Fifth Draft

This is going live late on a Sunday night. Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to read this, but it’s something I read about and a new style of blogging I want to try and I have a keyboard in front of me so here we go.

Weeknotes. Designer and blogger, Matt Webb, finally put into words what I’ve always admired from many of the personalities I follow online: a list of what they’ve done in the week.

Weeknotes, according to Webb as described here:

I wrote the first ever weeknote in August 2009 at BERG and here it is: Week 217. Like anything new, the origin is fuzzier than that.

I thought it’d be interesting to start giving a weekly update here of what we’re up to in the company.

Even in that proto weeknote the format is there already: a little reporting on the life of the business; a little off-road rambling; a single person’s individual perspective; a strong feeling of in medias res.

A little reporting on the week’s events. When you spend so much time surfing and reading and researching for various articles, it can feel like you’re digging in the jungle and missing the trees. It’s understandable to feel loss in a world of social media, when a thousand tweets and articles and images and Soundcloud links come flying your way, to think you’re doing nothing. So, as a form of accountability, and as a way to communicate my process.

I turned 31 last Friday.

No longer content on being 30, my time stream has continued to go against my wishes and progressed forward.

I fear I’ll need to put it down. Violently. And with many weapons.

We took a trip to Williamstown, Massachusetts this past week. When I saw “we,” I mean my wife and I. The norm of our trips across the country typically involve a red-eye and less than a 48 hour turn around. We flew out Sunday night, arrived Monday morning, then flew out Tuesday after midnight. The only cab service had to come in from New York to take us to the airport in Albany. Over curved roads in the pitch black at 3am, we arrived. Alive. Nauseous, but alive.

It’s drives like that one that makes me think, “Might just be time to pay a little more for first class at a regular hour of the day.”

So, Lebron James is in the news.

I’ve been over his stats and numbers. Seems legit. I can only applaud someone who’s willing to take his own money and put it back into the community in such a large way.

Forty-three staffers will help run the I Promise School — including not just teachers but also a principal, assistant principal, four intervention specialists, plus a tutor, English as a second language teacher, music instructor, and gym teacher, USA Today reports. Classrooms will hold 20 students per teacher.

I speak a lot about my classroom experiences. Call it the curse of the teacher. We can’t help but talk about what we do for kids. Selfish, maybe, but part of me thinks that if others understand the craziness and madness that goes into educating kids, they might vote through laws and regulations that support teachers. I’m fairly positive my home state, Arizona, went nuts a few months ago trying to fix this.

Reading about Lebron making it so highly-accredited teachers are well paid with 20 students in a classroom? That’s all I needed to read to know hearts are in the right place.

Here’s an art class for drawing the everyday life.

Before I committed myself to writing stories, I wanted to draw stories. Comic books or video game character design were possible options. My first two years of college were spent filling up a dozen sketch books with characters and worlds I might one day have hoped to use in my future career.

But, as it turns out, drawing is hard.

This spoke to me because it seemed like a good way to get me back into the drawing practice.

Blot.im is a blogging service that takes all sorts of word documents from a Dropbox and automatically uploads them. Notepad, Word docs, TextEdits, anything.

I’ve been tinkiering with this idea. An entirely second blog. Again, would anyone read it?

But that’s not really the point, is it? It would be writing for the sake of writing. My main thought is to use it for book/television/movie/video game reviews and dissections. Keep this blog for writing advice and updates on personal matters, and one specifically for short, blurby bits on whatever fiction I’m taking in. For example, I’m currently on a Modern Family kick (Hi, 10 years late to the party) and have had thoughts on mutiple episodes. This would be the space to dump those thoughts and examinations, then walk away.

$20 a year?

Might be worth it.

Five Nights at Freddy’s: The Silver Eyes. (Amazon US)

I’m a fan of the Five Nights series. I read this book in a week. It was a surprisingly vicious, awful tale told within the world of killer animatronics and terrible pizza. While the books don’t necessarily match up to the games, that’s not the point. They tell an entirely new tale which is all the more helped if you’ve played the games. Thinking there could be a soul-possessed bear monster lurking in the shadows is helped all the more because of every jump scare you experience.

Charlie’s a fascinatingly depressing character. She comes from a life of tragedy, and lives alone in a world of loneliness. The only thing that makes her come alive is her father’s creations, murderous machines that were used to lure children away. A killer lurks in the shadows who only comes alive when he’s allowed to wear a yellow rabbit head.

And this book is published by Scholastic. You know the book orders that your kids bring home?

So dark. Beautiful. A little repetitive at times, but overall, I enjoyed it greatly.

And that’s it for me. The school year begins this week, my morning and afternoon tutoring students will be revving up, and because of that my schedule is in a flux. There’s writing to do and I missed my birthday deadline.

Plotting books is one thing. Following through is another. I did what I could and made it up to over 60% done. Three more outlines are almost finished. A string of “almosts” and “closes.” It’s hard to look at those, but I guess if I don’t stop, then I haven’t lost yet. This isn’t a timed race. It’s a journey to a temple in the hidden jungles that no one’s found for years.

Not bad for a first time. Or maybe it was. Who cares? Maybe it could have been better and cleaned up a bit. But, for a #1, I’ve read worse.

Talk soon.

-Robert Acosta