Hello and happy new year, fellow Gopher-ers! It's been a while. Last year was
a lot, and it's nice to be starting this year out a bit fresher.

I quit my job back in October, no longer able to deal with it all. It was a
good decision, although my bank account seems not to think so. Still, I feel a
lot better than I did and more inspired than ever. I've been trying to look
into submitting works to literary magazines and looking into fellowships and
residencies and such. I'm really not all that sure what I'd like to do yet,
but I'd really like to avoid returning to the 9-5 or working on people's
computers constantly. I love computers and I enjoyed a lot of what I did, but
it sucked the energy out of me and made it hard to live. It just stopped
serving me, and I wanted to stop serving it.

For twelve weeks up to the weekend before Christmas I spent time doing The
Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. It
really helped reignite a LOT of creative passion in me and the desire to be
creative and produce things which I love, like comics and software and poetry.
Pretty much every single day since I started I've been doing what Cameron
calls The Morning Pages -- 3 pages (translated to roughly 30-45 minutes) of
nonstop writing each morning. The idea isn't to produce anything, rather to
write in a sort of stream of consciousness style and get all of the things
hindering your creativity out of the way and seek answers to the things you
need to help you on your path. It's a highly private sort of thing, done on
paper, and I've got to give it to Cameron -- it's damn effective. Writing
without stopping is a way of breaking past your Censor, as she calls it, and
the things you really want to hide from yourself more often than not come out
on the page. There's so much more to the book than just the morning pages, so
if you're interested in something that will really help you reconnect with
your creative self, I HIGHLY recommend the book. It's a whopper.

I'm on my last good month of "savings," which is frankly a frightening thing,
but I know things will all work out. I've got a lot of resistance to a whole
lot of things that I'm still trying to sort through and overcome, but it's a
process. I felt particularly inspired to phlog today for some reason, and it's
been quite a long while since I've done so, but it's nice to do it. So anyhow,
hello to all my friends! Hello to the random miscellaneous readers! I'm glad
you're out here on the slow net hopefully enjoying these posts! Please check
out my poetry if you're into that sort of thing! I'm sure I'll be back for
more future posts this year with my usual fervered talk about computers and
such :)

That's all for now! It's a short one! See you on the flip side!
Later :p