It seems utterly fucking ridiculous....

...that it's taken *goes back and checks the archives* over two years to get to the point that I could tweet this:

And that's just the first draft. I got tons left to do 'fore I can call this muhfugga Done widda big D. It's like I just crossed the Texas-New Mexico state line on a road trip to California. Or Japan. Of course, part of the reason it took so long is that at least a year of that was me learning the lesson of committing to the project. Maybe other people can dabble at writing something of novel length and get it done, but I am not one of those people. I can put that at the top of the great big list of lessons learned.

I was walking out to my car after work one day last week, thinking about this scene I'd been working on earlier that day, just these two people out in the woods having a quiet conversation, when suddenly, BOOM, those two people in the dark became a whole other way of seeing this story I've been trying to get together. It was there all along, I just had to stick with it long enough to get to where I could see it. My head totally exploded, it was disgusting.

So yeah, tons left to do. This is me, looking forward to the next milestone.

Free of Training Wheel Tyranny

Over the summer, my eldest figured out how to ride his bike without training wheels. He'd tried a few times before and not quite made it, but on this one particular day, he must have awoken with an extra bit of stubbornness in his blood. He refused to give up until he got himself up on two wheels. I had little to do with it other than standing back and watching and offering some encouragement. Any and all offers of actual physical help were rebuffed.

"Fuck this training wheel shit," he would've mumbled to himself, had he had his father's vocabulary at the time.

To celebrate the event, he wanted me to make a .gif of him on his bike, similar to the one I made of his brother running up and down a railroad track. Except he didn't know the term .gif, so he called it the thing where I take the camera and take pictures like ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing ga-jing....or however you spell the sound of a camera snapping.

So finally, months later, I finally got around to it.