Jason Murphy

There is Still Time

Aug 12, 2007 Creative Writing, Unordered Miscellany

This is one of those posts where I’m practicing forcing myself to write. Most of the time it’s merely an exercise. But today, I’m at risk of losing my own challenge of writing a blog post every day for thirty days. I have about 40 minutes until the bell tolls midnight. I could cut it closer, but this is already close enough.

Weekend writing is never consistent for me. Sometimes I come up with plenty of ideas and topics about items I wish to write about across my sites, and sometimes I’m at a complete drought.

During the week I work at a computer station for 8 to 10 hours a day, then come home and usually put a few more hours in during the evening. Some weekends I’m just so happy to be away from a glowing monitor that it doesn’t phase me if I don’t work on my side projects. I seriously need a nice extended vacation.

I have a few ways of conjuring up ideas about what to write about. My favorite method is to browse through a few friends blogs to see what they are talking about. Since my friends typically update their blogs with as much frequency as I do, I’m usually left to the next best alternative: netvibes and popurls.

Popurls is an aggregate that lists feeds from a lot of my favorite sources including del.icio.us, reddit, digg, and newsvine all on the same page. They’re already my browser homepage since their interface is very clean, and they update the feeds frequently.

Netvibes is also a newsreader. Only its more like a news aggregator on steroids! I have well over 100 feeds of my favorite sites in my netvibes account, and I also use it to jot down notes, to do lists, bookmarks, and occasionally play a game. I do have a bloglines and Google Reader account, but both pale in comparison to the robust features of netvibes.

And finally, the last source of content for writing is reflecting on the day’s events and conversations. I am a people watcher and always intrigued and/or entertained by the characters that I get to witness each day. I even work with a few characters who are so unique that a fiction writer wouldn’t be able to come up with some of the traits that they carry. Then there is my family. Never a dull moment. And I mean that quite literally. My wife tends to summon drama and my son is Dennis The Menace reincarnated (he even LOOKs like him, see!). If I truly need a muse, I have a house full of them. Although if I asked my wife how best I might be able to monetize some of our conversations, I’m sure she’d slap me.

• Today is Day 4 out of 30 for My Own Thirty Day Challenge.