March was a pretty good journal writing month for me. I moved into a new place. I cleaned up the public section of the apartment enough to host family for gumbo and games. I got MOST of my books unpacked, organized and cataloged on LibraryThing. I've started thinking about my free time in terms of weighted priorities. Spending time with Erin pleasantly overrides (while often intersecting with) these priorities and keeps me from going crazy trying to organize my fun. I find that the higher things are on the following list, the less I have to do in relation to them to feel satisfied, so I'm still not necessarily dividing my time up exactly as I'd like to, but I'm getting there.

• Producing something new. (I actually wrote a complete story for the first time in the last month and I need to submit that and pour some other thoughts onto paper.)
• Produce ANYTHING. (I'm trying to write up reviews on some of my favorite books. This journal falls into that category. And most of my job is fulfilling in this category. And I guess I produced some decent physics students this year.)
• Learn new stuff. (There's my project management class, and I've been reading deeper into many of the web technologies I already use so that I can make even better use of them.)
• Input. (I've actually got a reading list I'm going to try and get on top of. Most of it's good speculative fiction that should get my mind churning. Also the actual reason for this post ... I've also been wrangling my RSS reader under control)

I'd been wanting to experience Escape Pod on a more regular basis for a while. Over the weekend I listened to a few good stories and reviews of Sunshine and Beowulf. I'd enjoyed Sunshine on the big screen and I have VERY fond memories of both Beowulf and Grendel from high school. I finally grabbed an iPod nano so that I can devour more escapePod and some other audio fiction I've been encountering. I listened to Cloud Dragon Skies and Conversations With and About My Electric Toothbrush on my drive this morning. I like that both of them touch on the simple "boy meets girl" plot, as my story does as well. There's a TON more to both stories though.

The former is a very personal and visual tale set in a far future where you'd expect hard sci-fi. It's timely as it's an extrapolation of ecological devastation we're currently bringing on ourselves, and a warning on the hubris of assuming that we can fix the damage we've caused. The toothbrush story is delightful. It's humorous speculative fiction for Wired and Make junkies (oo, oo, me, me). It's an amazingly dense story idea-wise, yet firmly avoids taking itself even vaguely seriously, which works perfectly.

I'm looking forward to a Nancy Kress story and a few others on my ride home this evening.

Currently reading: The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross