Jon Furniss

As this is the first entry in a brand new blog, I will try to briefly go over what I plan to do with the blog and what I hope will come of it. The thing I want to accomplish the most is to evoke some sort of emotion, primarily happiness, but anger, sadness, and pretty much anything else will be accepted as well.

This blog will be about goals, accomplishing them, and not accomplishing them, and what you get out of them either way. At the beginning of each month I will post my goals for that month, and as it goes on I will you keep you up-to-date with how I’m doing and what I’m learning.

My goals for this month are:

1) Make a budget and start living by it.
2) Get all of my Christmas shopping done. (No last minute trips to the mall for me this year).
3) Go to the gym three days a week. (Those are going to be Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and yes, tomorrow is the first day…)
4) Write one blog entry a day.

I’m hoping that the last one I will be able to keep up after the month is over, but doing one blog entry a day for thirty days is a lot easier to comprehend than doing it indefinitely. This one is also important to me because I never managed to have a set updating schedule for my old Livejournal, so hopefully that will go a bit differently today.

The place where I first got the idea for these month long goals was this blog post at StevePavlina.com, 30 Days to Success.

Another thing I will be doing every day is posting a Word of the Day, which will be randomly handpicked by me from a 1980 copy of Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition. Today’s WotD is:

Pictograph n. 1. a picture or picturelike symbol representing an idea, as in primitive writing; hieroglyphic 2. same as PICTOGRAPHY 3. a diagram or graph using pictured objects to convey ideas, information, etc.

That wasn’t as exciting as I had hoped, but it is what it is.

I will also be posting interesting webcomics (I’m a huge fan of webcomics), links, news stories, and whatever else I find interesting around this electronic world. I will not be rewriting or copying word for word articles and things that I see around though, if I see an interesting article on someone’s website then I will give you a link, there’re not many more things that I hate more than copy and pasters, but to each his or her own. If I do have feelings or ideas or whatnot that I feel are original about a subject than I will definitely let you know those.

My biggest tool for finding anything is of course, StumbleUpon which is pretty much one of the greatest web inventions ever. I could make a post just on that, but it’s been done so many times before (and somehow every single one of them was stumbled) that it makes me sick. If you don’t know what StumbleUpon is, then go to the website, or if you don’t trust people talking about their own inventions, Google it.

Another site that I love that I’ll let you know about (if you don’t already) right off the bat is Pandora Radio. It’s awesome, go check it out.

And now briefly, what I was going to have my post be about today if I hadn’t spent all this time telling you what I’ll be doing with this thing:

So it is November 1st, and this will be my fourth year since finding out about NaNoWriMo that I am not writing a novel in the month of November. For the uninitiated, NaNoWriMo stands for National Novel Writing Month, which is November. I was informed about it in tenth grade by my English teacher, who at the time wanted me to be a writer just as much as I wanted to be one. (Whatever happened to that dream I’m not quite sure…)

The goal of NaNoWriMo is to show average people that anyone can write a novel, and they can do it quickly. Every participant in it aims to have a 50000 word novel by the end of the month. You can upload your progress on the website, compare yourself to how others are doing, and see how many words a day you should be doing. It’s amazing the number of people that do it, and it’s quite a fantastic idea.

The reasons that I haven’t done it are… probably not good enough. I feel that I’m not original enough (and so far I’ve been too lazy to buy their book No Plot, No Problem. I’m also incredibly lazy and a procrastinator, which is one thing that I’m hoping to change with my monthly goals. I tried participating in tenth grade when I was first told about it. I don’t think I got past two thousand words, and I don’t even remember what my story was going to be about or if I even still have it saved anywhere. Maybe I’ll try it next year.

But anyway, it’s a pretty cool site, and if you have a spare fifty thousand words to write down this month, then go for it. I also find it interesting in how many people out there (like I once was, and probably still am a little bit) really feel that they’re destined to be writers and storytellers. I certainly don’t have anything against that, I think people should chase their dreams, and if they can’t catch it, keep going anyway. For without the dreamers and the poets, who would envision a better world?