Timeline: There’s an app for that.
Today’s post was going to be all about new timeline layout. As you must surely know, it’s rolling out today as mandatory for all users. I was going to say, “There’s an app for that,” for all the haters out there. I was going to send you to to Lifehacker, wherein is described a Chrome extension you can use to avoid looking at timeline.
While I’m not thrilled with FaceBook as a whole, I do happen to be excited about new appearance, and I think it’s a pretty nifty change. But lots of people don’t like change. And I get that. Change means keeping up, thereby adding work to an already overloaded schedule. Sometimes, it’s the little things that cause you to blow. You want to be able to rely on your toys of leisure for comfort. FaceBook is like sitting down in a recliner after a long day at work. You don’t want to endure one more moment of stress — you just wanna lean back and relax. And then those dang administrators force change on you. Those bastards!
[Update: This was originally written in April. Now it’s July. I fucking hate TimeLine. That is all. Carry on about your business.]
Forget FaceBook
But that’s not what I’m going to write about. Forget it. Something else has demanded my attention. And if I’m honest with myself, it’s way more cool. I mean, who isn’t blogging about FaceBook’s timeline layout today? Duh. Boring. Gosh, Andi-Roo, get with the program. Sometimes I can be such a sheeple. Hate it when that happens.
What I am going to write about is my plan for April. Which is terrifying. Because it popped up out of nowhere and grabbed my wrist and pulled me along down a dark alley. When I was in high school I had this cool friend who did that kind of thing. And sometimes the dark alley led to a party at the playground where everyone was hanging out and having *le good times*, which was a positive outcome of peer pressure. But other times the dark alley was just a dark alley, leading not to a party, but to a bad situation better left undescribed. <<< *shudder* >>>
Like a BAU5 — someone not me.
I innocently decided to sign up a writing challenge to beef up my errant story writing ways. I have very little self-discipline and thus seem to require a boss. Not a real boss, because I am the queen of me and no one shall tell me what to do. A virtual boss. A pretend finger pointing at me, behind which resides a pretend mouth bellowing things like, “Have you done your words today, Andi-Roo?” or, “You can’t take a break till you reach your goal, quitter!” or, “What the hell have you done all day, slacker?” Yeah, I need that bossy tone, if not the bossy person behind the voice. I need assignments. A checklist off which I can mark completed items.
My hubz kind of fills this roll for blogging, because he’s the one who posts my shizzle online. I don’t do those sorts of things. I write it out and pass it on. Technical SEO-type items aren’t on my list of joy. I’m a copy-n-paste kind of gal. Once I asked him why I couldn’t just copy-n-paste my blog entry out of the Word document from which it’s saved, and he just looked at me like I’m stupid. Probably I was. Whatever. Fuck coding and whatnot. So when I’m behind, I have a boss-type person asking me to please get off my ass and be productive. He walks a fine line.
A Round of Words in 80 Days
I’m very excited about this challenge. I’d already half-heartedly told myself to write everyday.
“Self,” I said, “You will poop out 750 per day, which is only like three pages (if that), and you will not complain because this only takes like forty-five minutes.”
I meekly complied, but only sometimes. So I cranked up the persuasion to the next level: heckling.
“Self,” I said, “You’re a stay-at-home mom now. You don’t work outside the house. You have no excuse. Now sit your ass down in that chair, and do the work.”
This only caused me to rise up against the tyrant, bellowing belligerently,
“Who the hell do you think you are? You’re not the boss of me!”
Which is kind of funny. Because, yeah. I am.
So obviously I needed either a bigger bully, or an objective third party. I went for the latter. It seemed the smarter route. I chose A Round of Words in 80 Days, which is an 80-day writing challenge in which you set your own goals. Since I utilize 750 Words for all my fiction writing, this appeared an ideal pairing for my purposes. I’m supposed to poop 750 words per day, and now I have to report in twice a week somewhere else to show I’m staying on track. And I have to blog about it. So now you are my boss, too. Please don’t hurt me.
[ UPDATE: The current challenge period began Monday, July 2, and runs through the third week of September. Be sure to use #ROW80 when discussing in Twitter, and follow its creator .]
Blogging From A to Z
I’m still not sure how this happened. I was just strolling along down Twitter Street, minding my own business (by which I mean, I was tweeting madly with my new pals, ecstatic to be part of a conversation, over-the-moon thrilled to be included by more long-term bloggers).
All of a sudden a wild suggestion appeared out of nowhere.
“Come do the A to Z challenge with us,” my new friends invited.
“It’s sexy. You’ll love it. Just do it.”
WTF is A to Z? I’m new here in town, remember? So one of the gals sent me a link and suddenly I was signing up and grabbing the logo-button-badge-banner thing and losing oxygen at a very fast pace. Panic-panic-panic. Cannot breathe.
So now I’m taking part in two writing challenges at the same time. <<< *gulp* >>>
But Blogging From A to Z is geared specifically toward blogging, not fictional endeavors. I can’t decide if this is a good thing for me or not. I’m mostly leaning toward yes, it is quite good that this challenge’s purpose does not overlap the aforementioned. This challenge is also different in that it does not require a specific word count goal (beyond the order to “keep it short!”). Nor is it tied down to any one particular topic. The goal is to focus that day’s blog entry to a topic of your choosing beginning with the letter-of-the-day.
[UPDATE: This challenge begins again next year in April. Be sure to use #atozchallenge when discussing in Twitter, and follow the challenge updates, .]
So there it is, pooples! Two challenges for the month of April.
Any plans to dive in with me?
