This week’s assignment is “Food Photography: Desserts”. This is the first actual assignment (as opposed to Weekend Challenge, which is a little more casual) I’ve participated in. My entry isn’t spectacular — I like it, but in the end it’s just a picture of a cookie, not much special about it. Still, every shot is practice, right? Doing something is better than doing nothing, even if that “something” isn’t as stellar as it could be.

Most of the shots for the assignment are of some coconut macaroons I made as a birthday treat, sitting on a cooling rack in the bright afternoon sun. There are also a very few shots of what appears to be a cupcake at the end of the gallery. These are included because they technically fit the theme, but I actually took them for this week’s entry to the “Life” contest. I don’t generally make a big deal about birthdays (not even “big” ones like this one), but they do feel all wrapped up in the concept of “life” to me, marking as they do our progress through the term of our life. Or, at the very least, I wasn’t coming up with anything else and didn’t want to miss a chance to enter, yes?

This one was better for creativity, not necessarily in the composition but in the staging of the photo. We didn’t have any cupcakes or icing, and I didn’t really feel like making any. So I had to come up with something else that would stand in photographically — and then set the stage the way I wanted it as well. Much different from the macaroons, where I just had to grab a camera and take a photo of what was already there! It turned out to be an exercise in editing as well, as one of the better-composed shots came out with some odd refraction in it that I had to Photoshop out. (Thank goodness for the plain black background and the Heal tool.)

Links:
“Desserts” Assignment Entry
“Life” Contest Week 2 Entry
“Desserts” Assignment Gallery

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Over at SparkPeople, I’m hitting a brick wall. Over and over again. Because what else can I do?
Aaaand There’s the Down-Swing

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Well, regardless of whether it’s a “project of the month” or not, I had decided long ago that I’d like to start getting my photography out there more. Get it seen by more people, maybe even see how I could do in some contests. The Digital Photography School weekend challenges help with this to a minor extent; I’ve gotten about 15-20 views on the photos I’ve entered in the “Blue” and “Good Morning” challenges, plus a few hits on other photos in the galleries. I keep meaning to do their weekly assignments, too, but those never seem to make it to the RSS feed or Twitter and so I wind up forgetting about them. (Now that I have a user account on the forums, it’s probably worth seeing if I can “subscribe” to that folder or something.)

Butanyway. DPS just started a contest. So, hey, I thought maybe I should enter it. The theme is “life”. One entry per week is allowed. It was my intent to take new photos for each week, but this week I fell back on my archives. (This is allowed by the rules.) Recent archives, though; I used the image “Growth“, the picture of our little garlic chive plant in the PowerPlant hydroponic system. It was on page 30 of the week’s entry thread, and although I didn’t look through all of them I saw enough to know that there are many better photographs in there. I also saw many I didn’t think were as good. So I’m slightly encouraged, but also nervous. I don’t really expect to win anything, but I’m trying to get myself to just do it, just try, because I’ll never know if I don’t at least try.

I’ll post other entries as they come along, I guess. (I’m planning to try to stay away from using pictures of Natalie, actually, because I feel like that’s a little obvious.)

I also forgot to post that I’d done the “Good Morning” challenge at all. My entry was an image that was actually taken not in the morning, but at around 8:30pm. It was dark, and, well, that’s what I see when I wake up in the morning too. (At 4:45am, it’s pretty much dark year round.) So the only light is from the lightpost outside. It didn’t come out looking the same way it looks to the naked eye, but that was OK by me because it looked more sunrisey.

Here’s my entry: Sunrise
And the whole gallery: Good Morning

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How did this happen?

I started scheduling projects-of-the-month to keep myself focused on one thing and then allow that focus to shift from month to month, right? Right.

Well, it’s working wonderfully for getting me to focus on things I might otherwise have let fall by the wayside. (It works even better when, as with this month, someone else is doing the project along with me.) But suddenly, somehow I’ve fallen right back into the middle of my pile o’ projects again. Currently on the plate:

1. Writing exercises (until the end of this week, at least)
2. Doing DPS Weekend Challenges when they come up, and now also their “Life” contest if I can figure out what to do with it
3. Getting myself back to exercising on a regular schedule, preferably eventually the old every-morning schedule (involves specific goals about trying out WiiFit Plus and an abs DVD for 15 sessions each as well)
4. Tracking food to hopefully help get myself back to eating healthy and away from stuffing my face with sugar
5. Changing my dental hygeine schedule in order to give my poor rotten teeth a better chance
6. Changing my eating schedule for the same purpose
7. Keeping three plants alive (catnip and chives at home, nearly-dead pothos vine at work)
8. Watching my way through Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, as well as keeping up with The Vampire Diaries (which is so, so much better than I ever expected it to be) and finishing Dollhouse (almost over)

This is not even counting the back-burner projects, like finally sitting down and editing one or both of my NaNo novels (from 2008 and 2009, respectively), giving my long-standing Alex project a good long look to see how to pare it back to a writable scope, and learning to play guitar, or blogging on a regular basis. It’s also not counting the projects that shouldn’t be back-burner but have wandered back there on their own, like some improvements I’ve meant to make to the Civic Theatre site (some of them, like the e-mail distribution thingy, badly needed). Nor does it count parenting projects like potty training. And we won’t even talk about stuff that just needs done to keep the household running. Or, you know, my actual money-paying job. This is all just stuff I’m doing for me, because I feel like it, and actively trying to work on.

Besides all that, I’m noticing that things tend to bleed over. I’m still doing a lot of seeking out and trying new foods, for example, even though that was December’s project. December’s food thing wound up being both food and photography. And so forth. And of course some things just aren’t suited to a one-month timeframe (like learning to play guitar).

And I keep getting tempted to take on more! “Hey, a photo365 project sounds really cool, maybe I should– NO. NO. STOP IT.”

What. The hell. Happened?

Anyway, the upshot of this is that I’m not really sure the whole project-of-the-month thing is working out after all. The writing thing isn’t going to continue through February (for other reasons, but may be picked up again later, depending), which leaves me open for whatever else I’d like to do. I’m not sure, though, whether I should set another project of the month or not. If it’s not doing what I want it to… Maybe I should stop and try something else. I’m not quite sure what, though. Or if I should, indeed, try anything else. Maybe I just need to accept that this is the way my motivation goes and try to ride it out as best I can. I’m sure I’ve blogged about that before…

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Everyone else has something to say about Apple’s newly-announced tablet, the iPad. I suppose I ought to put in my two cents. If nothing else, I’m hoping to come out with some balance here. As I told Tim last night, it seems like most (not all, but most) reactions I’ve seen fall into three categories: People who were predisposed to like it and are pretty excited about it, people who were predisposed to dislike it and hate the whole concept, and of course the apparently-obligatory maxi pad jokes. (Which I don’t pretend to quite understand. It’s roughly the size and shape of a notepad, and its screen functions similarly to a touchpad; I don’t quite get the immediate leap to feminine hygeine products.)

In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention here that I’m actually pretty predisposed to like it. We’re pretty much an Apple household. It’s been ages since we had a dedicated Windows machine in the house (as opposed to a Mac that can run Windows if we need it to), we both have iPhones and iPods, we’re even one of those weird households that actually has an AppleTV, etc., etc. I like Apple, frankly. That said, it’s not my intent that this entry should fall into any of the aforementioned three categories.

My initial reaction when I saw it, for example, was, “…It’s a big iPhone. What’s so special about that?” And there are definitely some drawbacks and shortcomings. It’s running the iPhone’s OS, which means that what it runs is iPhone Apps. Not regular programs. If it’s not in the App Store, you can’t run it — and while “there’s an app for that” is becoming a common joke because it’s usually true, and you can do a lot with Apps, and let’s not forget they’re usually reasonably cheap as software goes, this does have its limitations. I sincerely doubt, for instance, that there will ever be any Web browser available other than Safari; Apple won’t approve it for the App store because it’s competition. And the App Store is notorious for rejecting apps for strange and inexplicable reasons. It doesn’t have any kind of camera, which is going to hamper anyone who wants to, say, video chat. The mobile edition of Safari, installed here as on the iPhone and iPod Touch, still won’t handle Flash, which is kind of a big deal for Web surfers these days.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I liked the idea. Because: It’s a big iPhone. I already use my iPhone more or less as a tiny computer; I don’t actually use it as a phone that much. I surf the Web, I check Facebook and Twitter, I keep grocery lists and look at the forecast and track my daily calories and exercise, I make notes, etc., etc. Some of those applications, as well as some that I haven’t used it for (such as ebook reading, which is being pushed as a major feature of the iPad and makes it potentially a Kindle-killer) do suffer from the limited screen size and teensy keyboard. I think about being able to actually for-real type e-mail responses, keep a digital recipe open in the kitchen while I’m cooking without having to clean my hands off to scroll around every thirty seconds, read a web page without scrolling side-to-side on every line to see it all… I do start to get excited, I’ll admit. Add the fact that apps have been developed and will continue to be that are made specifically for the iPad, to take advantage of its bigger screen and greater processing power, and it starts to sound even better.

I think there are a couple of things to bear in mind, though. The first is that this is not, strictly, a tablet computer. Tablet computers, as I understand them, are full-fleged standalone computers, currently typically running Windows, probably Vista or 7. That’s not what the iPad is, and anyone expecting something that will replace their laptop or desktop is going to be sorely disappointed. This product is intended to fill a specific gap in Apple’s product line. It’s meant to be lighter and more portable and generally more stripped-down than a MacBook, not to mention less expensive, while offering more functionality than an iPhone. I repeat: It runs the iPhone OS. Not OSX. That should tell you something about what it’s intended to be. The second thing to keep in mind is that this is first-generation Apple hardware. The iPod didn’t look so exciting when it was first announced either, but through quickly developing new iterations of the technology Apple has turned it into a very big deal. I think that it’s worth considering looking at this as a start point and seeing where they go with it. This is not new and revolutionary, no, but who knows what future versions might be?

Tim’s laptop is dead. Mine is… not dead yet, but has been doing the digital equivalent of looking pale and wan. We’re looking to replace at least one of the two. We do still have a desktop machine to provide any functionality that the iPad can’t. Will we be getting one of these? Or even two? (For around the price of the MacBook Tim would prefer, we could get each of us an iPad.)

Don’t know. We’re Apple fans, yes, but we haven’t yet decided whether this is what will suit our needs. It would require some adjustment in terms of how our computing is distributed; there would be certain tasks we’ve relied on our laptops for that would have to be moved to the desktop, at least. But will that do it? Is it going to be what we need? And is it worth jumping in now instead of waiting to see what else they do with it? We haven’t decided yet.

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I used to do all my writing on paper. The reason for this was simple: I wrote during school hours. A notebook was unremarkable in class. A student writing in a notebook? Even moreso. I didn’t have a laptop to carry around with me all the time, or even a tablet or an iPhone. I had. A notebook. The kind with paper in. So, that was what I used.

After I graduated college, I no longer had a reason to be constantly scribbling in notebooks. I did, however, spend the best part of my day in front of a computer. So I started writing on computers instead, typing up documents in Word and TextPad instead of filling notebook pages. If I ever gave it a second thought, it was to reflect that I was glad I had a computer to write on, because I could type ever so much faster than I could write. And, hey, my hand hurt less. (Until I started developing cubital tunnel problems. But, you know. Actually, my hand didn’t hurt then either; it was just half-numb.)

Nowadays, my computer time’s gone back down. I have plenty at work, but don’t get on the computer as much at home anymore. Too many other things to do. I found this was a slight problem when I started doing these exercises with Sarah Kathryn, because it made for more difficulties getting the writing done on time. When we got to the collection of six short sketches that we did for last week, I thought, “Screw it. These are short. I’ll write them out on paper first.” This is, after all, part of why I wanted Moleskine notebooks, right? So I could work on writing wherever I was? And I discovered an odd thing.

The way I write — I don’t mean my style, or the mechanical bits, or even my handwriting here, but the method I employ of working on writing a piece — has completely changed over the years. I used to write very linearly. After all, that’s how you write, right? I mean… You start at the beginning, and when you get to the end, you stop.

Except when you’re writing on a computer, you don’t have to do it that way. What I discovered when I tried to write a piece on actual paper again was that I had this urge to go back and change things before I’d finished writing. To insert things where there was no page space to do so, to erase things set down in ink, to rearrange where the only cut-and-paste available was the literal sort. I wasn’t writing linearly anymore; my mind was skipping around all over the place.

Here’s what my writing-on-paper looks like now (from the first draft of the current exercise, about the woman coming home to find her boyfriend’s lover):

What does all that mean? I don’t know. I think I would not want to try doing NaNo longhand. I’d still have to type it up for official wordcounts, and that’s a serious lot of writing to do by hand in one month (and a lot of paper to waste). For shorter exercises, I think it’s good, in a way. It forces my focus into moving forward and not just going back over what I’ve already written. It makes time spent changing and rearranging more visible, because the original content is still there even if it’s been struck through. It changes things up, makes my perspective a little different maybe. But is it better than typing?

Nah. It’s neither superior nor inferior. It’s just there, an interesting tool to have in my toolbox. For now, I’m sticking with the practice of writing the first draft longhand like this, for these exercises at least. Another time, in another context… Who knows? Even when novel writing, it might prove useful in getting out of a rut.

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This week’s exercise is paraphrased from Fiction Writers Workshop by Josip Novakovich. It should be about one page long. You’re describing a woman coming home from work who is about to discover her boyfriend’s lover. Note, though, that you’re only describing the lead-up, the details that set off warning bells for the reader that something is not quite right — not the discovery itself. Pay attention to subtle details like smells and half-heard sounds; lead us to the conclusion that something’s off rather than hitting us over the head with it.

This is the last exercise for January; whether to continue into February or not has not yet been decided. Stay tuned!

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I started listening to an NPR story about this story, and then decided to just go find the story itself.

The Test of Time: A busy working mother tries to figure out where all her time is going

Despite the headline, it’s interesting reading for more than just busy working moms. Also, if you’re a busy anything (working or otherwise, mom or otherwise) you’ve probably seen a billion similar headlines promising to help you find time for yourself again. You’ve probably already written it off, much as I did initially. It’s not actually that kind of article, though.

Now… As someone whose work does not tend to take over her life, and whose child is not yet old enough to need ferried anywhere other than to and from daycare, I did find the article a little discouraging. It left me with a little bit of a feeling that I shouldn’t have a right to feel overworked or busy, because this woman’s life is clearly about ten times more frenetic than mine. I actually don’t have to do a great deal of looking to find some leisure time in my average day. For that matter, I have an average day. By comparison, my life is positively sedate. I don’t find this frame of mind useful, because the fact that others have it worse should not invalidate my own problems, and thinking that it does makes me focus on that and not get anything done about my actual problems.

At the same time, though, it did serve to remind me of the amount of leisure time I actually have. (Even if I don’t count exercise as “leisure”, which I don’t and I don’t care what Mr. Time Expert says.) Tim and I make time every evening we’re both home (which is most evenings) to sit down and watch TV together for an hour before we go to bed. Nights he’s not home, I usually have that time free after Natalie goes to bed anyway. I often have some time, some days even a full hour, after I get home but before I pick up Natalie from daycare. Weekends, I have Natalie’s naptime, if I don’t fill it up with chores. And then there’s the fact that Mom and Dad keep Natalie overnight every other Friday, which results in an entire evening of leisure time. The following morning does sometimes have errands and chores tucked into it, but also generally counts as leisure. I’ve got leisure time, all right. Maybe not the 30 hours/week claimed in the article, not off the top of my head, but I actually get to sit down and rest reasonably often.

Because I can so readily identify my leisure time, I don’t feel the need to go through the time-diary exercise (which–am I the only one who looks at that phrase and thinks, “that sounds like an early-Rose-Tyler thing to do”?) in order to help point out to me that I have more time than I think I do. There is a part of me, though, that wonders if it might not interesting anyway. Not necessarily as a diagnostic tool, but just to get an objective look at where my time goes and see if it matches my perceptions.

Then the rest of me reminds that part of me that I’m accumulating Projects again, and the point of this project-of-the-month thing was specifically not to do that, so slate it for a later month or drop it already. Which is maybe another post in and of itself.

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I’m talking about motivation, inspiration, and how I’m doing on my get-back-with-it exercise goals, over on SparkPeople:
Action Breeds Motivation

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Sorry! Sorry! I should’ve posted this yesterday and just forgot. This one is a combination of two exercises with a little modification, one from Writing Fiction Step By Step and one from Fiction Writers Workshop (both by Josip Novakovich).

The assignment is to write six half-page sketches of people. These sketches should focus on one particular angle, as it were, one thing specifically used to give an idea of who this person is. Two should be about hands, two about clothing, and two about posture. Don’t rely on general terms like “graceful”; instead, show us the detail of the hands performing a graceful gesture. Show us how your characters’ personalities are expressed by their clothing choices, the way their hands move, the way they carry themselves.

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