Farewell, New Zealand
An incredible year has come to an end. Thanks to everyone who has made this time so valuable to me. I love you all. Cheers!
An incredible year has come to an end. Thanks to everyone who has made this time so valuable to me. I love you all. Cheers!
I’ve spent the past 7 days on an exciting road trip from Wellington up north along the beautiful east coast. Finally, I’ve ended up in Auckland where I’m sitting right now on New Year’s Eve. I’ve got a bit of time to think about the year that has passed and the one that is to come. As my plans are to go back to Germany in just a few weeks I want to make sure that everything I have learned and experienced this year won’t be forgotten by my future self. I’m therefore setting myself a few goals, some that I can really measure at the end of next year.
Travel more: Visit 3 countries I haven’t been to before.
Learn more: Start learning Spanish to the point where I’m able to have a casual pub conversation. Pick up my French from school and improve it so I’ll be able to have a fluent conversation and watch a French movie without subtitles.
Read more: Finish at least 2 books a month.
Start something: Have a software project of my own or with friends put the first euro into my account.
Let’s see how all of that works out. 2013, I am ready.
The TV thing about the Hobbit premiere has been on German TV yesterday. Embedding their weird Flash player wasn’t really working but you can check it out in the ARD Mediathek.
My goal for November has been simple: Sit down and write a novel of 50,000 words. At first, that sounded like a lot. 50,000 words, that is this blog post times 130 or about half the length of “The Hobbit”. Is that a lot, is that possible in 30 days? I had no idea.
Now that November is over and I have actually reached the goal and finished won NaNoWriMo, the most important lesson for me is that it is possible and – to my surprise – I can actually get myself to spend 2 hours a day writing, even when spending the rest of the day at my full time job. Two hours a day, every day of the month. Well, till about the time of the Hobbit premiere last week when time management started to be a bit challenging. Luckily, I’ve somehow worked it out, even without having to write through the night.
Oh, but don’t get me wrong: I don’t have a finished novel at the moment. As one of the essential “rules” is not to waste your time editing but instead just write and write and write, I did just that. My original idea has changed and shaped during the writing process so that a lot of scenes don’t play together very well. My characters are flat, their motivation probably unclear most of the time and the fantasy world I have created is full of inconsistencies.
Nevertheless, I now have a draft that I can dig into. I’ll start asking questions about the ‘what’ and ‘why’ and answer those with more writing. The good stuff in there needs to be found and extended and I’ll throw away or rewrite the bad parts. There is a lot of work to do but right now I am allowing myself a bit of time of not looking into the text. I feel like I want to make up my mind about what this story that I’ve created really is and then re-read the whole piece with fresh thoughts.
Also, the story isn’t finished yet. Right now this feels like book one out of three – let’s see where this journey takes me. But for now, I am happy to announce: Yes, I am a writer.
Has your boss ever told you to “post that on reddit, dude”? Well, I had to agree that uploading some of my memories of the Hobbit premiere was a good idea so I selected the photos that hold my dearest memories and posted them on reddit.
The next moment I check, my post has taken off and is getting about 100 upvotes per minute. Comments keep coming in at a rate where you start having troubles reading them in real-time. And then, suddenly, my post appears on the bottom of the front page, gets noticed by some friends that mention me on twitter and is still actively being upvoted. I finally end up on 2nd place, just after an actual relevant announcement by NASA. Wow.
My post is just about 3 hours old – with recent posts being ranked far higher than older post with potentially more upvotes. It looks like it would be staying on the front page for at least one more hour. But suddenly, it disappears.
You can still read all the comments in the thread, but the post is not listed any more, neither on the front page, nor in /r/movies where I had created the post. A few messages later I learn what I was suspecting, it had actually been removed by a moderator.
Fair enough. The /r/movies subreddit is meant for discussions about movies, so I see how the post does not really fit in there. I had my moment of fame and heaps of fun in the process, so that doesn’t bother me. In retrospect, I am surprised by how fast that post took off (and by how few offensive comments I got), also I am quite happy that I made the front page with my original content and not just a screenshot or some random link to something I haven’t created myself.
An interesting side story is how people were confused as to why the newspaper had my reddit username in it and not my actual name. Many suspected a karma conspiracy of how I must have actually told the newspaper to use my username. People showed up with some forensic analysis of how which part of the picture could have been manipulated. This is pretty impressive, in particular because I have actually labeled the picture as “shopped” in the gallery. No one seemed to have read those captions.
So yeah, this looks like an appropriate ending of my exciting days around the Hobbit premiere. As for the movie, I am listening to the soundtrack a lot right now and can’t wait to see it in about 2 weeks time. My only hope is that it will be better than Skyfall which I’ve seen last night. While characters, cinematography and soundtrack where impressive, I was disappointed by the plot. But that’s a different story.
