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I don’t like spoilers.

Take movies, for an example. If there’s a particular movie I know I want to see, then I do absolutely everything possible to avoid watching even a single frame of it before the big day. I want to wait until it’s in the theaters, where I can sit down with two-gallon drink, a lawn bag full of popcorn, and enjoy it properly.

Think about it from the writer or director’s perspective. As the story unfolds, each scene is carefully designed to carry the viewers forward, with just enough information to keep them interested but without revealing too much (thus reducing or even eliminating the impact of the story’s climax). This carefully calculated dissemination of the plot — trust me — does not come easy.

So why waste all that hard work by revealing the entire movie in the trailer? We’ve all been there. You’re sitting in the theater, hand in the lawn bag of popcorn, mouth on a three-foot-long straw, when that big green PREVIEW box illuminates the theater. In the next two and a half minutes, you’re introduced to the characters, their backstory, their conflict, and at least two or three scenes from the critical resolution. You turn to your friend, and what do you say? “Well, guess there’s no need to see that movie.”

Spoiler Alert

I mean, I get it. Not every movie is a self-marketing, why-even-bother-making-a-trailer, Star Wars: The Force Awakens magnet. The vast majority of films need to give potential viewers at least a glimpse of the story to generate interest if not genuine excitement.

Spoiler alert: nothing I’m working on is a self-marketing, why-even-bother type of project. No one is clamoring for the 1,719,535th novel to be released this year. So I’m in that majority of content providers that must give a glimpse to generate interest among potential readers.

That’s why one of the promises I made to myself when I launched this blog was to no longer force my fan(s) to wait interminably for a completed manuscript. Instead, I vowed to “spoil” things a little here, a little there along the way.

I avoided this in the past on my other blogs for largely irrational reasons. “Oh, if I post all my story ideas, someone will steal them and then they’ll write my books and eventually get all my Hugo awards!” Let’s get real. I can barely get people to visit the site let alone steal anything from it.

So without further and undue ado, here we go! As promised last week, I’m posting an excerpt from a work in progress. Please to enjoy!

Chapter One

The sky was getting dark and the clouds and the rain were kind of rolling in too. Mr. Sanders walked into his new kitchen that he didn’t like a couple years ago and so he made some phone calls and hired a contractor and then got it updated with new appliances and a new counter and a new floor for him to walk on when he needed to do that. Like now when he walked into his new kitchen in the growing darkness.

Except this time something wasn’t going on right. It was getting very dark. He went to turn on the light switch that also got replaced from the old one when the kitchen was getting updated. The new light switch was white and complimented the warm brown wall a lot more than when the old switch was just kind of a brown one on a different kind of brown wall. He flipped the switch and the light didn’t come on! Mr. Sanders got a little frightened and maybe even a little bit scared too because it was dark and there was rain and the light didn’t come on so he decided to leave the remodeled kitchen and go to bed instead. What would you do? I thought so!

The next morning it was okay. He had a crazy dream about his briefcase. But then when he went back to the kitchen he didn’t think of the dream any more. “I’m hungry!” he announced, as if talking to an empty room or a briefcase. “I didn’t get to eat last night because of the light not working and getting scared and stuff.” His new appliances looked as if they were looking at him and listening to his words. “I also didn’t sleep good not because of just the briefcase, but because I thought I heard wolves in the distance but maybe when I hear sounds I’m just imagining them.”

“How about some toast?” His toaster suggested. But not really. That’s just like a metaphor because toasters can’t talk. Yet! But Mr. Sanders heard the toaster’s imaginary suggestion and so he put in some toast. Well, but except it was bread first. Then toast later after the orange things inside light up and do their magic! When the toast popped up after a long time (it seemed like a long time because he kept staring at it and it wouldn’t come up while he stared at it.) When it popped up, Mr. Sanders immediately stopped thinking about those wolves and thought about what to put on the toast. He made a list and recited it aloud.

“Butter. Jelly. Butter and jelly. Butter. Butter? Peanut butter. Yes, that’s it!” He said out loud and all his appliances including the toaster agreed. He gingerly lifted a knife from the block of wood that holds his knives and he put it in the peanut butter and then moved the peanut butter from the jar to the bread which is now dry because it’s toast because of the hot orange things inside the toaster.

Suddenly there was a loud noise outside! The sound of many large and heavy paws galloping across the ground. It wasn’t Mr. Sanders’ imagination. It was wolves. Real wolves heading toward him to perform unimaginable violence as wolves sometimes might do under the appropriate circumstances. More frightened than before, Mr. Sanders shouted out: “I HOPE EVERYONE ENJOYS APRIL FOOLS DAY 2016!!!” The toaster nodded in agreement before adding, “And I just hope everyone tunes in next week for Charlie’s real book excerpt!”

Back in the third post of this here new blog (which, on many levels, was actually the first post of this here new blog), I laid out my next decade of accomplishments. Ten years might seem like a long time. But it’s not. I know this for a fact because the last ten years went by as fast as . . . uh . . . well, as fast as something that goes by fast. And let me tell you, that’s fast.

But I’m not here to rehash old blog posts. At least not yet. No, I’m here to call out a quote from astute reader Martha Tingle. She left this particular comment, not because of how awesome my ten-year-plan was, but because I spent the requisite percentage of each blog post in self-deprecation mode. She wrote:

Charlie – I have known you for 50 years. I think you are a procrastinator. While I am not, it doesn’t mean that my “plans” have come to fruition any more than yours. I think most of us are just winging it through life and I don’t think things happen for a reason. They just happen, taking us down a path we never envisioned.

First of all, I don’t know what she means by that “50 years” thing. I’m only thirty-six. But after that, she used the word procrastinator. When I hear that word, what immediately leaps to mind is the person lazing about on the couch in front of the television for months on end while the lawn grows to a height of two or more yards. And that is most certainly not me. (I only wait until the grass is thirty inches tall before putting down the remote.)

I immediately made up my mind to make procrastination the topic of the very next blog post, but something came up that week. So I pushed it out another week, but got busy on something else. My point, however, remains: procrastination is (to me) synonymous with laziness and I’m definitely not lazy. Every waking hour (plus a good portion of my sleeping hours) is dedicated to some facet of productivity. I simply can’t not be producing.

But then the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t help but think she was absolutely spot-on correct. Because, let’s face it: if I wasn’t procrastinating, I would’ve written five or maybe even ten books by now. For real.

To help reconcile all this, I had to look up the definition of procrastination. Wikipedia told me:

Procrastination is the avoidance of doing a task which needs to be accomplished. It is the practice of doing more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones, or carrying out less urgent tasks instead of more urgent ones, thus putting off impending tasks to a later time. […] Procrastination can lead to feelings of guilt, inadequacy, depression and self-doubt.

Well, if that isn’t absolutely spot-on, I don’t know what is. BUT, I do want to address one key part: the part that says, “more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones.” Because as I look back over the last two decades, I can make a pretty good list of what kept me from getting any of these stupid novels written:

  1. The day job.

I work a lot. Not like, “Oh, I’m a workaholic so I don’t know what else to do with my life.” But because I’m an empathetic person who’s ended up in a series of jobs where unreasonable demands have been placed on me and I feel compelled to meet them.” It goes like this:

“Charlie, can you do this project?” asks the company.

“Why yes! That’s exactly why I’m here,” I reply.

“So, can you do it in three months?” they ask.

“Uh, sure. That seems reasonable. Might be tight, but if it’s Good for the Company, I’ll get it done for you,” I say.

“How about two months?”

“Um, no. Three months was tight. Two would be quite impossible,” I state.

This is the point where they look at me with big, dewy eyes, altogether reminiscent of Puss-in-boots from Shrek.

“Well, uh, okay. Two months,” I concede.

One week later.

“The business has decided it would be best if this is ready next week,” says the company.

“But we still have seven more weeks of work left,” I object. “Eleven, going off my original schedule.”

“But we need this. If we don’t have this project done next week, our competition will start killing puppies. This is the only way to prevent such a tragedy!”

“Okay, I guess I can work one hundred and fifty hours this week. I wasn’t doing anything else anyway.”

And so, with such unreasonable demands constantly being heaped upon someone born with a brain defect that never lets him say “no” to anything, I take exception to anyone describing this situation as doing “more pleasurable things in place of less pleasurable ones.” Because just between you and me, there is nothing pleasurable whatsoever about a one hundred and fifty hour work week. (Yet there is a great deal pleasurable about writing.)

At this point, I could end this post with a “so there!” But there’s another issue bothering me. In all that time and with all of those long, long work hours, I’ve managed to:

  • Run my own video production business.
  • Write eight editions of two different video editing books.
  • Compose and record some music. Not a lot, but not zero.
  • Start my own publishing company.
  • Write my diet book.
  • Mothball my own publishing company.
  • Generate some three hundred thousands words of blog posts.
  • Work on home maintenance, improvements, bills and finances.
  • And simply be part of my family (and ALL that that implies).

At the end of the day? Well, heck. I’ve had plenty of time to finish at least one novel, but I’ve spent that time on other stuff. And that’s okay.

But before I finally really and truly wrap up this post, there’s one more thing. What I left out of that list (and what’s easy to forget) is that I’ve written at least another couple hundred thousand words across all my novels-in-progress. So it’s not like I’ve done nothing but dream about writing “someday.” And that doesn’t even take into account the time spent on backstory, geography, linguistics, culture, genealogy, and the piles and piles of other things that make a story feel real.

One of the things I fully intended to do with this here new blog is to share some of that. After all, just because I don’t finish something doesn’t mean there’s nothing worth sharing. And it’s high time I do that.

So tune in next week for some awesome excerpts from a work in progress. I’ve got plenty of time to make up something between now and then.

I went to college. Actually, I went to two colleges. I attended a community college freshmen year, simply because I couldn’t justify industrial-grade tuition only to gain basic English and math credits. Then, with twenty-six inexpensive hours out of the way, I moved on to a “real” college. There I studied computer science and psychology, eventually obtaining a bachelor of science degree in the former and a minor of nothing degree in the latter.

But after dozens of classes, hundreds of tests, thousands of pages, and millions of caffeine-infused calories that kept my brain powered, my greatest takeaway from all of that? I learned the word cattywampus.

I’ve since learned that the proper form of the word is “catawampus” but that’s not nearly as fun to say as cattywampus. I’ve also heard others say “kittywampus” but, come on now, that’s just silly.

If you’re unfamiliar with the word, it means “disorder”, “in disarray”, “chaos”, “out of kilter”, or “many other words” which I could “put in quotes.” Out of all the definitions I’ve read, though, the third one below really captures the true spirit of the term for me.

cattywampus (\kat · ee · wom’ · pus\) — 1. something askew or awry. 2. out of alignment or crooked. 3. a great word to kick off Charlie’s blog post on the devastating impact of moving to a new house.

Standard Disclaimer: “devastating” is just poetic exaggeration. The person who voluntarily decides for no good reason to just pack everything up from one house and put it in a completely different house has no grounds to grumble about it. It’s not as if this is a result of war or natural disaster or anything. (As Joe Walsh so eloquently put it, “I can’t complain but sometimes I still do.”)

Like most humans, I’m a creature of habit. Habit, after all, is how we function. It’s how we get dressed, fix our meals, pay our taxes, and, at the end of a very, very long day, explains where that six-pack of Sam Adams went.

But unlike most humans, I’m a creature of habit what really likes to keep track of things. I track how I spend my time, I track the foods I eat, I track how much I weigh, I track the miles I drive to work and the gas I put in my car. I’m even in the habit of tracking my habits.

It’s about as close as I get to obsessive-compulsive behavior without an actual medical diagnosis. I don’t do it because I’m bored or because it sounds interesting. I do it because I can’t not do it. If I don’t keep track of something that I’m supposed to be keeping track of, well, I feel all cattywampus.

And there is nothing to mess up a perfectly good, obsessive-compulsive schedule like taking decades worth of ones possessions and shuffling them around like some unending shell game from hell. I just went a week without tracking my foods. I didn’t log my weight as soon as I’d weighed in. And while these things seem pointless and trivial in the grand scheme of things (they are), they eventually add up and greatly contribute to an overall mental state of disarray.

But quite apart from habits alone, it’s also about having all your possessions go from one perfectly disorganized pile that you were used to, to a horribly disorganized pile that you no longer recognize. It’s the exact opposite of Thomas Dolby’s line from his most famous song:

“I don’t believe it! There she goes again! She’s tidied up and I can’t find anything!”

Believe me, I would give body parts to have things tidied up. I went several days last week with my keys divided into three different locations. And just last night we spent far too long trying to locate the power drill I’d used just the day before. In less than twenty-four hours, this moderate-sized piece of hardware somehow vanished from existence. I began to picture it floating around in some dark corner of the universe amidst all the unpaired socks.

Granted, it eventually turned up in the exact spot where I left it, but that’s not the point. During the intervening time, that area had been covered with plastic wrap, tools, brushes, paint, spackle, and workmen: any of which basically drove all recollection of the tool’s last use from my brain. And recollected here are just two items of a million little things, pushing thoughts around my brain like some unending shell game from hell.

It’s at this point in the blog post I had planned to upload all sorts of pictures so you could experience and enjoy the cattywampusness for yourself. But alas, I’ve used up my thirty minutes of frantic typing and have to get back to work. I’ve got some new window blinds to install and I can’t find my power drill.

Welcome to the first in a series of three hundred and forty-seven posts on “Important Skills for Writers.” In this episode we discuss spelling.

Growing up, my dad used to tell this story of a time when he was in grade school. He created a very artistic cover for an English spelling folder. He was always proud of his eye for design, and this was not an opportunity he could pass up. He ended up putting so much time and effort into the presentation, that he never realized he’d written: “My Sellping Book.”

(Ironically, I’m not sure if I even spelled that correctly. He always just told us the story and I never knew how he actually sellped it.)

So why is correct spelling so important? To be honest, I have no idea. Spelling things correctly (in English) is a relatively recent phenomenon: only about five centuries or so. And when I say “correctly” I really just mean “consistently.” Before then, spelling wasn’t standardized. Spelling would drastically change from region to region, from person to person, and even from page to page in the writing of a single individual. Chaucer himself wrote, “This I telle you, the thyng what I needeth: is more cow belle. A fever hath I. And there is but one prescription: more cow bell.”

But how about in modern times? What if we just spelled things any way we wanted to? Like so:

Kawshun. Water may b akros rode way at hi tydez or adverse wether condishuns.

You can read it, right? Sure, it looks awkward, but the primary purpose (BY FAR) of writing is simply to communicate. It’s about the closest thing humans have to both telepathy and time travel.

So then, if I have successfully communicated a thought, who really cares if I write, “Nothing compares 2 u” instead of “Nothing compares to you”?

I’ll tell you who cares: I do.

And I’ll tell you why: writing “2 u” looks stupid.

Sorry, Prince. But it does. Spelling words correctly (consistently) is just that final touch that says one thing: I care about this. And if you don’t care about your writing, why should I care to spend the time reading it?

Fortunately we have something today that Chaucer could have only dreamed of: spellcheckers. These amazing and infallible tools give us that caring touch for free. After all, check out this spell-checked excerpt from one of my novels:

Phil: What’s are speed, Gym? Our Wii even moving atoll?
Jim: We’re down too just one not, Fill!
Phil: Worse, we’ve lost site of land.
Jim: Don’t worry, Fill. I’ll safe us!

Now you might assume, given how important this is to me, that I can spell any word thrown at me. Well, if that’s your assumption, then you’re wrong. There are dozens and dozens of words that I simply cannot spell no matter how many times I try. Eventually I get it, solely because of that red squiggly line. But it’s never on the first, second, or sixth tries.

  • Compatability (Actually, any word with -ility
  • Occassional
  • Furnature
  • Spring (if this doesn’t look misspelled to you, it’s because I was trying to type Sprint)
  • Traffice (It’s just “traffic” stupid.)

I could continue, but this sad post has already gone on 2 long. But if you made it this far, leave a comment with any words that give you trouble. One lucky winner will win a free link to my next blog post.

Good lock!

We’re moving to a new house soon. As of today, the exact date and time of the move is “2016.” If you want a more specific date and time, I’d say, “the first half of 2016.” Which is soon, but sometimes not soon enough.

There are a number of reasons for this move. For one, we’ve been in our current house for fifteen years now and almost every light bulb has burned out. For another, I got out of the car yesterday, walked across the lawn, and realized we need to mow. But the last straw happened over the weekend when we ran out of ice cubes.

In all seriousness, though: the real reason can be summed up in a single word: traffic. That’s right, we got traffic. With a capital T and that rhymes with Z and that stands for ZOMG I cannot stand this commute another day.

In the whole grand scheme of things, I suppose it’s not horrible. It’s not like I’m Thurmond Alford, a man who lives in Richmond, VA and works in Washington, DC. Here’s a man who doesn’t seem to mind a 220-mile, seven-hour daily round-trip commute. I’m also not an “extreme commuter,” defined as someone who travels more than 90 minutes to work each way, each day. (Though, to be sure, there are certain days where it will take 90 minutes. But that’s not the norm, thankfully.)

So how long does my commute take? The answer is simple: too long. I don’t measure it in minutes. I measure it in blood pressure.

Back in 2001 when we moved to Austin, we didn’t know where to live. Our real estate agent assured us we should live south. And I was happy with our choice for about 36 hours. After that, I realized that 95% of the tech jobs in Austin are on the OTHER side of town.

Rats.

But by then we’d moved. The kids were in school. And that was that.

However, first one kid graduated high school, then the other. And suddenly I thought: hey, I don’t have to stay here any more. So last May we started looking around. Last July we signed a purchase contract with a builder. And last week my blood pressure went up again when they closed yet another lane on Loop 1.

In short, the new house can’t get finished soon enough. I’ve gotta get these precious hours of my life back and applied to something useful. Like changing light bulbs, mowing the lawn, and filling ice trays.

I don’t have a Bucket List. At least not yet I don’t. In lieu of a tangible list, I only have a set of vague notions about some of things I’d like to do (or, more accurately, accomplish) before that inexorable kicking. But that is a topic for a future blog post.

That being said, I do know of one item in particular destined for The List. And here it is: “Have someone I don’t know ask me, ‘Where do you get your ideas?'” While at first glance this might seem like an odd sort of thing to add to a Bucket List, if you peel back the words you’ll see that its importance lies in the chain of events that leads up to this event. But, again, that is a topic for a future blog post.

This post is just about ideas in general, and it just so happens to begin with someone else checking off an item on my list. Earlier this month, author Joanne Harris tweeted:

All authors dread the question: “Where do you get your ideas from?” This is because there is NO ANSWER.
— Joanne Harris

Up-and-coming author J. K. Rowling retweeted this and concurred: “True. I once answered: ‘The same place you get yours!’ to a small boy. ‘I never have ideas,’ was the glum response.”

In spite of the sad reply, Rowling’s explanation is absolutely true. The “place” she is talking about is what the scientific community collectively calls “the brain.” There’s no magic here, just one hundred billion cells all working together and churning out countless ideas each day, whether you believe that is happening or not.

One day in 1990, Jo Rowling’s one hundred billion cells produced one idea: the image of a young boy attending a wizard’s school. That is all. She didn’t right then and there compose all 1,084,170 words of the Harry Potter series. She just had an idea. And that idea just came from her brain.

To the small, glum boy who never has ideas: I believe you do have ideas. We all have ideas. Unless you’re suffering from physical damage to the brain, you simply cannot function without having ideas. “I know what to have for dinner tonight!” “I know what I’m going to wear to work today!” “I know what might create a twenty-four billion dollar franchise.”

The trick isn’t in the idea. The trick is in recognizing it for what it is and then doing something about it. My guess is that when people say “I don’t have ideas” (and believe me, I say this to myself all the time) what they really mean is “I can’t think of anything right now that might create a twenty-four billion dollar franchise.” And they’re right. They probably can’t. But here’s the thing: Rowling never thought that either. It began with a simple idea, and then off it went.

So many good and/or popular stories have such small beginnings.

  • Star Wars: Boy meets mentor, goes on adventure, overcomes the Evil Empire. In space.
  • The Hobbit: Hobbit meets mentor, goes on adventure, overcomes the Dreaded Dragon. In Middle-earth.
  • Green Eggs and Ham: Weird creature in hat meets mentor, goes on adventure, overcomes the Fear of the Unknown. In drawings.

As you can see, every big idea starts from a little idea, and people have little ideas all the time. Fortunately, I’ve just thought of a little idea that I think might be big. Let me know what you think: Boy meets mentor, goes on adventure, overcomes Agent Smith. In some weird kind of computer-simulated reality.

I think I’m onto something here.

What if just by making one change in your habits, you could double your weight loss? It may sound too good to be true, but many experts say that the simple act of keeping a food diary can encourage you to eat fewer calories.
— Dr. Web Emdee

I’m sure everyone has been to WebMD at least once in their internet life. It is, after all, the number one, doctor-recommended method of obtaining erroneous self-diagnoses. (And if you were curious about what came in second place, it was Yahoo! Answers, tagline: “The Blind Leading the Blind Since 2005.”)

The above quote is interesting to me. As everyone knows, if something sounds too good to be true, it is. And as everyone also knows, if Many Experts say something, it has to be true. So setting aside the paradox of this quote being both true and false simultaneously, what it’s getting at is one simple idea: keep track of what goes down your pie hole and you just might start putting fewer pies down there.

On July 28, 2008, a mere two thousand seven hundred and fifty five days ago, I found myself at livestrong.com staring at their MyPlate food logging tool. It was Day One #88 and I had heard that keeping track of what one ate was a good thing. But beyond that, I really like keeping track of stuff. This seemed like just one more way to indulge my track-all-the-things obsession.

So I created an account and logged my first food: “Banana, large.” I would then go on to log pie hole traffic each day for 2,129 of those 2,755 days: an overall rate of 77%. That’s not a bad percentage, but when I narrow it to the last four years, it gets even better. Then, I logged my pies on 1,381 out of 1,459 days. That’s 94%.

So based on the opening statement, I must be the weight loss king. I mean, tracking my foods that much? There’s no way I ever could’ve overeaten in that entire period.

There’s no point in saying, “Of course I did.” But then again, I really didn’t sign up for this for the weight loss benefit. I did it so that someday I would know that I logged my foods 94% of the time over a four year period.

And if you (like me) really like numbers, then feast your eyes upon these:

Number of Days Logged: 2,129
Unique Foods Logged: 3,733
Calories Consumed: 4,305,768
Individual Entries: 25,540
Average Calories per Item: 168.59

The reader who has made it this far is probably asking, “So what did you eat most, Charlie? Was it pizza? French fries? Pizza covered with French fries?” Nope. Not even close. This is my Top Ten list:

Bananas 863
Fake Butter 761
Peanut Butter 673
Almond Milk 628
Bread 557
V8 Juice 412
Pringles 292
Salsa 255
Apples 208

And if your next question was, “Wow! Are you as surprised at those results as I am?” Yep. Very much so.

Addendum

Oh, and that original WebMD weight loss claim? Well, let’s look at the last set of numbers in this overly-detailed blog post. We’ll compare the eight years before I started food logging with the eight years following:

Weight on January 1, 2000 234
Weight on July 28, 2008 224
Weight on January 1, 2016 197

So without food tracking, I lost ten pounds in eight years. And with food tracking (drum roll, please), I lost twenty-seven more pounds. I knew it! The quote was wrong. Let’s fix it.

What if just by making one change in your habits, you could boost your weight loss 2.7 times? It may sound too good to be true, but Charlie Hills has demonstrated that the simple act of keeping a food diary can encourage you to eat fewer calories.
— Dr. Charlie Hills

We’ve all heard the quote, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” We’ve all heard it because: 1) it’s very true and 2) a very, very famous person said it. According to the internet, that famous person was Benjamin Franklin. Or Alan Lakein. Or George Carlin, Maya Angelou, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Eleanor Roosevelt, or possibly even Gandalf. (Believe me, the internet is the last place in the world to look for accurate quote attributions.)

As great as this quote is, though, there are many other planning-related quotes to choose from, if that’s your thing.

“Always have a plan, unless you’re too busy. Then, like, whatever.”
— Oprah Winfrey

“If you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll probably end up on the third floor. Dead.”
— Albus Dumbledore

“You know why I’m so witty? Cuz that was the plan, man!”
— Mark Twain

“I love it when a plan comes together.”
— Margaret Thatcher

You know, I should probably create images for those quotes and upload them to Tumblr. Because as Ernest Hemingway famously quipped, “Once a quote has been wrongly attributed and uploaded to the internet, it becomes true forever and ever.”

All kidding aside, I do have one real quote that I do find appropriate today:

“A goal without a plan is just a wish.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Take it from the man who brought us Le Petit Prince: you gotta have a plan. And, as it just so happens, a plan is exactly what I wanted to share with you today.

What Plan?

This blogger recently took a good hard look at his last ten years. Back when he turned
forty, he’d just wrapped up some old projects and looked forward with renewed hope at what the next ten years would bring. “I’m going to do it. After thirteen years of thinking about it, I’m really going to do it.”

But you know where this blogger went wrong? He never came up with a plan. Because who needs a plan? There’s plenty of time to just wing it, right?

Wrong. There’s no better way to waste time than plowing forward blindly.

So this time, this blogger’s got a plan. He’s finally thinking clearly. “I’m going to do it,” he says. “After twenty-three years of thinking about it, I’m really going to do it.”

Spring 2016: This blogger finishes the move to the new house. There’s just no way around this and he has to realistically budget plenty of time for it.

September 2016: This blogger publishes his “cancer book.” Yep, for real.

April 2017: Right on the heels of that, he publishes Ronald. True, this isn’t a lot of time from the end of the last book. But that’s okay because: 1) he’s already written the basic storyline and 2) it’s only going to be a novella, if not shorter.

December 2017: This blogger finishes Elsewhither, the first book of the Underhaven Trilogy.

January 2020: The second book of the Underhaven Trilogy.

February 2023: The third book of the trilogy.

January 2026: This blogger writes another blog post, “How None My Plans Worked Out The Way I Thought They Would.”

But that’s okay. Because by then I’ll have a new plan. “I’m going to do it,” I’ll say. “After thirty-three years of thinking about it, I’m really going to do it!”

Announcement

After one post, seven days, and hours upon hours of deep pondering, I believe it’s time for me to retire this blog. It’s been a great run but I feel like I’ve done everything I can do here and it’s time to move on. A big thanks to everyone for all their support since last Friday.

Ha ha. I so funny.

Of course I’m not about to close up shop. Not after just one week. Not after spending a thousand hours tweaking this WordPress theme. Not when Awesome Post Number Two is about to begin . . .

Awesome Post Number Two

I launched this site last week, not coincidentally, on my birthday. Now the astute reader possibly noticed that I mentioned nary a word of my birthday in the post itself. In fact, I had intended to keep the entire affair quiet. The date is hidden on Facebook and other social media outlets. I don’t talk about it in day to day conversation. And I always try to let the day just come and go with as little fanfare as possible. Like Donald Trump, I try not to draw attention to myself.

Of course, if someone already knows it’s my birthday and if they feel like expressing it in some way, that’s perfectly fine. I prefer this approach, actually. And maybe that’s because this method is much more natural than some web site jogging your memory with the sincere and inviting link entitled “Charlie Hills plus one other.”

But alas, the secret wasn’t meant to be. Two separate events reached deep into the bag and extracted the cat.

  1. A couple weeks prior to the big day, Laura sent an email blast asking the world to send me cards. (Ironically, with the mention that I didn’t want “a bunch of hoopla.”)
  2. Then the day of, a most unexpected a post from my sister appeared, which she kicked off with a “Shhhh. Don’t tell anyone.”

Okay, then. I guess everyone knows now. 🙂

I can’t really put my finger on it. With so many actual problems in the world, what’s the big deal about getting older? Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. Sure, there’s that constant and never-ending pang of, “Man, I’ve barely checked anything of my Lifetime Todo List!” But seriously, I bet even the likes of Warren Buffet and Steven Spielberg feel the same way. Everybody’s list will always be longer than time allows us to complete.

But back to the birthday thing! Everything turned out to be a success. Biz’s blog post sent a veritable bevy of people to my new site. And Laura’s call to action produced nearly forty cards and emails from all over the western hemisphere.

And as I pondered things, I realized that in a lot of ways, a good birthday is just like getting a life-threatening case of cancer. But in a good way.

Just look at the similarities:

  1. Both events are rare. In fact, the rarer the better.
  2. Both events produce an outpouring of good wishes (many from people you haven’t heard from in a long time).
  3. And both events involve large quantities of medication. Sure, in one case it was hydroxydaunorubicin and in the other, a beer. But when you get down to it, what’s the difference? Well, besides the fact that one costs twenty-seven thousand times as much as the other. That just means it means that much more.

So a big thank you to everyone who took the time to wish me a happy day. I shall endeavor to return the favor to you one day. Just be sure I have your current mailing address so I know where to send the hydroxydaunorubicin.

Welcome!

If you followed me from here or (less likely) from here, then thank you for joining me at my new place in space. If you simply arrived here on your own, then please leave a comment below and tell me how on earth you came across this web site out of the nearly one billion other web sites currently available. I’d like to shake your hand.

My name is Charlie Hills. I spend more than a third of my day at work, less than a third of my day asleep, and the rest trying to get from one to the other. By profession, I’m a software developer. But when I grow up, I want to be a writer, a musician, and an artist. Oh, and I also want Forrest Gump’s riding mower job. That’d be pretty sweet.

I’ve been blogging more or less continuously for nearly eight years now. Over that time, I’ve maintained at least half a dozen of ’em: some private, some public, some more well known, others essentially invisible. When I started my first one, Back to the Fridge, I did so with two purposes: as a creative outlet and as a way to promote my then-new book.

But just recently, as my thirteenth mid-life crisis approached (for the record, these have happened at ages 12, 15, 17, 20, 28, 31, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 and 42) I realized that if I wanted to make the most of that third third of my day, I would have to start making some hard choices. Blog consolation seemed like the right thing to do and thus The One Blog is born.

Topics?

I’m glad you asked! For all the cool kids who followed me here from The Fridge, things actually won’t look much different for the foreseeable future. I’ll continue to write about the topics that interest me, but most importantly, they’ll be written in the same voice you’ve grown to know and crave on a weekly basis.

Posts will fall into one of the categories I’ve defined (so far): Health, Food, Writing, Music, Art, and the ubiquitous “General.” (Not necessarily in that order.) But we’ll see how it goes. I’m not going to paint myself into any corners.

The End?

Oh, I’m glad you asked about that too! In spite of the fact that this is my very first post of my very new blog, to me it really marks the end of many things. It’s the end of me worrying about readership and blog statistics. It’s the end of me whining about my lack of progress in all my creative endeavors. And it’s even the end of my mildly irritating, nearly omnipresent, self-deprecating talk.

Well, maybe not the end of that, but I’ll at least try and dial it back to maybe a two.

And that’s really about it for today. Thanks for paying me a visit and come back next week. I’ll still be posting every Friday. And I just might make it worthwhile.

Until then, please enjoy my 2015 year in review video. I decided to take a picture a day just to look back and see all the amazing things that happen during one spin around the sun.