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January 30, 2008
Happy Birthday To Me
Well, there you go, thirty-six years down. An unknown number of years to go. I did most of my public celebrating over the weekend with friends and family, so I guess I'm going to take today and be all reflective and such. Or maybe I'll go see a movie. Who knows? I might find time enough for both!
So what happened this past year? It was a weird year to be sure, chiefly because of my whole privacy game with Steven Rambam where I was in quasi-hiding for so many months. That definitely made things weird, but also exciting and unpredictable. I've been working on writing the book for which all that effort was exerted, and I think readers will both get a kick out of it and be properly scared/sobered up about how transparent the world is becoming.
Speaking of books, I got my newest one out the door, Geek Mafia: Mile Zero, which also marked my new relationship with my cool new publishers, PM Press, which I continue to be super excited about. It's especially nice to have that book out since, on balance, I did a lot of spinning my wheels this year in the writing department. My much-delayed and deflected hacker book (still in the works!) got reshaped and put aside and picked back up and reshaped again, and much of what I wrote last year isn't really usable anymore. Likewise I put some serious time and effort into some other projects that didn't pan out, but from which I learned a lot. I did write my third novel this year, the one about Cthulhu, and that's probably coming out this year sometime, which I'm excited about. This year is shaping up to be a pretty damn productive one, and I have big plans for two new novels - a third Geek Mafia book and another novel (which I'm starting on now), which I think has real potential.
In the name of research and writing I did some interesting travels this year as well. There was my first Shmoo Con last year, which was great, and now I'm gearing up for my second one in just a couple of weeks. I only got to one other hacker con, which was PhreakNIC, but that was amazing because it was my first time giving a talk at a con and it seemed to go over pretty well. I also had my magician-filled tour of Las Vegas and LA over the summer, which was super interesting, especially the night at the Magic Castle in LA. Then of course there was my journey to Belize, about which you'll read much more in the privacy book. And of course I started my MFA in creative writing program this year as well, and spent a couple weeks in Washington state for that in August. I feel like I'm forgetting some other trip I must have taken, but maybe not. Compared to the year before, it was a pretty light travel schedule. This year's shaping up to be much busier, with some trip almost every month between now and August when I take the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic to Germany and return to Berlin for several months (to, of course, write another book).
I've read a bunch of great books, seen some cool movies, played some amazing video games (Bioshock! Portal!) and listened to about a trillion hours of podcasts. And of course there was all that television... Media Glutton that I am, enough is never enough of all these things, even though so many of them disappoint on some level. I switched over from Windows to Ubuntu Linux for most of my computing needs and am planning on never buying another Windows machine again if I can help it. I lost a bunch of weight, which is great (and literally vitally important) and am now looking to make another big push and move down another weight class or two this year. All in all I suppose I'm better off this year than I was last (except financially of course), and I'm looking forward to making the most of this one.
So there you have it. Rick in Review. Happy Birthday to me...
Posted by rdakan at January 30, 2008 07:55 AM