I know when I come back to a story after a few weeks off, I can find all sorts of problems that I’m sure weren’t there before.

Is my brain really mulling things over while I’m working on other things? In theory, I’m learning new things all the time, and I’d be able to apply them to old pieces. But I don’t think the learning curve is that steep.

I’ve mentioned I’m working on a programming project. Distance helps there, too. Since it’s all done in my spare time, there have been gaps of weeks or even months where I haven’t looked or even thought about it. Several times, I’ve opened the file up after a long absence, looked at a thorny problem I’d been stuck on, and fixed it immediately. It’s not like I was doing other programming in the meantime.

Anyone out there know why this happens? (I failed a quick google search. Maybe if I try again next week, I’ll hit the right query on the first try.)

An article in yesterday’s paper said that plant hardiness zones are changing. We’re now in 5b, not 5a, which means that the average annual extreme minimum temperature is -15 to -10 (-26.1 to -23.3 C), not -20 to -15 (-28.9 to -26.1 C). (Note the “extreme”. It is not usually anywhere near that cold here.)

This isn’t surprising to me, since I’ve been sort of ignoring the maps on the backs of seed packets since I started my garden a few years ago. But now it’s official. It helps that we’re at the southern end of the zone, almost in 6a (a balmy -10 to -5). I grew up in 9a (20-25 or -6.7 to -3.9 C), which is why my parents have citrus trees and why I find it acceptable to complain about cold weather, snow, and ice.

The new map lets you look up your location by zip code.

As a side note, this is quite likely the first thing I’ve written about the Agricultural Research Service since I covered the agriculture beat in journalism school.

Sound familiar?
 
The guys who made Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour! Not only is the plot the same, but they kept many of the same lines of dialog (“A hospital! What is it?”). The result is that Zero Hour!, a completely serious film, is now hilarious. Sort of like a karaoke version of Airplane! where you fill in the jokes yourself. (Actor: ”I am serious.” My family: ”And don’t call me Shirley!”)
 
It was really interesting to see the changes that were made to turn it from drama to comedy. Some of it is delivery, some of it is the addition of the jokes (“I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue” was not in Zero Hour!), some of it is context (aside from clunkiness, there’s nothing funny about “our only hope us to find someone who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have the fish for dinner” in Zero Hour!, but in Airplane!, I’m already primed to find things funny).

I enjoy the exercise of figuring out how to take one story and turn it into another. And I’m now writing a story abut swans…

I read 29 books last year. Since I didn’t set goals for reading, that’s neither good nor bad. It just is.

For highlights I have to go with The Wise Man’s Fear and A Dance with Dragons. Also The Hunger Games (new to me) and Merrie Haskell’s The Princess Curse, which is my most-recommended book of 2011 (yes, if you ask me what you should read, I will tell you about my friends).

For 2012 I plan to read some books. Some of them will be nonfiction. What are your reading plans? Any suggestions for what I should read?

I have a similar spreadsheet that I (used to) use for novel first drafts. But for over a year now, I’ve been tracking my writing in Bento. This is the same program that I use to keep a list of projects and track my submissions, and it’s convenient to have it all in one place.

Bento is a slightly simplified database program–you can’t directly hook things together (so I have to manually tell it to associate a “submission” entry to a “project” entry, but this is very easy to do).

I’ve mostly been tracking time spent, rather than word count, so that I can include planning and revision time as well. I only added a word count column and a “wrote new words today” checkbox a couple months ago, because I’d like to be producing more new stuff.

My column setup is:
Date, Project (the name of a novel, “Short Stories”, or “None” for critting or writing classes), Task (writing, revising, critting, etc), Duration (in minutes), Notes (where I type in what story I worked on, or whatever else I feel like noting), Word count (duh), New words (checked if I created new stuff, unchecked if I didn’t).

For the most part I don’t actually look at the data much. I can do basic searches to figure out how many hours I spent on X project in December, or how many hours Y short story took. The latter is something that’s becoming useful to know for planning purposes, though it doesn’t account for fermenting time.

I’m working on a project in Mathematica that will let me do a bunch more analysis and make pretty charts, but it’s been going in fits and starts. To be honest it’s more of a learn-Mathematica project than a improve-writing-productivity project (which I want to do because, and here is the disclaimer, I work for the company that makes it). I’ve nearly duplicated the functionality I’ve been getting from Bento’s search results.

For the next novel first draft, I will probably just type word counts into Bento and use Scrivener’s session targets instead of going back to my Excel spreadsheet. One less thing to mess with.

My plans for this year include more tennis league–it would be nice to get out of last place by the end of 2012–and more races:

• 10k on April 28 – my first running race over 5k. I’m following a training program to get up to that distance, which I haven’t run in a few years. It’s going well but I haven’t been worrying about speed yet.
• Tri the Illini again (early October). I’d like to have more energy left for the run.
• Rattlesnake Master 5k (November)

Right now, I’m running three times a week, swimming twice a week, doing tennis class or league twice a week, and weights or yoga twice a week (yes, that adds up to more than 7). After the 10k, I’m going to have to cut the running back to 2 days a week again to make room for biking. It’d be nice to have time for everything, but sadly life just doesn’t work that way.

I can’t speak for that person, but in my case, my brain is the limiting factor, not my fingers. I can type garbage quite fast but that’s not all that helpful in the end.

I switched to Dvorak in 2007. Back then, my Qwerty typing speed was in the 70-80 wpm range, with a fair amount of errors (and when I take typing tests, I can’t stop myself from hitting backspace and fixing all my mistakes). A few months after the switch, I was in the 50-55 wpm range in Dvorak.

Four years later, I’m up to the mid-60s–still not back to my Qwerty days (but my hands don’t hurt, so I don’t care).

And these days I’m bi-keyboardal. Apple still hasn’t made an iOS Dvorak keyboard, which means all the writing I do on my iPad is Qwerty. It’s not touch typing or I suspect my hands would get very confused. Having to look at the letters makes it easier to remember Qwerty. When I use a fullsize external Qwerty keyboard I get very confused.

I know I could get a hardware Dvorak keyboard, but it’d be an extra thing to haul around.

Anyway, the day we left, my dad picked us four lemons. Thankfully they weren’t seen as any sort of security threat, so they made it home safely. Then they turned into:

• Lemon Spaghetti
• Garlic Roast Chicken with Rosemary and Lemon
• Lemon Yogurt Cake

The chicken and the cake were fantastic and will go on the to-make-again list. The chicken in particular was very easy (and of course it was good, it has garlic and rosemary in it).

The cake was kind of crazy–you bake it, then once it’s out of the oven you pour a lemon juice/sugar mixture on it, and then when it cools you glaze it with more lemon juice/sugar. It was, however, very moist, lemony, and tasty.

The pasta was fine, but paled in comparison to the other two dishes.

This week, with the leftovers gone, I think I’ll be going through lemon withdrawal.

I’m also picking a couple habits to focus on each month. (More than one because most of them are things that are almost habits already, or else are old habits that I want to rekindle. Otherwise it’s hard to establish more than one new habit at a time.) These are exciting things like reading before bed and stretching every day–some health related, some writing related, some other stuff.

After a long search, I finally found an app that will let me check things off each day: GoalTracker. It’s pretty clearly designed for parents/kids, but putting butterfly stickers on a weekly chart will make my inner eight-year-old happy too. Plus it has pretty much no analytics features, so I won’t waste time thinking too hard about this. I just want to not clutter up my to do list or calendar, and put stickers in boxes. And maybe collect trophies.

If you’re hunting for something similar but want more analysis or a web-based tool (or something more grown up), 42goals and Joe’s goals both look pretty good.

Anyway. I’ve got a good idea of what I want to do with the gardens next year, so let me lay it out:

• The rhubarb should be big enough that we get to pick some, and I want to plant a second rhubarb.
• Beets! Beet greens make me happy, but I’m giving up on getting beets.
• I’ll try spinach and swiss chard again. Maybe they’ll grow.
• There will definitely be successive plantings of lettuce and mesclun. If J is lucky, more than just the arugula will grow in the late fall.
• I’m not going to bother with beans or peas because they don’t produce enough to be worth it. I’d rather use the space for greens.
• Lots of fennel again.
• Radishes. This year I didn’t plant them until fall; next year I will try them in spring as well.
• I’m going to try putting something (stones or metal) around the tomatoes and eggplant to make them warmer. Hopefully in some fashion that won’t look horrible. If I buy flagstones I could use them elsewhere once we widen the driveway.

In non-food plans, I want to add one or two native prairie flowers to the end of the vegetable bed, where I have one purple coneflower and one…I forget, one of the many yellow things. This year they were just a few leaves, so I hope next year they actually grow tall. And if I’m really ambitious, I’ll put a lattice up to screen the rain barrel from the street.