So, right about now, I should be basking in — or recovering from — an afternoon of marathon training staff members here at my Important State Agency to use our new, content-management system powered internal website. This is a project that I have been working on, off and on, for over six years, by the way, and pretty much exclusively for the past six months. However, mere days before reaching fruition, the project was completely wreaked by a) a director who was apparently asleep during the reading of the project proposal and who was shocked — shocked! — that the staff would actually be able to add their own content to the new internal website, and who likewise assumed that the ability to do so would lead to a rash of staff members spending all their time adding pictures of their kitties to the site or some such, and b) a technical manager who decided, without even consulting the website’s project manager (i.e., me), that it just absolutely had — just absolutely had — to use LDAP instead of the CMS’s internal authentication system, and set his staff to getting it running, the end result being a new internal website for the Important State Agency that is pretty much completely and utterly broken.
The end result of this being that, instead of doing lots of training and lots of migrating content from the old internal website to the new internal website, I’m pretty much waiting around for the guys to get LDAP working.
Given that I now have some free time (“free” in that I’m really not feeling all that terribly motivated to find anything having the general semblance of productive work for my Important State Agency), I decided to start work on a new piece of pulp fiction, a new novel of the sorts that used to be published exclusively by second-rate, cheap publishers in paperback form. You know — the fun stuff.
Rather than doing what I normally do when I get this urge, however, I’ve decided to try a distinctly different track. Rather than creating characters and backgrounds in excruciating detail and trying to develop stories around them — a technique that, honestly, has never been especially successful — I’ve decided to start with the plot. Basically, I’ve decided to plot out the story in great detail, fleshing it out further and further until, almost magically, my new pulp novel should arise to the surface, like Aphrodite emerging from the waves, or biscuits emerging from dough or such like. And, just to make it halfway interesting for me, I thought I would do it all here, on a Blogspot blog, where everyone and his brother can follow along with the process.
It’s something to do, I guess, until I get back my motivation to actually work on the projects assigned me here at my Important State Agency, and get over this gaping wound in my back.
Six fucking years, man. Six fucking years.