Happy Thanksgiving to the Americans among you, and if you’re traveling, best wishes for a smooth trip. Also, make sure the turkey’s fully cooked. For you non-Americans, have a great Thursday tomorrow.

Random things I’m thankful for this year:

1) My garden – It’s fun to play with, and it makes food.
2) Tennis, running, and every other sport I do – Something has to keep me humble. I’d hate to be good at everything.
3) Penguins – Because they’re cute, and such graceful swimmers while seeming so ridiculous on land.

Random notes

* Dylan’s Candy Bar is big, but most of the candy is stuff you could find elsewhere. Still, fun to look at it all and imagine being seven and let loose in there.

* The Brooklyn Bridge is long.

* If you want to visit Ellis Island, get tickets online in advance.

* Occupy Wall Street is a lot smaller than it looks on tv (but obviously much bigger than this photo).

* The Central Park Zoo is nicely done, but I felt bad for the polar bear doing endless laps.

* This sign is in the zoo, which is in the park, which has trees. But still…

* Brooklyn seems to have more trees than Manhattan. Manhattan sticks them all in little islands (or big islands, in the case of Central Park). It’s quite possible that there are parts of Manhattan for which this isn’t true, but it’s something that’s struck me every time I’ve been there. (And I gather the mayor has a plan to add more trees, which there is some dissent about because it’s possibly not the most well-thought-out plan.)

Playing games late at night is much more fun than the typical overcrowded con room party where you stand around trying to make small talk with people you can’t actually hear.

Downtown Indianapolis is really nice. Some folks at the newspaper in Toledo used to talk about Indianapolis like it was something Toledo should aspire to, and now I see why.

Sunday afternoon before leaving I stopped by the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art. If you’re ever nearby, go. I didn’t see all of it, but what I did see was fantastic. There’s a strong emphasis on current Native American artists, which often covered examples of melding traditional culture and arts with modern and European-inspired ones. There was one absolutely stunning painting by Yatika Starr Fields (called Renewal, go look at it) that I stared at more than once. On my way out, I got two books from the gift shop: Everything You Know about Indians is Wrong by Paul Chaat Smith and a book of oral histories of contemporary woodland Indians. Should be interesting reads.

1. Read a blog post about how someone else uses their giant whiteboard to plot novels with big swoopy arrows or for some other cool purpose. Wish you weren’t a grad student and could afford one/had a wall to put it on. Repeat at least annually for several years.

2. Get frustrated with plotting and structuring novels on paper or a small computer screen.

3. Decide that since you own a house and have a job, you can get a whiteboard.

4. Be shocked by the cost of 5×3 or bigger magnetic whiteboards. Read reviews on Amazon, which reveal shipping problems like bent corners. Decide not to risk it.

5. Notice that there exist things called magnetic paint (it isn’t magnetic, it has metal in it) and whiteboard paint. Read reviews. Get very excited.

6. Dither over dry erase vs chalkboard. Magnetic paint is dark, so would be easier to cover with the also-dark blackboard paint, and the paint manufacturer (Rustoleum) talks about making magnetic blackboards, not whiteboards. Whiteboard paint might take several layers, each of which makes it less likely to attract magnets. The whiteboard paint has much poorer reviews than the blackboard paint. But dry erase is much nicer than chalk.

7. Go to Home Depot and spend ~$50 on one can of Rustoleum magnetic paint and whiteboard paint and assorted rollers and paint trays.

8. Tape off a randomly sized section of wall (a bit bigger than 3×5) based on where the windows are. Forget that the rollers won’t be able to go right up to the edge of the windowsill because they’re cylindrical. Find a drop cloth that might have been a rug pad in a previous life.

9. Sand the wall. A lot. But not enough.

10. Stir the magnetic paint FOREVER, or for the 10 minutes the directions call for, whichever comes first, and then paint the wall. Add a coat every half hour until the entire can has been used. Lose count of coats after 4 or 5. Scrub arms with a pumice stone to get the drops off.

11. Experiment to find out that a magnet will hold 4 sheets of paper and one index card to the wall. Theorize that one layer of whiteboard paint = one sheet of paper as far as the magnet is concerned, so this is ok.

12. Wait a day, then tackle the whiteboard part of the plan. Whiteboard paint has to be used within two hours of being mixed, which means you can do 4 or 5 coats. Four sounds safe.

13. Paint. Discover that the reviews weren’t kidding, the whiteboard paint is very thin and runny, and your wall, which wasn’t flat to begin with, now has rivulets of paint running down it. More thin coats would be better than thick coats, but that’s not possible with the two-hour time limit. Wish that it came in smaller cans. Also discover that four coats isn’t quite enough to hide the magnetic paint.

14. Refuse to fret about the bumps and not-completely-white spots until the two-day wait for the paint to cure has passed.

15. Write. Erase. Stick papers up with magnets. Rejoice.

I’ve posted some takeaways from the conference at my tumblr. I heard some interesting talks, met some great people, and learned a lot. More details later…sometime.

Ok, actually it’s Friday evening and I’m scheduling this post even farther in the future than usual. I hope we all had a great weekend. More on the conference later.

It was a great trip–wonderful family, interesting city, good food, and lots of fun sightseeing. I walked my feet off. (Shoes that are perfectly comfortable for wearing to work aren’t necessarily all right for walking 24 hours a day, oddly enough. Good thing I brought my running shoes.)

I will make an actual post about the trip later (i.e. if my sleep schedule ever normalizes), explaining some of those photos. But here’s the Cliff Notes version of the trip that I kept so I wouldn’t forget where I took which photos:

Sat – left
Sun – arrived. Dinner.
Mon – Purple Bamboo Garden. Lunch at a Muslim restaurant. Swam, strolled around malls. Dinner – Peking duck.
Tues – Old Summer Palace. Lunch at pizza buffet. Olympic plaza.
Wed – Free morning, went shopping – fruit (dragonfruit, and snake skin fruit looks like a pangolin). Forbidden City. Dinner – hot pot.
Thurs – Ming emperor tombs. Great Wall has so many stairs.
Fri – Silk Market. Tailored dress, skirt. Misc other things. Annoying bargaining. Dinner for Ellen’s birthday included pigeons.
Sat – Temple of Heaven. Vow renewal – part of a traditional ceremony at a palace belonging to the second son of a Qing (?) emperor
Sun – Fitting for dress and skirt. More Silk Market. Dinner at the duck restaurant again.
Mon – Zoo and aquarium. Dinner at Schezuan place (taro-covered spare ribs).
Tues – Art museum, Lama temple, picked up dress and skirt. Dinner at mall food court (where someone was making fresh noodles)
Wed – Hiked at gorge, lounged around at hot springs, late snack at congee place.
Thurs – left.

• I’m a fan of saving the environment, but doing without toilet paper is further than I want to go by a long shot.

• What’s the next puzzle craze after sudoku? Article with sample puzzles. The nurikabe was really easy.

• Limyaael’s Non-Villain rant. There’s no reason that you need to assume a villain in order to have a story. Mainstream fiction and many “classic” novels get away quite handily with having no villain, or only one truly despicable character in a populated world where many other shades of morality exist.

Writing Summary:

Goals for the past week:
Two reviews – one on the OWW, one off.
Revise ATfD. Almost done.

Although there’s a large energy barrier to critting, I really enjoy it. I like taking things apart and seeing how they work, and I like the chance of discovering something really good.

I should write more short stories. (I won’t, of course, because I don’t have short ideas.) It’s so nice to be able to go over a whole story in one sitting, and keep it all in my head at once. I need more practice with endings, too, and they’re a lot faster to get to in a 2k word story than a 90k story.

Goals for the coming week:
Revise (and submit) ATfD.
Write post about beginnings of novels.

Tasks for later:
(OWW) Catch up on reviews to be returned. (Only one or two left.)
(Trapped Magic) Finish unstickynoting ch 11-15, Finish ch 1-3, Type ch 4-10, Notebook notes for ch 11-15.

Other stuff:
I’m in the early stages of creating my own WordPress theme. Since I don’t know PHP at all and my CSS is built on a weak foundation, this is slow. But fun.

Fred Gratzon, in Your Calling and The Real World, writes:

I see squandering the better part of one’s day when one is most energetic, most alert, and most creative on some “tolerable” job as a tragic waste of one’s gifts and time. Far better is to identify, develop and enjoy those gifts.

and

Whenever I seemed to need money, it appeared. It’s the damnedest thing (or better put, the undamnedest thing) but I have found that it is all a matter of deserving and desiring. If I thought I deserved it then I desired it. And then it came. I’ve never gone without. It has nothing to do with work or effort or jobs or careers. It seems to do the trick because I live comfortably.

Now, on the one hand, he has a point: Why waste time and energy on something unimportant while the Great American Novel languishes unwritten?

But it’s a bit simplistic. I mean, wow! All I have to do is what I want and my rent will magically pay itself? Sign me up!

I think what Gratzon fails to note in his post (and I’ve only briefly skimmed other parts of his blog), is that he’s lucky. What he wants to do, what he enjoys doing, is something *that earns money*. (I believe he’s started some successful businesses. He said he got out when they weren’t fun anymore.)

Do what you love, and the money will follow — as long as what you love is something society values.

Otherwise, you get a choice: do something “tolerable” to pay the bills while pursuing your dream in your spare time, or starve on the street. Being dead does not make pursuing dreams any easier.

[I suppose I should point out that I did, in fact, once quit something I no longer enjoyed to do something totally different that I do enjoy, and I do make a living at it. So I'm my own counterexample. Though I'd rather have more time to write novels.]

JA Konrath on relaxing activities to give up and Shadawyn on getting mental work done throughout the day.

I don’t think Mr. Konrath is actually suggesting to never do any of those activities, considering one of them is posting to blogs. Also, I think reading books and exercising are two things writers ought to do.