Blog Post No. 526
Welcome to the end of 2022. As is tradition, I’ll write a nice long post looking back on the year when I get to the year-end of the blog in mid January. This post is all about looking to the future. The distant future of 2023, to be exact. Will there finally be flying cars and food in pill form? I have no idea, but I kind of hope not. I’ll settle for better healthcare and cheaper groceries. I’d also really like to finally get out of the house more and specifically start attending events again. I’ve been writing these looking ahead posts since the early days of the website and so far my predictions have been unreliable at best. That doesn’t mean I’m not sincere when I state my goals (also, it’s mostly fun to look to the future and dream). Also, the lock-downs have reminded us that the world doesn’t care about what plans you’ve made.
Writing is a sprint and a marathon. Each day is the sprint. You sit at your computer and type away, trying to reach a self-imposed goal. Sometimes it’s a struggle with stops and starts. Sometimes you breeze through it in no time and wonder at your own incredible speed. Then, the next day, you do it all over again, and over again, until it’s done. That’s the marathon. The fun part comes when you have other obligations and you have no choice but to force yourself to go fast. Otherwise you sit at your desk late into the night until you finish. Or you don’t finish and everything falls to pieces. 
Every year around this time, I go ahead and have a birthday. It’s a day where I mark the passing of another calendar year, thus adding to my numerical age. I’ve been doing it my whole life. I’ve even heard of some other people doing very similar things. I’m not accusing them of stealing, I think more than anything, it’s a coincidence. I’m actually kind of glad that I’m not the only one. Makes me feel like I’m part of a community or something. I do think I am the one who invented the term birthday. It’s because I mark my yearly numerical value from the day I was born. If you ask some of these copycats, I doubt you’ll get as quick an answer. 
I work up on Sunday morning and knew something wasn’t right. My weekend had been the culmination of two solid weeks of work (no time off for good behaviour, or writing). Lots of terrible thing happened that had no choice but to be dealt with. Friday night was seven hours of crap that stuck to me through Saturday morning for my back-to-back shifts. While I managed to get a solid chunk of text written Friday morning, nothing was getting done on Saturday. As soon as I got home from my thankfully easier shift (minus having to mop the floors as the cleaners failed to do for the umpteenth time) I took a much needed nap and prepped all my stuff for Sundays RetroRama. No time for love Doctor Jones. I did my best to get to bed early Saturday night, knowing what was in store for me. 
Last week, I was on a bit of a tear with my novel. I was catching up after a couple of less than stellar months. It was a good feeling. I was getting things together for the long haul. Now, after a busy week of work (and really busy weekend) and too many tasks left for too long. To top it all off, I have the dreaded layout to finish. A huge jumble of micro tasks assembled into one element that, when one task is finished, it screws up something else, leading to a never ending stream of necessary fixes and adjustments. Like I said last week, it’s a doozy. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let it interfere with my writing, and I was partially successful. The writing related tasks didn’t disrupt my flow, but work, more basement construction, and a last minute invite to help out in a music video did. 
A while ago, no one knows exactly when (unless you were to do a cursory look on line) a principal in Belgium started a facbook group. She had too many books to fit on a shelf, so she hid some around her city and posted hints to the group as to where they could be found. It took off like crazy. There were international news stories about it (which is how I found out about it). The idea isn’t new. Geo cashing has been around for decades, and I’ve even heard about specifically hidden books around cities before. Still, it’s a neat idea, so a couple of writer friends and I stole it. 
Ben Van Dongen 