It’s about 5:30 in the morning on Saturday.  I’ve had possibly one of the busiest and most intense weeks of my life.  Thankfully, all of that is over for now.  While it can be utterly exhausting putting in nearly 18 hour days for a week straight to get one thing finished, there’s a sense of accomplishment at the end of it all where you can say, “I did that.  And it works.”

With the exception of this week, I’ve been doing research for my book and slugging through the first few chapters.  It only feels boring when you have to trudge through a mountain of paper to find a few nuggets of information that might be helpful in your own writing.  Feels almost like going back to the beginning all over again.

I’ve also got another screenplay almost finished.  I’m keeping the genre and story quiet for now.  There’s a few of you out there that know what it’s about in the ramblings I give during our phone conversations.  One more thing to get off the plate, but it’ll feel really good to have another finished script under my belt.

Rather than let my programming skills dimish, I’ve also been developing some new plug-ins for the GIMP in the old-school Scheme language.  It’s fascinating to use such a compact and brief language to develop complex and powerful graphics processing routines.

If you’ve never heard of the GIMP and like to use programs like Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, give it a download and try it out.  It’s available for Linux, Windows, and Mac, and it’s free.  Plus there’s tons of very high-quality free plug-ins available for it on the net.  Okay, shameless plug paragraph over.

One of these days I’ll figure out what I want to be when I grow up: a programmer/engineer or a writer.  It’s good having the whole programming thing to fall back on during the tough times.  Believe me, it’s saved my bacon on more than one occasion.  But writing full-time is where ultimately I am heading.