Hayden Thorne

Bless You, Tracey

Ran­dom video post. Then again, the song screams “teen love!” every time I hear it — couldn’t resist. The kicker is that the video’s a bril­liant bit of comic irony, and I love it.

And the lyrics behind the cut:

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Saturday Epic Ride

As the post header says. :) I’m a bad cycling fan in that I missed the Clas­sica San Sebas­t­ian race and wasn’t able to cheer on my Garmin-Transitions team (Ryder Hes­jedal came in 6th!). But I did go on a long — and I mean long — ride with Andy today, using a route that’s a favorite among some local diehard cyclists.

Here’s the map of our route, cour­tesy of our Garmin Edge (click on the image for a closer view):

It’s a gor­geous route that takes us through Mor­gan Ter­ri­tory, pass­ing behind Mt. Dia­blo and then to Pleasan­ton, Black­hawk, and then back to Mt. Dia­blo via the South Gate road, which inter­sects the North Gate entrance and back down to our car. *phew* I took a hand­ful of pic­tures, but some of the best scenes hap­pened to be in the long descent past Mor­gan Ter­ri­tory and into Alameda County (er — I need both hands on the han­dle­bars, yeah?). Noth­ing but miles and miles of golden hills, a hand­ful of scat­tered ranches, and occa­sional horses and cows chill­ing in the grass.

I’ve love to go back and do that ride again, but I’d rather wait till autumn, when the temps are lower. After a long day on the sad­dle, that long ascent up South Gate Road in the sum­mer heat nearly did me in.

Final data: 56 miles, 4700+ feet climbed. Tan sit­u­a­tion: way darker. Epic, man.

Sage Advice

I com­pletely for­got about the Story Sensei’s series of posts on blog­ging. My bad. For any­one who’s kind of in the same sit­u­a­tion as me, i.e., try­ing to revamp his/her blog­ging style and some such, here’s a handy post that’s actu­ally seven dif­fer­ent entries all put together: Build­ing a Blog by the Story Sensei.

By and large I’m pretty much okay as far as sim­ply being myself when it comes to my posts. Right now I’m try­ing to limit my posts to 200 — 250 words. But what I mon­u­men­tally suck at involves my blog theme, and you know that I tend to switch blog themes a lot.

I guess my main prob­lem when it comes to blog appear­ances is that I tend to grav­i­tate toward min­i­mal­ist designs. To what extent that reveals some­thing about my char­ac­ter (bor­ing?), I’ve no idea, but I cer­tainly would like to see my tiny cor­ner of cyber­space look a lit­tle spiffy. Or spiffier than it is.

I am look­ing at three-column designs that have some color because I’d like to show­case my books’ cov­ers on my side­bars reg­u­larly. Hope­fully I’ll find some­thing — two or three columns — that’ll work more nicely in giv­ing off some kind of char­ac­ter to my blog.

Idle Stuff

So I’ve been try­ing to fig­ure out how best to approach blog­ging. ^^;;; Yeah, I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and every blog I cre­ated was a per­sonal one with links to my books and so on. I still enjoy blog­ging and don’t mind main­tain­ing a pretty reg­u­lar sched­ule of updates. I don’t have a plat­form the way count­less other blogs out there do. I sim­ply post what’s on my mind or keep you all updated on my stuff. I do get really worn down every so often, though, with ideas dry­ing up or just plain moti­va­tion hit­ting low points.

So I’d like to kinda sorta give this blog a bit of an over­haul in terms of post­ing length. By and large, it’s pretty much the (self-placed?) pres­sure of shar­ing lengthy nuggets of wis­dom or plain jab­ber that’s cur­rently my day-to-day online alba­tross. Any­way, if you notice my blog entries shrink­ing into single-paragraph lengths (or two…three with block­quotes, maybe), it’s because I’m try­ing to retrain myself here — as well as relearn the value of com­mu­ni­cat­ing sim­ply and effectively.

Success! :D

She came, she saw, she stressed, she con­quered! And earned her­self a medium Dark Choco­late Mocha Freddo from Peet’s Cof­fee. Badabing!

Yes­ter­day, I thought I wasn’t going to top Monday’s writ­ing frenzy of 2,600+ words. I man­aged to write 3,000+. Tonight, I didn’t think I was going to top that. I man­aged to write 4,000+. So, yes, I cracked my goal of 10,000 words writ­ten for the week, and it’s not even the end of Friday.

Woll­stone now offi­cially stands at 20,000+ words, which makes me giddy all over, con­sid­er­ing the angst that this WIP gave me for two months. July on the whole might suck, but it’s end­ing on a more pos­i­tive note than I first hoped.

There are a num­ber of things I’ve writ­ten so far that I don’t care for, with some of them being almost like fillers while I fig­ured out how to con­nect X scene with Y. So I’ve got my work cut out for me when the revi­sion process rolls around. What I have been doing on pur­pose is take my time expand­ing the set­ting because it’s a board­ing school fan­tasy. So there’s a lot of descrip­tion so far, which I’ll be trim­ming down when I revise, but I don’t plan on tak­ing out too much. This story depends on the world build­ing for it to suc­ceed, espe­cially since the school has a more sin­is­ter pur­pose to it.

So I’m stoked! I don’t have a set goal yet for next week’s writ­ing, but I’ll fig­ure that out some­time dur­ing the week­end. If my luck holds, I’ll shoot for another 10,000 words, but I won’t pres­sure myself. So, yeah — woohoo!