I talked last week about how I planned on doing this weekly wrap up thing. I’m calling it a newsletter so that I can be pretentious about it. No sense in not being snooty about it. All of my fellow bloggers do “wrap ups,” I do a “Newsletter.”

Work

This was the week I found out that I’m likely not to have a job on January 1st. My company is moving most of its editing to AI, so it doesn’t need as many managing editors. I drew the short straw apparently (i.e. I make more than the other guy), so I’m done after Christmas. It’s not official yet, but it’s going to happen.

Remember a few weeks ago, I wrote about how I had these plans to read a literal ton of books in October? I had been coming off my worse reading slump in ages, and dammit, I planned on finally getting some of the books off of my TBR list.

Yeah.

That didn’t happen. Now, to be fair, I did read some. Here’s the list I set out with:

• Powers and Thrones by Dan Jones
• Grave Peril by Jim Butcher
• The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon
• Dynasty by Tom Holland
• Investigation, Mediation, Vindication by Chris Tullbane
• Genghis Khan by Jack Weatherford
• The Will of the Many by James Islington
• Alexander the Great by Paul Cartledge
• A Fellowship of Bakers & Magic by J Penner

I finished the last one, and I’m much further in to Grave Peril. So I did read. But I didn’t really make as much progress as I had hoped to. Now, I knew when I wrote that post that I was never going to get through everything. I had hoped for more progress than I actually made, however.

Every year since 2012, I’ve participated in NaNoWriMo. This year is a little different, since officially, NaNoWriMo is no more. Due to incompetence and mismanagement, the organization that ran NaNoWriMo killed the entire thing off earlier this year. A couple of years ago, my bud Amin created Writing Month, an open source and community driven replacement for NaNoWriMo.

This year, I’m utterly unprepared. I actually kind of forgot about Writing Month until this morning when I saw Sudo Science talk about it. So, I’m going into this with very few expectations. I’ll probably float between a couple projects for a few days and see what can grab my attention. Or maybe I’ll ease my way back into something I’ve written before.

I’ve been writing about notes, note-taking, and notebooks a lot lately. Beyond the fact that I have a crappy memory and writing everything down helps with that, I also feel the need to create a record of my own personal history.

As I get older, I feel more and more like I want to do things that matter, if not to others, at least to myself. I’m not so sure that I succeed at that, but I do feel like documenting the things I do, even if they all end up supremely mundane, is something I can do to make myself feel like I’m actually doing something.

I’m resisting buying a new keyboard.

I have promised myself that my need to collect new keebs is over, and I can be happy with what I have. I tell myself that at least once a day. I have a problem.

The thing that is prodding me towards breaking my “no new keyboards” streak, is that my current dactyl doesn’t have enough keys. It does, and I could easily use layers, but my brain thinks it needs more keys in the thumb cluster. It would be nice, but it’s not really necessary.

I’m filling up my Field Notes notebooks quickly, so I’ve been on the lookout for my next set. I figured I would go cheaper this time, since Field Notes (it’s a brand) are quite pricey. I found some generic A6 size notebooks on Amazon that looked nice and have about 10 times the number of pages as the Field Notes.

I’ve been scribbling in one the last couple of days, and I realize that I don’t care for them as much. They’re too thick. They’re not as easy to write on, nor do they feel as nice to write on as the Field Notes.