Good thing February is such a short month. It was a nutty one, without much free time in there, thanks to the day job craziness. We had a new release (2.1!), which meant tons of updates to my User Help site and a good bit of bug-testing, and then I started doing some extra work at another company to help them out with their documentation. So yeah, the day job(s) has been keeping me busy, which would explain the lack of journal entries the past few weeks.

Actually, I must say that I'm proud of my work on the Help site (check it out, though some pages are password-protected). In the past year, I put together all the pages, wrote almost all of the documents and created all but one of the product demos on the Feature Tours page (and those damn demos take a ton of time to edit! And I'm not done updating them!). Click on over and take a look -- I'm especially enjoying writing the User Info Blog.

So that's where a lot of my creative energy has been going, keeping up with the day job and wearing multiple hats (writer, trainer, support person, bug tester, all-purpose infielder). The days just fly by, which is great, and I love the challenge, but man, those are some long-ass days.

At least there are Carolina basketball games to watch to take the edge off. (I like what coach Roy Williams has to say about improving -- "The only way to build habits is by repetition, repetition, repetition."

So my fiction writing has taken a back seat, again. Not much repetition when you're too tired and brain-fried to write. But I'm trying to get back into the swing of things, and I saw this interesting entry at an agent's blog that has me polishing off my opening "hooks" for my baseball novel and Sixteen Miles (the hook for the baseball novel is much better, and I've been interested in revisiting that book one more time, actually).

You know, I should try and do a hook for the young-adult fantasy novel I've been trying to fix up as well (I've made about ZERO progress on that this month). Deadline is March 4th for the Got Hook? contest, so I'll try and get that done this week. Maybe it'll inspire me to actually send some queries out again (I'm WAY behind on that, so few I don't even want to mention them here).

And finally, my buddy Moby has some lovely advice (which he rarely gives out, apparently) about creating music that is excellent. In most cases, replace the word "musician" with "writer" and "album" with "book" (although I think most writers would love a 10-book deal! And thankfully, writers don't have to perform live often, just at the occasional reading, which isn't TOO painful, in my limited experience).

The best parts in his entry are the parts about being yourself, finding out what you're good and bad at and working to improve or find ways to deal with your weaknesses, as well as learning lots of skills. Writers have to be a repository of weird facts, anecdotes, philosophical musings, and character traits. It's all material, baby.

By the way, Moby isn't a close personal friend. But he seems like a very cool guy.

Okay, so no real writing done this morning (though I did get up at 4:30, thanks to the dog needing to go outside). But I'm getting there. Got some ideas and plans working -- fix up those proposals, get some stuff in the mail, and get to work on a novel (or two). Hopefully March will be a better, more creative month for us all! Later.