Awesome

I made a couple tweaks around this here blog. The most obvious one is the totally flippin sweet banner, courtesy of my frikkin awesome wife. Seriously. She rocks.

The other one is that I changed the bullet image. Flowers? No thanks. It's now a circle, also courtesy of my wife because I am that lazy.

• check
• it
• out

I'm pretty pleased. I always liked the colors of this theme, but it came with too many frills and laces for my liking. Now I like it much more.

I also put in some writing time last night. Not too much, but enough to get the proverbial ball rolling. That's always exciting. Normally when I'm working on a story, I just start writing and see what happens, then go back and rewrite it several times. That process kind of blows with longer works because starting from scratch leads to trashing everything and making something completely different. For this one, I decided to try starting with a plot outline to see if a clear sense of direction helps keep me focused. I think part of the reason my longer stuff tends to fall to pieces is because I reach a point where I don't know what to do, and therefore do nothing. Not the best approach. Maybe this approach will help. Maybe not. We'll see.

For the sake of accountability

OpenOffice tells me I just put 688 words toward a new story. It's one that I have many pages of ideas on, but no actual story. Well, now it's 688 words of story. I'm pumped. It's so worth being frickin exhausted at work all day tomorrow.

But that's a boring entry, so I'll leave a little something called "Things I Would Say versus Things I Wish I Had the Stones to Say."

The Line: "Well, it's not that we don't want to let you work from home regularly to reduce your gas expenses, it's just that we need to think about the kind of precedent it will set with other employees and how to address it before we can move forward."
What I Would/Did Say: "I understand. There has to be a real reason for it, otherwise people might get upset and bitter."
What I Wish I Had the Stones to Say: "Your existing precedent is that you don't care about any of your employees until they try to quit, at which point you realize the company is doomed without them and agree to let them work from home. So, yeah, you need to figure out how to spin that so people don't mistakenly believe you have their best interests in mind."

Sorry there isn't really a punchline in there. People do this sort of thing all the time (obviously myself included), and it's interesting to see how two completely different characters can exist as pieces of the same mind. I guess I look at it as a lesson that creating unique voices isn't as difficult as it can seem at the outset, because sometimes all it takes is a different degree of restraint to make the leap from polite guy to mister road rage.