always with the persecution.

I’ve gotten up on my high horse a few times over the past couple of weeks, here and on Twitter, about dreams and motivation and buying the right to bitch if you’re also doing something to improve things for yourself. So I figure it’s only fair for me to “put my money on my chin,” as a devilishly handsome fellow once put it, and mention a few of the things I’m working on.

• I will be training for the at-home version of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, founded and directed by Will Shortz and featured in the movie Wordplay. This means going back to doing at least one puzzle a day (as often as I can), and especially working on my speed game, at least on the Monday-Wednesday puzzles. You send in your puzzles with your times — on the honor system, of course, but what’s the point of cheating? — and the judges send you back your scores compared with the actual attendees. I’m thinking about fulfilling a life dream of attending the 2011 tournament in person, with my mother naturally, which would mean a year of more training.
• I’ve sent an email to my grad school advisor with a proposal for developing an academic writing project. I hope this will be my master’s thesis, but I don’t know if that’s feasible anymore. It may be a paper for a journal, or possibly an article of some kind.
• I’ve decided to do NaNoWriMo this year. This is where you write an entire novel of 50,000 words in the month of November. I have no idea why I’m fixated on this. I’ve never written a novel or even aspired to; I prefer screenwriting. But I have an idea I’ve been kicking around for years, and I think I may be able to milk 50K words out of it.

I’m not too deeply invested in any of these projects. That is to say, if I don’t finish my novel, or I don’t do too well in the tournament, or the academic project doesn’t work out, I’m okay with that. (I say now.) I’m excited to have some interesting things to shoot for, especially ones that can be accomplished on my laptop and at whatever time of day works for me. And if these don’t pan out at all…well, there’s always the next thing.

I send you off with “Sorry I’m Late,” a charming animated short by Tomas Mankovsky.