This has been an interesting couple of weeks; ever since my recapping duties ended at Television Without Pity in May, I thought I was going to have a ton of free time to do other things, but of course, the free time fills up rapidly with other life stuff.

The freer weekends have afforded me a few luxuries, like being able to go shopping for clothes more than once or twice a year and settling in for Season Two of The Wire (So. Good. Man. More than lives up to the hype.), but I find myself writing much more at work and other gigs like on the NPR blog.

I have a pretty major writing project I want to start on with a friend of mine, and I'm still hopeful it'll happen. Without Smallville to worry about in September, it feels like there's less of a pressing deadline looming than I usually feel in the summer.

Someone said the other day that it seemed like I'm writing much more for the Statesman. It never seems like that to me; I always feel I could be writing more and when I look at some of the music and metro writers around me, I always feel like they're much more productive than me.
My editor's been really good about pulling stuff from my work blog and getting it into print, so that's been a nice change recently. It does come in waves and some of the kinds of stories I do end up taking longer to write than others, but that never makes me feel like there aren't enough hours in the day to write about all the things I feel I should or that I want to cover.

And that's because I write pretty fast. If I were a slow writer, I'd be depressed beyond relief. But I don't now if that nagging, "You should be writing. RIGHT NOW!" feeling will ever go away. It's been with me since I was a teenager.

It shouldn't surprise me by this point that energy I save from not recapping will instantly be transferred to other writing. But that was a lot or wordage, about 8,000 words a week, to fit into other spaces.

I have a pretty sizable story running in Sunday's paper about mom bloggers that took me a very good chunk of time to research and report, then a column in Monday's paper. It's always good to see stories of mine in the paper; it alleviates the constant writer's guilt I have of finite time and not enough words out of my head and onto a page.



Speaking of pages, a new comic was just posted today on Space Monkeys! I wish we were producing more comics more often, but I'm content when they turn out like this one. I love seeing what my brother does with the artwork on these comics.

This is actually based on one of my favorite movie trailers of the summer, the first preview from District 9. It's not exactly something that screams, "Comedy gold!" but the twist in the teaser is so good, we could resist doing a Trailers Without Pity for it.

It sucks that the twist is revealed right on the movie poster, but I can imagine this isn't exactly going to be an easy movie to market.

Happy with the way this one turned out even though we've been struggling with some audio problems that necessitated a change in equipment. We usually use some cheap USB headsets, but one of them went bad on us and we've had to replace it with mixed results. Hoping to clean up the audio for next time. We thought about getting some very nice condenser mics, but then decided it might be overkill for what we're doing. If we can't eliminate the mic sounds or get it leveled exactly right, we'll definitely be doing that because that kind of shit drives me nuts.

Anyway, here's the video. Hope you like it!

My regular producer on NPR returned this week -- he was the person who brought me on in the first place and it was awesome to work with him again after he was off on some other assignments for a while (including having a kid).

One of his first ideas coming back was to do a quick-hit series of items for All Tech Considered instead of focusing on one topic, so we gave it a shot with pieces about Facebook farming, the anniversary of the Walkman and some other tech news that was floating around in geek circles last week.

You can hear the segment on this page and check out links to stories related to what we talked about. I'm sure we won't do it this way every week, but it was a nice break from our usual format.