Typically, I’m a curmudgeon on Halloween and don’t give out candy. I’m that guy, lurking in the darkness to dissuade the kiddies from knocking on my door. This year, since I live in a nice area now, I’ve shed my loner ways and am actually quite neighborly. So, to stay in the spirit of things and as a great way to get to know the people in my apartment complex, I splurged on candy for when they come a-knockin’. Not only did I buy candy, but I bought “name” candy. You know, the working class candy: Snickers, Baby Ruth, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. That’s the kind of candy I sought after when I was a child, so why not give it out as an adult? None of that candy fit for the ghetto in the clear plastic wrapping. Brach’s = no good.

Anyway, since this is my first Halloween at this complex, I’ve yet to find out what kind of foot traffic to expect. It’s 7 p.m. at this moment and not one knock. I’m starting to think that no one trick-or-treats around here. Come to think of it, it’s a lot of work for too little gain since I live in a three story complex with no elevators. Furthermore, the apartments on a given floor aren’t necessarily “connected.” Meaning, going up one flight of stairs only gets you access to four apartments before you have to go back down and then up the next flight for the next four apartments. That’s a decent workout for in-shape adults. Imagine what that’ll do for tiny legs.

So, I’m going to start making my dinner and we’ll see if anyone comes. I won’t expect them, though, leaving $30 worth of candy all for me!

My dentist is going to have his work cut out for himself.

First, let’s get a few housekeeping things out of the way. Typically, I’d leave it up to my sidebar updates section to inform my readers about Web site changes, but since I’ve got a few readers that subscribe to my feed they’ll miss out on the wealth of entertainment to be had from other parts of my blog! With that said, I’ve added the rest of my meager REVIEWS and Articles for your viewing pleasure. I’ve also wrangled the layout to my MySpace page so that it kind of reflects what I have here. Now that I think about how hard it was styling those damn tables, that makes me never want to change this layout if only to keep from having to change my MySpace page. Whatever. You can check it out at www.myspace.com/workingauthor. Add me if you’re on there.

OK, with that said, let’s talk about the dreaded Writer’s Block.

Writer’s block can come at any stage of the writing process, really. I think, typically, most writers experience it at the beginning of a project. I can totally understand that. There you are, staring at a gigantic monitor with all that white and one, solitary blinking cursor, prodding you incessantly. For many, I think the blockage is due to the formality of the medium. With today’s word processors, everything you type looks great and spell check can easily fix your mistakes. It’s hard to not want to live up to that by churning out something of publishing-caliber immediately. Some people suggest writing the part of your work that you’re inspired to write or know very well, just to get some text down, but it’s awkward doing that on the computer. So while I agree with the “write what you’re inspired to write first” suggestion, you may want to do that manually on regular ol’ paper. I know that it’s helped me many times, working through a particular scene, drawing arrows here and there to connect the random paragraphs. On a word processor, it would have been a mess, with a bunch of carriage returns to break everything up. No good. Plus, with paper, you get that added tactile sensation of your pen or pencil in hand, scarring the page. I know it’s a little silly, but I love being that much more connected to my work.

Writer’s block can also come in the middle of writing. How many times have you gotten to that point in your story where you simply didn’t know what your characters did next? For this, pre-writing (yes, that crap they forced you to do in school) can certainly help. Outlining your story so that you at least know where things start and how they end is certainly important. When you do that, make sure you have iconic scenes for your characters to reach along the way. Still, the best outlines are simply that: outlines. They’ll still have gaps. And those gaps, no matter how small, can still snag a toe and trip up the most focused writer. At that point, it’s time to step away from your work. Get up. Go outside. Have a cigarette. Mix a drink. Clean up your home. Go shopping. Ease the pressure to write. After some time away, come back to writing. Read your work with fresh eyes and see if you know where to take your project next. Ha, I make it sound so simple!

Personally, I experience writer’s block, but only when I’m not inspired to write whatever it is I’m writing. I had this problem throughout school with essays and research papers and I experience it on a daily basis with my day job. As the main copywriter for my company, I’m forced to be Johnny-On-The-Spot with my writing on a daily basis. I’m writing blurbs, disclaimers, marketing descriptions, business letters, press releases, headlines, you name it. I’ll tell you, it ain’t easy coughing up salable material for spas and saunas and gazebos over and over again. Since every minute of my day is a deadline, I don’t have the luxury of “stepping away from my work” to “ease the pressure of writing.” So instead, I resort to the last method of dealing with writer’s block: I muscle through it.

I just start typing. Usually, it starts off reading like crap, but since I only have to write a blurb it’s easy enough to spit it out in one go and then start revising. For longer projects, I just keep reminding myself to get to the end and fix it later. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a writer it’s that the process is not so much “creative writing,” but “creative editing.”

If any fellow writers get around to reading this, I welcome you to share your insight.

Alright, so I lied about getting another post out yesterday. I think I was a little too ambitious about the one-a-day posting idea. At least this early in the life of this blog. I’m way too busy promoting and building right now. In fact, this post isn’t going to be anything special, either. I was crawling someone’s site today and saw that she displayed what kind of tarot card she was.

You know, I don’t typically like these little “fill this out and find out what you are” survey thingys, but I hadn’t seen this one before and I thought I’d give it a shot. I’ve always been interested in fortune telling. A) It’s amazing how accurate the fortune seems, if only because it’s so general. B) It’s also amazing how many people believe this stuff.

Anyway, this is me as a tarot card:

You are the Hanged Man

Self-sacrifice, Sacrifice, Devotion, Bound.

With the Hanged man there is often a sense of fatalism, waiting for something to happen. Or a fear of loss from a situation, rather than gain.

The Hanged Man is perhaps the most fascinating card in the deck. It reflects the story of Odin who offered himself as a sacrifice in order to gain knowledge. Hanging from the world tree, wounded by a spear, given no bread or mead, he hung for nine days. On the last day, he saw on the ground runes that had fallen from the tree, understood their meaning, and, coming down, scooped them up for his own. All knowledge is to be found in these runes.

The Hanged Man, in similar fashion, is a card about suspension, not life or death. It signifies selflessness, sacrifice and prophecy. You make yourself vulnerable and in doing so, gain illumination. You see the world differently, with almost mystical insights.

See? Accurate.

Take the test for yourself.

Bleh. Missed my one-blog-a-day regimen for the 26th. I was caught up with importing my old articles all night that I didn’t make time for myself to blog. Oh well. I guess I’m gonna have two posts today: One super early and one later in the day. Anyway, if you’re interested, check out the WRITING section and you’ll find a new FEATURES section in the drop-down menu. You’ll also find that I added my Restaurant Reviews to the REVIEWS section. I’m a little wonky on when those reviews were actually published since the publication was a webzine and is now defunct. I had to guesstimate, but I think I’m pretty close.

Lastly, I added a handy link to my sidebar for Firefox 2. If you haven’t already downloaded it, I suggest you do so that we can all be on the same page. Much appreciated.

Come back soon and I should have more changes done and more articles posted. Thanks for bearing with me.

Alright, I’m taking a break from putting together other parts of the site to knock out a more complete post.

So last time I left off on PC gamer elitism. While my stance hasn’t changed, there are a few undeniable drawbacks to gaming in this medium. Price is the biggest issue. If I want my games to run at bleeding edge graphics and sound then I have to shell out big bucks for premium class hardware, like the latest in graphics and sound cards. Combined, that’s a near-total of one grand. In and of itself, I guess it’s not so bad, considering that console gamers have to shell out the same kind of dough for a hi-def television. The problem for the PC gamer arises when the graphics card people release the next gen model six months down the line. That means game developers start developing for that level of performance, leaving your current card to play catchup. In this regard, console gamers have the luxury of shelling out a one-time payment that will last them for years to come since game developers only have to focus on one set of specs.

That brings us to the other major problem: Game developers focus more on the console market. That means all of these cool games, like Gears of War or Halo 3 don’t get released on the PC until way after their original release, if at all. Typically, these “ports” are half-baked messes that are more insulting than fun.

The last major problem is the “consolization” of games that are released on PC and consoles simultaneously. Whenever I see this happen with a game I want, I cringe, because this means that the game will dumbed down to accommodate the understandably younger audience playing on consoles. Two games that illustrate this point are The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Bioshock. You’ll find that in Morrowwind, Oblivion’s predecessor, you had more options for weapon and armor types. You could open separate parts of your menus individually. Lastly, you didn’t have “helper” icons to point you where you needed to go. Then, of course, there’s Bioshock, the direct descendant of System Shock 2 in everything but name (though it came quite close in that aspect, too). System Shock 2 had a nifty inventory system that prevented you from carrying every weapon in the game at all times. Furthermore, you could pick up food and stash them in safe areas rather than what you have in Bioshock where you consume everything you can upon grabbing it. What happened to the skill system, too? In System Shock, you specialized in a class that afforded you access to particular weapon types and hacking abilities. In Bioshock you can do everything instantly! If Bioshock is billed as an FPS/RPG, where’s the RPG?

Speaking of which, I’ll take the Baldur’s Gate’s and Fallout’s of the PC over any Final Fantasy on the consoles for my role-playing. RPGs are about choices, not watching fancy cinematics.

Unfortunately, this is the state of PC gaming today. The only real solution here is for PC games to start selling more, proving to developers that the PC market can be a reliable revenue stream in its own right. Sadly, with bittorrents as prevalent as ever, the PC market has a long way to go before it reaches that kind of status again.